Rocky Mountain High

On our last night in Utah, we went to a barbeque yard where a cowboy was grilling the thickest steak I have ever eaten on a “swinging grill”. The restaurant was predictably called “Swinging Steak” and it was so unique to have my meat grilled to PERFECTION. The steak swings to keep it from charring while the inside cooks. He included a delicious salad of greens and beans. It was amazing. The desert has many flies though because of the unusual amounts of rain they have gotten this year and so it was a problem to eat without feeling the hundreds of them crawling all over you. They were smaller though than the mongo ones in the north so it wasn’t too bad.

We sat outside our balcony room late that night overlooking the incredibly muddy San Juan River and enjoyed the ambient heat while trying to find stars that we don't get to see at home because of our latitude. The desert climate is perfect in the evening and the early morning (when it can be cold). The river makes deep noises because of its density. It sounds like fast moving cream soup. Here is a picture of Mexican Hat natural monument just after sunset.

The next morning we ate in the Navajo run café as the Navajo reservation is just over the bridge from the river. They are very tall people. Biologically, I am part Navajo and when I see a Navajo child it reminds me of how I looked when I was little. The Navajo people are very kind and the women are very traditional. The men look so much like my dad, James Joe, that it takes me aback when I see them (my father is half Chinese and half Lebanese which seems to be a recipe for “Navajo”). It is remarkable how much that ancient Mongolian gene remains in the people. When the ancient Mongols crossed the Bering Strait 30,000 years ago chasing game, they cut themselves off from other genes as the strait melted and and others wouldn't meet these peoples until 1492. They have since maintained a kind of genetic purity. The closer you are to the original crossing (the Arctic) the more “Chinese” you look (the Inuit peoples). If my father were here right now he’d fit in perfectly! (Why aren’t you here anyway, Dad?) The picture above is of the Poncho Mountains that look like the stripes on a poncho! (You have to look closely at the picture).

We had reached the halfway point of our trip as of this day and I was feeling like time was flying by although we’d been on the road for a virtual eternity in terms of travel time. My friend Pete asked me if I was tired or sick of driving and the truth is that I am not. The drives are not impossible as I planned to stop over for the night after about 4 hours of driving a day which isn't too hard anywhere west of the east coast! I get exercise every day by walking which is more than I get in the suburbs and I am enjoying seeing something new every day. Marley and Cole have been great and they have reading, drawing books, iPad, Mac laptop (Nintendo when things get really tedious) and movies for the DVD player in the car. We've been watching old television series that are new to the kids like 'Third Rock From The Sun' to pass the time on lonely stretches. I bought snacks from Trader Joe's and put them in a laundry basket to get something fairly healthy for the trip and have been snacking and making some cold meals from the car. We have all our clothes in ziplock baggies labeled for each of us and the outfit that's inside so we only take that up to the room. In the back of the car we have 5 laundry baskets full of our baggie-d clothes, laundry detergent and coins, household items for a picnic, car care items, medicine 'in-case', and a large tower fan for problem-noisy-airconditioners. We don't feel crowded as everything has a place and I am super strict about this because I don't function well if the car feels like a rolling garbage can. So far, so good (and I know it could go awry at any moment so I am not going to say that it will continue to be this great!) The picture above is from just outside the hotel in Mexican Hat, Utah.

One of the best parts of the trip though has been never eating at a chain restaurant. This has been the biggest eye-opener for me. Although I never eat at fast-food places, finding and appreciating food that is locally made and meeting true local people has been a great reward. These places are often away from corporately owned facilities so we've seen the "real" parts of town and not the generic America. From this standpoint, I must say that this country is very different regionally. Yes, I can go to Applebee's if I need to, but I don't have to and that makes me super happy. Local restauranteurs are also interested in meeting us as we are of them and that's a great thing. My friend Pete was right though, it's almost impossible to get in your veggies unless you consider iceberg lettuce a vegetable.

Continuing on out of Utah, we followed a lesser known road through a Navajo Reservation and we were shocked at the conditions of the people living there. It was an education to say the least. The government housing had crumbled and the reservation sold out to the natural gas industry care of Halliburton Inc. where thousands of ugly pumps and “hydraulic fracking” instruments were glutting and polluting the already sad and infertile landscape. It was shockingly depressing and toxic looking. Fracking the hard metamorphic rock under the sedimentary sand requires about 98 toxic chemicals that then leech into the water supply. There are currently homes near fracking chemicals where the water coming out of faucets can be lit on fire.

We stopped at Four Corners which is a site that is now run by the Navajo people where the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet. The kids did backbends to be in all four states at the same time…upsidedown! The Navajo are responsible for the care of the site and they must keep the medallion clean. They aren’t interested however in keeping the composting toilets empty however as they were FULL TO THE BRIM with waste. It was beyond reasonable! There were so many people that day having to line up and we all looked like we would faint from the horror. Seven…yes, seven toilets were all completely full. Any day now the health department will show up and the site may be reinstated by the United States National Park Service as there is also no running water and they are serving Navajo Fry Bread without washing their hands. It’s revolting.

The better part of the day though was spent walking through the stalls of Navajo crafts. They are the most open and chit chatty of all the tribes in the desert southwest. They also like stories of places beyond the reservation. It was fun talking to them. One man had a cat and a Navajo said to me, “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a grown man take a cat on vacation and and I’ve seen a lot of things over 20 years here.” It was funny as this man was talking away to his leashed, meowing, and frightened cat. It must have gotten a whiff from the composting toilets and thought for sure that death was all around him. Above to the left is a picture of "Ship Rock" which is 7,000ft high and you can see it for hundreds of miles around. Ship Rock is a great navigator as I would pass it going north keeping it to the east and then south as it was in the western horizon in two days.

We passed into Colorado and went up into the Alpine forests of Engineer Mountains at about 12,000 ft in the Rocky Mountains. It was a forest of tall birches (I love love love birches!) and pole pines with carpets of wildflowers. It was glorious. A man was sitting in a car next to us at the viewpoint and was smoking marijuana at this high altitude with very little oxygen as it was and then proceeded to drive up the mountain! It was crazy! There were no guardrails over the cliffs and I was shocked to be sharing the road with him! I steered clear. John Denver came on the radio singing “Rocky Mountain High” which now had new meaning for me and I was cheered up. This was the beautiful Rockies and I was thrilled to be on top of them. Here are a few pictures from the top of the range.

We drove south and then west again toward Durango, Colorado. Along the way we stopped at an Alpine slide that is something that I loved as a child at Mount Tom in Holyoke, Massachusetts. You sit in a little plastic car after being hauled up a ski hill by a lift and then you race down on a bobsled track with wheels on the bottom of your car. It’s super fun and I was glad to try it again. Cole did some bungee jumping on a trampoline and then we started back down the mountain towards town. We all needed a little canned excitement and the Alpine slide fit that prescription.

We came down off the mountain and saw an amazing hot spring just right along the highway. It was so out of place and gorgeous that it looked like it could be fake! Going up to it, it was definitely real and gushing lots of hat water down the road. The plants that were growing near the spring were so pretty. Here is a picture of it.

Durango is an old western town that has been gobbled up by rich entrepreneurs to make a destination spot for western visitors. My sister has the best description of this kind of phenomenon and I hope I can express what she means; In towns like Durango, Taos, and Santa Fe, there is an exodus of the native peoples as the land has become too valuable for them to afford as rich people from places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and other large cities come to live here to be more “rustic”. They are also a weird blend of bourgeois and bohemian, cleave to new age philosophies and eastern meditation, are educated with abstract ideologies, and drive cars like Subaru Outbacks with about 10 or more bumper stickers on them that extol the virtues of saving Tibet and such.

They usually wear essential oils, androgynous hairstyles, hiking boots with dresses, no makeup, yoga wear, drink local coffees, are in an existential crisis, and have trouble making lasting monogamous relationships while being oh-so-smug about themselves. Another unique feature of them is that they laugh really loudly as if to make others aware of them. It's bizarre. Curiously, they also have the most well behaved dogs that wait for them outside of shops like nothing I've ever seen before. This is Dog Town, U.S.A. and I really liked these impressive canines!

Here are two examples of "Durango Characters"; We saw a man wearing a safari hard-hat, khaki button up hiking shirt, and a SKIRT…although he would call it a “mountain kilt” but it was a man's LYCRA SKIRT. He had a blond pony-tail, was wearing Teva sandals, and was carrying a hiking stick on a flat sidewalk.

Behind us in a Himalayan Café (of course), was a Chinese calligraphy tattooed man with bulging muscles and wearing yoga pants who told his date to pay the bill because he didn’t have any money. She seemed to find meaning in the fact that she was paying saying how “refreshing” it was to date someone so “honest”. She paid up for his feast. She was about 45 years old, unmarried, gorgeously fit in her own revealing yogic-wear, and seemed to be looking for meaning in her life from what I could tell of their conversations about the self-help books she was reading. She validated all the nonsense that was driveling out of her date’s thinly disguised sense of self-importance.

This is Durango and these stories are everywhere. It’s a bumper sticker town with all kinds of protests and no one doing anything about injustices other than meditating in their expensive condos nearer to the clouds. It’s like this in other western towns that have beautiful scenery and lush landscapes with ideal climates. All I could do was shake my head in shame, not because they were there but because they have financially muscled out the native peoples who once lived here. They should put THAT on a bumper sticker!

I stopped in to an “incense shop” (that also sold bumper stickers and essential sage oil of course) and talked to the shop-keep for a while wanting to know the name of the hiking “skirt” the man was wearing. Her college aged boyfriend said that lots of “dudes” wear skirts in town and it was a shame. “Not if they were a cross-dressing type of man,” he added, “but because they are hairy men wearing stupid skirts around town looking ridiculous”. It was such a fun conversation. If I lived here I could wear my hair long and gray at 43 years old, wear formless clothes, never shave my legs, and wear hiking boots to go out to dinner. I could be a genuine article without expectations or a drive to get anything done other than what’s in my selfish head. Would that be freedom or egomania? I can’t decide but I might meditate on it later.

I loved driving through the Rockies and following Route 550, we would descend slowly into the Albuquerque valley and we saw the very end of the grand chain of Rocky Mountains that passes through the Jemez Mountains and continues to the Sandia Mountains. Route 550 also crosses over the Continental Divide which is the dividing line between all rivers either going to the Pacific Ocean west of the Divide or going to the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic to the east of this line. We passed over it going east after having crossed it in Yellowstone Park going west! We had reached another milestone. Route 550 is amazingly variant through New Mexico. Here are pictures of the progression of the drive going from north to south over a period of two hours:

I had entered New Mexico's "Land of Enchantment" as it is called. We had five weekdays to spend here and I was thrilled. New Mexico is the kind of place that photographs can never really describe and I love it here. We arrived at my sister's house and since she had to work, we would spend the evening with her children and husband (who is the best brother-in-law I could ever ask for). Pulling in to her driveway I couldn't believe that I had MADE IT TO NEW MEXICO as I have been here before many times but only by plane and now IT HIT ME!!! I had traveled a LOOOONNNNG WAY!!! How did I get here? It was a startling moment as I didn't expect to feel so humbled! We went to lunch to get my favorite ROASTED GREEN CHILIS and to actually unpack clothes in drawers! We had set up house for most of the week and I was so grateful to be here!