Blue Highways: Alder Creek, New York

Unfolding the Map

We are now climbing into the Adirondacks with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), Ghost Dancing straining, and we will again reflect on mountains, their majesty, their age, their wisdom, and our admiration of them.  At least I will.  To see where Alder Creek is located, start climbing toward the map.

Book Quote

"I went up into the Adirondacks at a point where they form a virtual wall, and Ghost Dancing labored making the ascent.  No sun in the forest and twelve degrees cooler.  The ancient Adirondack Mountains are much older than the old Appalachians they merge with; consequently, they tend toward roundness with few sharp outcroppings.  Adirondack ('bark eaters') was a contemptuous epithet Mohawks gave to some degenerated tribe so poor it had to eat trees.

"I bought gas in Alder Creek and asked the pumpman what winter was like in the mountains. 'This,' he said and held up the stump of a little finger.  'Frostbite.  Snowfall of a hundred forty-two inches last year, forty-five below, wind chill seventy below. That's what we call winter.'"

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 6

Junction near Alder Creek, New York. Photo by Rick Ehrenberg and posted at ViewPhotos.org. Click on photo to go to host page.

Alder Creek, New York

Never having been to the Adirondacks - I've only really skirted them as I drove through New York - I can't comment on their beauty or the effects of their great age upon them.  But I love mountains, both young and old, and for different reasons.  I grew up in the California Coast Ranges, which are relatively young mountains, about 3-4 million years old, that range near the coast of Northern California.  The immense forces that raised these mountains are tied in with the plate tectonics of the west coast of North America, and where near my hometown the Mendocino Triple Junction of the North American, Pacific, and Gorda, as well as the meeting place for the San Andreas and Mendocino faults with the Cascadia subduction zone.  In other words, it is a cauldron of plate tectonics and this cauldron has created forces which has heaved up the mountains in which I played and explored when I was young.

I'm trying to think of what might be the oldest mountains that I've visited?  The Appalachians would certainly qualify.  The forces that built the mountains may have begun as early as a billion years ago, though 540 million years ago is a good midpoint to think about in terms of when they began to take their present shape.  However, one person disputes this, writing that they are really very young mountains.  I am in no position to agree or disagree.  However, on the gut feeling side which is totally unscientific, they seem to be old mountains to me.  Though my visit in them reminded me of home, I still felt that they were different in some way, that if they could talk they would be older, wiser, and full of stories that my young coastal mountains could not know.  Another mountain range, the Blue Ridge Mountains, which I drove along for a while, might be about 400 million years old, which would put them a close second.  These old ranges, with their wooded sides, eroded and gentle slopes, are beautiful and home to a history as varied as the people who have trod, hunted, fished and settled on and in them over time.

The Sierra Nevada, another mountain range with which I'm quite familiar, is a mystery to geologists.  There is a camp that claims that they are relatively old, at 40-80 million years old, or almost an infant, at 3 million years old.  I have always thought of them as young mountains, given that they are so stark and craggy, and perception is everything, I guess.  If you look at a person and think that he or she is young, then for all intents and purposes he or she is until the truth is revealed.

The mountain ranges I currently live near, the Sandias and Manzanos, formed about 10 million years ago, the result of the geological forces associated with one of only two continental rift valleys (the Rio Grande Valley - the other is the Great Rift Valley in Africa).  These certainly make them older than the mountains I grew up in, but younger than most of the other mountains I've frequented.

From what I've read, the Adirondacks are much more complex than LHM imagined.  The Adirondacks can be considered ancient, because they are made of ancient rock that was created and buried 30 miles below the earth's surface.  The age of the rocks are anywhere from 1-2 billion years old.  However, the forces that pushed them to the surface and created the Adirondacks is much more recent.  Sometime around 65 million years ago, the land began to rise, pushing those ancient rocks to the surface.  Then erosion began to form the Adirondacks, leading to the mountains that are familiar to those in that part of the country.

I love mountains, whether they are old or young.  When camping out at my property in the Irmulco Valley, some of my most serene and sublime moments have come while traversing a mountain ridge and hearing the wind through the evergreens overhead.  The vistas that can be seen from a mountaintop are those that can stay with one forever.  While driving along the Blue Ridge Mountains, just looking down over the fields far below almost gave me a feeling of flying, even though my car wheels were held fast to the road.

On the other hand, just looking at a craggy mountain vista, such as when one approaches the Rockies or the Sierra Nevadas, gives one such a perspective.  When I've gazed upon these mountains looming in the distance, there are times that I feel small and appreciative of the wonders that God or gods, Nature, the Universe, or whatever one might believe in, put on this earth.  I sometimes wonder if they were put here for me to admire, or whether it doesn't matter.

I think the gift of a mountain is simply that we ARE here to admire it, to let the mountain free our minds to imagine what it would be like at the top, or if we are at the top, to wonder what might be going on to those unseen down below.  I believe that whether the mountains speak to us from the ages when the earth was young, or in the blink of a couple of million years, they speak truth.  Their truth is that they are there, fixed and permanent, as marker and metaphor in our lives.

Musical Interlude

Mountains put me in a reflective mood, and so does Stevie Nicks' song Landslide, which uses the mountain both as a metaphor for a change in life, and the potential pitfalls that can occur.  Right now my wife and I are in a place of change, and she has a mountain to climb and is concerned about the potential landslides.

If you want to know more about Alder Creek

I'm sorry, Littourati, but there just isn't anything of substance on Alder Creek.  It might be that the community is just too small.  Here's some links on the Adirondacks in general.

Andirondack Region of Northern New York
The Adirondacks
Wikipedia: Adirondack Mountains

Next up: Forest House Lodge, New York

Blue Highways: Danville, Kentucky

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapMoving away from the Shakers, and toward the Appalachians we go.  It's amazing how far we've traveled in only 25 pages of the book.  To see where Danville is located, click on the map!

Book Quote

"The highway took me through Danville, where I saw a pillared antebellum mansion with a trailer court on the front lawn.  Route 127 ran down a long valley of pastures and fields edged by low, rocky bluffs and split by a stream the color of muskmelon.  In the distance rose the foothills of the Appalachians, old mountains that once separated the Atlantic from the shallow inland sea now the middle of America.  The licks came out of the hills, the fields got smaller, and there were little sawmills cutting hardwood into pallets, crates, fenceposts.  The houses shrank, and their colors changed from white to pastels to iridescents to no paint at all.  The lawns went from Vertagreen bluegrass to thin fescue to hard-packed dirt glinting with fragments of glass, and the lawn ornaments changed from birdbaths to plastic flamingoes and donkeys to broken-down automobiles with raised hoods like tombstones.  On the porches stood long-legged wringer washers and ruined sofas, and, by the front doors, washtubs hung like coats of arms."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 13

Danville, Kentucky at dusk

Danville, Kentucky

When I was in my early 20s, a young idealistic volunteer in inner-city Milwaukee who had done two years of service and had no idea what he was going to do for a career, I considered doing a third year of service in Appalachia.  The program that I volunteered for was going to open a volunteer community in Hazard, Kentucky.  Yes, this was the same Hazard, Kentucky that inspired the the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, and later the movie of the same name.  True fact: in Hazard, Kentucky I was told there was even a Hogg family that inspired the infamous Boss Hogg on the TV show.

I went with a director of the program down to Hazard to scope out the possibilities for a volunteer community there.  I remember driving south, through Cincinnati, Ohio into Covington, Kentucky and then past Lexington and on down Highway 402 through the mountains and into Hazard.  As we got farther from Lexington, the scene fit perfectly with what William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) describes above in his quote.  I remember vividly passing seamlessly from bluegrass and nice dwellings into mountains and poverty, but not all at once.  It sort of snuck up on you until suddenly, you were in it.  The poverty was very apparent: trailer houses and shacks with rusting automobiles or other machinery in the yards.  At the same time, modern convenience also sprung out at me, at least at the dwellings along the roads.  There were satellite dishes on many of the trailer homes, and the newest model pickup trucks parked alongside rusting heaps on the front lawn.  Clearly, like in many of our inner-cities, people picked what to do without and what to do with.  I thought it was selective poverty, in the sense that perhaps foregoing the truck or not having satellite TV might make other things possible for these poorer families, but the truck and satellite TV was too important to pass up.

Though I was drawn to the area, I decided not to continue to volunteer.  But I got to know some of the people who went to volunteer in that newly opened community, and my girlfriend (now my wife) and another friend and I drove down to Hazard to visit them.  What struck me was the disconnect with what people believed and how they acted.  I was pretty lefty in my politics at the time (really, I still am), and most people I met were pretty conservative.  They were active gun enthusiasts and voted Republican.  I was probably treated pretty well by them because I was white, and even my longer hair that I wore at the time fit in with some of the styling and grooming of the people who lived in the hollers.  If I had gotten into political discussions or discussions about social mores, I would have probably disagreed with them 99 percent of the time.  Yet, they were very nice to us.  We stopped at an outdoor flea market where you could buy everything, even guns.  I was invited to come hunting and fishing by a guy I didn't know, who told me that "those Northern girls don't treat you good...you come down here and we'll fix you up with a nice Southern girl who'll cook for you and treat you right."  My girlfriend was somewhat amused...probably because I didn't take the guy up on his offer.  When we were invited to people's houses, even those that were poorer, they never failed to have something for us.  As LHM moves later in the book into Tennessee, he marvels that the people who have the least are usually the ones to invite you to dinner.  That's my experience of Appalachian Kentucky.

This all hits home to me now in another way, because being adopted, I recently learned that my biological mother came from similar roots in West Virginia.  Plain, hardworking, and often exploited people that would still give the shirts off their backs for friends, relatives and even strangers.  In the Appalachians, coal was king and people were often in thrall to the coal companies for work and a livelihood, but the dangerous work and the poverty brought them together.  In a way, I'm proud that I come from such stock.  Certainly with poverty comes pain and suffering, but also a connectedness to community, work and family because they are precious to survival.

What this all has to do with Danville, I'm not sure.  Wikipedia says that Danville is known as the "City of Firsts" because of all the things that first happened there.  First courthouse in Kentucky, first post office west of the Alleghenies, first state supported school for the deaf, first physician to successfully remove an ovarian tumor, oldest college campus west of the Alleghenies.  However, as LHM seems to indicate, Danville and Lexington are gateways to this most rural, most poverty ridden, in some ways most backward part of the country.  We tend to forget these areas because white Americans don't like to see poverty, especially white poverty, so the gateways are usually closed, keeping white poor folks back in the shadows of the mountains and the hollers.  But if you take the paths that the Danvilles and the Lexingtons open to these areas, you may find amidst the poverty shining moments, adventures and deep discovery and meaning.  So visit Danville and think of it as a doorway to the Appalachians.  If it is too rural for you, you can always take in a festival and then go back to the cities.  But if you want to see a unique slice of America, use Danville as a way point to see rural, Appalachian Kentucky.  Perhaps you'll be entranced by its beauty and fascinated by its contradictions, like I was.

If you want to know more about Danville

Danville Advocate-Messenger (newspaper)
Centre College
Festivals in Danville
It's Better in Danville
Wikipedia: Danville

Next up: Ida and Bug, Kentucky