Blue Highways: Austin, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapMy three weeks in Turkey are over, and I'm back in the saddle again riding along with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) as he continues across America.  If you want to see some pictures and posts about my Turkey excursion, go to my Muse Gumbo site.  In this post it's Austin, Nevada, a sleepy hillside ghost mining town that I happened to pass through myself a couple of years ago.  It'll take me a couple of posts to get my Littourati chops up to speed again, but at least we've started!  Click on the map thumbnail to locate Austin.

Book Quote

"On three sides of town, prospect holes riddled the mountains and dripped out mine tailings like ulcerated wounds; to the west, several hundred feet down, lay a flat desert valley disappearing into the Shoshone Mountains on the horizon. Main Street, also U.S. 50, made a straight and steep run through Austin, then down the mountain and off across the desert. The side streets were hard-packed, oily sand, some with gradients that would test a donkey, and the rutted sidewalks, washing down the slope, still had their Old West canopies. Because Austin is without level land, many of the houses had been built into terraced cutouts so that from their porches people looked down onto the roofs of buildings along Main Street."

Blue Highways:  Part 5, Chapter 7

Photo by Chris Ralph at The Rock Hound's Corner Click on photo to go to site.Austin, Nevada

On our trip out through Nevada, we drove through Austin.  I remember driving up from a plain into some mountains, cresting, and then a steep drop on Hwy 50 through town as we looked out on the flat plain below stretching toward the next set of mountains.  Austin seemed unremarkable to me then, and because we were on a schedule we didn't stop but kept moving right along.

However, it was remarkable in one way in which LHM also finds of interest.  Before I visited Hazard, Kentucky in the Appalachians, I had never seen cities or towns laid out along a steep hillside before.  I thought it extremely cool that towns could have streets overlooking other streets, and porches of normal houses overlooking other houses' rooftops.  To lay a city out in that way really fascinated me, even though I could see the logic of the layout.  The only other way to lay a town out in a deep valley with steep hillsides is to follow the valley, which could lead a town to stretch for miles and miles.  In the day of the car, that would not be such a problem, but in the days before cars when many of these towns were being laid out, that would have made it very difficult for people to go to do basic tasks such as get supplies and food.  Keeping the town compact would have been much more important.

You find a lot of these types of towns in the mining areas of the west.  On a trip into Arizona, my wife and I visited Jerome, a small mining town perched high on a mountainside.  The town was built into a mountainside so steep that one of the buildings actually, over the course of time, slid from one street down to the next.  Another mining town in Arizona that we visited, Bisbee, where a certain color of turquoise is found, had a similar layout.  Walking the main street meant walking uphill as the street followed what used to be a gulch.  Taking side streets up from the main street often meant a steep climb.  If one lived in Bisbee and didn't have a car, one would be in really good shape from the daily workout!

On our trip through Nevada, the only other place we visited that had a similar layout was Virginia City.  But if you want to eschew the tourist areas, you probably won't go to Virginia City because it's whole purpose now is to cater to tourists.  The main street was full of all kinds of kitsch, but we did find a very cool little museum on a back street, steeply downhill from the main drag.

Living in a town like that, I can only imagine, would cause a rethinking of privacy.  Presumably, one would want to live higher up, because that would preserve privacy.  If you lived farther downhill, you could be observed by uphill neighbors as well as the people who lived to either side.  In a town that is flat, you wouldn't necessarily have that kind of problem.

But, the perspective engendered with such a town would also be changed.  How one viewed the world would have to be affected by whether they lived up the gulch or down the gulch, up higher on the valley walls or lower on the valley walls.  The light would last longer in the evening the higher one resided, and would arrive earlier in the morning.  Noise from below might be muted, but I can also imagine that echoes from below would be more discernible.  Would a person who lived higher up be more removed and aloof from the town?  Would a person who lived below be more active and sociable by necessity?

I don't have answers to these questions, I just pose them as thought exercises.  However, one thing is clear to me through all my travels.  If humans choose to live somewhere, well, they find a way to make it work whether it's temporary or permanent.  Certainly, there are examples of abandoned towns and cities all over America and the rest of the world.  However, most of those places enjoyed, even for a few evenings in the case of the shortest lived, the human activities that attempt to build a community.  Austin, Nevada is but one place, in the middle of a naturally arid and harsh landscape, where people succeeded. in building something long-lasting.  Obviously, we succeed more often than we don't.

Musical Interlude

It isn't that I loved O Brother Where Art Thou (I really did), but I really like the song In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.  It shows that everyone in their situation hopes for better things, even if the utopia is completely rooted in their own experience.  We used to joke that our dog, who was rescued, hit the big rock candy mountain when she came to our house.  But I too would like to reach the big rock candy mountain.  Who wouldn't?

If you want to know more about Austin

Austin, Nevada
Ghosttowns.com: Austin
The Historical Society of Austin, Nevada
TravelNevada.com: Austin
Wikipedia: Austin

Next up: New Pass Station, Nevada

Blue Highways: Spencer's Hot Springs, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapLet's stop and rinse off at Spencer's Hot Springs with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM)!  After all, we deserve it.  Traveling is long, dusty and tiring.  In this post, I'll reflect on hot springs and bathing in general.  Sounds fun, doesn't it?  To see where Spencer's Hot Springs is located, so you can really visit there one day, click on the map thumbnail at right.

Book Quote

"On the map I noticed a thermal spring to the south.  I wandered around side roads before Spencer's Hot Springs appeared on a knoll under the snowy Toquima Mountains east of Austin.  When I saw the blue pools steaming, there was no question in my mind.  With only five Nevadans to the square mile (in actuality many fewer when you discount Las Vegas and Reno), I figured I could get by undisturbed.  Behind a cover of thistle and spiny hopsage, I stripped and dished up the hot water, let it cool slightly, then poured buckets of it over me.  I even slapped on hot, gritty, blue-gray mud to loosen the sinews.  Then I rinsed clean as men before must have done, dumping over me water warmed by the molten heart of the earth."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 6

Spencer's Hot Springs, near Austin, Nevada. Photo at AustinNevada.com's Flickr photostream. Click on photo to go to site.

Spencer's Hot Springs, Nevada

Until I moved to New Mexico, I had never experienced the glory of a hot mineral spring.  I knew they existed - in fact there were hot mineral springs near where I grew up in California - but I'd never been to one.  I still haven't been to Orr Hot Springs or Vichy Springs, so near my home town.

The state in which I live,  New Mexico, as in Nevada, is a place where hot springs abound. You find them in the Jemez Mountains, at Ojo Caliente, and in the desert at Truth or Consequences (once known as Hot Springs).  Trips to TorC and Ojo Caliente made me a believer.  In Ojo Caliente, the baths are infused with different minerals.  There's an iron bath, an arsenic bath, and a mud bath, as well as other pools.  You can even drink natural water with lithium in it for a mental pick-me-up.  At TorC, you can stay in motels and hotels that tap directly into the hot water underground, or you can rent a public or private tub at a place like Riverbend Hot Springs, situated right alongside the Rio Grande.

There's really nothing like soaking oneself in water heated by the earth's internal processes.  Heat generated by molten hot magma (can't you just hear Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers films?).  It feels different than city water dumped into a bathtub through a faucet.  It leaves one with an invigorated feeling, but also a relaxed and rested feeling.  It is very hard to describe.

I think about this because I often, just because my mind work this way, have thought exercises where I think about what humanity did before our modern technologies.  Certainly, before hot water heaters installed in houses, to take a bath most people had to heat water on a stove.  Of course, this is the genesis of the gags you can see in old westerns, where the womenfolk enlist the menfolk to drag some character with a name like Old Scratchy in for a bath.  He kicks, bites and screams, kind of like a dog that really doesn't want to get wet, but in the end he gets put in the tub and he ends up liking the bath.  Of course, heating enough water for a bath took a while, so baths were rare and when they did occurr, a lot of people had to share the same water.  You were not lucky if you were the last person to bathe.

That type of bathing, I'm sure, happened for pretty much most of humanity's civilized period.  Before that, well, there was the streams and oceans if one wanted to get clean.  And they were cold.  No wonder that bathing didn't happen very often.

So, I imagine that those people who lived near a hot spring like Spencer's Hot Springs were really lucky.  They could bathe in water that, depending on the spring, remained warm to hot.  They got the experience that very few people in the world had.  And, I'm sure, they were cleaner than most of the rest of humanity.  we are very spoiled in the modern world with our daily showers or baths.  For most of our history, cleansing one's body, heart and mind was a luxury.

I'm glad that I didn't know about Spencer's Hot Springs when I drove past on Highway 50 in July 2010, because I would have been disappointed that I couldn't stop.  I had a schedule to keep - which is unfortunately the way most of us travel nowadays.  Also, it was mid-summer and very hot in the Nevada Desert which does not make a hot spring sound appealing.  If I ever travel that way again, however, I'll either work it into my schedule or make it a priority to visit the springs, especially if it's a more hospitable time of year for such activities.  Like LHM, I'll strip and rinse, or even climb in, and enjoy something that I've found to be extremely soul-refreshing.  I'm not a prude about nudity, so if there are some other people there and they are naked, I'll climb right in though I never push the sight of my nakedness on others - I'll suit up if those who are there are suited.

Pippin's song in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien best sums up the feeling of taking a hot bath (and it's even better in a hot spring!)

Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
that washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.

O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.

O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings
From Lord of the Rings Wikia

Musical Interlude

I searched long and hard for a song about bathing in a hot spring, or a mineral spring.  Well, long and hard is about a half hour for me.  There seems to be a real dearth of such songs and that presents an opportunity for an enterprising songwriter.  Think about it - laughter and love at the hot springs!  So, in its place I'll give you an old standard about bathing - Splish Splash by Bobby Darin.

If you want to know more about Spencer's Hot Springs

All Around Nevada: Spencer's Hot Springs
Backyard Traveler: Soaking in Spencer's Hot Springs
CmdrMark.com: Description of Spencer's Hot Springs visit
List of all of Nevada's hot springs
Tour of America Airstream Life: Spencer's Hot Springs
Vanabode: Spencer's Hot Springs

Next up: Austin, Nevada

Blue Highways: Hickison Summit, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapHickison Summit was evidently a place where early Native Americans "posted" carved symbols in a kind of prehistoric Facebook page.  A lot of those carvings could be considered "naughty" because they depict various female body parts.  The academic term for these carvings is "vulviform."  Click on the map thumbnail at the right to learn where you can go to see prurient archeology.

Book Quote

"Wind and water had cut the canyon wall into particularly sensuous shapes, and on rocks the elements had left blank, Indians of a thousand years ago carved sacred designs.  The Bureau of Land Management had fenced off the petroglyphs, but stick figures, concentric circles, and rectangles stood out clearly from the damp stone.  To the Indian, these cuttings were not pictures or objects so much as events: they carried life.

"At the west end, where the fence came close to a ritualistic chiseling, I reached over and traced my finger along an incised abstraction now polished by years of hands.  A cryptic engraving.  Then I saw that the design wasn't at all abstract, but rather a graphic rendering of a female pudendum, a glyph even Cro-Magnons carved.  In a time so long ago no descendant can remember any of it, an Indian had cut his desire, or coming of age, or hope for regeneration into the pink sandstone.  It was as if I touched another dimension - a long skein of men, events, places.  It was as if I had reused the image."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 6

Looking west from Hickison Summit. Photo by Max Farrar in Panoramio. Click on photo to go to site.

Hickison Summit, Nevada

When I was an early teenager, my uncle who was staying with us at the time came to me and said he wanted to talk to me.  "Okay," I answered, not sure what he wanted.  He took me outside and we sat out on our deck for a while, and then he said "so I saw your pictures."  I wasn't sure what he meant.  I hadn't drawn any pictures.  I didn't think of myself as an artist or anything.  "What pictures," I asked, puzzled.  "The ones on the bathroom window."

Oh...those pictures.  At night, after taking a bath, the window was fogged up and I drew pictures of female genitalia in the steam on the window.  After all, it was that age where I was really thinking about those sorts of things a lot.  Women and their bodies were a source of extreme interest and fascination for me.  I had gotten in trouble previously for having some magazines between my mattress and the box spring, but in those heady days those were the first glimpse that I ever had of an unclothed grown woman.  They were amazing, beautiful and a bit intimidating and I remember the feelings as my hormones kicked into gear when I saw them.  The pictures I drew were my attempt to recreate what I saw and remembered.  I had thought they disappeared when the window fog evaporated but, evidently, they had left enough trace amounts of oil from my fingers to leave behind a more lasting record of my artistic endeavors.

Our art is a signpost of where we are at in our lives.  Like Picasso, who had his "Blue Period," I have occasionally, through art, had my own periods of creation.  (Note:  I do not equate any of my creativity with the genius of Picasso or any other great artist or writer)  When I was a teenager, my stabs at the female form were one marker of where I was in life.  As a young adult, my tortured poetry about relationships marked another period.  I had a long period where I didn't do anything creative at all.  After another reawakening of literary creativity brought about by a disastrous foray into a friendship that got too involved, I went through another bout of creativity reflecting that period of my life.

Now, my art reflects, I think, a more sober, reflective self.  I don't put myself up there with the great artists of the world, but like the Native Americans on Hickison Summit who carved their signs and symbols into rocks I throw my creative endeavors up onto the Web, which in our age is a hi-tech version of rocks, bulletin boards, billboards, or refrigerator doors.

Given that, it's nice to know that a constant art theme throughout history, especially the history of males, are the signs and symbols of the feminine and female beauty.  They may not always intend to honor, but in my heart, even if such symbols are born out of lust or humor or even anger, they still acknowledge the amazing power of our feelings and longings to be close to someone, even to be one with someone.  It's only our own thoughts of inadequacy and our insecurities that may lead such symbols to be drawn as expressions of unfeeling objectivity.  The essence of life and the forces, which we barely understand, that drive men (and women) to try to picture and reproduce the feminine, is pure and sacred in its untouched state.  It makes me feel less silly for drawing pictures in steam on my bathroom window, and more a part of the strong energy of life.  Now in my late 40s, it's wonderful to still feel that urgency, those longings, that sense of the mystery of the feminine when it reveals itself, or is revealed, to me.

Musical Interlude

I guess, fitting with this theme, J. Geils Band's Centerfold will fill the bill.  Ahhh, the 80s.  Where my teenage lusts clashed with my more adult finer sensibilities!  I wrote in the last post that pornography has not been alien to me...obviously some form of it has been around since early humans started drawing pictures on cave walls.  Whether you think it can be art or not, turning our longing and sexual expression into graphic depictions of all types, from porn to high art, has a long history.

If you want to know more about Hickison Summit

Hickison Summit Petroglyphs in Pictures
Historical Marker Database: Hickison Summit
Online Nevada: Hickison Summit

Next up:  Spencer's Hot Springs, Nevada

Blue Highways: Ely, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe turn onto the Loneliest Road in America with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) as he travels the bluest of the blue highways.  In Ely, at least when he went through, we find that the loneliness pervades his perception of the town.  My experience in Ely was of a quiet place, but not necessarily lonely.  But, we'll examine loneliness through the prism of a Nevada industry - the oldest profession in the world.  Click on the map thumbnail, to your right, and make Ely a little less lonely.

Book Quote

"Not everything that happens in Ely happens at the Hotel Nevada, but it could.  The old place is ready for it.  But that night the blackjack tables were empty, the slots nearly so, and the marbelized mirrors reflected the bartender's slump and a waitress swallowing a yawn...."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 5

"Tradition persists in Nevada.  You can see it, for example, in the whorehouses of Ely.  Prostitition is legal in White Pine County because miners, in order to work efficiently in the ground digging for this and that, traditionally require whores."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 6

Hotel Nevada in Ely, Nevada. Photo by Megan E. Kamerick.Ely, Nevada

So far along this virtual journey we have been taking with LHM, I have come across only a few places where his journey and my actual experience intersect.  Ely, Nevada is one of them.  In a previous post, I mentioned that I had persuaded my wife to drive to California to see my family.  Our route took us through Utah and then into Nevada on US Highway 50 to Ely, where we got a motel room and spent the night.  I'll include in this post some pictures we took there, including some of interesting public art murals that are sprinkled downtown.

It's interesting that LHM paints Ely as being so initially...unexciting...with his description of the Hotel Nevada and then turns around and writes about prostitution in Ely.  Prostitution is prurient, and somewhat exciting to read about, right?  However, I read this as a way of indicating the loneliness that is part of the Nevada experience.  Okay, maybe that's not LHM's intention but that's what his description brings to my mind, which is really the point of this blog.

Downtown Ely, Nevada. Photo by Megan E. Kamerick

As you drive into Nevada on Highway 50, the signs unmistakably identify that road as the Loneliest Road in America.  In addition, US Highway 6 joins Highway 50 near Ely, and my only other awareness of Highway 6 was in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, where way back in the state of New York Sal waits in the rain for a ride at the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River, intending to hitchhike Highway 6 out west, and has to take a bus back to New York City berating himself for a fool.  Standing at Bear Mountain Bridge in the rain, Sal feels a loneliness and, not being able to handle it, heads back to New York City to start his journey in another way.

I am also struck that prostitution, seemingly out of touch with a lonely hotel and the loneliest road in America, is an occupation that caters to the lonely and for the lonely, often by the lonely.  Prostitution has been labeled the oldest occupation on Earth, and has been a symbol used throughout literature.  We have a lot of archetypes of the prostitute, such as Mary Magdalene in the New Testament, or the whore with a heart of gold.  However, I am often struck by the other side of what I read about prostitution - the difficult circumstances that lead people to turn to the world's oldest profession.  Dysfunctional families, personality issues, emotional issues.  Those gateways to the dark and lonely side of the human soul that I, who suffered family dysfunction and sexual abuse, know all too well.  I'm not a prude - in fact I have a history of difficulties with sexual addiction (pornography) related to my history of sexual abuse - but it strikes me that my experience is probably similar to that many prostitutes in the commonality of loneliness.

Mural on AT&T Building in Ely, Nevada. Photo by Megan E. KamerickI was reading a book recently called The Art of Racing in the Rain.  It is a touching book about the loyalty of a dog named Enzo.  Enzo, who is the narrator, reflects upon the difference between loneliness and being alone.  Being alone is a reality.  When one is the only person in a room, he or she is alone.  However, loneliness, according to this book, is a state of mind.  One can be lonely, despite the fact that he or she is not alone.  One can be alone, yet not lonely.  Being lonely is very difficult, and I've known people, including myself, that despite the presence of those who care for them and love them, remain lonely.  People seek out aloneness at times.  Nobody seeks loneliness and prolonged loneliness can lead people to desperate things.  After all, we are all social and want human interconnection.

Miners, out in the wilderness around Ely, found themselves lonely for companionship.  They might have wanted someone to talk with, be a companion, to love them even for a short while.  Of course, that meant a business opportunity existed, one in which the providers could justify their actions as a type of public service.  Giving up one's body in prostitution is an opportunistic business transaction performing an act that should be the complete antithesis of such transactions.  The sexual act in a normal, healthy way involves putting much trust in one's partner.  As a business transaction, such sex might be the extreme version of loneliness without being alone.  Why?  Because no matter how much is paid for sex, the sex act under such conditions cannot provide the loving human contact that most of us crave.  It is simply business.  At the end, the participants, if lonely, remain so because once the transaction is over, it's finished.  There is no continuity, no promise of tomorrow unless there is payment, no chance of unconditionality because it is all about conditions.

Detail of downtown Eli mural. Photo by Michael L. Hess

That is probably why the websites of the two brothels that still exist in Ely strike me as strip clubs, where one can get extra benefits after the strip show and the lap dances are finished.  It all seems very lonely to me, with the participation of a lot of lonely people.  While Nevada regulates the prostitution industry, the exploitation of people's loneliness by appealing to their need for companionship through the most powerful feelings and instincts we have as humans seems to me to really touch on the most vulnerable parts of us and is ripe for the emergence of the dark and seamier sides of humanity.

I don't want to end this post on Ely with a downer.  Ely has more merits than LHM gives it.  It has some very nice attributes as a city, and is quiet and not at all completely driven by the prostitution industry.  We especially liked the public art, in the form of murals, spread around the downtown.  When a city makes efforts like this, it shows a pride in community and a real attempt to make a place appealing for residents and visitors alike.  The photos I've peppered through this post show some of the artwork one can find around the town.

Detail of mural image in Ely, Nevada. Photo by Megan E. Kamerick

Musical Interlude

I was going to put, for the musical interlude, Patti Labelle's Lady Marmalade, to keep in the mood of this post.  I forgot about an amazing Cole Porter song called Love for Sale.  This version is sung by the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald.  Just listen to the lyrics rendered in Ella's wonderful voice - it captures the loneliness perfectly "If you want the thrill of love / I've been through the mill of love / Old love, new love / Every love but true love."

If you want to know more about Ely

Ely, Nevada Home Page
The Ely Times (newspaper)
Hotel Nevada
NevadaWeb: Ely
Nevada Northern Railway
Wikipedia: Ely

Next up: Hickison Summit, Nevada

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