Vicksburg

When you drive into Vicksburg, site of a Civil War battle, you get a brochure. It mentions Lincoln' words: "Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket." Then you go to the visitors' center, and you hear, "Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket." Afterwards you walk though the small museum to a large map, where the first words you hear are, "Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket."

The National Military Park of Vickburg celebrates the crucial battle that won the west in the American Civil War. But battles are such complicated things, and this one so complicated that students of military history study it assiduously and probably write thousands of dull papers about it, titled things like "Vicksburg, The Key." In order to fully understand it, non-military types must grasp an array of subjects : geography, history, politics, and 19th century technology.

And so, the museum simply beats you over the head with it all. Again and again. Yes, it's somewhat dull at first. But over time, as you drive across the strange, undulating landscape marked by hundreds of memorials—like an elongated graveyard—you begin to understand it all. The parallel lines, the assaults, the redoubts, redans, and lunettes. And you begin to forgive them for their ceaseless repetition of the themes, the dull recounting of facts. It all starts to become clear.

Suddenly, you see the battle in all of its fascinating detail. The Gibraltar of the Mississippi. The fearless and brutal Grant moving his troops at dazzling speed. While Pemberton and Johnston and Jefferson Davis prevaricate and fumble. And then, the guts and determination of Sherman and Porter bring them to heel. The suffering of the people, the righteousness of the victors. It's quite a story, once you get the backstory.

The best part of the park, however, is the restored gunboat Cairo. It was an ironclad river-battle ship, sunk during the war and buried in silt in the Yazoo River. Raised and restored in as much detail as possible, it opens a window on 19th century naval culture and technology. There also is an interesting video about the restoration. Needless to say, it opens with the words, "Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket."

Houston: a million bizarre little pieces

Houston is admittedly an ugly place. From one end to another, it bristles with car dealerships and chain restaurants. People drive in big cars from neighborhoods without sidewalks to malls without sidewalks. They walk (some waddle) into thousands stores, under the lights of a hundred thousand branded signs—ok, enough. Houston is filled with strip malls. It's a picture no one needs to paint.

That said, for all the scorn poured on it, Houston is a surprisingly diverse city—more authentically diverse than, say, Austin. It's also a big food city. There might be strip malls, but a single one can have a Japanese, Vietnamese and Turkish restaurant—many of them really good. There is even a supermarket specializing in Middle Eastern cuisine, the first time I'd ever been in one. We had terrific Thai food and the best bowl of Vietnamese noodles since a hole in the wall in Hue. It was all tasty.

For tourism, we asked my sister for a trip to the National Museum of Funerary History, which was suggested by one of my Facebook friends. It currently has an exhibit of a working 1900-era coffin manufacturer. My sister thought it sounded ghoulish. She had a point (but no imagination).

Instead, she took us to something that is, in a way, even more strange: NASA and the Johnson Space Center. (Pop quiz: why is the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Answer: because then-VP Lyndon B. Johnson put it there.) It's part McDonalds-Playland, and part very serious and sober history of the US Space Program. There are many very cool things: big rockets, full scale models of Skylab, moon rocks, knowledgeable staff—I've never been to a museum where the curators knew so much.

But I have to say there's something very odd about it all. Every single staff member lives convinced that going into space is the apex of human ambition. There is nothing cooler, greater, or more impressive than climbing into a tin can, strapping yourself to a rocket, and blasting into space. I admit it's really cool, and I'd love to take the ride. But if I had to hang out with those people all day I'd never make it. They were so clean cut, so dedicated, so driven, and so thoroughly humorless and boring, that I'd have to shoot myself and several of them long before I made it through the program.

Even so, NASA comes well recommended from me.

Dead trees for sale

As you enter the Petrified National Forest, a sign reads "Do not remove petrified wood under penalty of prosecution." At the gate to the park, a ranger sternly warns you that "It is against federal law to remove petrified wood." He then hands you a brochure that adds, somewhat unnecessarily, in my opinion, "Do not remove petrified wood."

The sad irony is that the warnings are not really needed. The vast majority of the petrified wood that could be picked up and carted off is already gone. What remains would typically require a backhoe to steal.

The vandals who did the damage are all long dead. Like many national parks, the Petrified Forest was opened up as a tourist attraction in the late 1800s by a railway company (Santa Fe). The main activity of the tourists was souvenir hunting, and they filled their pockets with so many splinters and sticks that that the area was set aside as a national park in 1910.

Still, there are enough big logs left to make the area very interesting. Millions of years ago, these logs belonged to a jungle. In summertime, they were washed into a flood plain, where tons of silt buried them. Over time, the silt replaced the wood and pressure rendered the logs into quartz. Finally, the land was lifted up, and erosion washed away most of the surrounding sand, leaving the petrified wood exposed. There are three major groupings of these rocks inside the park; all are fitted out with easily accessible walkways.

The main activity of tourists still seems to be the acquisition of petrified wood, however it is done in a slightly different way. Directly outside the park, in every direction, you can find rickety gift shops advertising the stuff. There, the logs sit in vast lots that remind you of auto wrecking yards, divided neatly into sections by size. For a few bucks you can get a paperweight, and for a few thousand, a nicely polished log. Of course, you would need a truck of some size to cart your log away, and a small army of movers to get it situated in your house. But it's a small price to pay for prehistoric contraband.

Cool Taos

(sorry, photos still out of commission, this is the sky in Montana)

Before our trip, we stayed at a KOA over the memorial holiday in California, where the population was decidedly sedentary. Here and there, scattered across the campground, were massive specimens of vacationing humanity. Most of them had their feet up on coolers and were engaged in a non-stop orgy of eating and drinking. One group of four people had even brought a portable oven and gleefully stuffed a 25 lb turkey into it. In these dark days of Atkins diets and 12-step clubs, it's refreshing to see such unapologetic gluttony and alcoholism in action.

As we headed north, we began to find our fellow campers more slender, but occasionally infiltrated by religious cults. In Missoula, for example, we met up with some ex-pat South Africans, whose women who wore bonnets and gingham dresses and sang prayers before dinner. I heard a 12 year old boy explain to his mother that the reason he had taken a bike from another boy was "because he has to learn to be more patient about adversity." I see a great future in politics for that young man.

As you turn south, things change again. The encampments of boy scouts, trout fishermen, and Church of Christ buses give way to vacationing teachers driving their kids across the country in hybrid vans.

By the time you get to New Mexico, everything becomes "cool" again. For a good example, you need look no farther than the upscale town of Taos, whose adobe buildings have all the appearance of having been built out of slightly melted coffee ice cream.

If you haven't heard of Taos, it's because you're not an artist. Its chief attraction is the Taos pueblo, whose adobe houses and church were an object of veneration for Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keefe. Even today the pueblo is a rite of passage for serious painters and photographers, who come hoping to measure themselves against the masters. Its residents, who are determined to exploit this mystifying stream of artists, open the doors early and charge per camera.

The rest of the town is quite a pleasant, sunny place. Its main square is composed of open air cafes, fair-trade shops, and dozens of "galleries" selling Native American-inspired art. We celebrated our return to this kind of civilization by purchasing fresh-roast coffees, and spending ten minutes deciding not to buy an interesting disk of green glass for $59.95.

But if you are the kind of person who finds it hard to resist a painted headdress or a piece of iron twisted into the shape of an eagle, I'd advise giving Taos a wide berth.

Weeding Kansas

(The photo this post is not from its location. You can find moose in Kansas, but they are almost always mounted over a fireplace. We had a mishap with our cameras and CF cards, and our pictures of Kansas and Nebraska were obliterated. This picture was taken in Grand Teton.)

After reaching the apex of our journey (The Mitchell Corn Palace), we made a swing through Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas. The excellent reason for this odd route was that neither of us had ever been to Minnesota, Nebraska, or Kansas.

But it's actually a good thing, because it brought us through God's country. God talks to you a lot in Kansas. "Life is the only choice," He says on many billboards. "Have you read my best-selling book?" He asks. He then reminds you, "There will be a test." Whoever put up that sign—and many similar ones—should reread the best-selling book in question, and particularly the part about taking his name in vain (Deuteronomy 5:11). It does cover such things as portraying your Lord as a smart-ass.

Still, it's good the people of western Kansas have found God, because there's not much else to find there today. It is a desolate place. Every inch is farmed, but typically by mechanized means. You hardly ever see anyone, merely neat groups of stainless-steel silos and parked combines. Years, ago, that wasn't the case. Kansas was dotted with a thriving network of small prairie towns, manned by an army of homestead farmers.

Today, the towns are still there, but many many of the people have gone, and their neat barns and cottages have long been plowed under. Instead you find towns with ghostly rows of brick buildings, abandoned storefronts, cracked sidewalks, and faded signs. It's strange that the heartland of the country should seem so empty.

We'd actually like to come back here some day and poke around some more. Places like this can have interesting secrets.

Kamping

The American institution that has largely supported our trip is Kampgrounds of America, or KOA. This picture is from the first (and in our experience best) KOA in Billings, Montana.

Typically, when we roll into a campsite, we have a time-saving system that ensures that our nights are relaxing and refreshing. We start by unloading our camp chairs. Then, I take one of these, open a cold beer, put my feet up, and undertake the arduous duty of overseeing Nicole, as she sets up the tent, builds a fire, and cooks dinner. In all, it usually takes about 20 minutes from parking to hors d' oeuvres.

For some reason, KOAs have a reputation for being glorified trailer parks. And some do look remarkably like them. The bigger ones always have a number of rough-looking trailers that seem to be permanent habitations. (The chief evidence is that they don't have tires).

But with rare exceptions (Grand Island, Nebraska, for example), KOAs are remarkably nice. Typically, you get a plot of grassy ground, a fire ring, a picnic table, water, electric, and WiFi. If you're one of those people who bathes regularly, they have showers. Their convenience stores are also reasonably priced, and the bathrooms are clean.

The first one was founded in 1962 by a Billings businessman named Dave Drum. By 1969, there were almost 300. The peaked at 900 in the early 1980s, but now number only 450, with some of those in Japan. Even so, trends point upward. With baby boomers increasingly buying RVs, KOA added 13 new campgrounds last year.

A-maize-ing

As the symbolic eastern frontier of our trip, we have picked the town of Mitchell, South Dakota. The reason? In a state full of manufactured tourist attractions (Sitting Bull's Cave, Old MacDonald's Farm, Mt. Rushmore) Mitchell has perhaps the best gotta-see-it of all. The world's only corn palace.

Some people—and not one of them should be allowed to reproduce—will say that the reason Mitchell has the world's only corn palace is because Mitchell itself invented the corn palace. I find this a travesty. We can't blame Mitchell because no other town has ever acutely felt the lack of a corn palace and dared to build one.

Mitchell's citizens came up the idea in 1892 as a way to put the town on the map. It turns out that Lewis and Clark, those bastards, had said that South Dakota was so barren that nothing could ever grow there. Mitchell proved them wrong. Every year, the city buys bushels of native South Dakotan corn, genetically engineered to have different colored kernels, and nails them in hokey patterns all over the building.

It's quite the attraction. 500,000 people will show up this year—including a carload of confused-looking Indian women in saris who followed us there. They took pictures and looked at us very politely, though every last one of them was thinking that America's time on the world stage should pass, and soon.

I would agree with them, except that I think Mitchell is an extraordinary place. It takes a special kind of person to walk up to complete strangers and say, with an entirely straight face, "Have you seen our Corn Palace?" I don't think I could do it. And, yet, the town has so many people who can.

At Wounded Knee

Though the Pine Ridge reservation may have the name of a tract-home development, it has nothing in common with one. We had a few free hours and decided check out Wounded Knee, the site of where the last major "engagement" between the US Army and the Sioux. You can find a good description of it here.

Though the incident looms large in Native American history, you'll find little there to commemorate it. This picture shows the site where the massacre occurred. You'll notice there is no visitor's center, no museum, and no informational kiosk. Up close, you can only find a few swap-meet style tables selling trinkets and a blue plaque explaining the event.

Why so little commemoration? Well, today Pine Ridge is one of the poorest places in the world. Not in the US, in the world. Average income is $3,800 per year. 85% of the people are unemployed, 97% live below the poverty line. Life expectancy for men is 47 years. By comparison, the life expectancy for men in Bangladesh is 63.

Oddly enough, it has plenty of rich farmland and many beautiful horses.

Bad Badlands

We have spent two days at the Badlands. Before we arrived, my sister, a geophysicist, told us about an interesting combination of sedimentary layers found within it. It turns out that in one layer there are lots of fossils, and in the one above it, there are almost none. In other words, it documents a massive die-off in species millions of years—the same one, in fact, that took away the dinosaurs.

But I would like to protest. I am in South Dakota, and John Thune is the senator in these parts. A staunch evangelical Christian, he doesn't believe any of this hogwash about sedimentary layers. To him, the paleontological record at the Badlands shows nothing more than the inventiveness of the Evil One, who is always thinking of new ways to tempt us with the folly of evolution. He's a senator, mind you. My sister is merely a geophysicist. What would she know?

The Badlands are, of course, one of the weirdest landscapes you'll ever find. They rise abruptly out of a grass green prairie like an upside down version of the Grand Canyon. Bands of red and gray sandstone alternate in spired hills, intricate and numerous. One day, we saw a mountain goat framed against the sky as he peered off the edge of a high ridge. What's better than that?

I've included my sister's letter in the comments.

Hunting buffalo

Nicole and I recently purchased two Canon Rebel XTI cameras, a pair of lenses, and several books describing the mysteries of F-stops, shutter speeds, and ISO numbers. Until we met this obliging buffalo, a resident of the Sage Creek Wildlife Preserve, none of it was of any use.

I don't know his name, but I do know he likes to eat huge bunches of prairie grass and could give a rat's ass about who watches him doing it. We grew so excited at seeing a buffalo up close that we followed him around in our car, blasting away with every combination of camera settings we could think of. What we lacked in knowledge, we made up for in thoroughness.

From time to time, he obliged us by looking up as if to say, "Aren't you done yet?" This captures him in one of those moments.

Crazy as Crazy Horse

Fifteen miles from Rushmore is a curious monument-in-progress to the great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse. Who is he? Feel free to ask, but don't do it there. You'll be hard pressed to discover an answer. As with many tributes to the Indian Wars, it's short on detail.

The Crazy Horse Memorial is something of a folly, but a massively interesting one. Its subject was a noted Sioux military leader, who took part in many memorable battles and showed extraordinary courage, cunning, leadership, and the rest. In the West, we often put up monuments to such people. But Crazy Horse was a true Sioux. He eschewed fame, didn't like to have his picture taken, and considered the Black Hills so sacred that it's entirely doubtful he would have liked to see them defaced by his image.

Nonetheless, in 1948, the Sioux chief Sitting Bear became depressed by the fame of Mt. Rushmore, which was located in his peoples' sacred Black Hills. He invited sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who had labored on the other mountain, to create an even larger sculpture of Crazy Horse to let the world know that "the red man had his heroes too."

A few notes about Ziolkowski as an artist: he is much better than Borglum, the man who created Rushmore. His sculptures, of which there are many examples at Crazy Horse, show an ability to both understand the spirit of a person and render it in physical form. His model for Crazy Horse is not perfect, but it shows a young man, superbly shaped, driving forward in an unmistakably martial gesture. It's darn good. By comparison, Borglum's model for Mt. Rushmore looks like an elderly barbershop quartet. The only thing that saved it was that the project ran out of money before Borglum could get started on the cravats.

Still, the Crazy Horse project is mad. In the first place, it's godawful huge. The entirety of Mt. Rushmore, which took 13 years and government backing to carve, would fit inside the noble warrior's head. What's more, Crazy Horse will be carved in three dimensions, and when finished it will be, by far, the largest sculpture the world has ever known. Nothing even remotely compares.

Worst of all, and perhaps most noble, is Ziolkowski's vision. He conceived the project, and began working on it alone. For the first seven years, he labored each day, by himself, walking up the hill to drill holes and place dynamite. He hated the government and would not accept its money (or interference). It was only over time that private support came.

The project, naturally, outlived him. But his wife and seven of his ten children have carried on. They raise millions every year by charging entrance fees, selling trinkets, and trying to raise donations by funneling visitors to see a dreadful bore of a movie. Whenever they get money, they work, but they have no idea when they'll be finished. Today, nearly 60 years after Ziolkowski drilled his first hole, only the head is carved.

Above all, Crazy Horse is not about the Sioux, who are deeply divided about the monument. Instead, it's about an artist, whose stubborn perseverance and refusal to compromise have inspired generations of his family and others to do the same. One wonders whether to root for them, or call in Dr. Phil.

James K. Polk wuz robbed

To go from I90 to Mt. Rushmore, you have two options: through the historic-now-casino town of Deadwood, or along Route 16 from Grand Rapids, which runs a gauntlet of waterslides, theme parks, and cave adventures. They culminate in Keystone, one of the world's great repositories of false-front stores, fake lawmen, and women who are paid to stand outside restaurants wearing poorly-fitting hoop skirts and prairie bonnets.

The park, which is five miles further on, contains the famous heads, which were carved from 1927-1941. The artist was monumental sculptor and "bully" patriot Gutzon Borglum. While there, we learned that he selected the presidents based on their work in two key areas: preserving the Republic and expanding its borders. Washington was chosen for defeating the British, Lincoln for defeating the Confederacy, Jefferson for making the Louisiana Purchase, and Teddy Roosevelt for the Spanish American War.

Which brings us to an important point: Borglum made a very unfair selection. What about James K. Polk? He was president during the Mexican War, waged largely to give us the great states of Texas, California, Nevada, and so on. Roosevelt only made only minor lasting contributions. To him, we owe the possession of Guam, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and our famous naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Bully for him. Polk gave us Las Vegas and Hollywood. Where is the equity?

The mountain is smaller than you might imagine, and it's been photographed so often, no description is going to add much. However, it has a gift shop that is too little mentioned in history.

The Mt. Rushmore Gift Shop is one of the great wonders of the world. Although only the size of a drug store, it has nonetheless managed to put the four presidents on every possible knickknack imaginable. In addition to spoons, paperweights, postcards, T-shirts, dinner plates, and such standard fare, it has extended kitsch to entirely new classes of commodities. I know what you're thinking. Presidential bobbleheads. It goes way beyond that. There's Mt. Rushmore needle point, paint sets, snowglobe refrigerator magnets, buckskin bags, baseball and bat sets, cribbage games, backgammon tables, stuffed presidential animals, shot glasses, wine glasses, multishot viewfinders, slide shows (who the hell has a slide projector these days?), pens with stone carvings of all four heads, and my personal favorite: the Mt. Rushmore Dig Experience. This toy consists of a piece of sandstone, a hammer, a chisel, plans for carving your own miniature Mt. Rushmore, and a pair of safety glasses. Just what every boy needs.

As you can probably tell, we left Mt. Rushmore in a great mood. Some of you will be receiving Mt. Rushmore tealight-holders soon.

Custer's Last Stand

We've pulled off the highway to examine the interesting but utterly vapid memorial to Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a noted lunatic who led 200 cavalrymen against the assembled Sioux and Cheyenne nations. And paid the price. Throughout the entire battlefield site and museum, you'd be hard pressed to find out a) what happened b) how it happened or c) why it happened. And no one there seems to know either. The battle occurred in 1876, and we heard a park ranger explaining that many of Custer's men were immigrants from Ireland, who came to the US to escape the potato famine. The Irish potato famine occurred in 1846, 30 years earlier.

What you do get is a lot of artifacts, a number of tombstones, and two monuments, one to each side. There is also a remarkable photo of Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his wife sitting in their study. On the walls above them are two pictures. Both of them are photos of Colonel George Armstrong Custer. That gives you the measure of the man.

Custer is opposed in the museum by Sitting Bull, the spiritual and rhetorical leader of the uprising that our vain colonel was sent to suppress. His words are recorded, most are of righteous and justifiable anger. The problem, of course, was that his people did not have the power to back up those words, and that he actually led them into a hopeless and suicidal war.

After the inevitable defeat, Sitting Bull refused to surrender and went into exile for five years. He returned in 1881, and then, in 1885, embarked on one of the strangest career moves in history: he joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. Audiences loved the surly chief, who rode around the ring and roundly cursed them in his native tongue. Cody, who paid Sitting Bull $50 a week for this service, had earlier helped destroy the buffalo on which the Lakota Sioux subsisted. History is not quite as simple as we think!

I've always been surprised that Red Cloud, who was also an eloquent spokesman and the only Native American leader to defeat the United States in war, is less revered.

Hard right

The other night, as we were sitting in a cabin, with 30 mph winds and rain snuffing out the burners on our camp stove, we looked up the weather for our next stop: Banff, Alberta. The best we can say is that the seven day forecast was remarkably consistent. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, and rain.

We regret to announce to the people of Canada that if that's all they can do with respect to the weather, we'll have to take a rain check. Rain check, get it? Oh, we do know how to have our fun, now don't we?

Instead, we have decided to backtrack and head east where South Dakota's Badlands are experiencing a mild, balmy summer. Expect future posts to cover grassy plains, exotic mountain forms, and presidents' heads carved in stone.

Road to the Sun

Montana is so universally beautiful that it has places you've never heard of that are so remarkable that any other state would send platoons of congressmen to lobby for them to be national parks. Instead, Montana contents itself with only one park, Glacier, and it is a treasure.

Unfortunately, the night we arrived, a threatening sky began releasing large drops of rain, just as Nicole had just put the finishing touches on a vat of corn chowder. We hustled into our tent with books, and were happy until we noticed that it wasn't only raining outside. Years of service and abuse had rendered our tent no longer waterproof. We watched with some interest, perched in the middle of our air mattress, as the water level rose up around us. We grabbed buckets and tried to bail ourselves out, but it was no use. Finally, the captain of our ship—Nicole—declared it was time to head for the boats. We rented a cabin for the night.

The rain, wind, and cold continued for the next three days. Luckily, Glacier is eminently drivable. Its chief visual feature is not, incidentally, glaciers, which are mighty scarce in those parts. I'm reliably informed by a conservative friend of mine that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by enviro-fascists. I tried to explain that to the one shrunken glacier that we did see, but it wouldn't listen to reason. Instead, we had to content ourselves with the brilliant aquamarine water of the glacial lakes they had left behind.

The chief thing you must do in Glacier is the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Montana is not a state to name places with such odd names. Its towns, valleys, and mountains are largely named after people—men, mostly explorers, businessmen, or members of the Jefferson administration. But how else could you commemorate something like that? Going to the Sun is about as good as you can do.

It is, of course, hard to describe physical beauty—the rough slate mountains, the blue green lakes, the torrential rivers cleaving gorges through the rock, the brave little road clinging to the side of the mountains—but you must see Glacier before you die. Only do it in August. It's very cold in June.

Apologies for the photo, which was taken in a freezing rain. Hopefully it gets the point across.