February && March 2023 ||| Pgh >> SF Bay >> Pgh
I love a road trip, and every other year for the past four years (2019, 2021, and 2023), I’ve taken a cross-continent voyage, at various paces. I’ve visited almost every state, three round trips in. This adventure was inspirational, profound, and filled me with visions for my art. I met some wonderful and wild Americans, of course. We’re all over the place now.
Westbound
‘Treat Yourself to the Best’ - Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco Barn-side Advertisement, McDermott, Ohio
I spent almost a week in and around Ohio, in the part of the Ohio River Valley where they ancient Teays River flowed far north of the Ohio River’s present channel (before the Canadian Shield rose and tilted its watershed northward). This intersection of ancient river channels was something like a highway interchange for the first peoples of the Americas.
There are megastructure mound sites all over the area, enormous ceremonial and cultural sites which many peoples would use, as modern pilgrims would follow the Camino de Santiago, or nations might perform state funerals for revered leaders.
I visited Mound City & the Serpent Mound. Both sites are more than a thousand years old - Mound City’s use and growth-in-construction eclipsed the Roman Empire (and was contemporaneous). The very early Smithsonian publication Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley provides detailed surveys of hundreds of sites with as storied a history as these two, most of which were dismantled by white settlers and used for roadbeds, fieldstone foundations, and other ‘land improvements’.
I took a fair amount of video at both sites, which I’ll edit together for Youtube. (If this text is still here, I haven’t created the youtube video yet. When I do, I’ll replace this with a link or an embedded video.)
The Lafe Taylor house, Rarden, OH
There are other monuments in this set of wide, old valleys. Population ~160, the town of Rarden Ohio also hosts this 22-room Victorian mansion-house. It was built for a local stone magnate, Lafe Taylor. He took a lumber fortune and rolled it into the Taylor Stone Company, a sandstone mine. The area is called Scioto County, a native word related to deer and deer hunting. On a followup trip to Columbus, OH, I absolutely want to stop and meet the Scioto Lounge Deer Sculptures.
As you reach Southern Ohio, and close in on the borders with Kentucky and West Virginia, you reach the hilly edges of Appalachia. Here, roads and highways cut through limestone, shale, and sandstone laid down 400+ million years ago.
Williamson, WV, on the Tug Fork River, has my favorite Chamber of Commerce building of any place- the Coal House.
This stone block building is made out of a special stone: coal, cut from the heart of the vein. There was an interior fire which took the original wallpaper, but the building’s structure never lit - quarried & still massive (uncrushed) coal only ignites at very high temperatures.
Interior of an iron puddling furnace, looking up. This space would have been loaded with alternating layers of iron ore and coal, and fired for days, until metallic iron seeped out.
The Cumberland Gap Trail runs a few miles from the Kentucky-Tennessee-Virginia tripoint. This ancient low-point in the Cumberland Mountains is the gentlest pass for a hundred miles in either direction, and has been used for thousands of years. During white settlement, they built this iron puddling furnace by the fresh creeks flowing down from the ridgeline on the southern (Virginia) side. The northern side (Kentucky) has favorable geography because there is a meteor-created valley there, the Middlesboro Crater.
I got to meet these beautiful cows (and one handsome bull) at a friend’s farm in Tennessee. The hill you can see on the other side of the creek-valley has been in his family for four generations now.
These were some deeply spiritual cows. They just wanted to hang out and be calm. I felt at home on this Tennessee earth, grounded in a very literal sense, as if the grass and the cows and I had neural connections down into the earth, like we were all players in the same dance, reading from the same script.
It was a wonderful spiritual tuneup to hang out just across the electric fence from these ungulates, just sitting crosslegged and singing to them. They are part of an agrarian tradition which predates our current, broken food system.
On Rt 411, in far Eastern Tennessee, you can find Benton’s Smokey Mountain Country Hams, a buildings which smells of smoke and sugar, and is the home of expertly prepared meat from big southern hogs. I picked up a few center cuts and a rasher of bacon, which were distributed out again across the rest of the trip. I got a t-shirt, which still retains the smoke-and-sugar smell of the building, even after many washes. Amazing ham. Benton’s ships nationwide, by the way.
GAR! Gar gar gar!
As I crossed the south, I came through Monroe, Louisiana, and the Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge. While walking the trails, I saw vultures circling, taking off and landing from a set of trees on the trail ahead. Among other bones scattered across the trail, this circular gar was the most photogenic. Look at those teeth!
The wildlife really changes as you move across the continent. This front desk scorpion was cousin to many real sting-friends in Canton, TX.
These deer are new to the continent. To my eyes, they seemed like small, fat white tail deer fauns, but this is a herd of adults of a totally different species. They are chital, or axis deer, native to the Indian subcontinent. They were introduced in Texas in 1932 as a hunting animal, though they’ve become wild self-sustaining populations since that controlled introduction. These ones are chewing up the lawn at the Lynden B Johnson State Park & Historic Site.
I’ve never been to another place like south-west Texas. The land is verdant and also arid: there are plants here that are totally unique to the region, evolving innumerable clever strategies to preserve water, minimize sun damage, survive herbivory. Species like this opuntia thrive in hot, dry, mountainous land, forming a waist-high forest of sharp and waxy flora.
My aunt Molly, my mother’s younger sister, is a volunteer campground ranger for the National Park Service, currently stationed down in Big Bend National Park, along the Texas-Mexico border.
She’s having an incredible time, and was also very happy for a visit from her nephew.
Big Bend is one of the few truly empty places left in the country, and it will remain that way. Camping is reservation only, and limited to just five or six sites across thousands of acres of cacti, thorn-scrub, stonecrops, roadrunners, and more.
February in the Rio Grande valley is quite cool. The sun shines bright through the thin, dry skies, but the chill of night takes a few hours to blow away. I really love this see-you-around photo with my aunt: we are both very content and in-our-element.
Driving through Arizona and New Mexico towards Las Vegas, where I was visiting a friend, I saw many more deserts, each one a different geology, and host to wildly different plants. Sotols, Yuccas, Century Plants, Agaves, cholla trees, hedgehog cacti, saguaro, and more. The nine-foot-tall plant above is an ocotillo, a plant which straddles the US-Mexico border, growing tiny leaves close to their needle-filled trunks, and flowering with beautiful red buds in spring, for bees to feed at and pollinate.
San Francisco Bay Area
Stanford University’s Tower, with snow on the mountains west of the San Francisco Bay.
Visiting the San Francisco Bay area is always a surreal homecoming. The strange weather events of March 2023 amped that feeling up. Since 1993, when my family moved to California, I’ve seen (or got a phone call describing) snow just once or twice in the Bay Area. On this trip, I saw snow accumulation on Skyline Blvd, a ridgeline road at just 1000-2000ft above sea level, and only a few miles from the sea. Typically, this arrangement gives it an extremely stable and mild buffer of warm, moist sea air (part of the attraction of living in the Bay Area), but even this coastal arrangement could not keep the snow away. Wild!
Dry Gardens are of great interest in California, where many communities must adjust to strict restrictions on irrigation and garden-watering. These Mexican succulents, Sedum adolphi, are known as the Coppertone Stonecrop. My mom planted them among many small and medium rocks, as well as two enormous boulders turned to their maximum verticality. The effect is as you see here - a kind of calligraphic landscape in miniature: Sedum trees form a foreground forest, with abstracted, hilly landforms rising behind.
Lightwell at the Westview-Valley Fair mall complex.
“California Dreaming” is a real built phenomenon: The mild climate has provided for a century of abstract, light-filled buildings, as a strong cultural preference. Combined with modern capitalism, there is a strong architectural urge towards total abstraction, to the point of empty, backrooms-like dream spaces.
The pandemic has emptied these spaces out to their minimum viability, which really adds to the ‘you’ve left reality and entered a void’ feeling. The food court had dozens of folks across its cavernous, tabled atrium, so it wasn’t all empty. But once you left that central food zone, you tended to have the whole hall to yourself unless you ducked into one of the open stores (about half of the available retail bays), where at most two people were working.
Self-Portrait at the original Round Table Pizza location, in my childhood town, Menlo Park, CA.
Round Table Pizza is a Menlo Park institution. This is King Arthur and his Knights themed pizza, and has maintained that theme from 1959 to the present. The chain has grown to 400+ stores.
My earliest video game memories come from Menlo Park’s second Round Table location, which had arcade cabinets for Mortal Kombat, Raiden II, and 1943, and, eventually, Metal Slug II.
I’d play these quarter games while we waited for take-out pizza. I could usually get thru the first level or two of each game. The video games are gone, but the pizza remains, and the pizza is mighty.
My favorite has long been the Maui Zaui, a spicy Hawaiian pizza with onions, tomatoes, ham, pineapple, bacon, and a zesty sauce.
Tuesday is so cute. This little witch-cat has been my friend for almost six months now. She traveled all the way out to California (and back) in the enclosed truck-bed (a little cat condo!) and can be seen here flopped over trying to distract me from journaling.
Oleander, a bitter and poisonous plant. Exposure to the sap can really inflame. It’s a very popular garden plant in California.
This is some very solid sidewalk art. If only stone koi lazed about in all of our cement.
Menlo Park has strict tree-cutting laws, and documentation on almost every tree in town. Homeowners are encouraged to really let big trees keep growing. I used to ride my bicycle under the branches of this mighty oak, on my way to high school. She keeps growing, and has been fortified from traffic. She must be eighty feet tall, and as wide, in addition to an underground root structure just as big.
California has multiple kinds of corvids. In addition to the blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata), they have the rude bois known as Steller’s Jays, Cyanocitta stelleri, whose crests and bulk make them stand out from their eastern cousins.
They love peanuts. My dad has a small wicker basket by the back door to the back porch, and he and the jays have come to an understanding about exactly the right throwing distance.
My folks doing their best American Gothic, the day I headed back East.
The state flower, the California Poppy. Sign of a happy, bounteous visit.
Eastbound
San Luis Reservoir, in Central California, is much more full than it was a few months ago. The enormous rain storms (atmospheric rivers) which have hit California, Arizona, and New Mexico have alleviated a years-long state of drought. The statewide reservoir system, San Luis included, has been refreshed enough that any water restrictions have been lifted for at least the next three years.
Southern California, the desert part, is a wildly different landscape from the coast. This long sunset in the Mojave Desert, somewhere outside of Barstow, CA, really shows off the blue of distance - truly gorgeous gradient effects.
About seventy miles from the Arizona border, I pulled off the highway for a little stretch break, and ended up hiking forty feet up a scree field to photograph this hedgehog cactus. It’s about a foot tall, and there were ten more specimens visible higher up (and on steeper banks). This is another species native to North America. I was about a month early for any kind of flower bloom - beautiful magenta petals.
These are the Bristol Mountains, a complex set of geologies that rise above the alluvium of the Mojave flats. Some of the granite outcrops are pre-Cambrian, pre-fossils, some of the oldest parts of the North American continent. Other parts are geologically recent lava flows, emerging from faults as this land slowly stretches and thins out. (Denver and Salt Lake City and Lake Tahoe are all slowly moving away from each other, and new magma flows in to fill in the widening gaps, usually kicking out silicic volcano-hills).
The strange and varied soils in such mosaics allow for a lot of plant speciation, and intense biodiversity. The botany follows the geology.
An omen-bird of the deep desert, an American Raven.
This is Bill Williams Mountain, whose cloud-hidden summit is in the 9000ft range. It’s in northern Arizona, off Route 40, and does not typically get snow like this in mid-March. On the far side is Flagstaff, Arizona.
An enormous container train on the long straight haul between Flagstaff, AZ and Albuquerque, NM. As you can see from the milemarker (which counts up from the west to the east), the train is near the Arizona-New Mexico border.
The Painted Cliffs outside Lupton, AZ. Oversized Pickup Truck for scale.
This little lady was in some kind of animal communion with Tuesday as each creature was parked in her respective truck bed, and both trucks were parked filling up on gas.
The other driver said that she was doing good, she had just gotten way lost for a few days, outside whatever enclosure her flock is enclosed within.
The former Gallup Refinery, outside of Church Rock, NM, decommissioned August 2020.
A billboard outside Bluewater, NM.
Tiamat, five-headed dragon-queen of Hell, at Duke City Games in Albuquerque. I really love the little human miniature for scale.
Speaking of scale, we’ve built and are building some pretty amazing megaprojects here in 21st century America. This is Salt Fork One, an installation of 112 two-megawatt wind turbines, east of Amarillo, TX.
For scale, note the two-story access stairway at the base of the front right tower. How many rows of turbines can you see receding into the fog?
Loretta’s, an antiques and gift store in Shamrock, TX, truly was a lucky, and bizarre find.
I have a couple photos of this van-with-a-cross-trailer, which are days apart. We were fellow travelers on Rt 40 for states.
Somebody had just too many extra Space Marines, and went ahead and made a gradient wall here at New World Games and Comics, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
I love the green brontosaurus of the Sinclair Oil logo. It’s a dependable, friendly roadside monument, a sort of travel-saint in 25 of our 50 states, mostly in the greater American West. This one was in McLoud, OK. Behind the dinosaur and me, you can see the truck and its bed cap - Ms Tuesday spent the voyage in that back area, with various bedding areas, her cat sand, a cat tower, and a food station (as well as my luggage and travel supplies). She sleeps very well at 80 mph. She also has a lead and harness, so she spent some amount of time in the passenger seat up front with me.
Headed towards the "deep dark hills of Eastern Kentucky” on the Cumberland Parkway. These ridges feel like home territory. It’s just a day or two to Pittsburgh, four or five hundred miles.
Increasingly close to home. This rubber tire gantry is being used as a mobile crane in this highway reconstruction project outside Huntington, WV. My last day of travel.
Enormous greenshield lichen patches on bedrock, Wallback, West Virginia. For scale, my hand-width is around 10in, so the larger colony here was around 5ft tall - as big as a person!
An oft-photographed view because it is an awesome one: Pittsburgh’s downtown skyscrapers as seen from the Fort Pitt Bridge (yellow, left), just as you exit the Fort Pitt Tunnels. It’s a dramatic reveal every time, even two decades into residence.
