http://neilfeather.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=http://neilfeather.com/fwp_portfolio/1164/ It's always a good omen when the house you're staying in has a sign saying "Omnia Vincit Amor."
is it bad to buy Clomiphene online The friend we were staying with in Kansas City – Rachel, who was going to be coming with us and hiking in the Sierras – was at a show that evening for Father’s Day, and we made it to her house just as she was arriving back home around 10:30 in the evening. We had logged more than a thousand miles in a single day, which ends up being very easy as long as you have multiple drivers who can sleep in a car when off-duty. After some excited talk about our trip we all hit the sack. The next morning was our first morning together as a hiking group of three: we compared our packing lists, eliminated redundancies, wrote our grocery shopping list, and set off for the supermarket. We were going to be hiking for eight days and needed to carry all our food on our backs. In addition to this, our plan was to overload on fresh fruits and vegetables – which are watery, have little nutrition relative to weight, and take up a great deal of volume and so are unsuitable for long-distance backpacking – in the days prior to our departure. We had a cooler and would fill it with food and munch on it all the way to the trailhead. We had three days to drive from Kansas City to Giant Sequoia National Park, and then two days camping in the Giant Forest acclimating to the park’s elevation (6800’), before setting out on our hike across the Sierras.
We were not dawdling in Kansas City so I had to see what I could see of it from the window of a moving car on our way to the supermarket. Its greenness surprised me; I know that precipitation decreases as distance west from the Mississippi increases (until you are almost at the coast), but I was surprised to see no obvious change of the landscape yet in Kansas City. The city was filled with tall trees and there were a number of conspicuous fountains. It seemed like a nice enough place to me. There was a neighborhood called “the Plaza” which was all done up in Spanish colonial style, like Balboa Park in San Diego. Mostly this was just a backdrop for a mall: places like Sephora and Victoria’s Secret which were renting the spaces. But I suppose the same thing could be said of Bloomberg-era New York City, a nice backdrop for a mall. All in all it seemed a great deal nicer than your average mall, and I approved.
We had done all our necessaries by about 1 p.m. and we shot out of Kansas City. The speed limit went from 60 to 65 to 70 to 75 and the roads were straight and wide. We set the cruise control at four miles an hour faster than the limit and busted out the food.
I was apprehensive. I was aware that the hike we had planned was extremely ambitious, and as an Easterner I had always wondered if I was tough enough to handle “real” mountains like the ones out West – I had climbed precisely one peak in my life over 5,000 feet, and that was in Arizona the year before (Mount Wrightson, 9,500’). We were planning on climbing the tallest mountain in the continental United States, Mt. Whitney (14,491’). And before that we were going to be hiking clear across one of the largest National Parks in the United States – Sequoia and Kings Canyon together are some 860,000 acres. This apprehension proved unwarranted, and in fact Russ and I had hiked across a great portion of the Catskills the year before on the Devil’s Path, and the Catskill Park is in fact some 700,000 acres itself, which is in fact not at all shabby. But still, we were going to be hiking days into the backcountry, across a mountain range so imposing that its crest lacks a single mountain pass crossed by a road for more than a hundred miles – and this in densely populated and well-developed California. In the middle of our trip we would be quite literally days away from any help. Our starting and ending points on the trail were 350 miles apart by car.
All of this is to say that none of us were sure if we’d be dying of starvation in a week, and so our drive was a moving feast of strawberries, cherries, carrots, snap peas, bananas, and apples. And when it came time for an early dinner we pulled into Abilene.
I have always found the name Abilene evocative, and seeing the name approach on the map made me want to stop there. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Syria, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene…” Besides that little snippet of the Gospel, I had in mind a song:
Indian summer
Abilene
You were new in town
I was nineteen.
That song might refer to Abilene, Texas, but I don’t think it really makes much difference. The Abilene in Kansas is not as big as the one in Texas but it is fairly important in American history, as the place where Dwight Eisenhower grew up. I was curious about seeing the house and the grave, but we were moving quickly, and so we came there just to eat. I refused to eat at roadside garbage vendors such as McDonald’s and Taco Hell on this trip as on all trips – I haven’t eaten at such a place since 2003 and I see no reason to eat at another one ever again. This requires some poking around in small towns to find places to eat, which is good entertainment anyway.
Abilene, Kansas.
Once we were in Abilene – which was a pleasant prairie town, with a little grid of shops downtown and a relatively large grid of nice houses around downtown – it wasn’t hard to pick a restaurant, because when we saw a man literally passed out on the bench in front of Joe Snuffy’s Bar and Grill and a bunch of pickup trucks lined up in front of the place, we knew it was where we were going to eat. Abilene was one of the towns where Wild Bill Hickok had been sheriff – he who died with aces and eights in hand.
I steeled myself to look tough before stepping in, but the bar’s rough exterior belied what we found inside, which looked like a parish hall basement on Sunday afternoon. Pairs of old couples were seated at four-person tables, fleshy cheeks bursting up against big old old-person eyeglasses. The waitress was nice and I felt that our trip was something she would want to hear about: driving New York to California, hiking in Giant Sequoia National Park, and so forth. I concluded my description of our trip by proclaiming, “So we’re hungry!” I said. “I’ll bet you are,” she replied. “You know there’s room in the car for a fourth,” I said. “We picked this girl up in Kansas City” – pointing to Rachel – and we still have room in the car.” “I don’t know what my husband would think of that,” she said. “Well, he can come too.” “Why that’s very sweet of you but I don’t think I have enough money to take a vacation right now.”
Joe Snuffy Himself!
We got milkshakes after lunch and she asked me if I wanted a “to-go cup.” I said sure, and instead of taking what I had left and putting it in a cup she gave me a whole new Coke. We got pictures with the owner – the actual Joe Snuffy (“more or less,” he said), and the waitress made me promise to like the place on Facebook. “That way we can see the pictures from your trip,” she said.
Back to the highway. We had dallied, and we had to drive straight through just to make it to Denver that night. Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado unfolded in endless vistas. The trees by now had quite vanished, and the land was brown and tan and yellow. It was beautiful driving in the late afternoon light. Our Kansas friend wasn’t too excited about this part of the world – flat, flat, flat – but to me it was the first truly different place we had seen. We had come a distance, and we could feel it. It was amazing.
A few dozen miles outside Denver we could see them – the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies. It was incredibly exciting. We took the old Kerouac road into downtown Denver – US 50 – and again, all I could do was drive by and look, but I was amazed by what I saw. The neighborhood we were rolling through was rollicking – mostly Hispanic people hitting the streets in the cool of evening, flirting, calling out, pushing baby strollers, walking around. It was great and took me completely by surprise – from the news I just imagine Denver to be an endless roll of cul-de-sac suburbs populated by well-armed video-game-playing adolescent-weirdo recluses. But it actually seemed kind of nice. The downtown was pleasantly monumental and had at least one nice square, and I was surprised to find that it was a place I was interested in returning to. We rolled through town, out the other side, back onto the highway and up to Thornton, where we were staying the night in Rachel’s grandmother’s basement. On our way in we picked up a cheap bottle of Chianti at a liquor store which ended up being the single worst bottle of wine I’ve ever had. The shop was interesting, though, an older Indian woman who obviously owned the place sat sullenly glowering at her young female employee who smiled and acted pleased as punch to see us. She wore a lot of makeup and was showing a little cleavage, and she looked in every way like one of those American girls with absolutely no idea of a good time outside of beers and bars and music, which was fine enough, as my biggest problem right now is not with good-timin’ women but with the people who have no idea of a good time at all. I chatted with her awhile and then left her to get glowered at by her dour Indian boss-lady until closing time.
Rachel’s grandmother lived in – you guessed it – a cul-de-sac neighborhood in an incorporated town outside of Denver. You couldn’t have walked two miles in any direction without hitting a Chili’s. But there was something excitingly different about the place: there was xeriscaping in place of her front lawn, red rocks and statues and so forth. We had passed out of the world of green and grass. And on the horizon were massive mountains.
Grandma herself was completely fabulous, full of stories and vim and a bit of bawdy. Her romance novels were out in full force on the kitchen table, and somehow we got on the topic of the Golden Girls and then Southern girls and our romantic lives. It was generally fabulous.
We slept that night on a carpeted floor in a basement in Denver. We would hit the road at first light the next morning.
Post a Comment