Low-Riding Moon

Moon events tend to be low-key and inconsequential. Blue moons—a second full moon in a single month— aren’t astronomical events at all, but merely the result of our current calendar conventions. And “super” moons are hardly more exciting. Sometimes the moon looks big, sometimes it doesn’t.

But lunar event that’s fast approaching takes place only once every 18 years, as the moon arrives at the low point of its almost two-decade swing up and down the horizon.  

This event has no practical significance, either, and it’s not impressive to witness. But I find it fascinating to consider that a thousand years ago residents of the area we now call the American Southwest were aware of it, and found it so intriguing that they built an observatory to pinpoint and perhaps even celebrate the occasion.

I’m referring to Chimney Rock, located amid the austere and haunting landscapes of southern Colorado. Hilary and I visited the stark contours of the ruins years ago. It rises above the pines, both strange and awesome, like a towering knobby ridge. 

Archeologists had long been puzzled by the presence of sophisticated core-and-veneer masonry at the top of it, typical of the Ancestral Puebloan culture centered in the high desert a hundred miles to the southwest. The mystery was compounded when scientists who surveyed the site in 1988 discovered that the buildings rested on solid bedrock. This meant that not only the stone and timbers, but also the soil and water for making bricks, had been laboriously carried by hand up the 1,200-foot escarpment from the river valley below. Why? The slightly longer growing season on the ridge could hardly justify such an enormous expenditure of labor. There had to be another explanation.

Before long someone noticed that if you stand in the courtyard of the loftiest and most elaborate pueblo you could watch the moon rise directly between the two “chimneys” further east along the ridge. Could Chimney Rock have been a lunar observatory?

Perhaps. But there was a hitch. The moon rises at a slightly different point on the horizon every month. Its position also changes from year to year, moving from north to south and back again following an 18.6-year cycle. At each end of its path, it pauses for two years before beginning its slow journey in the opposite direction. Astronomers, rather unimaginatively, call this pause the Major Lunar Standstill.

The archeologists studying the site in 1988 happened to witness the moonrise during just such a “standstill.” This meant that the moon would soon begin to rise further south along the horizon, and it would then be sixteen years before the quasi-dramatic sighting became possible again.

Clearly, the infrequency of the event was a mark against the theory that Chimney Rock had been used by the locals as a lunar observatory. But an archeologist from the University of Colorado determined, by analyzing the tree rings of the beams used to construct the buildings, that the site had been in use first in 1076, and then again in 1093, after a sixteen-year hiatus. Could it be merely a coincidence that the northerly lunar standstills of the late eleventh century began in 1075 and 1094?

Although the correlation in dates doesn’t prove that Chimney Rock was used to observe the moon, the evidence is intriguing; and the fact that sophisticated devices for tracking the moon’s rhythms have also been unearthed at Chaco Canyon, the capital of that now-lost Ancestral Puebloan world, lends further credence to the idea. It wouldn’t have been necessary for the Chacoans to calculate anything—they might simply have put sticks in the ground to chart the moon’s shambling peregrinations.

  

 It remains to be explained why anyone would care to track the moon so precisely in the first place. Well, modern observances of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are all dictated by lunar cycles, and many pre-literate societies have developed even more elaborate correspondences between events in the night sky, seasonal farming and hunting activities, time-honored myths, and ceremonial observances. Even today the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande and Black Mesa have a particularly rich set of such associations.

We’ll never know for sure what part the moon played in the lives of the Chacoan people—they lacked a written language—but the efforts they took to establish an observatory, and presumably a ceremonial center, at the top of a towering ridge of inhospitable rock, many miles from the bustle of life at Pueblo Bonito, testifies to their keen interest in the moon’s movements. Considered in that light, it becomes easy, when visiting Chimney Rock today, to envision the purpose of at least a few of the ninety-one structures that have been exposed by the excavations on the ridge.

Chimney Rock is now a national monument. If you’re interested, you can sign up to participate in programs there anytime, though it seems they’re hosting a special festival to celebrate the Major Lunar Standstill on September 23. The event may not carry the significance for us that it did for the Ancestral Pueblans, but what it lacks in spiritual overtones is compensated for by its historical resonance.

As we watch the golden orb appear between the twin peaks of Chimney Rock, we’re being moved by the same event that touched the local residents a thousand years ago.  

 

Moss Landing

Best known, perhaps, for its nuclear power plant, Moss Landing  might seem like an odd choice for a two-night vacation stop-over, but it served us well. It’s located roughly half way around the curve of Monterey Bay, midway between Santa Cruz and Monterey itself. The estuarian waters of Elkhorn Slough enter the bay nearby, and the Nature Conservancy owns the nice chunk of hills and woods and fields it flows through before it arrives. Sea Harvest Fish Market and Restaurant sits on a pier at the mouth of the slough, with Monterey Kayak Rentals at the far end of the same parking lot. On a gray day, you can visit the Santa Cruz Marine Biology Research Center on the west side of town. It’s not the Monterey Aquarium, but it’s nearby, and it’s free.

But what kind of a “town” is Moss Landing? The old river bed of the Salina River slices through it lengthwise, parallel to the ever-busy two-lane Highway 101 that runs along the landward edge. There’s a peculiar “main drag” with a colorful—and popular— Mexican restaurant, and a Shakespeare Museum—closed— that seems to have been lifted from Dodge City, Kansas. There’s a port lined with muscular pleasure craft and utilitarian vessels seemingly over-equipped with heavy duty fishing rigs and antennae, and to the north and west, a warren of pole barns and dusty sheet metal warehouses. The Pacific Ocean is invariably just a few feet away, a three-minute drive down the street or a short climb over the grassy dunes.  

We booked a room at the Captain’s Inn for two nights on the strength of a few pictures on Air BnB. You couldn’t see the ocean, but the rooms looked out over the old riverbed, where we had hopes lots of shorebirds might congregate. But two days? Well, we wanted to explore the Nature Conservancy property, which we’d been to twice before, but both times in a rush, an hour before closing. And we wanted to kayak up the slough, which is often teeming with sea otters and harbor seals, to get a view of the same heavenly terrain from a different angle.

Hilary was especially keen to do the kayaking. I was also in favor … but only if conditions were right. So our first stop was to the kayak rental. The man behind the counter—he had an English accent—led us over to a large and attractive screen where we could see the predicted wind and tides for the next few days in a panorama of overlapping blue digital waves.

He pointed. “Tomorrow morning at 9 or 9:30 would be perfect,” he said. “You see. The tide will just be coming out, so you’ll be fighting that a little…” At this point I felt it appropriate to interject that we’d canoes for miles in fierce wind In the North Woods on the Canadian border and against the current of the Mississippi. “Good. The wind will be light, you won’t have any difficulty, and once you’re ready to turn around, you can drift all the way back.”

He seemed far less concerned that we’d be carried out to sea by the tide (it does happen) than that we’d get too close to the otters and seals. Also a good sign.

We spent the afternoon at the Nature Conservancy property. The main trail through the fields leads down the hill to the estuary, where there are usually plenty of shore birds feeding. It’s a three-mile loop, and you’re likely to see some interesting things in the woods, too. As we were starting out from the visitors’ center we met up with an elderly couple who live nearby. They told us they’d recently seen a great-horned owl drinking water out of the dog dish outside their back door on more than one occasion!

I won’t bore you with the details of our walk, but for the birders in the crowd, here’s a smattering of what we saw: Brewer's Blackbird, Least Sandpiper, Lesser Yellowlegs, Long-billed Dowitcher, Marbled Godwit, Long-billed Curlew, Oak Titmouse, Common Raven, Black Phoebe, Acorn Woodpecker, White-tailed Kite.

The next morning we arrived at the kayak rental in plenty of time to be convinced we ought to wear the plastic pants they provide for their guests. It was a good idea. We paddled in an open plastic two-person vessel past the seafood restaurant, turned east, and headed up the slough, entering a realm of solitude and silence populated by long, sausage-like creatures—seals and otters—that we were mildly fascinated by but had been instructed to avoid.

There were quite a few exotic birds, too: Pacific Loon, Western Grebe, Eared Grebe, Forster's Tern, Common Murre, Black-bellied Plover, Common Yellowthroat, White-crowned Sparrow. The individual species meant less, however, than the exhilaration of a bright warm morning in March, low to the water on a red plastic kayak, paddling against a gentle tide.

We’d brought neither cameras nor binoculars. Too risky. And the fact that we’d seen so many birds from land the previous day made it an easy call. Just breathe the air, soak in the surroundings, keep paddling. Or drift.

We are lunch for a second time at the Sea Harvest, why not? But now, looking out over the rail at the entrance to the slough, we knew a little more about what lay beyond.

 

A Week on the Coast

During the last gray days of March we hopped a plane to San Francisco. A half hour after picking up our rental car at the off-site Fox Rental, we were descending the green hills of the central coast into Half Moon Bay, where the Pacific Ocean and a litany of familiar delights awaited. None of them would make a New York Times “36 Hours on the Coast” article, and with good reason, but that’s fine with us.

Our first stop was the Pillar Point State Marine Conservation Area, nestled in the reeds behind the Pilar Point Air Force Station, beyond which lies the famous Mavericks surfing zone made famous by teen surfer Jay Moriarity.  (Curtis Hanson’s last film, Chasing Mavericks (1992), isn’t great—it was made for teens—but it gets you in the mood.)  

We weren’t there to watch the surfers. We were there to see the ducks, and right on cue, we spotted seventeen cinnamon teal and six ruddy ducks out in the pond, with a lone snowy egret near shore for accent. As we climbed the hill to the ocean overlook a peregrine falcon flew by. Combine this with 60-degree sunshine, a cool ocean breeze, the smell of eucalyptus in the air, exotic flowers in bloom, and greenery everywhere, and it’s not hard to understand why we were elated.

After a late seafood lunch at Sam’s Chowder House we checked into our motel and then drove into town to wanderer the largely deserted streets of Half Moon Bay, an appealing mix of upscale, agricultural, and vacant buildings. I picked up a used paperback copy of William Matthews’ Selected Poems at the local bookstore, which was well-stocked and also featured fifty or sixty books wrapped in newsprint on sale for a dollar each. Take a chance!

The next morning we drove south a few miles along the coast, then up into the hills to the Purisima Creek Trailhead. We hiked up the canyon through the redwoods for a mile or two listening to the exotic chatter of the Pacific wrens as the filtered light of the rising sun warmed the air. We then returned north on highway 1 to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, famous for its seals and its tidepools. We’ve been there several time but had never seen the place before at low tide. Nice!

I was also pleased to discover that Pilot Light, the café alongside the local airstrip, had reopened. It used to be called 3 Zero café; now under new management, it continues to serve great food in a wide-open and unusual airstrip location. We had the sunny outdoor terrace to ourselves.

Asilomar

A two-hour drive down the coast through the bottleneck of Santa Cruz and around the dunes of Monterey Bay brought us to Asilomar Conference Center. The first time we stayed here COVID restrictions had just been lifted and there were few people in sight. Now the lodge was buzzing with people. Two conferences were in session: one sponsored by the California Land Trust, and the other by a quilting organization. At first glance I saw men in green ball caps sitting around a huge fireplace and small groups of women at card tables playing bridge (I guess). A cash bar had been set up at the far side of the room. Children were playing pool—sort of—and a woman in white was sitting at a piano nearby singling Joni Mitchell songs.

I love conferences; it’s something about the relaxed combination of sociability and intellectual exploration. But I’ve been to only a few, and never one at which I felt I “belonged.” Not at this one, for sure. I asked the man at the desk what the program was for the land trust affair, but his answer was evasive. I don’t blame him.

We were pleased to learn that our room was of the same vintage and in the same location on the sprawling, pine-dotted campus as the one we’d stayed at during our first visit. The center’s original lodgings were designed by Julia Morgan in the 1920s as a YWCA camp. These rooms are referred to on the website as “historic.” Though I’ve never actually been in one, to judge from the photos I would refer to them as Gand Canyon rustic.

The room we got was equally “historic.” But it was built of redwood during the late 50s (I guess) with twenty-foot ceilings and sliding glass doors opening out onto a small private deck. The rug, the bedspread, the paintings on the wall, all dated from—or were reminiscent of—the post-war “mid-century modern” era in the midst of which Hilary and I, and many of our friends, were raised. We had stepped into a yellowed page of Sunset Magazine.

Once we’d hauled our luggage up to the room, we wasted little time wandering down the boardwalk across the white dunes of Asilomar Dunes Natural Preserve—the last 25 acres of native dunes habitat remaining in Pacific Grove—and across the road to the beach, where we scrutinized the gulls and picked up various unidentifiable things that had been washed in by the tide. A few surf scoters were bobbing confidently between the waves fifty feet off shore. A smattering of black turnstones arrived and flitted among the rocks. And a few minutes later a flock of whimbrels appeared on the open beach from out of nowhere.    

This was grand.

        

A Few Days on the California Coast

After two pandemic years of only sporadic local travel, the other day we took a chance and hopped on a non-stop flight to San Francisco. Our itinerary was modest. Arriving in early afternoon, we'd take possession of our over-priced sub-compact rental car and drive up and over the bay peninsula ridge to the Pacific coast for a few days of hiking and bird-watching. No rain in the forecast, temperatures fluctuating between 45 and 60. Half-Moon Bay, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Pacific Grove. Sound idyllic? It was. For the most part.

We ran into a hitch, however, at the car rental counter. The line was long, and by the time I got to the counter, all the compact cars were gone. My friendly agent thought I'd be pleased about an upgrade to a Chevy Camaro.  A convertible, no less. I had my doubts, but I was hot and tired and eager to get on the road, and sight unseen,  I said, "Sure."

I did not know how hard it is to get into a Camaro. Once you're firmly ensconced behind the wheel, you might as well be going to Mars.

Nor did I know how absurdly bad the visibility is. And the two-door concept did not jibe well with our habit of repeatedly throwing jackets, vests, binoculars, and bird books in the back seat and fetching them out again at the next roadside stop.

 I didn't want to return to the rental counter inside, but Hilary knew it would be time well- spent. We  waited in line again—not quite so long this time—and when an agent was free he waved a yellow happy face on a stick, I walked down to his post, and I said, "We rented a compact, but we ended up with a Camaro, and isn't going to work for us. I can't even get my suitcase into the trunk. Maybe you've got a Corolla or something."

"A Corolla?" He looked surprised. "That's a mid-sized car. Well, let's see. It might be a fifteen-minute wait while they process the incoming cars." But he continued to scroll through the screen, and then he said, "How about a Jeep Wrangler?"

"A Wrangler?" I said. "That's the boxy little one that actually looks like a jeep. Right? It's the opposite of a Camaro. We'll take it."

The agent redid our paperwork. (Same price? of course. Though I noticed on the final invoice that a Wrangler is categorized not as a compact but as a "Cool Car.")

Out of the airport, south on the freeway, a right turn onto Highway 92 (I think) and we were winding our way with almost shocking suddenness, and also great delight, through the eucalyptus groves, up and down the hilly, verdant, and aromatic Santa Cruz Mountains, past horse farms and dilapidated million-dollar shacks. Ten or twenty minutes later we emerged from the hills and found ourselves in Half Moon Bay.

Some people come for the restaurants, others come for the golf. We come for the Fitzgerald Marine Preserve. And the ocean itself, of course. I don't get excited about harbor seals lounging on the beach with their pups like overcooked Polish sausages, but they're usually there, if you want to see them.

I love the smell of the forest, and the nasturtiums blooming to a height of ten feet amid the shrubbery. The tide pools can be great when the tide is out, with starfish and sea urchins and other small creatures I've never been able to properly identify. And don't forget: everything is green, unlike Minnesota. And the wind is blowing in off the ocean, and the waves are resounding. There are very few people around.

Also, there are plenty of birds migrating north along the coast. Our best sighting at the reserve was of a junco. I know what you're going to say: we have plenty of juncos in Minnesota. (It's been estimated that there are more juncos in North America than people.)

But the ones in California are different. Take a look.

A minor disappointment on this visit was that the café at the local airport was closed for remodeling. Our big find was the Pillar Point Wetland Salt Marsh Habitat. I had saved a brochure from a previous trip and Hilary made use of it, but also of her phone,  to guide me back and forth along the highway as we struggled to find a way into it. Finally we succeeded in locating the tiny village of Princeton-by-the-Sea and drove past several swanky Italian restaurants and a microbrewery before we located a warren of backstreets named after Ivy League colleges, all of which were lined with warehouses and small-scale marine industries. (There's a story there somewhere, but I don't know what it is.)

Finally we found the slough.  And almost immediately,  amid the buffleheads drifting out on the water in evening light, we spotted several cinnamon teal, which only rarely wander as far east as Minnesota, and also a snowy egret closer to shore, standing near a great egret, as if to highlight the differences. A few golden-crowned sparrows were feeding amid the gravel alongside the parking lot. I'd never seen one before. A California towhee hopped by. A raven landed in the gravel on the side of the road.

Visitors nearby were few, and they were all dog-walkers. We chatted with a man from England who'd moved to Half Moon Bay recently. "Well, I lived in Philadelphia for twenty years, so I'm not right off the boat." He and his wife bought a place five years ago and rented it out while they settled affairs back east.

He also told us about the military installation at the top of the hill. "If a missile goes haywire, that's the only place on the West Coast that can shoot it down."

"A nice place to spend your declining years," I said.

"Well, there's a bumper sticker that says HALF MOON BAY SUCKS. DON'T COME HERE."

I was going to ask him how he managed to afford the million-dollar price tags roundabout, but suddenly it dawned on me: he was Keith Richards' little brother!"

We ate an early dinner at Sam's Chowder House, gazing out the window at the marina while other diners enjoyed the cool breeze coming in off the sea under terrace heaters. We then returned to our motel a few miles up the road and crashed. It had been a long day.

The drive south along the coast from Half Moon Bay to Pacific Grove on Highway 1 would normally take about two hours. It took us six. Our first stop was the Purisma Creek trailhead, where we hiked up the canyon through the redwoods for a mile or two. We also stopped at Pompanio Beach because we'd spotted a flock of shorebirds from the highway. They turned out to be whimbrels. At least 80 of them. (Whimbrels don't often mix with other birds, for some reason.)

A young man was surf-fishing on the beach. I walked over and said, "Fishing for stripies?" This may have been a dumb thing to say, but the last man I had seen surf-fishing had been after that species. (But that was in Nova Scotia.)

"No, I'm after Dungeness crabs. I had some bites early and I thought it might be a good day. But it's been quiet for the last two hours."

He explained the method. "You just throw out the bait, wait a while, then pull it in. There are no "bites" or signals. It's like pulling in a wet boot. I've even started using Spam for bait."

"Do you sell them or eat them?" I said. "If you catch them."

"I eat them."

The coastal highway north of Santa Cruz is remarkably undeveloped for twenty miles. Santa Cruz itself is highly developed, and it can take quite a while to get through all the traffic lights downtown. From there the freeway trips south along the coast, passing a number of unglamorous sounding towns such as Watsonville (the artichoke capital) and Castroville (the garlic capital). Once you round the bend of the coast westward toward Monterey the nomenclature improves, but only slightly—Marina, Sand City, Seaside.

The one municipality along this stretch that stands out is Moss Landing. Most would agree that the nuclear power plant there is an eyesore, though it bears a more than passing resemblance to the Pompidou Center in Paris. No, it's the harbor, the beach, the slough that commands attention, because it's usually crawling with shorebirds.

We did not know this, but once again, we spotted some activity from the highway just before the turnoff and made a surprise stop. Wow! Alongside the godwits and whimbrels that you see everywhere on the coastal beaches were several duck species, various grebes, tiny sandpipers and bulky dowitchers, sinister cormorants and graceful terns, gulls and loons, herons and stilts, plovers and sanderlings. I was delighted to see clusters of ruddy ducks and widgeons floating in the bay. Similar birds pass through Minnesota at this time of year, but you don't see them that often. At least we don't.

The road to the beach crosses over a backwater of Elkhorn Slough, and there are a number of good places from which to view the birds and also the sea otters drifting casually on their backs, seemingly without a care in the world.

And Hilary noticed that there's a robust kayak rental on the inland side of the slough. (We might have to come back here someday.) 

A few days later, we were hiking near Jack's Peak above Monterey (where Monterey Jack cheese was invented) and we ran into a couple who told us about a famous fish restaurant called Phil's Fish Market out on the spit in Moss Landing. "But it's hard to get a table there," the woman said. "Go early."

We drove there later that afternoon. We didn't get in.

  

Buffalo River State Park to Hamden Slough

We spent the drizzly morning following the east bank of the Minnesota River, ducking into Milan to visit the Folk School (closed) and veering across the river on a gravel road that promised a route to the hamlet of Louisburg (pop. 89). The gravel seemed new and soggy, and we weren't keen on stopping just anywhere, but puttering along with the windows open we started to hear meadowlarks—Western meadowlarks—and we pulled over to take a closer look. Meadowlarks tend to perch on shrubs and fence posts, and it wasn't long before we spotted two or three.

It's an unusual landscape, boggy and expansive, but it seemed less hospitable in the drizzle. Once Hilary found Louisburg on the map we decided we didn't really want to go there, and we retraced our route to Highway 7. We crossed the river again—roughly fifteen feet wide at this point—near the headquarters of the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge, and swung back to the east side again along the top of a dam near Odessa. It was no tragedy to discover that the nine-mile tourist drive through the refuge was closed—that often seems to be the case—and before long we were rolling down the long, bedraggled main street of Ortonville.

From this point on, mighty Highway 7 becomes a narrow, two-lane road winding through the verdant countryside above the east shore of Big Stone Lake, midway in elevation between the floodplain below and the cropland above, which is largely hidden from view by the crest of the hill. Maybe it was the drizzle, or the lake—wide and seemingly endless in length, it has the look of a fjord or a loch—but I almost felt like we were back in Ireland.

That feeling vanished quickly once we left the river valley and found ourselves once again traveling on long, flat, and mostly deserted two-lane highways surrounded by fields of corn, wheat, soy beans, and sugar beets.

Beardsley. Wheaton. Breckenridge. Two hours later we were in Moorhead. Our plan was to "get to know" the city better. After all, it's home to three universities. Yet the central core has little of the hipster vitality of downtown Fargo, just across the river. On the contrary, that "core" seems to have been permanently disfigured by several major rail lines and the traffic booming into and out of town on the four lanes of Highway 10. The Moorhead Center Mall was perhaps built to address that issue, but it doesn't inspire much enthusiasm with its zany marque and puzzling slogan: "Another Great Place to Shop." It makes you wonder: Where can we find that other, and presumably greater, place to shop? Somewhere nearby?  

The Hjemkomst Center, located in a shady park tucked into a bend of the Red River, conveniently holds most of Moorhead's tourist attractions, including a full-scale facsimile of a Stave church and a locally built Viking ship that residents of Moorhead and nearby towns sailed all the way to Norway. Both are impressive. But both have been on exhibit for decades.

The building is also home to the Clay County Historical Society and several small gallery spaces. We spent some time viewing a splendid exhibit of watercolors (see above), then walked down the hall to a quilt show organized by Studio Art Quilt Associates the theme of which was emigration and displacement. Interesting. We took a stroll out past the stave church and down to the muddy river. Perhaps if we'd continued our stroll upstream past the canoe rental and under the highway, then turn east toward the public library and the Rourke Art Museum, we would have gotten a better feel for the older part of town, but the sun was coming out and the air was getting steamy.

While researching the trip I'd singled out two local restaurants that might enhance our urban interlude: Rustica offered an appealing tapas-inflected happy hour and  Sol Avenue Kitchen, a recently-opened café in a retrofitted gas station on the north side of town, was notable (according to the website) for its outdoor seating and "globally inspired" street food. We drove by both places, but neither seemed quite right at four in the afternoon. We were itching to get back out into the country.

We'd reserved a campsite at Buffalo River State Park, twelve miles east of town. Like most of the picturesque countryside hereabouts, it consists of a modest river winding through a sliver of hardwood forest with open fields on either side, all of it dropping almost imperceptibly to the west toward the distant Red River. The patch of land on which the park is located, roughly a thousand acres, is notable because most of it has been planted with prairie forbs and grasses. The adjacent Bluestem Prairie Scientific and Natural Area, on the south side of the river, has never been farmed and is considered one of the most pristine and ecologically valuable prairies in the state.

The next morning we crossed the river on a footbridge a few hundred feet from our campsite and spent three hours following various trails around and across the fields. Though we watched a flock of bobolinks courting amid the grasses for quite some time, and spotted a second juvenile orchard oriole, most of our attention was directed toward the wildflowers, which can be appreciated equally well as vast and variegated fields of plant life, mostly green and pale silver, or as individual specimens.

I don't know much about wildflowers, but can sometimes recognize the families. Yellow clover, purple vetch, this one looks like wild gallardia—I'm sure there's a name for it—and there's a wild sage (Artemisia?). Butterfly weed offers a rare burst of intense color, but is outdone by the orange field lilies, growing in isolation well off the path. Milkweed blooms are in their fleshy pink state, forming globes three inches in diameter that look like they belong in a tide pool in California. The coneflowers are ragged. So is the culver root, whose elegant and elongated white blooms are appealing just the same. 

 We stopped on several occasions to admire a spindly, silver-gray plant sparsely distributed with small, well-proportioned lanceolate leaves. Still don't know what it is, but the winding patterns of the stems, viewed from above, looked like a kitchy wrought-iron wall decoration, only far more exquisite and natural.

We saw no one in the fields, but on our return to camp through the river valley woods we met up with an elderly couple out for a walk. She had grown up in Red Lake Falls, we learned, he was from Fargo. They were both wearing floppy straw hats. 

When I asked, they had trouble explaining why Moorhead remained so lackluster. "They're building some new apartments on the north side of town," the man said, trying to show some enthusiasm. I could tell he didn't like them. Then he said: "How old are you? We're seventy-nine."

We broke camp and headed north on highway 9, cutting east on County 108 to explore a chunk of Felton Prairie. A sign alongside the gravel road leading in said "no outlet" but that didn't matter to us. The traffic that passed us consisted of semis loaded with gravel from the pits on the ridge.  

We stopped at an overgrown parking lot a few miles in, surrounded by huge boulders to keep the ATVs at bay. We saw nothing but brush and sky vanishing into the distance, read a few sun-bleached signs about rare prairie birds we'd never see--where are all the chestnut-collared longspurs?--and the importance of conserving gravel for later generations. And we watched empty semis bounding up the gravel road we'd come in on to get another load of rocks at the gravel pit that remained out of sight beyond the crest of the ridge to the south. We decided to go north along a dwindling, sandy, two-rut road past abandoned pits, disused swimming holes, copses of towering cottonwoods, and barbed-wire fences. 

It all seemed sort of abandoned, sort of beautiful. A good place for a kid to build a fort.  At another time of year, or another time of day, it might have been great. At midday in July, ninety degrees, without a hiking path in sight, it was still worth a visit, and more interesting by far than a corn field, but still, merely "interesting."

Our final stop of the day, Hamden Slough, was more rewarding. Open water surrounded by grassy slopes. Black terns, yellow-headed blackbirds, and distant ruddy ducks with bright blue bills and upturned tails, drifting in the open water.

The town of Audubon, a mile south of the slough, has a meager claim to fame. A year before it was incorporated in 1872, the famous naturalist's niece accompanied a party of railroad officials on an inspection tour. (Why? I have no idea.) She was so impressed with the beauty of the region that she requested, if a settlement were ever to be established there, that they name it after her uncle. And they did.

I read this charming tale on a kiosk near the slough, and could well believe that this rolling, grassy countryside at the tag end of the Alexandria Moraine might have inspired the admiration of a nature-lover passing by on a train. Back in 1871 there were far fewer farms and far more prairie potholes blanketing the countryside. But it got me wondering who Audubon's "niece" actually was. Audubon was born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French naval officer and his Breton chambermaid. I can find no record that he had any siblings other than a half-sister, Rose, also born in Haiti, also illegitimate, who has vanished from the historical record. Hmmm.

MIA: Hearts of Our People

The current show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts features a collection of artworks crafted by Native American women ranging from traditional Navaho weavings and Inuit sealskin jackets to an automobile painted in the style of a Maria Martinez pot.

A healthy proportion of the artworks showcase the traditional beadwork, quillwork, and decorative ceramics that we might expect to find in such a show, but the quality is uniformly topnotch, and the range of indigenous cultures that have been sampled , from Florida to the Northwest Coast and beyond, is impressive.      

Perhaps a lesser number of pieces, while exploiting traditional materials and techniques, also nurture a conceptual element: a machine gun, broken chards of china made of buffalo bones, post-modern adobe towers, a cartoon image of the moon. A few pieces look entirely traditional from a distance; only when you get up close do you see you're looking at a finely detailed acrylic painting rather than an elaborate century-old piece of beadwork.

There are poems hanging on the walls, some of them are recited on tape loops in the original languages through speakers nearby. In the first room you enter you meet up with a colorful stack of blankets at least fifteen feet high symbolizing nothing more, I guess,  than the comfort of blankets.

And there are high quality artworks that were created explicitly for the tourist trade, or at the request of ethnologists hoping to preserve examples of techniques that were in danger of being lost—for example, a series of exquisite strip baskets made in 1890 by a woman well-known at the time for her skill in this vanishing art.

Some of the pieces illustrate collaborations between native artists and established "white" industries, an example being a mahogany dining room chair fitted with seat- and back-panels decorated with Mikmak quillwork patterns.

And then there are creations that are totally "off the wall," for example, a vast field of small leather cups—it takes up a good portion of a room—connected in pairs by thongs vaguely  resembling the yarn often threaded through a winter coat to keep a small child's mittens together. What?!?

One of my favorite pieces consisted of four wooden pedestals  standing in front of glass-covered chalkboards with images behind and Cherokee words written on the glass. Thinking caps are suspended above each pedestal, and the mirrors are rimmed with images of human hands. I don't know what it means, but it looks cool.

Tradition, continuity, innovation, confrontation. It's a fascinating mix. And the exhibit is enhanced by video displays. Some are triptychs of the landscapes—desert canyons,  deep spruce woods— from which some of these artists draw their inspirations, others broadcast interviews of the women who made the art, often several generations of the same family.  

Such a concatenation of objects, cultures, styles, and themes is bound to evoke all sorts of aesthetic and anthropological quandaries. Though the scene I've been describing might sound schizophrenic, with radical and traditional objects vying for attention, the exhibition rooms are spacious, and the curious juxtapositions heighten the appeal of individual works, traditional and post-modern alike.

For some viewers, the exhibit is likely to evoke fond memories. I was reminded of the homes of Indian families Hilary and I have visited in Jemez Pueblo, Acoma, the Hopi village of Walpi, and even farm fields in SW Colorado where heaps of Ancestral Pueblan pottery are unearthed every year during spring plowing.  I recall a crisp Easter morning at San Ildefonso Pueblo (Maria Martinez's home town), where we stood with a few other tourists and villagers as forty-odd bare-chested male dancers emerged from the central kiva wearing pine boughs around their necks, deer antlers on their heads, and some slight wrapping around their torsos. Just then bells started ringing and people began to emerge from the church at the far end of the plaza wearing traditional "Anglo" dress.

Two of the locals standing nearby invited us into their two-room adobe home to share a brief meal of stewed lamb and hominy. I will never forget the shaft of morning light beam in through a window to illuminate the tidy square of bright green Jell-O on my paper plate.     

Camping on the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge or in the hills of Valle Vidal, or on the banks of the Chama river. The glint of the sun, the smell of the sage brush, the endless miles of stunted piñon and juniper.  It isn't that hard to make contact with the spirits of the ancestors, even if they aren't your ancestors, when you hear a rush of wind coming up a canyon and a flock of pinyon jays appear from around the bend and whiz by, only barely recognizable in the dusk. Thoughts of the Barrier art in Horseshoe Canyon, which predates most of the items in the exhibit by centuries, and of the Hubbell Trading post on the Arizona-New Mexico border, where (among other places) notions of turning household items into marketable works of art gathered steam, fill the head.

Meanwhile, contemplation of the artistry exhibited by a single basket, shawl, or pot, brings to mind hours of tedious repetitive activity resulting in works of remarkable vibrancy, endearing and covetable at first glance. As if the harmony of the universe could be restored once and for all by placing our stone-ground corn and  parched wild rice in the proper containers.

The flamboyant colors of the clothing are also appealing, though no one is likely to wear such garments to the grocery story—other than Robert Bly, perhaps.  Yet their beauty and ceremonial "power" is undeniable, and almost irresistible. Quite unlike the glittering silk robes on display at the recent China show, for example, these pieces carry the rough-hewn facets and the earthy grit of the materials out of which they're made, and it gives them an autochthonic authenticity that any Boy Scout could appreciate.

One of the central themes of the show is that female native artists have remained in the shadows too long, considering how stunning their aesthetic accomplishments often are. This may well be true, at least in the world of museums. But anthropologists and collectors have taking a keen interest in artists and their lineages now for at least four or five generations.

The massive, full-color, 340-page book that accompanies the show isn't cheap, but the text is dense and scholarly, fleshing out the background to the artists, their works, and the cultures from which they arose. It also includes photographs of quite a few pieces that aren't included in the show we saw the other day. I presume they'll join the exhibition as it moves on to Nashville, Tulsa, and Washington, DC.  

Eclipse Overture

Our second day involved less highway grinding and more pleasant touring. I'm tempted to call it our wildlife day. After making a few stops at pullouts along the upper rim of the Badlands, we took a gravel road twelve miles to Sage Creek Campground. Along the way we saw a big horned sheep, hundreds of prairie dogs, and a ferruginous hawk—a species I'd never seen before. It was probably looking for a careless prairie dog to eat for lunch. At the spur leading to the campground the other car spotted three red-headed woodpeckers in a small grove of cottonwoods, while just ahead, we were coming upon our first magpie, which it hopped into the shade under a hippie van as we approached.

It was hot in the noon-time glare of the treeless campground, and I was glad we hadn't spent the night there. A few tents were scattered over the dusty expanse, but one of the women hanging out in the shade of a ramada said, "Last night this place was packed!"

On our way out we were stopped by a herd of buffalo desultorily crossing the road. I should have been admiring them but I was impatient to get going, and I started to wonder if the two cars bollixed up ahead of us were enthralled by the beasts or simply too timid to make their way through.

Studying the map a few minutes earlier, we had decided to have lunch in Farmingdale. When we arrived we discovered there was nothing in Farmingdale. We next chose Hermosa as a rendezvous, but the most appealing place we could find there was a deli in a casino-cum-truck-stop called the Flying J.

It was 2 p.m. and we were glad to get in out of the sun for a while.  I got a ham and cheese sandwich in a cellophane wrapper and a plastic container of baked beans. They both would have been better if I'd micro-waved them—the bun was on the verge of being frozen—but with loads of mustard and mayo and a big bag of bar-b-que potato chips, the "meal" was satisfactory.

Tim and Carol, more adventurous, purchased a chicken-fried steak sandwich, with the thought that if it was good, they'd buy a second one. They each took a single bite and then, by mutual consent, tossed it in the garbage. Hilary, going further out on a limb, bought a sausage wrapped in pastry dough with jalapeños and cheese that was sitting under a heat lamp —a glorified pig-in-a-blanket, one of the specialties of the deli.

I think the do-it-yourself root beer floats oozing out of a big do-it-yourself machine may have been the hit of the occasion. "We're going to get one of those for the house," Tim said.

Just south of Hermosa we turned west on Highway 36 and were almost instantly engulfed in a wonderland of rising hills, green pastures, and shadowed pine woods. The sudden contrast was extraordinary, and welcome. We forked over the entry fee at the park gate—$20 per car—and made our way along the narrow and winding road through the open woods to the Needles and on to Sylvan Lake.

At one point we spotted some mountain goats on the rocks just above the road. And at the Sylvan Lake Lodge we ordered drinks and sat on the terrace in the late afternoon shade discussing whether there might be a limit to how many birds could bear a single individual's name. For example, after the Swainson's hawk and Swainson's thrush, does the ornithological union cut Swainson off? But what about the Wilson's phalarope, the Wilson's thrush ... and Wilson's warbler!

The subject came up because I'd mentioned that I was surprised there weren't any Clark's nutcrackers anywhere nearby—it seemed like perfect habitat—and went on to say, in case anyone was interested, that the bird was named after William Clark of "Lewis and Clark" fame.

The lodge is small but nice—a large field stone lobby with timbered furniture, a quaint bar, and a well-lit dining room beyond—but the terrace doesn't have much of the view. And they were piping pop music out past the ponderosa pines! I think the Sons of the Pioneers or Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen would have been more appropriate.

On our way back to the car I spotted three big whitish birds attacking the cones in a tree alongside the parking lot.

"What are they?" Carol shouted. (They were parked on the other side of the lot.)

"Clark's nutcrackers," I replied.

"Next time, we should bring up the subject of ivory-billed woodpeckers," she said.

It was a ten-minute ride south to Custer, the attractive tourist town where Gayle had booked a "family suite" of rooms at the Rocket Motel six months ago. It was actually a single long room with the bathroom placed in the middle, which made the two sleeping areas more private. The rooms were immaculate, and the tile work in the narrow bathroom was superb.

The receptionist had only a single key to give the five of us, which proved to be a problem later. But the motel's great strength was its covered terrace, where, as the sun went down, we could sit at wrought-iron patio tables and watch the world go by on Main Street just below us.

A winsome couple from San Diego sat down at the next table to eat a pizza they'd picked up in town.

"This isn't the pizza we ordered," the man said as he opened the box, though he didn't seem very upset. "There's no pineapple on it."

"That means someone else got our pizza," his son said astutely. "Well, I guess we might as well eat it."

"So, you're here to see the eclipse?" the man called over to us. "Where ya from?"

We told him. He and his wife had flown to Denver from San Diego with their two kids. "Did you hear they banned double-semis from the freeways in Colorado and put construction projects on hold to alleviate congestion on the freeways? They say a million people are headed this way. We decided it would be easier to drive north of the totality line and ease back into it from this direction."

They had been hearing stories as they passed through the small towns on the path of totality. "In Agate," the woman said, "they've been discussing such things as what kinds of ordinance is in place to respond to someone who wants to sacrifice a chicken during the eclipse. Is that legal? These towns aren't used to all the attention. They've been preparing for years."

The outdoor terrace and hot tub

 

The eclipse had been calculated to commence at 10:30 the next morning (mountain time) and we were two and a half hours away according to Google Maps. I had been thinking that under normal conditions we'd have plenty of time if we got up at 6, but after a bit of discussion we decided to set our alarm clocks for 3:30 and try to leave Custer by 4. Carol located an all-night convenience store in town on her phone—the Corner Pantry—where we could get some coffee before setting out, and we spent a few minutes relaxing in the hot tub adjoining the terrace, confident that all the pieces were falling into place nicely.

It was at this point that we inadvertently locked ourselves out of the room.

*   *   *

I love the muffled sounds of early, early morning, when your mind is like cotton and your body is stumbling around on "safe" mode, not yet fully booted. Get up, get dressed, get packed, and get out: that's all you have to do.  Stepping outside into the cool night air, I noticed that on the street below, someone had driven a big white pickup truck up onto the curb. (I think he may have been delivering papers to the corner news stand.) We were soon headed downtown on Mt. Rushmore Blvd. to the Corner Pantry, which turned out to be a well-lit Conoco gas station stocked with plenty of sugary donuts and rubbery breakfast burritos. The coffee pots seemed to be empty, however.

The magic before dawn

"I'm making some more right now. It will be ready in a second," the manager said. She was thin as a rail, heavily tattooed, and looked to be about sixteen. Several of us noticed that the cream dispenser squirted cream sideways, and when I mentioned it to her, she said, "I clean that every hour. It just sticks out of the bag funny." She was definitely on the ball.

We headed out of town going south at 4:15 (I looked at the clock on the dash). The main drag soon turned into Highway 385, otherwise known as the Gold Rush Byway, which would take us all the way to Alliance. It was pitch black, and there were very few cars on the road. The landscape was shrouded in fog. The tail lights of our companion car soon disappeared around the bends ahead of us, only to reappear on the straightaways, growing ever smaller.

Rounding one bend, we came upon an elk standing in the road, but he moved aside into the ditch a split second before I tapped the horn.

The town of Hot Springs seemed to go on forever in the dark, and it struck me that many of the limestone buildings whizzing by in front of the headlights as we wove our way through it might have been worth looking at more carefully in daylight.

Semis caught and passed us occasionally, but as light came gradually to the sky and the fog lifted, the tone remained hushed. Gayle, who was in the other car, texted Hilary as we approached Alliance, and we pulled into the Conoco station on the outskirts of Chadron where they were already parked.

We were now an hour north of Alliance. Traffic continued to be very light, almost nonexistent. As the sun rose it transformed the fog itself into a thin diaphanous blanket.  At one point four large dark birds flew across the highway ahead of the car. My first thought was cormorants, but then I got a better look at the bills. "Hey, look," I said, "Ibises!"

That was the only unusual thing we saw until we passed a makeshift sign pointing the way to Carhenge. At the next intersection three men were ushering cars into a field. The fee: $10. It was easy to see that the "guests" were being lined up like sardines in anticipation of a big turnout, but the field was less than a quarter full. It was not an appealing scene. 

We turned left on the gravel road past the makeshift gate and continued east, passing several similar pay-and-park operations, and turned south on the next section road. We were looking for Madison Road, which sounded important but was no different from the other gravel roads in the vicinity. A mile or so east and we arrived at Sugar Farm.