Yoopers

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was nice and all, but now that we have visited Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on the Upper Peninsula, we are Yoopers for life.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After waking up dew-covered in our thistle field outside Empire, we packed up the car and headed out in search of coffee and the road north. Neither of us had ever been to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so we were eager to get there.

We opted to take the scenic route along the shore of Lake Michigan, and we’re glad we did. It brought us not only by the two world-record holding Largest Cherry Pie pans (the one in Traverse City is the current record-holder, but the one in Charlevoix was much nicer thanks to a particularly interesting Eagle Scout project. I mean, who else can say, “Yeah, for my Eagle Scout project, I renovated the pavilion around the pan from the world’s second-largest cherry pie”?), but we got to visit countless beautiful shore towns. Route 119 between Little Traverse Bay and Sturgeon Bay was definitely the most scenic scenic route we have encountered thus far.

Soon, though, it was time to bid farewell from the lower peninsula that we’d called home for more than a week. We crossed the Mackinac Bridge sometime in the early afternoon and we’d might as well have left the Lower 48 behind.

Other than the aforementioned dude who cursed at me as we bottlenecked into the toll booths – and by “He cursed at me,” I actually mean “I cursed at him” – (and the toll was only $3.50! We were counting on $10-$15. Welcome to the West), our experience of the Upper Peninsula has been nothing short of paradise. A slightly buggy paradise, but paradise nonetheless.

We were pretty amused by the tourist trap that is St. Ignace, the city you encounter right when you cross the bridge. Actually, we are pretty amused by every town on the UP, because if there’s something resembling a town here on something resembling a modern road, it does its absolute best to sell travelers “real Yooper gear” and pasties (which is pronounced “pass-tees” – NOT like the burlesque dancer’s nipple-cover) and fancy UP minerals and rocks.

We stopped at the “Mystery Spot,” which advertises itself as just that until you get into the parking lot and finally get a chance to actually read a little sign about what the Mystery Spot actually is. Apparently it’s one of those strangely-magnetized places (there are a number of them scattered around the country) where navigation tools cease to work, levels won’t level, people feel woozy, all that kind of stuff. This spot offered $7 tours (to which I say: “Why would I want to pay $7 to feel light-headed?”) and a little shop full of tchotchkies for travelers. Right near the Mystery Spot is the Deer Ranch, which we stopped at mostly to take our picture in front of the giant fiberglass deer out front (we didn’t go in to see the billions of albino deer the site claims to have living there).

When it came time for lunch, we knew we had to try the magical local cuisine known as the pasty. It’s essentially a pastry filled with anything you can imagine (everyone claims some different concoction is the “original” recipe) and formed freestyle with no dish to shape it. We stopped at Lehto’s, a little stand on the side of the highway that sells nothing but beef and onion pasties and cans of soda. But the place has been there since 1947, so we figured it had to be pretty good, right?

We were right to stop there. The guy behind the counter (yes, one guy – and I think there was one person back in the kitchen, and that’s it. No restrooms, no credit card machine, nothing but beef pasties) was really nice, and the pasties were fantastic. It was hot out, and the pasties were hot enough to burn our mouths, but they were the perfect size for a modest lunch for one person (but that didn’t stop me from wanting another one when I was done).

The further we got from St. Ignace, the more nothing we passed. It didn’t take long at all for the motels and clusters of vacation cabins to turn into miles upon miles of pine trees and the occasional abandoned cluster of vacation cabins. At Epoufette we cut north on a county road so that we could take a short drive through Rexton.

My sophomore year of college, I wrote a short story about a girl from Long Island who travels to visit family in Rexton, Michigan. I was loosely (very loosely) basing the story on a visit I made from New Jersey to visit Dexter the summer after my freshman year of college, but I wanted to change it around enough that it was unrecognizable from my own life (I later said that it was a miracle when, during my fourth year of college, I finally wrote a fictional piece of fiction). I looked at a map and chose Rexton, based probably on the X that it shared in common with Dexter, and its proximity to a lake that featured largely in the story (on the map it’s Strouble Lake, but there are actually tons of lakes in the area).

Rexton was not exactly as I’d pictured it for my story, and upon going back to read the story I would probably have to re-tool the landscape descriptions (I don’t remember exactly, but I probably talked about barns and farmhouses and fields like I’d seen in Dexter – but in the UP it’s all just trees and more trees). But overall it was great; a small cluster of houses, a couple streets, a Mennonite church (how perfect! If I ever go back to edit the story I will totally make the family Mennonites), and… That’s it. Most of the houses were tiny run-down saltboxes like you find all over the UP – not much more than a trapper’s cabin updated to have shingle siding and a screen door. Those that weren’t saltboxes were mobile homes from the ‘70s with particle board patches on the outside. There were a few houses that were a little nicer, and I figure that’s where my characters would have lived.

Driving through a town like Rexton, Pat and I were struck again by the question of how in the world people in areas like that could possibly make any money. Some of them probably live on public assistance, but the rest – seriously, where? There were a few companies floating around the roads we drove, like a granite company and a concrete company, but other than that – nothing. Even if someone needed the plumber we saw to fix their pipes, where would the person with the pipes get the money to pay the plumber? I’ve never lived in a tiny town like those so I have no clue – I mean, I live in a tiny town now, but it’s only 26 miles from the state capitol and 50-ish miles from the state’s largest city. These places on the UP don’t have much by way of a nearby metropolis.

We managed to get to the main interagency visitor center for Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and the Hiawatha National Forest at about 5 pm (it closed at 6). Patrick knows all the right questions to ask to find camping, so he went to the woman at the desk and asked where some good places to pitch a tent in the Hiawatha National Forest were.

She replied, “You can just drive your car down any of those roads and camp, as long as it’s forest land.”

Um… We know. But are there any good places in particular?

“Oh, any of those roads.”

Okay.

We figured she wasn’t going to be much help (she didn’t look like much of a camper herself), so we decided to fend for ourselves. Our main concerns were finding water – we were very low on drinking water, and while Patrick has a water filter, we didn’t want to use it if we didn’t have to – and getting me a shower or some other manner of bathing, because it was now Monday and I hadn’t showered since Saturday morning, and I’m a bit of a hygiene freak.

We got in the car – Patrick a little irritated at our lack of specifics, me a little irritated that I was so filthy – and set off down H13 to find us some camping.

After trying a few times to go down roads that we thought would end up at bodies of water, only to find them dead-ending or impassible, we had our first indication that things were going to be okay. We found some water relatively easy. We took a detour off 13 to the Island Lake campground and came upon an old-school water pump. I held bottles under the freezing-cold stream while Patrick pumped away, and soon we got five or six bottles of… Brown water!

We smelled it, and it smelled like metal, so we knew it was just rust. Pat’s water filter would take care of the crap in it (but, as we found later, not the taste).

The campground was primitive, with no more facilities than that one brown-water pump, yet it was $16 to stay a night – oye! I mean, I know the forest service isn’t exactly rolling in dough, but that’s a lot of money for a place to pitch a tent and some rusty water.

We continued on and turned down a road that led to a strange swampy-looking place that wasn’t a swamp at all. It was a large expanse of tons of dead trees poking up out of ground that looked like it was covered in marsh plants, but when you walked into the field you realized the ground was actually sandy, and the “marsh plants” were actually ferns. We didn’t figure out why all the trees were dead, but it was pretty strange.

We drove down the road a ways, having no luck finding a place to camp, not to mention any water. Soon we saw a big pickup truck with a trailer behind it was coming our way on the one-lane road, so we pulled off the road to let it by.

The truck stopped, though, and a smiling forty-something man with a bandana leaned out the open window.

“You lookin’ fer blueberries, eh?” he asked.

“No, just trying to find some camping,” Pat said from the passenger seat. “Know of anywhere around here? Maybe on a stream?”

“No… No, no streams in this area,” he said. “I’m just out here choppin’ some wood.”

Somehow, both Patrick and the man got out of the cars and began talking, and when Patrick pulled out a map and told the man what we were looking for, he said, “Oh, yah! Yah, go down 13, and you’ll see Wide Waters on the right. Right there on the left, there’s a road, and then it will come to the Indian River. Turn right before you get to the river and there’s a road there with all offshoots to the right where people cut roads and campsites to put their canoes in. People camp there all the time.”

Bingo!

This was exactly what we wanted from the woman at the visitor center. We should have known to just ask a Yooper.

We hung out with the man for another few minutes, asking him how to find blueberries. He told us about how, when he was a kid, his family was very poor, so he and his siblings would all go out picking blueberries – then their father would sell them, and fed the whole family on blueberry money. He said the only problem with camping near a blueberry patch was “the bears and the cah-yoots.” He told us that he’d be picking blueberries, and he’d look up and not ten feet away a bear would be doing the same. But he knew he wasn’t in much danger – “the blueberries were sweeter than me.”

He brought us to a little bush on the ground, and it was just like the blueberry bushes we’d pick from as kids in Bass River State Forest. Patrick resolved then that we would be eating shitloads of blueberries while in the UP.

We thanked the man and I thanked the powers that be that Patrick is as nice as he is. For some reason, I have been more hesitant lately to talk to strangers – but Patrick isn’t, and many times on this trip he’s gotten us tips that I never would have gotten by simply smiling and going on my merry way. I have never been good at asking for help, but recognizing when you need it is one of the most important life lessons you can learn – especially while traveling.

We followed the man’s directions and, sure enough, the first campsite we stumbled across was beyond perfect. About 150 feet in from the road on a slightly bumpy little rutted sand driveway was a site with a trim stone fire pit and a steep eight-foot-ish embankment down toward the river. We went and looked at another few sites, but realized we weren’t going to find one this nice anywhere else.

We pitched our tent and this has been our home for the last two nights, and will be our home tonight again. I almost don’t want to leave in the morning.

My first order of business upon arriving was to take a bath in the river. The Indian River is actually pretty deep – probably four feet deep at its lowest point near our campsite, with a beautiful clean sandy bottom and a swift current of clear water the color of the weakest cup of tea you’ve ever brewed. I picked my way down the bank to a spot where a bunch of large stones rested in the water, forming a perfect stairway down into the water, not to mention a little shower seat and a place to put my soap while I washed up. The water was warm enough and the spot secluded enough that I took my time, even shaving my legs. It was far better than a campground shower any day.

That night we turned in relatively early. There was a whipporwill off near the road that sounded just like a car alarm and went off most of the night. Sometimes, in half-sleep, I could swear that I had distinguished two birds, calling and answering each other in a rapid and perfect pattern of whoops, never stumbling or hesitating for hours and hours on end.

Great Lakes III

I had to cut that last post uber-short last night because it started to rain. After a few little drops on my laptop screen, it continued to rain until Pat and I were in the tent during torrential downpours and ridiculous red lightning bursts that lasted for what seemed like hours. I laid there on my back and watched as first the tent ceiling would flash, illuminating the poles and seams, then it would go dark and the pattern would show up in negative, only to have lightning flash again a second later and the negative would float again. I realized during the storm that you could probably drive a car perfectly fine in the storm; it was only ever dark for a split-second at a time – the rest of the time it was bright as day.

So anyhow, that is what kept me from writing all this down last night.

Now I am dressed in bug-resistant garb and the sky is blue, so there will have to be some other less-expected occurrence for me to cut THIS post short.

We got to Sleeping Beat Dunes National Lakeshore on Sunday, July 25, and expected to be able to find camping in the primitive campground at the park. We rolled into the park relatively early in the day, counting on the few walk-in sites that campgrounds tend to reserve for same-day reservations, but found that we were too late anyway. All the campgrounds were full.

Pat got irritated and said we should just say screw it and head to the upper peninsula. I told him to shut up and that we’d find a campsite just fine – there were state forests all around Sleeping Bear Dunes and we wouldn’t have a problem finding a backcountry site.

First we tried calling a campground in Garey Lake State Forest to see if they had any sites available, but the state forest offices were closed so no one answered. Instead, we went to the road that the campground was on, a small dirt forest road outside the town of Empire, and did some driving to see what there was to see.

On forest roads like those, there are often private residences and properties interspersed within the state or national forest, and property owners are often vigilant with “POSTED” signs along these roads to discourage people like us from camping there. Along this road we saw a few signs like that, including a few offshoot roads that were clearly marked as private drives. We also saw, however, a number of Michigan state signs asking visitors to keep out of the forest because of newly-planted trees; this told us it was state land.

We drove along the road a ways until we found an offshoot road that was not labeled as a forest road, but was probably cut by other campers in the area because it led somewhere particularly nice. We turned down it, and in less than a quarter-mile we ended up in a beautiful field of thistle ringed by pines. We got out and investigated the road; ours were the only recent tire tracks, and we looked all over and couldn’t find any POSTED signs. Our best guess, then, was that the land was state-owned, and that we could camp there.

After we’d staked out that nice spot, we got back in the car and headed back to Sleeping Bear Dunes to explore.

The story of why the area is called Sleeping Bear Dunes strikes me as particularly sad. It’s printed in all the park brochures and has probably developed a trite and convenient tone to people who work or live in the area, but for a tourist like me, it rings new enough to be effective and touching.

An old Anishinaabek Indian story says that a long time ago, in what is now Wisconsin, a forest fire drove a mother bear and her two cubs out of the forest and into Lake Michigan. They swam all night, but eventually the two cubs began to tire. The mother bear finally made it to the other shore, but the cubs succumbed to exhaustion and drowned just before reaching land. The mother bear lay down on the dunes to wait for her babies. The Manitou turned her into The Sleeping Bear, a prominent dune, and then created the two Manitou Islands just off the coast to mark the spots where the cubs disappeared.

There are a lot of little stories like this to describe land formations all across the country, but usually they honor heroes or legends or particularly powerful beings. This story, unlike many others, I found particularly sad because it describes a mother who will never be reunited with her babies. As I read the few sentences in the brochure I expected a happy ending – that the cubs made it and they were happy and lived to old ages and eventually went to govern the islands that were created to commend their bravery. But it wasn’t like that.

All in all, the park was nice – you just don’t get massive dunes like this except for on the coasts of the Great Lakes. The beaches there were just as nice as any I ever visited in New Jersey, with fine sand and calm waves. They were admittedly pebbly here and there, but overall the swimming was great – and there is tons of it. Patrick and I opted for swimming between the Glen Haven Historic Village and Sleeping Bear Point.

To get to the latter, you have to go from a parking lot and down a huge dune to get to the beach – and when it came time for us to pack up and leave, I just didn’t feel like climbing up the huge dune again. Thankfully, since Patrick is ridiculous, he said he’d be happy to take a jog up the dune, get in the car, and meet me about a quarter- or half-mile down the beach at the Coast Guard station/maritime museum. Perfect. So I meandered down the shoreline and Patrick brought the car around and everyone was happy.

After swimming and driving around the park a bit, we were tired but not quite ready to end the day – not to mention we didn’t want to break out the camp stove and make dinner at our state forest campsite, just in case it was someone’s private property and they smelled the mysterious aroma of ham coming from their thistle field. So we went over to the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive, which has been in operation since 1967 as a scenic drive around what was then Sleeping Bear Dunes State Park. The 12 stops on the scenic trail mostly focus on the ecology and geology of the dunes, including nearby Glen Lake and the beech-maple forests that grow right next to the sandy, stark dunes. The best stop on the drive, however, was number 9, the Lake Michigan Overlook.

You get the perfect sense of just how huge the dunes are. As approached the edge of the dune, it basically looked like the sand dropped off at a sheer cliff 450 feet above the lake. The sun was beginning to set when we got there, so it was casting a blinding shine over the water. As we approached the “edge,” we saw that it was actually a steep dune that ran all the way down to a narrow beach at the lake – the angle of the dune must have been 60 degrees. People were still trying to clamor up and down the hill. I just don’t see the appeal – the view is totally spectacular from the top, and once you get all the way down there, you’re on a beach like any other… And then you have to climb back up 450 vertical feet in loose, hot sand. Not my idea of fun. But there were a bunch of people doing it, most of them kids who I bet slept really well that night. I guess it’s worth it to say you did it, but I can say I did a lot of other cool things that didn’t cause so much physical pain.

After the scenic drive, we returned to the campsite to find it just as deserted as we’d left it. We parked the car and explored the outlying land a little – we heard a dog barking off in the woods and the occasional car drive down the main road we’d come in on, but other than that – and a conspicuously newly-planted tree surrounded by chicken wire – we were completely alone.

Being so totally alone again in the woods, after spending two nights with Tom and Mikki and a week before that in Michigan and two nights before that in Columbus, was particularly sweet. Pat and I function in a lot of the same ways, take comfort in a lot of the same things and enjoy much of the same activity – so we spent the evening enjoying each others’ company, reading, making jewelry and, eventually, getting a fantastic night’s sleep (despite some suicidal bug that buzzed and thrashed itself against the outside our tent for the better part of the evening). The sky, of course, was lit by residual sunlight until after 10 pm, and in the morning when we woke everything was soaking wet with dew, but that’s part of the package.

Great Lakes II

I had to cut that last post short last night because the mosquitoes were driving me up the wall. Everything they say about mosquitoes on the UP is true. If you come up here, ever, do NOT forget your bug spray.

Great Lakes I

We are camped on the Indian River in Hiawatha National Forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. So far it seems like everything they say about the UP is right – the mosquitoes fly in flocks, the water is crystal-clear, and the people are just about the nicest on earth. Except for that guy who cursed at me at the toll booth as we crossed the Mackinac Bridge. Oh wait, I cursed at him. Never mind.

We left Dexter on Friday in order to spend Friday night at Tom and Mikki’s in Clio. The next day, Saturday, we got a bit of a late start (Patrick and I like to usually be on the road by 10 am at the latest – but we didn’t leave Clio until 1:30 in the afternoon). With Tom and Mikki following on Tom’s Harley, we crossed the lower peninsula’s countless miles of farmland via two-lane roads until we reached the Ludington area on the shore of Lake Michigan, in Manistee National Forest.

The campgrounds at Manistee are around $12, which means you get prime real estate near the roads and paths to the beaches, plus running water and a hardly-bearable bathroom. To camp in the “backwoods” (aka, 150 feet off a road) is free – and peeing in the woods smells a lot better than peeing in the bathrooms they had there. We’d planned on backwoods camping anyway, but it was nice to see just how smart we were when we pulled a little bit off a main road to find a sprawling campsite complete with fire pit.

Since we have two tents (one 4-man tent for car camping and one 2- man tent that we’ll use once we do more backpacking), we set up camp with two tents and, before it got too dark, the four of us headed down to the beach to take in the lake.

After visiting the Great Lakes again, it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to live near an ocean. I mean, don’t get me wrong – I’m a Jersey girl through and through who wouldn’t give up the shore for all the freshwater glacial lakes in the world. But seriously, these lakes are gorgeous, and you have none of the nastiness associated with oceans to go along with them – no salt air, no smelly fish, no rancid low tides. Just clear water, silky sand (in most places, that is) and, yes, waves.

We walked down the beach at Manistee for a while. I mostly lagged behind taking pictures while the three of them wandered ahead. I wandered into the waves mid-thigh and hardly noticed – the lake was warm as bath water. The water was this fantastic clear blue-green-brown color – almost like the color of a pale beer bottle or an old telegraph insulator. The little waves crashed on the pebbles and sounded like wind chimes.

It was strange camping with people other than just the two of us. The more people we meet and spend time with – especially on this trip – the more Patrick and I realize that, despite our obvious differences, we have a lot more in common with one another than we differ.

We’re both really quiet people, we’ve found – like right now, Patrick is off making macramé jewelry in the campsite and I’m sitting here writing. Sometimes we go hours at a time in the car with no music. We speak only as loud as is absolutely necessary to be heard. I think I used to be a much louder person than I am now (well, I know I was) – but something clicked in me a few years ago that made me shut up and open my ears. I think I have learned a lot more this way.

We’re also both relatively goody two-shoes. We were laughing the other day that pretty much everyone we know smokes or otherwise ingests pot – except us. We’re the last people on earth who have no interest in it. So it’s nice that, wherever we are, when everyone wants to offer us pot at every turn, we both say “No, thanks.” It would get really old really fast if one of us smoked and the other didn’t. And if both of us smoked, we’d be really broke by now.

Here’s an important one: We’re both very clean. Being on the road, it’s not easy to be spotless all the time, but I’m a hygiene maniac – so if I’m not totally freshly showered and laundered and perfect, I have very good ways of hiding it so everyone thinks I am. We wash dishes obsessively and with the scrubby side of the sponge. Every other night or so Patrick will almost completely unpack the car, tidy everything up, and re-pack it again. We aren’t obsessive and ridiculous about it – you can’t be, when you have two people living out of a station wagon – but when it comes down to it, we’re pretty organized and put-together.

So after a relatively shitty night’s sleep, for whatever reason, I woke up and we headed back down to the beach for a morning swim. The water felt a whole lot colder than it had the previous night, but we got used to it fast as we waded further into the waves that were cresting at three or four feet – just like a calm day at the ocean. Patrick and Tom, reviving their common Floridian childhood, tried to bodysurf on the larger waves, but generally failed. Mikki and I just bobbed in the water and laughed at them. I had brought the soap and a washcloth down to the beach to wash my hair in the lake, but I was having a good enough time just swimming around that I didn’t bother.

For some reason, I find myself wanting to swim pretty much constantly on this trip. I always liked to swim when I was a kid, and had a brief stint on the swim team, but it was never an obsession like it has become on this trip. If there is water, I will swim in it. I don’t know if it’s a side-effect of having lived in Santa Fe for so many years, being so waterless, or if it’s just some new weird quarter-life obsession I’ve developed.

Either way, a morning dip in a cool lake was a great way to start the day. By about 11 am we said goodbye to Tom and Mikki and hit the road, headed North – just the two of us once again come Sunday afternoon.

Our big destination yesterday (Sunday) was Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, on the pinky of the mitten of the lower peninsula.

Rain

Posting from Clio, Michigan, a little town outside Flint. We spent the week in Dexter, just outside Ann Arbor, but sleeping in the same bed for 6 or 7 nights was starting to wear on me - so we moved on.

Here in Clio, Patrick's high school friend Tom and his wife Mikki put us up in a camper they have in their driveway - a perfect guest house, complete with air conditioning. Today they will follow us on their motorcycle as we head over to the west coast of the Michigan mitten. Tonight we'll stay in Manistee National Forest and tomorrow will head to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. After we conquer that, we'll head to the Upper Peninsula and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Everyone has asked if we'll be going to Isle Royale National Park. The truth is that I'd love to go, but the ferry to get over there is pretty expensive. Seeing as we're doing this trip as cheaply as possible, anything pricey is a no-go.

We've been lucky thus far that awesome friends have put us up for a night or two along the way - Pat's uncle in Burlington Flats, NY; a friend-of-a-friend (Amanda and Daniel) in Rochester, NY; my brother in Pittsburgh; Amanda in Columbus; Marcia and her empty house in Dexter, Michigan; and now Tom and Mikki in Clio. When we haven't stayed with friends, we have either found free camping in state and national forests (not many people know that, as long as you're 150 feet off the road, you can camp for free in most national and state forests; no amenities, of course, but it's a place to sleep), paid for camping (we don't like that), or one night we slept in the car outside Akron.

We pulled some gear out of the car and I layed down in the trunk (I have a station wagon), and Pat attempted to sleep in the front seat - however, due to all the stuff behind that seat, he couldn't put it back, so he didn't get much of a night's sleep sitting upright. I was fine, though. My feet were near the back of the front seat and my head near the trunk, and I popped the trunk so right near my head I got fresh air and could listen to the rain. I was a little cramped, sure, but overall I didn't have a problem with it.

So here were are, about to get on the road again. I have a friend in Minneapolis who we'll hopefully catch at home before she leaves on vacation on Aug. 2 (I'd hoped to spend my birthday, Aug. 3, hanging out in Minneapolis, but it looks like I'll spend it in the car somewhere in South Dakota - whatever, could be worse), but after that, we're unlikely to encounter any more friends until Missoula, Montana. Emilie, one of my best friends, has been living in Great Falls, Montana for the last few years, but of course she is moving away from there mid-August, and I think we'll be getting there just a few days too late to see her.

Patrick and I have been eager to get West. I'm eager to get where I don't know where I am - to somewhere I've never been, or at least haven't been in a long time - a landscape that keeps reinventing itself. Anywhere I know feels too close to home to be an adventure. Today I will be glad to get to the shores of Lake Michigan, and when we head into the Upper Peninsula I will be even more excited. My mom told me stories of paper mills and fog horns and pea-soup clouds on the northern shore of Lake Superior in the '70s - I could do without the paper mills (have you ever smelled one? truly horrid), but the fog horns I'd like to hear.

I never imagined I would be more comfortable West of the Mississippi than East, but I think it's coming down to that. I need to move slower and see more. I need to have a line of sight that isn't punctuated by so many buildings and trees. Green has been lovely to see and smell and feel again, but I need to get back to the plans - and eventually the desert.

I got thinking about the concept of wanting to be somewhere new, and why it was that I was simultaneously craving being back at my little casita in Madrid, New Mexico. The hill out back of my casita is always new. There are always new birds and new plants and new rocks and old rusty metal and tumbleweeds blowing across it. The old broken-down building just behind the neighbor's house is still new to me. There are so many mountains I haven't crawled under and through. And even places I have always been - downtown, the mountains, the arroyos - keep being new, keep reinventing themselves, keep turning over people and faces.

Somehow I don't feel that constant newness anywhere else.

There have been torrential rains in the Northeast and Midwest these last few days. The other night a lightning storm actually prompted a tornado warning in New York City. Indeed, it's raining here in Clio, and parts of Chicago are under four feet of water and being evacuated. The same rain is moving across the peninsula of Michigan now, and we're about to drive into it.

Bring it on.

Pictures 24: General Grant National Memorial and Riverside Church

On our last stop of our pictoral tour of Manhattan, we have made it all the way up to Morningside Heights (122nd Street, to be exact) in Riverside Park, home of General Grant National Memorial, also called Grant's Tomb. Just down the block from Grant's Tomb is the ever-impressive Riverside Church, which we visited in the same trip, so I've included those pictures here as well.

A Civil War hero and America's 18th President, Ulysses S Grant was pretty well-liked among the public - over a million people attended his funeral in 1885. His tomb is the largest tomb in North America - I guess it's like an American pyramid. The national memorial currently houses exhibits in the main room, but an extra pavilion is being built across Riverside Drive to house the exhibits, so that the memorial itself can exist without too much extra distraction. I think this will be a great move, and I'm excited to visit the tomb as it was intended to be: A "simple" monument to Grant and his wife.


What would a new site be without the thumbs-up from Patrick?



19 more images below the jump.

Pictures 23: Federal Hall National Memorial

Call me daft, but a lot of Revolutionary history is just too distant for me to truly grasp. I have known people who get just as jazzed about Revolutionary history as I would about something that happened yesterday, but I just can't do it. I think part of that may be because much Revolutionary history happened in the Northeast, and so much of the Northeast has changed irrevocably since that time, so it's hard to get a sense of what the landscape was really like back then.

That being said, Federal Hall National Memorial was still cool. It's down in the Financial District, just a stone's throw from the New York Stock Exchange, and is the site of George Washington's oath of office. It also originally housed the first Congress, Supreme Court and Executive Branch offices. Must have been a little crowded.


I was here. See? There I am!

7 more images below the jump. Click any one of 'em to make it bigger in Photobucket. Go ahead, click it!