Back into the Southwest

In San Bernardino, in the hotel you might remember from the origins of this here blog. Tomorrow I board a bus for 2 days to Tulsa, Oklahoma to begin orientation for my new job. Here are some pics from the past couple days coming back into the southwest.
North of Moab, Utah











Chimney Rock near Cortez, Colorado










Shiprock, Northwestern, New Mexico










San Andres Mountains near Las Cruces, New Mexico








Wind Farm near Palm Springs (here is where the cool ocean climate meets the hot desert climate through a tight window called Tehachapi Pass creating, as you might expect, heavy constant wind.)





It's amazing what a little rain will do for Southern California

Salt Lake City, Utah

In the Tabernacle with my tourguides










The Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints


















A Power Plant on North Temple St. SLC, UT



















The Utah State Capital and the Wasatch Range

The Palouse

The Palouse is an area of richly undulating treeless hills primarily in Southeastern Washington but extending into Idaho and Oregon as well. they are a huge area for growing barley and lentils and in the summer the hills shimmer in green and gold. Deep primary contrasting and otherworldly beautiful. In the winter they are more monotone but no less wonderful. (Have you seen the bizzaro Robin Williams/LL Cool J movie "Toys"? They filmed the outside scenes, the ones on the impossible green treeless hills, in the Palouse.)
The Snake River at the Washington/ Idaho Border

Pasco, Washington

I’m not sure that there is any state that is so different from one end to another (except adjacent Oregon or huge Texas/California) as is Washington. Pasco is not even in the same universe as Seattle. Out here in Central Washington (usually called Eastern Washington since that would be anything east of the Cascades, a mountain range in the western side of the state.) I feel like I am nowhere, or in a whole new place that no one has ever been before. (That being said I am at a Flying J and therefore someone has been here before.) Allow me to describe…
After driving across the basin and range of Idaho, beautifully frosted with snow (snow really brings out the best of the west, it takes the drab taupe hills and adds shine, depth and contrast, fucking gorgeous) I entered into Oregon, another state with a split personality. Up toward Baker City I climbed into the Blue Mountains where a thick and gauzy fog settled and, indeed, froze on surfaces, an exceptionally fine glazing of ice, turning everything into crystal. Horrible, treacherous, crystal. Fortunately that ended and I shimmied down what is called Cabbage Hill toward Pendleton. This is one hell of a down grade for an interstate. Switchbacks! Full on switchbacks on an interstate. Across the Columbia and into Washington or possibly the surface of Neptune. The hills swell in impossibly huge gestures, like being at sea, the waves, unbraking, rising in all directions, making one feel quite little indeed.
There are no trees.
(traveling west on I-84 looking at where I will be momentarily, i.e. an interstate switchback)



There are vineyards. All the big Washington state wines are grown here. Columbia Crest, Snoqualmie, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Hogue, etc. The long summer days (we are pretty far north here) combined with the warmth and then drastic cool at night along with well draining (i.e. shitty) soil and easy irrigation make it pretty ideal for viticulture, especially white wine grapes.
The Columbia Crest Vineyards south of Prosser, Washington










Up and over a huge swell of a hill (I only call it a hill because it is so gentle) and you are out of the Columbia River Valley and into the Yakima River Valley and their respective AVAs (American Viticultural Areas, the US equivalent of the French Appelation d’Origine Contrôlée such as Côtes du Rhône or Beaujolais.) Once over the hill one thing becomes very obvious, Mount Adams, The second highest point in Washington. A 12,000 foot stratovolcano in the Cascades. Then another thing becomes obvious. Mount Rainier, the highest volcano at over 14,000 feet. It doesn’t look as impressive from here because Adams is closer. These are easily the most astonishing mountains in the lower 48. From the Yakima Valley (at around 1000 feet) they rise over 11,000 feet. From Seattle you are looking at them from nearly sea level (when you can see them through the rain and fog). Nowhere else will you find this sort of differential.
After delivering my load of Fruity Pebbles et.al. to the Wal-Mart Grocery Warehouse I headed back east. I have a load to pick up in Lewiston, Idaho, just across the river from Clarkston, Washington, cute. I believe it is paper, uggh. (heavy). Tomorrow’s drive across the Palouse should be delightful. The load is headed to Laredo, Texas although I won’t be able to take it all the way there since I have to be in California by Friday in order to catch the bus to Tulsa for orientation for my new job driving flatbeds. We’ll have to split it somewhere.
Mount Adams from the Wal-Mart grocery warehouse, Grandview, Washington

Snowville, Utah

I-80 in Wyoming











Oh the plains of Wyoming. The first time I ever came into the country known as Wyoming was on an epic journey to Washington with my friend Robin. It was my first trip west. West from Iowa. We had come through the sand hills and badlands and then into Wyoming on I-90. I felt fairly certain that, had I not had the acclimatizing step of having gone to college for a few years in Iowa’s tallgrass prairie, I might have totally lost it in the emptiness of this most empty state. It is perhaps worth noting that my car was not working well. It ran but did not start, this may have added to my apparent agoraphobia. We continued that trip without turning off the car, all the way to Washington.
Wyoming this time around, having just had a fairly substantial amount of snow, decided, it seems, to start the job of plowing but not complete it leaving large swathes of the interstate, sometimes one lane, sometimes both, with just enough snow to be compacted into glacial ice making passage nerve-wracking. (Some of this might have to do with the nature of snow in Wyoming to “blow” i.e. not stay put, but still, this is not a new problem and I think Wyoming could figure out a solution, perhaps more of those charming snow fences.)
At the Flying J near Rawlins where I stopped midday for fuel there was no need for a plow whatsoever The semis would just tamp it down into a slippery mess for free.
Just as you are leaving “the equality state” (so named as it was the first to give women the vote, that and they beat the shit out of the gays) it gets interesting, or, to put it another way, just as you enter Utah it gets interesting. I-84 follows a river through there huge soft shouldered glass blue (because of the snow) mountains into the valley of the Salt Lake at Ogden. I wonder, when Brigham Young finally made it to this valley, after all the bullshit he’d been through and declared “This is the place!” I wonder what he thought once he got down to the alkaline shores and first tasted it bitter brine. That must have been a bit of a bummer.
I’m in Snowville just a few miles south of Idaho. There is snow on the ground and the place is just barely a “ville.” A number of widely spread houses, many trailers, with large fenced in yards, everyone has horses and dogs. The only businesses in town are one place with initials for a name, function indeterminable, two diners, and the Flying J by the interstate, where I sit now and pen this missive to you.

One of Snowville's two Diners











Cattle Grate, Snowville, Utah

North Platte, Nebraska

Sunset in North Platte, Nebraska











Traveling southwest I past through the driftless zone, the area of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa that escaped glaciation and thus is starkly unflat as compared with the landscapes that give these states their reputation. The sky was unfailingly grey. Not cloudy but rather as if you had, on photoshop, used the little paint can to turn everything that was blue into light squinty grey. The dirty snow on the ground added to the effect greatly. I passed into Iowa, the landscape a grainy B&W repro from a bad catalogue of Grant Wood and through small towns whose own greyness brought to mind the town where I went to college and what an odd setting it was for a boy from the east coast. Now, however, I think of the Midwest almost as a second home, it is just that in being away from it for so long it strikes me as foreign but familiar.
The trailer that I had, filled with paper towels from Green Bay I dropped in a glaciated lot in West Branch, Iowa, the home of the eminently forgettable Herbert Hoover. It seems in thinking back on the presidents, we had a lot of eminently forgettable ones. A bunch of important ones at the beginning, then some like Polk or Jackson who we remember because they were gigantic pricks and then the occasional Lincoln. Into the twentieth century they become less forgettable as the specificity of history favors the recent. I wonder if George W. will go down as a eminently forgettable president or a prick. Time will tell, time will tell. Let’s this year elect us an unforgettable one shall we. (All that being said I’m sure Hoover was a swell guy and the folks from Iowa sure love their only native son to make it to the highest office.)
I picked up a different trailer from the drop yard loaded with cereal (including but not limited to Chocolate Honeycombs and Fruity Pebbles) and lumbered along eventually across the Missouri and into Nebraska, the flash of excitement tumbling down from the Loess Hills and into Omaha and then the flatness. Oh! The Flatness. Eventually I-80 joins the Platte River, one of the primary routes west in the days when manifest destiny must have been a really god damn exciting idea. (my sarcasm might hide the fact that, had I been alive then, I too would have found it really god damn exciting. So much so that even today I only feel good when traveling west. (or north)) Settlers followed the flat fertile valley, with water for drinking and trees for fixing broken wagons (we have all played Oregon trail, yes?) across the length of Nebraska before emerging out of the green and into the wide desiccated landscape of the high plains that collapsed in on them with its immensity and surely they must have thought, what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?

Salt Lake City

hang in there dear reader, there are entries awaiting post as soon as I can
get near a good Internet connection. (I'm writing this on my phone)
in the slc now enjoying the cool mountain air and complimentary tours/
conversion attempts at the LDS compound. More on this next time.

Chicago, Illinois

Oh Brother.
I'm in Chicago, it is Tuesday.
Too cold for diesel engines in this, presently, most inhospitable climate.
At this time the batteries are inside warming and and charging up and, hopefully,
when they are done, the truck will start and all will be well again.
fingers are crossed, wood is being knocked upon.
In the mean time, my insatiable reader, I offer some images from the sometimes windy, but terribly chilly city.

Warm Light (deceptive)












Serge and the Antelope















David in the Cold City















Not from chicago. a fast car in a warmer place. with that crazy iphone distortion.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Its the 50th blog post! woot!
there is a song by a guy named Josh Ritter (no relation to star of Three's Company. Not that I know of at least) The lyric: "It's a long way to hell, it's closer to Harrisburg." But just barely. This was today as I made my way through the "wintry mix" of snow, sleet, freezing rain and, eventually, rain from a Wal-Mart DC near Clearfield to Palmyra, near the aforementioned Harrisburg. The route is US-322, a nice diagonal across the ridges of the Appalachians and down the Juniata river valley. The section between State College (perhaps the most imaginatively named land grant university town) and Lewistown is possibly one of the prettiest stretches of road in Pennsylvania. In freezing rain and sleet, however, prettiest=deadliest, and so it was a long day.