Dixie ... in Utah?

We met our group late this afternoon as we boarded the coach (a new Prevost H3-41, very swish) for the short drive to dinner in a private dining room at the Gardner Student Center on campus at Dixie State College of Utah. While not everyone has arrived yet, there will be 36 Road Scholars on this trip. Our guides for the next ten days are engaging folks: Marc Deshowitz, a retired geologist with Shell, is the instructor; Chrystal Deshowitz, married to Marc, is coordinating the trip (both shown here in an image "borrowed" from Facebook); Geri Bentley will drive the coach -- and is being referred to as "wagon master."

During the introductory program back at the College Inn following dinner, we learned -- first thing -- the "why" of the term Dixie in this part of the world (along with some introductory geology, of course). It seems that when the Mormons established the City of St George in 1861, the Civil War was beginning and cotton was in short supply. One of the intentions was that the Mormon community in Utah be as self supporting as possible. The prophet, Joseph Smith, determined that St George would grow cotton in order to provide fabric for the whole Morman community, there being water in southern Utah and the Mormans knowing how to irrigate efficiently. So, St George became known as Utah's Dixie. After the war ended and the American south began producing cotton again, St George's farmers turned to growning alfalfa, but the name had taken hold.

Further and more recently, two additional factors are keeping the term an appropriate one: St George has the warmest climate in all of Utah, bordering on the Mojave Desert to the south as it does. And, because of the mild climate St George is a fast growing retirement area with golf a favorite activity.

Desert rain

Well, Tal has always said that when he visits the desert it rains.

Rumbles of thunder and the flickers of lightening which penetrated the blinds in our room woke me during the pre-dawn hours of the night, but the day dawned warm and sunny. Our breakfast was great, at the Bear Paw Cafe, highly recommended by the folks at the College Inn. Two meals in a row of eating slowly, not needing to get on the road, both of them at actual tables.

St George is a lovely town, our morning walk to breakfast a confirmation of what we had seen during our dusk and nighttime strolls to and from supper. Clean; set out on a grid; lots of grass and interesting art, mostly sculpture; strong architecture, rather New England in flavor. Since our group is scheduled to check in between 3:00 and 6:00 this afternoon, we had every intention of taking advantage of "A Stroll through History: Historic St George Downtown Walking Tour" during the day. But, first, a nap and some reorganizing of our travel gear.

It's now 11:00AM and it's pouring, a deluge. In the desert. I just heard one of the staff say that the forecast calls for rain the next four days.

No walking tour for us. Tal's batting a thousand, it seems.

This photograph was taken right after breakfast in the St George town square. The back corner of the Mormon Tabernacle (not the one with the choir) can been seen on the right behind the fountain and the area's signature sandstone bluffs immediately to the tabernacle's left. And, check out those clouds ...

An arrival ... at last

Our destination: St George, Utah! What a welcome sight the College Inn was late this afternoon.

The last leg of our Utah-bound journey, following the stop at Navajo Bridge, was entertaining in many ways. Here's an annotated list:

Precipitation. Since making our way through the pass at Albuquerque yesterday we watched clouds form and disperse and form again in the western sky, the sun faithfully shining on us. By mid-day today it was obvious that there was water in those clouds and some anger. Eventually they became heavy enough that, in the distance, they produced vivid lightening and curtains of dark rain -- that stayed suspended, not reaching the ground.

The unassuming turn off at Jacob Lake to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. So tempting, but not yet ... not yet. Making that turn will come some ten days from now at the end of the trip, a grand finale to our Road Scholar wanderings.

A time change at the Arizona/Utah state line. Arizona doesn't participate in any of the daylight savings foolishness the rest of us do. I've heard it said that daylight savings makes about as much sense as cutting the top off a blanket, sewing that piece on the bottom and calling the blanket longer.

Towns at the state border. This particular location boasts sister cities, Colorado City on the Arizona side and Hildale in Utah, straddling the line. They're rather renowned in that they're actually a single polygamous compound.

The descent into Hurricane. With a long 7% grade of switchbacks, narrow road and run-away truck ramps arriving in Hurricane is an impossible to miss event. Tal drove and I helped -- with an occasional "oh my" and white knuckles gripping the seat on either side of my knees. According to the map, getting to Hurricane also means one has left the Colorado Plateau. Whew.

All was ready for us when we arrived … the door code worked, the keys to our room were where we had been told they would be, our room was more than welcoming. After a short rest we went in search of supper, finding our way, sort of mistakenly, to an exquisite restaurant, the Painted Pony, in our travel-weary, rumpled, bleary-eyed state – at the beginning of a booked Sunday evening. We were seated anyway, kindly, and had the most wonderful meal I can remember. My only regret is not having had the camera with me, so beautiful was Tal’s French onion soup – served in a large hollowed out onion, the melted cheese running down its sides, a shaft of sunlight falling across Tal’s place setting. Absolute perfection.

Day Four
Three States: New Mexico, Arizona, Utah
454 miles

A single stop

When Tal and I travel by automobile, the point for most part is getting to our destination. We don't meander much, even skipping lunch or eating crackers, nuts, fruit as we move along, the passenger playing flight attendant to the driver. Given the distances with which we're faced in order to join our Road Scholar group in St George UT, we have to stay focused. Fortunately, with the ever-changing terrain, as I mentioned previously, focus isn't particularly hard. But, our destination ever in mind, passing by interesting spots can be.

We left I-40 and 75MPH, four-laned comfort this morning at Gallup NM to ascend the Colorado Plateau and travel through Native American lands along twisting, climbing, switch-backed two lane roads. The contrast one day to the next was dramatic to say the very least -- in both road and terrain. Mesas, buttes, washes, unfamiliar wildflowers, stunted trees in some places, magnificent Ponderosa pines in others. The beauty of Saturday, foreign as it was to east-coasters, was transformed into something other worldly. Tal and I kept trying to find words -- tortured, harsh, brutal, fascinating, mesmerizing, stark.

After reaching AZ Route 89A, passing along the Echo Cliffs on our right, with the San Francisco Peaks far distant on our left and the Vermillion Cliffs ahead of us, we entered Marble Canyon, through which the Colorado River passes on its way to the grandest canyon of all.

Without warning we came upon a bridge, two bridges actually, side-by-side. In the blink of an eye, we missed the parking area on the south side, exclaimed at the bridge on our right as we crossed the other one and managed to turn into the parking area on the north side. What a treat. We had "found" Navajo Bridge!

The bridge we crossed, constructed in 1995, is on the left. The original Navajo Bridge, built between 1927 and 1929, is now a pedestrian walkway, linking the vendors on one side of the river with the interpretive center and restrooms on the other. In the far background are the Vermillion Cliffs.

Our head-long momentum toward St George was stopped by about half an hour, a stop well worth the time. And, the only one over the course of our four westward days on the road.

Counting cars

Albuquerque, straddling the Rio Grande, sits in a pass on the western side of the Sandis Mountains. As we passed through there yesterday and with the city shrinking in the rear view mirror, a landscape emerged in front of us that took my breath -- the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert and, way off to the south, trains. Long trains, purposeful and solitary. Trains moving in both directions -- east and west. (The intersection with the north/south rail route occurs south of Albuquerque at Belen.) Oh, wow.

Over the course of the 70 miles between Albuquerque and Grants, our stop for the night, those trains became much less distant. To my delight, I-40 crossed the tracks at some point and in Grants itself the rails ran between I-40 and the San Mateo Mountains which hover over the town. Also to my delight, our room was on the backside of the building which afforded us (namely me) a view both of the mesa during the late afternoon and early evening and of the trains -- which were far enough away that they couldn't be heard, actually, but their rumble could be felt distinctly.

I don't know when trains got to be such a big deal. It's been a long time, though. Most recently one of the perks of sitting with the gallery in Ridge Spring during the time I was a member of the art association was the frequency of the freight trains as they passed through town just across Highway 23. If there were no visitors when I heard horn in the distance, I'd step out on the porch of the old school building and wait ... and, yes, count the cars. It didn't dawn on me then, but it did last night -- when the train I counted (it was tough, but I limited myself to counting only that one) had six engines, three on either end, and 138 cars, that it's a pretty quirky, even obsessive -- thing to do.

Although very difficult to see, there are two trains meeting in this photograph, taken through the window of our hotel room. Both sets of engines are to the right of the utility pole.

In fact, Adrian Monk's face flashed through my mind like a pang, when, mindlessly, I started counting a second train travelling in the opposite direction, as though knowing the number of cars were a necessity. "My stars, am I starting to degenerate into a parking meter/light pole touching, sidewalk crack avoiding, closet rearranging, towel stack straightening, obsessing nut?" I wondered.

Starting?

*Don't know about Adrian Monk? Click here for a pretty impressive list of habits, obsessions and phobias.

Long shadows

We left Weatherford OK this morning before the sun had risen over the eastern horizon. Within 20 minutes or so our car was casting a very long shadow on the pavement precisely in the direction we were travelling. While that felt a little strange -- to be following that shadow so exactly, I was surprised by how sad I felt when I-40 changed direction and our shadow moved to run along beside the road, casting a moving shadow over the fields on our right, our two-wheeled silhouette flashing along, popping up occasionally at fences and narrow strips of trees growing in low spots, then going back flat. It seemed to me as though we were touching those fields in some way, leaving a mark -- which, of course, we were not.

Again today the terrain changed with great speed -- Oklahoma, across the plains of the Texas panhandle, well into New Mexico -- Grants, to be precise. There were times that I would have sworn we could see the curvature of the earth when we looked from horizon to horizon. Then, could come stretches with trees lining the road, other stretches with ridges on either side, those ridges being probably a hundred miles away. At one point we travelled in a straight line for 60 miles, each time we crested a rise seeing the road on the rises before and behind us.

Normally, when I'm not driving I tend to fall sleep. (But, then most of the long distances we drive are on I-95, and it's best to sleep through as much of that as possible.) Again today, though, I didn't sleep at all, watching instead, hoping that I'll remember, knowing, though, that everything my eyes were taking in would likely become a long blur before nightfall, if not before. Truth is, the land -- its mysteries and it surprises -- is stunning, beautiful, forbidding, welcoming, vast. Every passing mile opens up something new, reveals wonders.

I realize it has secrets to share, the land. There are stories that could be told -- human and geographical and geological. As we travel along, I cannot help but wish I understood more about how the terrain has evolved over the eons, and wonder how people have survived in the barren, beautiful, lonely landscape. What were their struggles? Did the joys come anywhere near offsetting those struggles? Perhaps my noticing the 75-mile an hour shadow our car casts constitutes something of a nod of acknowledgement to the land and to those people, most of them nameless and forgotten.

Now, as I write about the day and about shadows, perhaps I am writing not so much about shadows, literal and figurative, as I am about how fleeting life is, how limited the actual marks are that we do leave.

Day Three
Three States: Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico
548 miles

A lot of not a whole lot

Here at the end of day two and after hundreds of miles in the car I am left with many disconnected impressions, but with no story in particular. We are in Weatherford OK for the night, a small town boasting the first wind farm we’ve seen along our route. It’s a logical spot for such, the prevailing wind obvious from the interstate, wind sheer bending the scrubby trees from south to north.

After getting around Memphis and over the Mississippi River (oh, the bridges!) during Friday morning rush hour with clenched teeth-to-toes (but without incident), we stopped at the Arkansas welcome center to regroup for the day. The attendant offered us a travel book about the state which we asked her to keep since we were simply passing through.

As the miles flew by, we saw much more uninhabited land than we did settlement and the terrain changed almost as fast as we moved. I want to soak it all in; I don’t want to forget one single scene. To that end, I’m sad to report that, given our unbroken hours of westward movement, my photographic efforts have been reduced to the cell phone from a moving car. And, I don’t even know how to download those (probably pitiful) images to the computer – lucky for you.

Day Two
Four States: Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma
612 miles