9/25/2013

I left Pine Bluff (stopping at the Governor Mike Huckabee Delta Rivers Nature Center (forlorn animals; gloomy; depressing)), intending to stop at two small national sites. I knew nothing about them, but I’d been following a map that I’d picked up early in my trip that highlighted the location of all the national parks, monuments, historic sites, and so on. I operated under the principle that if something was good enough to be a national site, it was good enough for me. And although parks like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone are as crowded as Times Square, other places are beautiful, empty and interesting. You’d never pick them out otherwise. I’d seen that in Lava Beds, and Arkansas Post was a similar place. I wished there was camping there, because I’d love to have stayed.

Backwater of the Mississippi, viewed from Arkansas Post

Arkansas Post is was a naturally important location, the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. It’s one of those sites where history has accumulated, slowly and steadily, like silt accreting at the bend of a river. The first white settlement in the area was in 1686 – a distant French outpost on the Mississippi. It changed hands in 1763 – the Spanish took over. Built a little fort. Americans settled nearby, right after the revolution.

Armadillos are a source of leprosy

Far away, Napoleon concluded a treaty with Spain, was granted the land, then sold it 4 years later to the US as part of the Louisiana Purchase. The center of cultural gravity shifted away and Little Rock gained more prominence. The fort was occupied by Confederates, then Union forces as part of their campaign down the Mississippi. The river moved, and settlement with it.

The former town – now concrete memorial sidewalks

That’s a lot of history, and not much remains. If there weren’t any plaques out, and the lawns weren’t mowed, you’d have difficulty spotting it. There’s some paths laying out the buildings of the settlement. There’s some trenches still visible, from the Civil War, and there’s an invisible fort submerged in the Mississippi.

Gator!

There’s also some wildlife I hadn’t yet seen before on my trip. I saw my first-ever alligator in the wild, a small one swimming in a pond in the center of the park. And I saw not one, but two armadillos. They’re pretty cute, and they move by hopping.

Armadillo!

The heat was pretty oppressive though, even at the end of September, and humidity stifling. No way did I want to stay in the sun.

There was a fort here in 1863, but the river changed course

I was pretty much on the border of Louisiana, and I’d dip into the state for my next stop: an even more obscure National Monument called Poverty Point.

Stairs up the main ‘bird mound’ at Poverty Point

In fact, it’s a quasi-National Monument. I’m not quite sure what it is. It was listed on my map, but the people in the visitor center weren’t aware that it was a National Monument. It’s administered as a state park (and, as of 2014, a UNESCO World Heritage Site – but I was there before it was cool).

This place was just way out in the middle of nowhere, in the far northeast corner of Louisiana. It’s a noticeably poor area, but a nice place to drive around, with calm windy empty roads, even if I felt out of place. I also encountered something bizarre. As I passed vans and cars along back roads, I saw them waving at me. “What’s wrong with my car?” I thought. Maybe I had a leaking tire? Or maybe one of my lights was out? Or were they laughing at my NY plates? But no, I figured it out eventually – that half-wave from the steering wheel – that was just people being friendly. So I started waving back, and I’ll be honest, it felt pretty good. It’s a beautiful little custom that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Maybe it’s common elsewhere, but you certainly don’t see a lot of strangers waving at you on the coasts.

The van from the very top of the mound

Anyway, Poverty Point is an archaeological site that was home to a unique Native American group which occupied the area between 2700 and 3700 years ago. They were mound builders, a type of culture that was pervasive throughout the Mississippi river valley, all the way up to Ohio. There was some village here, and they constructed huge concentric rings of earth and a big ceremonial mound in the shape of a bird. Afterwards, it was home to a plantation (named Poverty Point, hence the name). It was farmed and some of the mounds were smoothed away, but there’s still a lot of remnants. And the big, bird-shaped mound is still around. It’s gigantic.

There’s a small museum at the park, and you can drive around a bit and take a self-guided tour, but there’s not a whole lot to see. But that’s like saying there’s not a whole lot to see at the pyramids in Egypt. This little state park/national monument is a hidden treasure. I didn’t see anyone else while I was there, and these mounds are just enormous. And they were built quickly: the biggest one, in just three months.

Arkansas Swamp

It’s also mysterious because archaeologists have basically no idea what happened here. What was the function of the mounds, generally? And specific mounds? When were they built, and by whom? There’s vague outlines of a picture, but so much is unknown. Probably aliens.

9/24/2013 – 9/25/2013

Leaving Wyoming, my plan was a mad rush across the midwest, Cannonball Run-style. It’s nice country, of course, but there’s not a whole lot of landmarks. And, I’d been traveling for two months, following a very aggressive schedule. I did want to get home. So, I covered the land between Cheyenne, Wyoming and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in two days. It was pretty much straight driving. I mostly listened to Shelby Foote (with his amazing drawl) narrate the siege of Vicksburg, an audiobook I’d been listening to since Utah.

The rough cross-country route

I spent the first night of this dash near Kansas City. I had dinner in a Fridays (I figured it was a fitting tribute to middle America) and watched the Broncos play the Raiders while I indulged in nachos. There were a lot of chain stores that looked reasonable as sleeping locations, but they were a little too mall-like for me to be comfortable.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning in some depth my accomodations. I always preferred campsites, when available, but in places where no campsites were available (either because I arrived too late, or because there was simply nothing nearby), I slept in parking lots. Which is free.

There’s a few welcoming places to sleep: generally you can doze off for a while in rest areas without worrying. I did that on the drive out west. A lot of Wal-Marts are welcoming, but some are not. I didn’t have a smart phone, so I generally tried to borrow some Wi-Fi sitting in my car outside fast food joints, or inside coffeeshops. There were a few websites reporting on which Wal-Marts welcomed overnight campers and which did not.

If Wal-Marts weren’t available, I’d try (mostly) empty chain stores, malls or all-night McDonalds. And finally there’s hotel parking lots – it’s expected that people will park there, but it still felt somehow more wrong than parking elsewhere.

I got pretty nervous generally – more than I really ought to. I was only woken up once, in a Wal-Mart that didn’t allow overnight camping, but the friendly security guy directed me to a McDonald’s that allowed all-night parking. Mostly for truckers. I take this as a sign that I erred on the side of caution, but I dreaded being woken up in the middle of the night. And in a lot of places that I parked, malls mostly, where I could see security cars driving around. But hey, it’s a free place to spend the night.

The next official stop after Wyoming – George Washington Carver NM

My first official stop after all that driving was George Washington Carver National Monument, in western Missouri.

There’s a striking difference between the land in Missouri, compared to Wyoming, and especially Utah. To be honest, Missouri doesn’t look much different from NY. It’s still familiar. Similar trees, similar hills. It felt like I was finally reaching home. Which is strange – on a map, Missouri is midway between NY and Arizona. But it feels pretty similar to the northeast.

George Washington Carver National Monument is a small monument – a little museum, a walk around a field and into the woods, a little farmhouse and pond. It’s the kind of monument you can imagine local schoolkids being forced to endure for annual fieldtrips.

Statue of George Washington Carver

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much about George Washington Carver before my visit, but he’s an interesting guy. Mostly a botanist, he’s widely known for his work with the peanut, but he was a polymath, and also one of the first in a generation of black leaders who was born into slavery, but grew up free and became a self-made man.

As for the peanut – well, he discovered over 300 uses for it. Among them: massage oil, hair oil, meat substitutes, paint, “evaporated peanut beverage,” fuel briquettes, laundry soap, insecticide, etc.

Typical view at Pea Ridge

My next stop was Pea Ridge National Military Park, in Arkansas. This was the sight of an early Civil War battle, and one of the more influential early battles on the western front. By Civil War standards, it was a tiny affair – about 25,000 men, total, with 3,000 casualties. But it cemented Union control of Missouri.

This was the first battlefield I’d visited in something like 10 years, since a trip through Virginia with my father visiting Civil War sites. Maybe my imagination had suffered in the interim. It’s exceedingly difficult to imagine what these battlefields were like 150 years ago. Maybe impossible. Consider that, even for the battlefields which have been ‘preserved,’ there has usually been farming in the interim.

A rare surviving farmhouse from the 1860s

More than that – most trees don’t live 150 years. Forests that may have been thick brambles could have grown, their undergrowth thinned. Likewise, what looks impenetrable may have been easy to ride a horse through. About the only terrain you can trust is the ground itself: hills rarely move. But it’s a real struggle to imagine what things would have looked like.

As my goal in visiting the southeast was primarily to check out Civil War battlefields; I knew after visiting Pea Ridge that I’d have to develop some kind of system. It wouldn’t do to stop by the visitor center and then do a loop around each park in the van. I’d learn nothing. No – I had to really understand what took place, and be able to situate it in the landscape. I did figure out a system – subsequent visits to battlefields would be more fruitful.

Arkansas Aquaculture Facility

Four hours from Pea Ridge, in the evening, I pulled into my final stop for the day: Pine Bluff. Shocking though it may be, I had a friend in Arkansas. I knew Justin from college; he and his wife were living in Pine Bluff while he studied aquaculture at a nearby university. I spent the night in the parking lot of their apartment, and the next morning I got a tour of an aquaculture facility. I’ve become increasingly interested in farming systems (particularly the automation of them), but I know nothing about aquaculture. Some of the things I heard were eye-opening.

Such effishient farm animals!

For instance, the mass of calories consumed, compared to the mass of meat generated, is off-the-charts for fish compared to cows or chicken. This number, the feed conversion ratio, can be something like 5-20 for cattle, or 3-4 for pork. For fish, it can be as low as 1.2, and generally is in the area of 1.5. That means that something only 20%-50% of the food that a fish is fed is ‘lost’ as energy expenditure. This is attributable to the fact that fish expend little energy supporting their bodies, since water does most of the work. The only comparable animal is crickets, and I don’t see many people lining up to eat those.

Well… nearly two years later and I’m gonna try to wrap up my cross-country trip!

9/20/2013

If you’ll recall, we left off at Canyonlands, one of my favorite parks of my whole journey. This involved some backtracking, past Moab. I went past my old campground on the Colorado River, where there was construction that reduced traffic to a single lane. While sitting in traffic, I realized: I knew the area looked familiar! This little sideroad near Moab was the front of my regional guidebook.

AAA Colorado & Utah Guidebook

Just outside the Utah border is another park: Colorado National Monument. I didn’t know a whole lot about it – but it was right off the highway. I stopped for a hike, doing a loop through the monument.

Monument Canyon

This monument is mostly known for its large central canyon, ‘Monument Canyon’ which is mostly red rock and scrub – although there’s also striking rock pillars (I don’t know if they’re technically considered hoodoos). The valley opens up above Fruita, Colorado, a town in a sort of desert oasis – after this city, the landscape started to change more dramatically into the Rocky Mountains. The nearest city is Grand Junction, not far away.

Fruita, Colorado

I was just passing through and wanted to stop for my daily hike – though this was quite a nice little monument and I’d love to return.

The ‘Kissing Couple’.

There’s a few major pillars within the monument: the ‘Kissing Couple,’ ‘Independence Monument’ and ‘Coke Ovens.’ I enjoyed the hike, down into the canyon, around a bend, and then up to an overlook above Fruita. However, the experience was marred by the dirt bike tracks visible in many places. The sand in these parks is delicate and composed of a lot of micro-organisms. It’s a living thing, in a way, and the dirt bike tracks last a very long time.

Bighorn Sheep

Nonetheless, I was excited to see another animal that I hadn’t gotten much of a look at on my trip: bighorn sheep. There was a herd of them at the end of the trail that proved to be a nice send off as I hopped back in the van.

The trail – moderate intensity. But man was it hot!