On the road again

Tonight I'm home, with the bright crescent of a waxing moon setting in the southwestern sky. But my mind is on the road. Thanks to photographer Jim Steinberg (this is your fault, Jim), I'm starting a new book project: Colorado Scenic Byways: Taking the Other Road, a two-book set that Jim calls a "love poem" to the 25 designated routes that show off the state's diverse landscapes and cultures. From the open spaces of the Eastern Plains with their ancient dinosaur trackways, grain elevators and futuristic wind generators, to the abrupt rise of the Foothills and High Peaks cris-crossed with Jeep and hiking trails, pocked with mines and dotted with ski areas and starter castles, to the wide swaths of Mountain Parks that run the gamut from shrub desert and sand dunes to lazy rivers meandering through green hayfields, and the brilliantly colored rock layers that shape the western Plateaus, Colorado is one amazing place.

One part of Colorado Scenic Byways: Taking the Other Road, is a coffee table volume in the spirit of our previous collaboration Colorado Less Traveled, a finalist for the 2006 Colorado Book Award. In this new book though, we're paying homage to a uniquely American love: the open road. We'll weave the photos and words into a lyrical whole that evokes the spirit of each road, each scenic byway.

The second part of Colorado Scenic Byways is a take-along Atlas & Road Guide, a route-by-route map of each byway giving the down-and-dirty details you'd need to get the most out of the trip, including maps and altitude profiles, details of geology, geography and history, fun and fascinating facts, and traveler's tips from each of us.

The deadline for this whole glorious assignment: January 1 for the essays for the coffee table book, February 1 for the road guide narratives. Yup, it's crazy - but how could I turn something like this down?

Richard and I managed to drive three of Colorado's scenic byways on our trip to Durango last weekend for Colorado Art Ranch's second Artposium, an event which was most appropriately focused on maps and creativity. What a weekend! We filled our minds with maps as metaphoric and literal aids to imagination and life, and filled our spirits with the starkly spectacular landscapes of southwestern Colorado and the stories of their millennia of human culture.

That's me in front of a nearly eight-foot-tall sagebrush at Lowry Ruin, an Ancestral Puebloan site perched on a hilltop off the Highway of the Ancients byway with a gorgeous view of the whole Four Corners region. If you're in southwestern Colorado, it's worth the trip on the dusty gravel road to visit Lowry. If you can get there at sunrise or sunset when the light colors the ruins golden and picks out the distant Henry Mountains to the west in Utah, Sleeping Ute Mountain to the south, the great tilted wedge of Mesa Verde to the southeast, and the high peaks of the Platas to the east, you can see why people settled in this now-isolated site. It's a view swells the soul.

(As a footnote to my traveling green entries, our Subaru Forester was a delight to drive. It's comfortable - I love the sunroof for skygazing!, averages 29 miles per gallon of gas, and its exhaust just smells like air, nothing more.)

Now I'm home with the brilliant silver moon setting as Cygnus, the Swan, flies down the Milky Way directly overhead. But my mind is very definitely on the road - on 25 scenic byway routes, in fact. Join me on the trip when Colorado Scenic Byways: Taking the Other Road is published next fall!

Eight days and thirty-two hundred miles

Richard and I just returned from a thirty-two hundred mile drive across the inland West, that wide stretch of mostly-open, treeless country between the Rockies and the Cascades. Our excuse for the road trip was a family gathering at my brother's land high above the Klickitat River in southern Washington.

We stopped in Portland first, and celebrated our anniversary with our daughter, Molly, and a dinner at Terroir, a wonderful restaurant in her Portland neighborhood that features local, fresh food served small plate style (like tapas). We shared a variety of dishes, beginning with a cold cucumber-yoghurt soup with hints of chile and cilantro and ending with a chocolate tart and a creamy slice of cheesecake topped with boysenberries. Yum! From there we braved the congested I-5 corridor in Washington to visit our nieces, Heather and Sienna, and their families, because they couldn't join us all at the land. (And yes, we spent half an hour one evening sitting in a traffic jam in between Olympia and Tacoma - I'm so glad I live in rural Colorado!)

Then we headed for the Columbia River Gorge and Bill and Lucy's land high above the gorge with a fabulous view of Mt Adams rising like the enormous dormant volcano it is on the northern horizon. We hung out, looked for birds and wildflowers - the yampah was blooming, its white Queen-Ann's-Lace-type flower a hint of the starchy bulb that for millennia nourished the people who loved on this land before us, ate salmon and fresh corn off the grill, and stayed up until what seemed way after dark to us old folks watching for the Perseid meteors.

We saw a few meteors, but mostly we just admired the myriad stars, sparkling in uncountable numbers in truly dark skies. Far from streetlights, yard lights, billboard lights, parking lot lights and stadium lights, the sky was the best show of all, black and infinite and positively littered with the twinkling dots of so many stars you can't begin to count them all. Looking at the heavens like that is a glimpse back in time to the universe where life began, a look at the wondrous fact that we exist at all, here on the only blue planet we know in all of space.

On the long drive home, we detoured to blue highways, the two-lane roads that take longer to get from point to point, but which gave us a more intimate experience of the landscapes. We saw stepped canyons cut in dark layers of basalt, sagebrush twice as tall as I am flourishing in the deep soil of stream bottoms, the searing scars of windblown range fires blackening miles of what had been green and sage-clothed landscape, pelicans riding the choppy waters of inland lakes, rivers sliding over worn cobbles, black-necked stilts teetering on impossibly long and skinny as they probed for food in muddy pond shores, the smoke of distant fires blurring blue horizons, mountains rising like waves from desert basins, red cliffs against blue sky, sagebrush coloring miles of high desert like gray-green and fragrant suede, bluebirds winging through Gambel oak.

We saw huge wind turbines with blades spinning in slow circles like one-legged dancers atop high ridges, pump jacks see-sawing up and down as they sucked ancient liquified carbon from the earth, the lighted derricks of drill rigs slowly piercing the skin of the earth, trucks racing their shadows down hills, trains winding up long grades.

We saw Wasco, Spray, John Day, Prairie City, and Unity, Oregon; Nampa (could that be a variant of yampah, the region's native "potato"?), Boise, Mountain Home, and Grassmere, Idaho; the Duck Valley Reservation, home to Shoshone and Paiute people; Owyhee, Mountain City, Elko, Deeth, and West Wendover, Nevada; Aragonite, Tooele, Salt Lake City, Spanish Fork, Helper, Price, and Green River, Utah; Fruita, Grand Junction, Delta, Montrose, Sapinero Gunnison and Parlin, Colorado.

We crossed the miles-wide Columbia, the John Day (three times), Malhuer (twice in two different states), Snake, Boise, Owyhee, Humbolt (the river that runs 250 miles west across Nevada only to disappear into the desert), Green, Colorado, Uncompaghre, Cimarron, and Gunnison rivers. We crossed the Columbia plains, Blue Mountains, Snake River plains, Independence Mountains, Pequop and Goshute mountains, Great Salt Desert, Wasatch Front, San Rafael Desert, Grand Valley, Cimarron uplift, and the Sawatch Range.

We traversed a huge sweep of country, all of which gave me a glimmer of the book I'm hoping to start this fall. But best of all, we came home. This valley in between two major ranges of the Rockies, this town that sits on the Arkansas River, this house on a formerly junky industrial site now restored to a native wildflower and bunchgrass grassland where the hummingbirds trill among the Indian paintbrush flaming bright scarlet is truly where my heart is: home.

A two turtle trip

Richard and I just returned from a 3,300-mile road trip across the Southern Great Plains. Our odyssey took us across Colorado and New Mexico, the length of Oklahoma - panhandle and all, and into Arkansas, where we spent a day atop the state’s tallest peak, 2,753-foot-high Mount Magazine. We drove south to the Texas Hill Country with its limestone caves, bat flights, and spreading live oaks.

In Austin, I interviewed Mark Simmons, a plant ecologist passionate about the need to re-wild urban open spaces at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center for an article I'm researching on living roofs for Audubon magazine. From there we headed south to the border at Eagle Pass and then back to San Marcos in the Hill Country, where I spoke and taught a workshop at the Land Full of Stories Conference. From San Marcos, we headed home via Marfa in West Texas, where Richard immersed himself in minimalist art at the Chinati and Judd Foundations' collections, and I finished up the sidebars for an article for National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts' youngARTS magazine. Then we crossed the Chihuahuan Desert and followed the Rio Grande north through New Mexico to home.

But it’s the turtles that stick in my mind from the trip. We spotted them everywhere: in roadside ditches, bayous, springs, in the blue flow of Hill-Country rivers. And on the roads too. Sometimes moving slowly on leathery legs, sometimes dead, shells cracked and innards gaping.

We stopped to move the first one off the road in Arkansas. It was a big painted turtle, its shell a calligraphy of markings that turtles apparently read to identify each other. In far south Texas, we stopped for a slider whose shell grew a mossy garden of algae, perched on the centerline of a highway nowhere near a stream. After Richard toted it to safety, we sped on, hoping the turtle knew where it was going.

One morning in San Marcos, we passed a huge red-eared slider struggling to climb a curb at the edge of a four-lane street. I hopped out, darted over and picked it up, my hands slipping on the turtle’s dinner-plate-sized shell.

It kicked, twisting hard. I dropped it, and my heart thudded as carapace hit concrete.

I picked the big turtle up again, gripping the slick shell firmly, and lifted it carefully over the highway fence. Then I waited, heart in hand, until its head emerged.

The last turtle we met on the trip was in an inner courtyard of a famous sculptor’s home in Marfa. The tour guide opened a wood door to let us look into a spare space enclosed by nine-foot-high adobe walls. A small, three-sided green “room” delineated by living bamboo walls punctuated an empty expanse of gravel and brick.

“There’s a tortoise with a cracked shell in here,” she said. “It’s been here for years,” she added, “probably rescued from the highway.”

A high-domed desert box turtle with a split creasing its shell hunkered in a patch of shade, watching us with unblinking eyes.

As we drove away, I thought about that box turtle: it had all the bamboo it could eat, water from a sunken pool in the courtyard floor, sunny spots to bask in and shade for rest. But it could not get out, and no other turtle could get in. So it would live out its life alone, sentenced by its injury to a courtyard prison instead of free to roam the desert grasslands.

And I wondered - I still do - if the person who hit that turtle even noticed the thump. Or if they drove on, unaware.

A Native American origin story tells how the world began as a watery place, with no land at all until toad dove deep beneath the surface and emerged with a bit of mud in his mouth. After the other animals plastered that mouthful of mud to turtle’s shell, the earth grew and grew until it became enough land for everyone.

Turtle, says the tale, still carries the world with room for us all on her shell.
(revised 6/19/07)