Blue Highways: Lewiston, New York

Unfolding the Map

As we cross over into New York with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), Lewiston is his first stop in the state.  We are also returning to one of the original thirteen colonies for the first time since we left Georgia many posts ago.  It's hard to imagine a time when western New York was a frontier, and I'll reflect a little on what that meant and how it played out in literature, especially James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.  If you are lost in New York, get your bearings on the map.

Book Quote

"I was in New York: land of Texas hots, beef-on-a-wick, and Jenny Cream ale, where hamburgers are hamburgs and frankfurters frankfurts.  I was also within minutes of running out of gasoline.  I took a guess that Lewiston would be a left turn; if not, I was in trouble again.  But it was there, looking a century older than the Michigan towns I'd come from.

In fact, Lewiston was two centuries older, although the oldest buildings now standing were ones built just after the British burned the town in 1813.  I filled up next to an old stone hotel where, the gas man told me, James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Spy.  'It's some book, they say.  Understand,' he added, 'our station wasn't here then.'"

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Lewiston Opera House. Photo by "Dougtone" and hosted at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host page.Lewiston, New York

I've only read one book by James Fenimore Cooper - The Last of the Mohicans.   It's amazing how, once LHM (and us, as we read) travel over three-hundred miles of territory, we get into an area of the country that is significantly older than the rest of the United States.  While the Midwest, being a territory and relatively free of European settlement except for trappers and explorers, the state of New York was one of the original thirteen and had been fought over between British and French, British and Americans, and Americans and Natives already.

The book of Cooper's, which he wrote in Lewiston, to which LHM refers in his quote has been unknown to me.  The Spy is set during the Revolutionary War, a time period I have already admitted in a previous post that I know little about beyond what was taught to me in primary school.   The Last of the Mohicans is set in an even more dim historical setting for me, the pre-Revolutionary time of the French and Indian Wars when Britain fought an alliance between France and Natives for control of Canada and the northern colonies.  Cooper's writings fit into the Romantic genre, and The Last of the Mohicans creates a juxtaposition between the might of the armies of Britain and France and the fading and disappearing cultures of the Natives of upper New York.  If you read The Last of the Mohicans, after getting used to the writing you'll find beautiful descriptions of New York as the untamed wilderness it once was.  Of course, this fits into Cooper's Romantic view - the Mohicans are the untamed, noble savages and his main character hero, Natty Bumppo, also known as Hawkeye for his tremendous aim with a flintlock rifle, is a man who is prefers the company of his Mohican companions rather than the French and British settlers and soldiery with whom he has more genetically and culturally in common.  The Indians themselves are being corrupted by contact with the Europeans, dramatically in the person of Magua who, as chief of the Huron tribe has thrown his lot in with the French.  There are also descriptions of the various Native tribes of the area who either side with the French or the British or try to remain neutral.  At the end of the novel, Cooper's Romanticism is completely front and center with a Native Mohican, Uncas, accompanied by his love Cora, killed in battle and then buried together leaving Uncas' father Chingachgook the last Mohican.  A Native wise man then proclaims:

"The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again...."

It's hard to envision New York state as it once was.  It's greatest city, then commanding only the southern part of Manhattan Island, now covers that entire island, Staten Island and the boroughs to its east.  The mighty forests and fearsome wilderness of the area, once full of Natives as well as beasts, ghosts, mysteries and terrors that fueled a generation of early American writers, have been brought to their knees under the axes and industry of the European settlers and have yielded to farmlands growing fruits, vegetables and grains.  In the New York state of 250-300 years ago, the frontier once began right outside the edge of the town or village, and sometimes right outside the front door.  In modern New York state, the frontier is something read about in books, seen on television or in movies, or defined as a different type of frontier - a non-tangible thing whose terrors, treasures and opportunities are more of a financial, business or electronic nature.

We occasionally catch wisps of the old frontier.  Jack Kerouac, in the guise of his avatar Sal Paradise at the Bear Mountain Bridge in On the Road, comes face to face with the loneliness and the fear of the remnants of the old frontier and quails, turning his back on his dream to hitchhike along Route 6.  He instead flees back to New York and catches a bus that takes him all the way to Illinois before he attempts hitchhiking again.  One can probably find echoes of the old frontier in the Adirondacks and perhaps get far enough away from civilization that a small twist of imagination will bring Hawkeye, Chingachgook and Uncas striding around the corner, rifles at the ready.

Yes, as we move into the original thirteen colonies one can find history.  One can also find titanic struggle as settlers fight against the elements, the Natives, other Europeans and their own fears and shortcomings.  When you step foot into New York, you can see this history and even feel the difference of this colonial and revolutionary past and, let's say, the Midwest, Old West, South and other areas that would eventually become the United States.  It's a history that, except for some limited exposure, I am not familiar with and therefore, when I read about it or have experienced it in my own travels through the region, it impresses itself upon me in a powerful way.

Musical Interlude

I'm putting up some music from the 1992 movie version of The Last of the Mohicans.  I guess that because they got a younger Daniel Day-Lewis to play Hawkeye, he had to have a love interest (Cora), so they switched things around a bit from the book.  While Uncas still dies at the end, in the movie Cora lives.  Instead in the movie, the younger blonde sister dies for love of Uncas.  In the book, the younger sister lives and marries the gallant American officer.  So, if you watch the movie, you should know that it is not completely the story that Cooper told in his novel.

That being written, it is good music and the theme was composed by Dougie MacLean.

If you want to know more about Lewiston

Historic Lewiston
Lewiston Art Festival
Lewiston Jazz Festival
Niagara County Peach Festival
Niagara River Region Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Lewiston

Next up: Cheshire, New York

Blue Highways: Clarkston, Washington

Unfolding the Map

It's the last stop in Washington with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), and we make it a doozy by pulling out our inner nerds and comparing legends of American exploration with fictional legends of galactic exploration.  What do I mean?  Read on, Littourati, read on.  Oh, if you want to place Clarkston in an earthly context, warp on over to the map (yes, that's a hint about what to expect).

Book Quote

"At the east end of the Clearwater basin lay the twin towns of Clarkston, Washington and Lewiston, Idaho.  Clarkston used to be Jawbone Flats until it became Vineland, then Concord (the grapes, you see); in 1900, the town took the present name to parallel Lewiston across the river.  The historical pairing is nice, but give me Jawbone Flats...."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 10

The Queen of the West steamboat docked at Clarkston, Washington. Photo by John Harrison at the Northwest Power and Conservation Council's website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Clarkston, Washington

I've only started really looking into the Lewis and Clark expedition since they've been a big part of this chapter in Blue Highways.  Other than knowing from history courses taken in high school that Lewis and Clark explored the large area of land then called Louisiana that was purchased from France by Thomas Jefferson for the United States, that it's purchase doubled the size of the United States with a stroke of a pen, and finally that the addition of the vast territory and its exploration gave impetus to the U.S. belief in manifest destiny, I didn't know much more about particulars of the expedition.

In fact, Lewis and Clark's expedition was one of three commissioned by Thomas Jefferson after the purchase to confirm the boundaries and explore the unknown interior of the new territory.  The others were the Red River Expedition and the Pike Expedition.  However, Lewis and Clark's probably became the most famous since they pushed all the way to the Pacific Ocean and not least because of the participation of Sacagewea, their female Native companion and guide, whose bravery and resourcefulness became an inspiration for 19th century women's rights movements.

When I think of the Lewis and Clark expedition, however, and try to think of parallels that would make their challenge and accomplishments more real to a modern audience, the only comparison that I can draw is (and I know you'll really think I'm a nerd for this, Littourati!) Star Trek.

I can hear you groaning now.  Star Trek?  Lewis and Clark?  Really?

If you get past the initial fit of laughing and snorting, I am perfectly serious.  Why?  Because for all intents and purposes, Lewis and Clark set out on an expedition into an alien world.  Nobody knew what, or who, was out there.  Based on fossils that had been found in what was then U.S. territory, Thomas Jefferson even warned Lewis and Clark to be on the lookout for living specimens of mastodons and other living relics from the Pleistocene Age.  They might as well have been taking a spaceship to some other planet - that's how unknown the new territory was.

Star Trek's theme goes something like this:

"Space, the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.  It's (five year - TOS) (continuing - TNG) mission:  to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where (no man - TOS) (no one - TNG) has gone before."

Make a few substitutions of words, and you have the mission of the Corps of Discovery, the official name of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  They headed out into what was then a huge, unknown (to Europeans) frontier.  They were to seek out new life through collection of scientific specimens and through observation.  They were to look for new civilizations and peoples in a world that could prove just as hostile and alien as any that Kirk and Spock encountered in their television galactic wanderings.  Lewis and Clark, in many cases, literally went where no one had gone before.

Unlike the explorers in Star Trek, they didn't encounter anything of the extra-terrestrial variety.  They did not see any mammoths or mastodons, since those species had been extinct in North America for nearly 10,000 years.  Like the Star Trek crew, they did meet Native Americans.  Yes, that's right.  Kirk and crew in Star Trek find a planet where American Indians had been transported by an alien race called The Preservers.  Lewis and Clark instead met Native Americans on the natives' own territory.  Both Lewis and Clark were veterans who had fought with and against Indians in the East, so they had some familiarity with tribal cultures.  However, as they went farther west each tribe they encountered had its own culture and customs, and Native culture was so unlike European culture that it really must have been like meeting an alien race where there are few commonalities other than a shared humanity.  Sacagewea, a Shoshone woman married to a trapper who accompanied the expedition, turned out to be incredibly helpful to them as a guide and go-between.  It is interesting in this particular chapter of Blue Highways that given the clashing of worlds that must have happened each time the expedition came in contact with natives, LHM writes that Lewis and Clark's conduct, especially toward the Nez Perce, was so well-conducted that the tribe didn't fight white settlers for 75 years following the expedition.

Unlike Star Trek, in which the Prime Directive is a major principle that guides and limits the crew of the Enterprise in how they deal with alien cultures, the Lewis and Clark expedition was under no such restrictions.  In Star Trek, the Prime Directive mandates that Federation personnel cannot interfere in the internal development of alien civilizations, especially those less advanced.  This serves as a way to create tension as the Enterprise crew determines how to best study and interact with less advanced civilizations.  It also provides another element of tension in Star Trek plots if they accidentally contaminate, or try to undo the contamination, of alien races.  There was no Prime Directive for Lewis and Clark, and they interacted often and frequently with native tribes.  They could not help but make contact to gain vital supplies such as meat and salt.  LHM relates a story, a clash of civilizations type story, where an Indian man, derisive of the expeditions reliance on dog meat, throws a malnourished puppy at Lewis.  Lewis throws it back at him, and then grabs the native's tomahawk and lets him know in no uncertain terms that he will punish such insults in the future.

However, most of their encounters went relatively smoothly.  Europeans were generally unknown in the area - this would change after the expedition.  And like the Enterprise crew, which could use advanced technology to smooth its way and occasionally threaten the peoples they ran across, Lewis and Clark were able to use products of European civilization like matches, magnets and magnifying glasses to impress and mystify natives.  Just as Star Trek had Dr. McCoy who often used advanced medicine to the advantage of the Enterprise crew, Lewis and Clark also used medical techniques to win over various native tribes.  Though none of the expedition was formally trained in medicine, they knew enough about dressing wounds and draining lesions that they won the goodwill of many of the tribes they ran across.

Star Trek is also infamous for the "redshirts."  These were Enterprise crew members, usually dressed in red uniforms, whose plot purpose appeared to be to die and thus demonstrate the terrible predicament facing the crew.  The Enterprise seemed to have an unlimited supply of these redshirts, and it makes you wonder, given their fatality rate, why anyone who signed up for Starfleet would ever agree to wear that uniform.  The Lewis and Clark expedition, by contrast, had remarkably good luck in potentially hostile territory.  Only one soldier on the expedition died, possibly because of appendicitis.  The only violent encounter, which occurred with a native tribe called the Piegan Blackfeet, was over the Piegans fearful interpretation of the Corps dealings with other tribes that would end their monopoly on guns and the balance of power with neighboring enemy tribes.   As the Piegans tried to steal the Corps guns in the middle of the night, they were discovered, chased down and in the struggle two of the Piegans were killed.  Other than that, the only other near fatality came when one of the Corps shot Lewis in the butt in a hunting accident.  He recovered.

I hope I haven't gone too far out on a limb comparing the Lewis and Clark expedition with Star Trek, but there certainly are parallels that can be drawn, as well as significant differences.  Both the fictional galaxy-exploring expedition and the actual American West exploring expedition had similar goals.  In the end, Lewis and Clark accomplished so much that a greater understanding of the dangers and potential resources of the newly purchased territory was achieved, and the frontier was pushed farther back.  Without them, a young United States might not have achieved its goal of a coast-to-coast unified (dare I say it?) federation.  Unfortunately, it also led to the gradual end of traditional native life and the loss of their traditional lands.  Lewis and Clark paved the way for a nation, but also began the inexorable destruction of traditional Native life as the explorers opened the frontier to the settlers.

Musical Interlude

What could be better, in a post that references Star Trek, than a video of a tune "sung" by Shatner himself.  And Bohemian Rhapsody, no less!  Enjoy!

If you want to know more about Clarkston

City of Clarkston
Clarkston.com
Hells Canyon Visitor Bureau
Wikipedia: Clarkston

Next up: Lewiston, Idaho

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: 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