Blue Highways: Somewhere on US 93, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe have our place in the universe, and what a grand and infinite universe it is!  We stop with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) on a lonely stretch of highway in Nevada, look up at the stars, and are amazed what we see and humbled and comforted all at the same time.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to fix our place in the cosmos of Blue Highways.

Book Quote

"I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight.  I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.  Galileo proved that the rotation and revolution of the earth give stars their apparent movements.  But on that night his evidence wouldn't hold.  Any sensible man, lying on his back among new leaves of sage, in the warm sand that had already dried, even he could see Arcturus and Vega and Betelgeuse just above, not far at all, wheeling about the earth.  Their paths cut arcs, and there was no doubt about it.

"The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me.  It was as if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by the vacancy...."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 5

On US 93 between Pioche and Ely. Photo by Mike McDonald at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to site.

Somewhere on US 93, Nevada

I have been fascinated by the night sky since I can remember.  When I was a kid, before I grew up and became jaded, I would often just look up into the night sky in complete wonder at the stars.  It helped that I grew up in a very small town on the Northern California coast.  Ground light did not really mask the light of the stars there, so I often saw the stars and the distant stream of the Milky Way in all their glory.

When I was around 10 years old, my parents bought me a cheap telescope.  I spent hours looking at the moon.  That year Comet Kohoutek appeared to the naked eye, and I spent hours in the early mornings training my telescope on the comet as it sat low on the eastern sky.  I used to imagine that I actually could see the gasses streaming off of it - it was probably mostly my imagination.

Until I almost ready to graduate, my dream was to become an astronomer.  I thought that there would be nothing better than to sit in an observatory, look through telescopes, and study the mysteries of the cosmos.  I really had a very romantic notion of them, which can still be stimulated when I see a movie full of sexy astronomers who discover the comets that are going to hit the earth, or hear the first signals from an alien civilization.  In reality, I probably would not have been able to handle the physics that I would have needed to know - calculus-based physics did me in when I studied it in college, along with just plain calculus.

As a jaded adult political scientist, I still have a fascination with the sky and the stars.  I don't often take time to look up anymore, which is sad.  But still, things will catch my eye.  A bright planet will get my attention, and I usually will try to find out what planet is sitting on the horizon in the early evening, or close to the moon at midnight.  For a long time, I had a screensaver on my computer called seti@home.  SETI is the acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the organization had radio telescopes trained on various sections of the sky to see if they could pick up signal patterns that would indicate intelligent communication.  The screensaver I had was part of their parallel networking - while my computer was not being used, it was analyzing SETI data and sending it back to SETI.  With thousands of home computers doing the same thing, SETI could analyze the data without having to purchase or rent prohibitively expensive supercomputer time.

One of my most meaningful astronomical experiences came in the Davis Mountains of Texas at the McDonald Observatory.  My wife and I went to a star party, and there, looking through an amateur astronomer's large telescope, I saw the rings of Saturn and the Great Red Spot on Jupiter for the first time.  It was thrilling to see with my naked eye the things that I'd only seen in books before.

Of course, the naked eye experiences are always the best and most gratifying, such as suddenly seeing a constellation like Orion, or learning how Polaris (the North Star) can be found.  I remember lying on my back on a hillside once with some friends and watching a meteor shower.  Over our heads a large meteor streaked, and then suddenly with a crackling sound, broke up above us.  Perhaps the meteor was as large as a small truck high above our heads, but it was fascinating.  What fireworks display can match that?

I'm not the only one fascinated by such things.  Walking along a dry arroyo in the late afternoon in Chaco Canyon, my wife and I looked for pictographs painted by the Anasazi when Chaco was a thriving center.  On an overhang we found them.  One of them looked like a star, and it is speculated by some that the painting symbolizes a large supernova that appeared a thousand years ago and was visible for weeks with the naked eye.  Today it only appears in telescopes as the Crab Nebula.

Here in New Mexico, we are busy building Spaceport America, where companies like Virgin Galactic will rocket space tourists to a suborbital position at the very edge of outer space, and allow them to experience weightlessness for 10 minutes before re-entering the atmosphere and gliding back to Earth.  My wife posted a video where a public relations person for the Spaceport explains the layout of the Spaceport terminal, and another where he explains the activities other than tourism that will happen there.  I'd love to go on that ride, but sadly, I don't think I'll ever have the $250,000 in pocket change to pay for a trip, nor the million or so dollars it will take to hitch a ride on a Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station.  However, I did get a chance to see the Space Shuttle fly over New Orleans, trailed later by the International Space Station.  They were two bright lights in the evening sky, but it touched that fascinated boy in me yet again.

I really need to get out and start looking at the sky again.  I need to lay on my back, like LHM did somewhere along the side of US 93 between Pioche and Ely, Nevada, and just watch and wonder.  It is a comforting reminder, in a strange way, that I live upon a ball that endlessly revolves around a fiery, stable thermonuclear furnace.  That star revolves around the center of a galaxy with an immense, black hole core.  That galaxy speeds endlessly toward some unknown fate untold years in the future of the universe.  That universe continues to expand.  Our lives come and go, but the machinery of the cosmos keeps working.

Here is a favorite poem that I first read in college, and which always brings out the wonder in me when I read it:

Imagine Grass

The planet that we plant upon
rolls through its orbit of the sun,
bending our grass upon the breeze,
While far away the galaxies
in a decelerating pace
reach for the outer edge of space.

Imagine in that final sky
("Give me deceleration; I
will give you mass and curvature.")
at journey's end a far-flung star
of an unnumbered magnitude
Mount Palomar has never viewed.

In that expanded universe
the furthest star will be the first,
poised at the end of everywhere,
on the edge of nothing, like a prayer,
to turn from nothing and retrace,
pulsating through the curve of space.

So many billion light years since
the particle horizon densed,
conceive the universe defined
within the orbit of the mind,
and somewhere in the measured mass
of everything, imagine grass.

Knute Skinner
in A Geography of Poets
(1979, Bantam)

Musical Interlude

What song is better to put to LHM's perusal of the universe than The Beatles' Across the Universe?  Here it is for your listening pleasure.  Will nothing change your world?  Perhaps a night stargazing under a cloudless sky with no light pollution will change it quite a bit.

If you want to know more about US 93

AARoads: US 93
Federal Highway Administration: History of US 93
Wikipedia: US Route 93
Wikipedia: US Route 93 in Nevada

Next up: Ely, Nevada

Blue Highways: Pioche, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on thumbnail for mapOur latest stop with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is in Pioche, Nevada.  It is the home of a rich mining town history, complete with lives cut short by the gun.  It is a boom and a bust and a boom town.  It is a current ghost town.  It all leads me to speculate on whether I would have made a good pioneer (I wouldn't have, I think).  Click on the thumbnail of the map to the right to see where I most likely would have met my maker.

Book Quote

"Pioche...was pure Nevada.  Its elevation of six thousand feet was ten times its population; but during the peak of the mining boom a century ago, the people and the feet above sea level came to the same number.  The story of Pioche repeats itself over Nevada:  Indian shows prospector a mountain full of metal; prospector strikes bonanza; town booms for a couple of decades with the four "G's": grubstakes, gamblers, girls, gunmen (seventy-five people died in Pioche before anyone died a natural death); town withers.  By 1900, Pioche was on its way to becoming a ghost town like Midas, Wonder, Bullion, Cornucopia.  But, even with the silver and gold gone, technological changes in the forties made deposits of lead and zinc valuable, and cheap power from Boulder Dam (as it was then) kept Pioche alive."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 5

Downtown Pioche, Nevada. Photo by Don Barrett at Flickr. Click on photo to go to site.

Pioche, Nevada

I am frustrated as I wrote a very nice post, but I somehow lost it.  Sometimes, writing a blog is maddening.  When something is saved, and then isn't, it can be very disheartening.  However, I will soldier along and try to reconstruct something of what I had.

I have never been to Pioche, Nevada.  In fact, I got my first experience of what is probably true Nevada, which is very different than Las Vegas, when I persuaded my wife that we should load up our car and drive with our dog to visit my family in California.  Our route took us over US 50, which stretches from Ocean City, Maryland to Sacramento, California.  Nevada touts its stretch of US 50 as "the loneliest road in America."  They're probably right - the road rolls through very few towns along the length of Nevada.  But what struck me was that the towns maintained the feel of old West towns.  It was as if I were traveling through Old West towns where the only improvements made were pavement and streetlights.

Most of the towns through Nevada appeared to get their start due to the industries that extracted ores from the ground, mostly gold and silver.  These were rough places, as LHM indicates in his passage above.  Thanks to westerns I was like a lot of other people who romanticize the Old West.  I used to think it would have been exciting had I lived on the edge of the frontier, helping to build a community and establishing a business or settling "virgin" land (we tend to conveniently forget about the original native inhabitants).  But something always sat wrong with me.  In my present life, I have high blood pressure, I suffer from allergies, I have poor eyesight.  In my childhood I had two bouts with pneumonia, chronic bronchitis, and all the other childhood diseases.  I once asked, rhetorically in the presence of a friend who was planning to go to medical school, how it was that people with such maladies made it on the frontier.  She looked at me like I was a little crazy, and then said flatly, "they didn't."

It is easy to forget that towns like Pioche, and other settlements throughout the Old West, were difficult places to live.  LHM relates an astounding fact, if it is true, that 72 people died by violence before the first person in Pioche died a natural death.  Certainly such towns were lawless.  They were settled by men who worked hard in the day and played hard at night - usually fueled by liquor.  Women were few and far between.  The first women to settle in such towns were usually prostitutes, followed by entertainers, followed by a few female entrepreneurs.  Not all the business was legal, and crimes resulted in feuds, gunplay, and death.

When I now think about that Old West romance, I remember that given what I know right now, I might not have survived.  The attack of gallstones that I had a few years ago that occasioned the removal of my gall bladder would have probably killed me back then.  If there were even any attempts to surgically repair me, I would have been under the knife of a person quite possibly never trained in a medical school, and perhaps even just a barber.  The kidney stone I suffered would have gone untreated, or the treatment would have been worse than just suffering through them.  If I were a miner or other working class person, I wouldn't have been able to afford glasses for my eyes, which probably wouldn't have worked that well for me anyway given the science of the times.  I wouldn't have had the antihistamines to relieve my allergies, or the steroid inhaler to relieve any asthma from those allergens.  My high blood pressure would really have been a silent killer - but only if I managed to avoid getting shot, or cut badly on the job and then developing infection.  I probably would have been lonely, without much in the way of female companionship unless I paid for it.  Of course, that would have led to possible STD like syphilis or gonorrhea.  I might have ended up crazy as a loon from untreated syphilis.  Nope, the frontier can seem romantic, but it often wasn't.

I still enjoy, however, listening to the stories of those who were pioneers.  My grandmother used to tell me her stories about growing up in Northern California, where her grandfather and father ran a sawmill.  It was the edge of the frontier in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  My mother grew up in the forests as well because her father was a logger and she lived in logging camps until she went to high school.  When I heard those stories, I heard about a life of hard work, but also a life that was filled with wonder and possibility.

Sometimes I think I'm too jaded now, except in rare situations where I can let my mind be free of all the clutter it has collected through the years, to experience that kind of feeling.  I don't quite understand what it is like to walk out of one's door and see nothing but wilderness and realize that it can be a playground, like my mother and grandmother saw when they were young.  Nor do I understand what it is like to build something from the ground up.  The basics have already been built for me - I just add my little embellishments to the structure already in place.  To me, that's what a pioneer does.  He or she builds something where there was nothing before.  If it wouldn't kill me, I think I'd like being a pioneer, and building a Pioche, or some other place, out of nothing.

Musical Interlude

Today's musical interlude has nothing to do with Pioche, Nevada or any western state except perhaps in its name.  U2's Silver and Gold is about apartheid in historical South Africa.  However, here's my stretch to make it relevant.  As seen above, pursuit of riches, represented by silver or gold, has led to lots of violence of suffering.  It doesn't matter if it is by gunplay and terror in Pioche, or through enslavement for foreign occupiers in South Africa.  Silver and gold may be pretty, but the behaviors it can incite in some are not.

If you want to know more about Pioche

Ghosttowns.com: Pioche
Lincoln County: Pioche
Lincoln County Record (newspaper)
Overland Hotel
Pioche History
TravelNevada.com: Pioche
Wikipedia: Pioche

Next up:  Somewhere on US 93, Nevada

Blue Highways: Cedar City, Utah

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapCedar City is the place where William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) felt that he got one of his most important interviews in Blue Highways.  In this post, we take another look at the concept of journeys and destinations.  Click on the thumbnail at right to see all our little journeys, wrapped up in a bigger journey, all making up a small part of our biggest journey called life.

Book Quote

"The key seemed to be emergence. Carved in a rock near the village of Shipolovi is the ancient symbol for it:

Hopi emergence symbol.  Photo at Aistear InisCealtra Online.
Click on photo to go to host site.

"With variations, the symbol appears among other Indians of the Americas. Its lines represent the course a person follows on his "road of life" as he passes through birth, death, rebirth. Human existence is essentially a series of journeys, and the emergence symbol is a kind of map of the wandering soul, and image of a process; but it is also, like most Hopi symbols and ceremonies, a reminder of cosmic patterns that all human beings move in."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 4

Downtown Cedar City, Utah. Photo on Wikipedia. Click on photo to go to site.

Cedar City, Utah

Why am I going back to the Hopi when I spent a good four posts on them?   Why don't I just write about Cedar City?  Unfortunately, LHM doesn't spend much time on the town, and I've never been there - though reading about it I'd like to go see some of the sights in Cedar Breaks National Monument and perhaps see the Shakespeare Festival there.

In Blue Highways, when LHM stops in Cedar City he gets some breakfast at the campus of Southern Utah State College.  While eating, he strikes up a conversation with a Hopi man named Kendrick Fritz who is studying medicine and who wants eventually to go back to the Hopi homeland to help his people.

In an interview with Artful Dodge, LHM says that there were three interviews that were most important to him.  One was at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Georgia with Brother Patrick.  We have already been there on our literary journey.  One  is with a person we have yet to meet.  His interview with Kendrick Fritz was another of the three interviews that he felt most important.  I think that it was because the whole idea of how journeys fit into our lives came into focus for him.

The quote above captures the essence of what LHM is discovering on his trip.  Life is a series of journeys that we make separately for ourselves and together with others.  All of those journeys that we make can be combined to additively make our life's journey.  The Hopi encapsulated all of that into a maze symbol.  We essentially wander around looking for our purposes, or our meanings.  We are sometimes lost, and sometimes we know our way.  Through it all, we continue our journeys until we are called to a new world.

The way I think of it, we are journeying all the time, whether we like it or not.  In my lifetime, I will make a number of journeys on Earth, whether it's to my corner store, or the trip to Turkey that I will be making in about three weeks.  But even as I sitting here on my couch typing on my laptop, I am journeying.  In my lifetime, without really being too aware of it other than watching the years come and go, I will have made a certain as of yet unknown number of rotations around the sun, journeying in circles for the length of my existence.  The sun itself will be traveling along with other stars in the galaxy as the Milky Way continues to move outward and away from its existence.  The universe continues to expand, and we are all taking part in that journey, even though we only see a small piece of it.

The journeys don't have to be physical.  I have taken a number of emotional journeys in the past two years, some of which were not good, some of which were very good.  From all of them I will learn.  I've taken professional journeys recently as well, and will continue to hope that they all mean movement forward toward some kind of goal.  I continue to try to journey spiritually, though I don't feel I'm very successful at it.  This blog is a journey: Not only does it map my reading journeys, but it also is a journey in itself as I don't really know where it will lead me.

As I write, it's Easter Sunday.  I was raised to believe, in the Catholic tradition, that this is the most important holiday, supposedly even more than Christmas though it was hard to convince me because we got presents on Christmas.  Even this day, however, is a celebration of the culmination of one man's journey through a short but incredibly meaningful and important life, and the beginning of a journey for a new faith that would one day become one of the major religions.

We tend to think of journeys as a starting point and ending point with points of interest in between. We make lots of them, even if we aren't aware sometimes what kind of journey we are on.  All of the journeys we make are bracketed by the start and end points of our lives, the ultimate journeys of our existence.  The point of a journey is, to me, accomplishing something and learning from it.  The journey of Kendrick Fritz, the Hopi who gave LHM such an important interview, has brought him back to the Hopi to serve his people as a medical technologist.  The journey of LHM in Blue Highways brought him fame and fueled his desire to write an even more personal and in-depth account, in a book called PrairyErth, of a journey in a small corner of Kansas.  If I can accomplish and learn something on my journeys so that they add up to a well-lived and meaningful life, then I will have made the most of my time on Earth.

Zia has it right. The journey IS the destination!Even as I think of all these journeys, however, I am tempted to want to journey like my wonderful little dog.  Zia jumps into a journey at a moment's notice, whether we are just going for a walk, or if we are getting in a car.  She doesn't know where we're going - it really doesn't matter.  For her, every journey is the best journey.  My good friend Vickie, who is a very wise person, told me recently of her revelation that the journey is the destination.  I was trying to figure out what she meant by that, but watching Zia's happiness and contentment when we are going somewhere, I think I understand.  For Zia, the journey is the joy.  It is her destination, and where she's at peace.  I wish I could look at all my journeys that way, instead of being so caught up in where I think I need to be.  Yes, I want to reach goals, but my journeys are also best when I just enjoy the experience of the movement.

Musical Interlude

Today's musical interlude is Light Enough to Travel by the Be Good Tanyas.  I picked this song not so much because of the lyrics but because of the title.  I think sometimes the things that makes our life's journeys more difficult is the baggage we carry along with us.  All the should haves and would haves and unmet expectations and perceptions of failure.  When I go on a trip, I spend time thinking about what to pack - what do I need and want etc.  I plan and plan.  And like I said above, my dog just gets into the car, ready to go.  We all need to keep it light enough so that we can travel with as few burdens on us as possible and enjoy our journeys in life to the fullest.

If you want to know more about Cedar City

Cedar City Daily News (newspaper)
CedarCity.com
Cedar City Official Website
Southern Utah University
Utah.com: Cedar City
Wikipedia: Cedar City

Next up:  Pioche, Nevada

Blue Highways: Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe are going to be cold and wondering about our own mortality in the Cedar Breaks.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) just gives in to whatever happens, and lives.  I reflect on what it means to face mortality, even symbolically, on this Good Friday, the most apt of days.  To see where we confront these important issues, click on the thumbnail of the map at right.

Book Quote

"At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment.  If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion.  But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid....

"....Perhaps fatigue or strain prevented me from worrying about the real fear; perhaps some mechanism of mind hid the true and inescapable threat.  Whatever it was, it finally came to me that I was crazy.  Maybe I was already freezing to death.  Maybe this was the way it happened.  Black Elk prays for the Grandfather Spirit to help him face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet...."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 3

Sandstone formations in Cedar Breaks National Monument. Photo on "bachspics" photostream at Flickr. Click on photo to go to site.Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah

As I write this, it is Good Friday in the Christian tradition.  Most of us raised in the Christian faith know the generalities of the Passion of Christ, and even it weren't laden with so much symbolism that occasionally gets in the way of its message (depending on one's interpretation), it would still be a good story.  The narrative basically comes down to this: a much revered man, a teacher whose growing name and popularity is a threat to the established power structure, is betrayed by a supporter and is punished with the ultimate sacrifice - his life.  However, his fame and his influence outlast his death and a movement begins that will ultimately claim billions of people.

The part of the story that always interests me is the decision that Jesus of Nazareth made, amidst very human fear, to go ahead with his part in the story even though he knew it meant death.  I am a person who believes that at times, we all face fears about our decisions.  Even if we know the path we must tread, we might still have a moment of indecision, doubt and fear.  Jesus prayed a long time in the garden, and could have taken the opportunity when his disciples fell asleep to leave and save himself.  But he didn't.  He accepted his role come what may.

We are asked in any religion to compare ourselves with the important people who have made those kinds of decisions.  We are told to put ourselves into their places and do as they would do.  We are judged by how close we can get to following their example.  In my Christian tradition, we are exhorted to be Christlike.  Followers of Islam strive to live up to the ideals set forth by Mohammed.  Buddhists seek to reach the enlightenment of Guatama Buddha.  Nearly all of us fail in some way or another, but we are judged worthy if we continue to try.

But I believe that we all, at times in our lives, face that Jesus moment.  We look back at what brought us to the place that we are and question why we are there.  We look forward and maybe we see what's ahead and maybe we don't, and we are afraid.  It is in those moments, I believe, that we show our true courage as humans if we continue on the path before us.  Some of my proudest moments are the ones where I have taken the path ahead despite my fears, and some of my bleakest moments have been the ones where I have not because of my fears.  As I was thinking about this, I remembered a passage in On the Road where Sal Paradise turns back in a storm at the Bear Mountain Bridge, cursing himself "for being such a damn fool."

It is a bit of a stretch to put LHM's situation in the Cedar Breaks on par with a man who, the stories say, sacrificed himself in the name of humanity.  But in the Cedar Breaks, as LHM was faced with spending the night on a cold summit buffeted by lightning, wind and snow after not expecting such a storm, he confronts fears and demons and questions his path.  He can't move forward and he can't go back, as much as he would prefer to do so.  He fears his demons, symbolized by the bears he thinks are lurking outside and ready to tear him apart.  At some point, he gives in.  Whatever happens will happen.

Of course, LHM's story does not end with his ultimate sacrifice.  The storm abates, and he drives away cold but alive in the morning.  But when he went to sleep, he was somewhat afraid for his life.  Those moments, I believe, are some of the most important points of our lives.  We don't actually have to stand perilously between life and death like LHM did, but symbolically we will face decisions that may mean a kind of death: a death of our old comfortable life to something new and unknown, such as a new job or relationship; or a transformation of our old thinking to a new perspective; or perhaps the actual passing of a loved one whose loss leaves us empty.  In those moments, I believe that we are most fully human and most fully divine when we display that courage to step across our fear and doubts and go forward to wherever our path leads.  It is in those moments that our life truly changes, we take the risk to learn and grow, and ultimately, I think, we see the paradox of our lives: our complete insignificance in the the context of the forces greater than ourselves at work in the universe but also our incredible significance in whatever sphere of influence we occupy in this reality.

Musical Interlude

What would Good Friday and a post about sacrifice, fear, courage and transition be without Monty Python, particularly The Life of Brian.  Often, when life gets me down, I try to remember this little ditty, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, which always makes me smile. With a wonderfully simple tune, it gently reminds us to keep our head up and laugh even when everything seems dark and absurd.

If you want to know more about Cedar Breaks

AmericanSouthwest.com: Cedar Breaks
Cedar Breaks National Monument
Scenic Southern Utah: Cedar Breaks
Utah.com: Cedar Breaks
Wikipedia: Cedar Breaks
Wikitravel: Cedar Breaks

Next up: Cedar City, Utah

Blue Highways: Navajo Bridge, Arizona

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapAs we blaze new frontiers with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), in this post I reflect upon the idea of frontiers and how they are disappearing in a world growing smaller.  Perhaps this blog is another manifestation of a frontier - a literary, geographical, reflective frontier.  I'll let all of you Littourati out there be the judge of that.  Click on the thumbnail of the map to learn where on the frontier the Navajo Bridge sits.

Book Quote

"Somewhere out there was the Colorado River perfectly hidden in the openness....

"The highway made an unexpected jog toward Navajo Bridge, a melding of silvery girders and rock cliffs.  Suddenly, there it was, far below in the deep and scary canyon of sides so sheer they might have been cut with a stone saw...

"In 1776...a Spanish expedition led by missionaries...wandered dispiritedly along the Vermilion Cliffs as they tried to find in the maze of the Colorado a point to cross the river chasm.  They looked for ten days and were forced to eat boiled cactus and two of their horses before finding a place to ford; even then, they had to chop out steps to get down and back up the four-hundred-foot perpendicular walls.  My crossing, accomplished sitting down, took twenty seconds.  What I saw as a remarkable sight, the Spaniards saw as a terror that nearly did them in."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 3

Navajo Bridge from inside Marble Canyon. Photo at the site of the Federal Highway Administration. Click on photo to go to site.Navajo Bridge, Arizona

How amazing it is when one comes across a piece of grandeur that strikes one suddenly because it is unexpected!  I wrote in an earlier post about this theme, and now is as good a time as ever to expand upon it.  I've never been to this area where the Grand Canyon begins, but I've had just this sort of experience in New Mexico when, driving across what appears to be a limitless expanse of desert west of Taos, a thin dark line suddenly turned into the gaping Rio Grande Gorge with its majestic, soaring and terrifying bridge, all steel girders and archways, seeming yet so flimsy as it tremored ever so slightly in the wind and as cars drove over it.  As I looked over the edge to the Rio Grande's waters flowing toward the Gulf of Mexico far below, I literally felt weak-kneed and had to back away from that abyss.

LHM doesn't stop to look over the side of the Navajo Bridge and writes that it took him all of 20 seconds to cross sitting down.  How he contrasts it to what the conquistadores faced upon gazing at the 400 foot sheer cliffs of the Marble Canyon in that desolate area of Arizona is what's interesting to me.

I've often, in times of deeper thought about this subject, lamented that I was born in a time when the physical frontier seems to have receded.  What do I mean by frontier?  I think of frontiers as a kind of limit that is also an invitation.  The frontiers of my experience are where I can find something new that excites me or causes wonder.  In finding that limit, I can explore it, and push my frontiers to new limits somewhere just beyond my perceived horizon.  Frontiers are not barriers.  If one cannot go around, above, under or through an obstacle, then the obstacle stops one from exploring further.  It is not an invitation, and if one sees a barrier then by necessity the frontier ends there.  If one initially perceives a barrier, but after exploration finds a way past it, then the barrier represents what was once the limit of one's frontier but was just another obstacle to overcome.

I realize that frontiers are what we make of them, and that often the places that we think of as frontiers have most likely been explored before.  Yet what makes a frontier, to me, are those places where we can at least think that we are the first or one of the few people to have forayed there.  Those places seem now to be few and far between.  Wherever we go, someone who has been there has put a sign up of their passing, hoping that it will mark their achievement for eternity.  West of where I live is the Petroglyph National Monument, where natives of the area inscribed their signs and symbols on the ancient lava rocks to inform and warn others.  Over some of those inscriptions have been carved newer ones - names of settlers in the 1700s and 1800s.  Over those have been spraypainted graffiti.  Multiple generations of "tagging," if you will, have made it abundantly clear that this area is frontier no more.

In contrast, I think of those conquistadores who, according to LHM, wandered about the "maze of the Colorado" looking for a place to cross.  As they gazed out upon the canyon, in what must have been a mixture of awe at the harsh beauty and sheer terror at whether they would make it out alive, they were pushing a frontier.  It looked like a barrier, but in overcoming their terror and carving steps down and up the sheer sides of the cliff, they turned it into an obstacle that they overcame, and pushed their frontiers farther.

Granted, the Hopi had been there before but for all intents and purposes, the conquistadores were exploring an area that nobody in their reality had ever seen before.  It was so impenetrable that in the mid 1800s explorers were still trying to understand the geography and topography of the area and discovering places where few people had ever been.

What it must be like, for just a brief second before our petty human interests get in the way, to be an aborigine standing for the first time on the shores of Australia, or a Marco Polo gazing upon a new country that would one day be named China, or a Columbus landing at Hispaniola, or a Neil Armstrong setting humanity's foot for the first time on a different world!  In those moments, I think, something in us pauses, just for a brief instant, to understand that there is wonder in what lies before us in the unknown and in that moment our horizons are pushed farther away and lead us to speculate and imagine all the promise and possibility before us.  That brief pause for reflection therefore seeds new exploration and new frontiers.

Horizons are always being reached, and new frontiers conquered, not only in the physical realm but also in the sciences and philosophy and whatever else we can think of.  Someday, we may find new frontiers to explore in our solar system and beyond.  In reality, I push new frontiers every day personally, professionally and otherwise.  I don't often think of those as frontiers - at least frontiers that I can physically feel and touch.  So for now, I lament that as our world gets smaller, its physical frontiers are rapidly disappearing, and I treasure those moments when I can imagine that I am the first to see a beautiful landscape or a geographical wonder.  In those times I can feel that I too am an explorer, standing somewhere between the awe and beauty of what's before me, the fear of what happens next, and the hopefulness of what my discovery might mean for my life.

Musical Interlude

When I was in high school, Journey was one of the hot bands.  I had Journey's Frontiers album, and I remember this song, Rubicon, speaking to the hope, anger and possibilities of my youth.  Needless to say, I blasted it a lot until I wore out my cassette tape.  "Rubicon" refers to Julius Caesar crossing a river in Northern Italy to make war on Pompey.  To me, it also refers to decisions where one takes a step over what was a barrier, and thereby pushes a frontier and writes a new future for oneself.

If you want to know more about the Navajo Bridge and its environs

Excellence in Highway Design: Navajo Bridge
Marble Canyon Photo Gallery
National Park Service: Navajo Bridge
Navajo Bridge Photo Tour
Wikipedia: Navajo Bridge
Wikipedia: Marble Canyon (community)

Next up:  Cedar Breaks, Utah