On The Road With The Glitchersons –Meteor Crater

A deep.shadow fell over a portion of the Crater, but the scope of the result of the impact is still very obvious

I did a reverse cross country road trip a long time ago, traveling from California to Tennessee, compared to this one from Florida to California. The direction doesn’t matter, except that it changes the order in which you sightsee.

On that long ago trip a relatively simple attraction really grabbed me and never quite let go. This was in the precomputer days of thick paperback guidebooks crammed full of small print descriptions of all kinds of sightseeing possibilities. One that caught my eye was Meteor Crater in the Arizona desert. Even though basically all there is to do is wander a little museum and watch a movie, before going out to gape into the giant indentation in the ground, this place spoke to my interest in history, geology, and space. Particularly space.

Oddly, starkly beautiful Meteor Crater

The very idea of something crashing violently into the earth from so far away is spellbinding. That it left such tangible evidence as a huge dent and the big chunk of rock that’s on display at the park is astounding.

This time we ran just late enough to miss the film. There was a clip for viewing in an area near the big meteor chunk display.. We stopped to enjoy that before venturing forth to see what havoc the impact wrought. As it was very close to closing time, we were allowed to go out onto the rim for a brief while.

And here we have a chunk of the culprit.

I of course never set foot near any scenic area without my phone or DSLR in my clutches. My DSLR got weird on me more than once, so I was very glad that my newish phone has an excellent camera. In fact, all of the pictures I’ve included so far in these posts were taken with my phone. I dropped my old LG G8 Thinq and it stopped connecting to data. The hard landing must have broken the antenna. I had picked it for it’s then great camera. The new one, a Motorola Edge 5Gwu 2021 was kind of bought in a scramble to just get a phone that would work.

I had been thinking about getting a new one and had done enough research to know I’d probably enjoy it, but I didn’t double down on camera research. Imagine my surprise when I really got into using it and went back to take serious stock of the specs. This thing has a 108 MP main camera! That’s way more than the old LG and equally way more than my Nikon DSLR. Both perform excellently because… Nikon. But I am very pleased with this phone camera.

The position I landed in to photograph the Crater had terrible glare. The sun was at an angle that seemed designed to interfere with my ability to see my camera screen. Or much of anything else. I was getting pretty frustrated, but then Piers stepped in to shield me from the sun with a flap of his open jacket. Worked like a charm. Who needs a lens hood, when you’ve got a husband jacket?

When we realized that Piers was body blocking me from the glare by chance as you can see here, he moved in with his coat held wide to give me a clear shot at the Crater.

From that moment on I happily clicked my way through a treasure trove of scenic images. Everywhere I turned there was another dramatic, stark, hauntingly beautiful section of Crater. My imagination goes into overdrive in such places. The incoming fireball from space! The impact! Debris raining all around! The drama! The terror!

I understand that there were no people living in the area at the time of the impact. However, wildlife must have been terrified. That such upheaval and chaos could result in the stark beauty of the awe inspiring giant dent in the ground that’s Arizona’s  Meteor Crater is absolutely incredible and to me thrilling.

A look through the rails at the harsh terrain of the slope up to the Crater rim.

I’m so glad I got the chance to revisit this marvel and experience it with Piers as a part of our first road trip together. An unforgettable bit of joy on the road.

A final glance at the sheer beauty of the cliff face that is the Crater rim, the tenacious vegetation that clings to life currently so long after the area was devastated, and the bright sapphire of the Arizona desert sky.

On The Road With The Glitchersons–Painted Desert and Petrified Forest

Next on our journey was a stop at The Painted Desert and The Petrified Forest. I had been there before and never forgot the unique beauty.

Both times I expected the Painted Desert to be awash in almost rainbow like primary colors. Instead the cone shaped hills were striped with grays, browns, beiges, whites, and black. They were a stark visual landmark in a somewhat harsh looking desert landscape. Beautiful in their way, but not exactly showstoppers. 

A gorgeous example of opalized petrified wood.

The Petrified Forest is endlessly intriguing and oddly beautiful. I say oddly because the very concept of trees turned to stone goes against everything tree lovers are accustomed to. Instead of green leaves or fronds fluttering in a breeze, these trees are literally rock hard. Frozen in time if you will. A detail that really struck me was the way the trunks’ bark retains the texture we’re so used to seeing that we take it for granted. It’s as if the trees have been embalmed by time and left scattered on the ground to try to visually tell us their stories of life and death and beauty and stopped in its process decay. 

There was a long sloping, looping paved trail that took us past many pieces of petrified wood. Some were like small slices of ancient tree trunks. Others were very large logs that lay in several sections. This caused some debate over whether the logs had been sliced by man for dramatic display or fallen apart naturally. 

Some of the petrified wood slices that intrigued us.

Eventually we wound our way to a sign that explained that nature and physics had sliced them and it made a lot of sense. I would have been very surprised if any kind of nature preserving people would have taken it upon themselves to desecrate such natural beauty by cutting it up for the pleasure of tourists.

The sign that answered our curiosity laden questions. “Who cut the wood? Nobody!”

However, I find myself equally surprised that the aging process itself is able to so precisely break apart those giant heavy rocklike trees. It does look as if they were carefully cut to pieces. My mind’s eye cooked up a mental image of a carving knife like the electric ones in commercials showing happy families celebrating Thanksgiving with a delicate looking mother in her 1960s apron and shirtwaist dress carving up the holiday turkey. On a much larger scale, of course. And my mental image had the carving mother’s hands dripping with trailing vegetation, because it was of course Mother Nature doing the carving in that particular scenario.

At the start of the trail, it seemed ideal for a wheelchair. Then, not so much. Some of the slopes became steep inclines and the other side were so steep that I half expected to see sand pits like the ones on mountain roads to stop semis with failing brakes. But. No failing breaks or runaway vehicles in the desert that day. 

Terrified…er…petrified slices and a slope in the path.

Erin took pushing duty again, and proved herself to be incredibly fit and strong. A couple of times she called Jeff in for extra push power when things got almost alarmingly uphill. He’s 6′ 5″, which translates to extremely strong. Piers often kept a protective hand on a chair arm…or my shoulder. It was quite an adventure to explore that way, as well as a pleasure to see so much natural beauty, so much more clearly than stopping at overlooks would have provided.

Last time I was there I did just overlooks. That was still very enjoyable, but this time getting more out into the park via the nearly one mile trail really enhanced the experience. And of course sharing the experience with Piers was the icing. One reason I really wanted to do this trip was that he had never been on a true road trip. I’ve done many. So have Erin and Jeff. Introducing my husband to the amazing Southwest of our consistently beautiful country was such a joy. Sharing the experience with our dear family who are also dear friends made it even moreso. An unforgettable experience in so many ways that gave us memories to treasure. Always.

Here’s a random shot. I’m sorry I can’t say exactly where. Remember the old movie If This is Tuesday it Must Be Belgium? That. Canyon de Chelly, I think, though.

On The Road With The Glitchersons–Storyteller Pot Made By Darlene Sam

When I wrote the previous post about my experience meeting Arizona artist Darlene Sam and buying a piece of her wonderful pottery, I wished for pictures of my new little pot for the post. It was protected in the glove compartment of my car. That was the safest place I could find to keep it during the hustle and bustle inherent to road trips. Piers rescued it in pristine condition from its safe place, and I took some pictures today, finally.

This one just shows one part of the images. These fantastic works of art are  called Storyteller Pots. Some of what I learned at Canyon de Chelly has slipped away into the mishmash of details I picked up along the road. Something I greatly regret. I wish I could remember verbatim every single word Darlene said to me. Alas, long covid does not allow for that kind of recall. 

This top view shows the  cross symbol that indicates the directions her ancestors traveled. I love the very idea of having such detailed records of ancestral history, made possible, I assume by dedicated oral history.

And finally a view with more details. I remain thrilled that it was made from clay that came from the canyon its so delicate that I live in fear of breaking it, but all I can do is take the utmost care with this precious souvenir in of my time spent at Canyon de Chelly.

A Face From Long Ago

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/see-the-striking-facial-reconstruction-of-a-paleolithic-woman-who-lived-31000-years-ago

There are three striking images in this article about the facial reconstruction of a woman who lived 31,000 years ago. She’s beautiful. And, though we can never truly match personality traits to images of people, she looks kind and intelligent. She could be the woman in a department store looking at jeans in the next aisle over. This is fascinating. And it’s truly remarkable what modern science is accomplishing. I’ve long thought forensic anthropology, where crime victims are identified by experts who reconstruct their appearance is amazing and very cool. This version of that is even moreso. A face from long ago emerges into the now from the mists of time to introduce us to our very distant relative.

Ice Melt Artifacts Revealed

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mongolia-ice-melt-archaeology?utm_medium=atlas-page&utm_source=twitter&s=09

This Atlas Obscura article is fascinating. As ice melts in Mongolia what has been hidden beneath it is being revealed. One such piece is a rope woven from animal hair, probably used as a halter. Apparently, it looks as if it were put there yesterday. Researchers were even able to tell it’s made of camel hair. I keep thinking it’s as if archeology is digging itself. It will be so interesting to watch and see if this happens in remote places all over the world. Of course too rapidly melting ice is not good, but in some circumstances the results are amazing.

Hilltop Farm

As the specter of World War II loomed large, Alfred and Norma Jacob wanted to make a place where people could help each other, learn to carry on during hardship, and survive whatever came next. After their relief work to feed starving children during the Spanish Civil War ended, they bought a big chunk of the mountains of Vermont and set about realizing their idealistic dream. They called their would be utopia Hilltop Farm. Though it ultimately failed, this experiment in subsistence living was a noble and ambitious effort.

In the recently published book simply titled Hilltop Farm, their two children tell the story through their parents’ compiled correspondence. It includes old pictures, old thoughts and ideas, and old hopes and dreams. The siblings Piers Anthony Jacob and Teresa Jacob Engeman who spent several years growing up at Hilltop Farm are now in their eighties. They are pleased to be able to present the story of what their parents hoped to accomplish.

I knew Piers for quite a long time through correspondence, before we met in person and married. His fiction written as Piers Anthony spans several genres and tells stories of depth, honor, and compassion, even when clothed in whimsical funny fantasy. We’re the kind of people who will always talk together, tell each other our life stories, share our love of history and so much more, and continue getting to know each other endlessly. I love asking him about life on Hilltop Farm. It’s fascinating, hopeful and sad at the same time, and, I think, a real testimony to the power of the human spirit.

Hilltop Farm is available in bookstores and online retailers, including Amazon:

Centralia Pennsylvania’s Bizarre Charm

This Atlas Obscura piece ups the ante on the fascinating town of Centralia, Pensylvania. I first read about it decades ago, and was struck by the specter of a historical town, hit by bizarre tragedy, and moving forward into modern times…extreme abnormality juxtaposed against the normal everyday world.

A town whose ground is perpetually on fire!

What could be more strange? Well, the movie Silent Hill, which depicted it as even more unreal than my imagination had managed.

And what could make it seem more creepy cool? This article about the Graffiti Road. How awesome that such a place existed. How sad that it is no more, though I can understand safety and security concerns, I still wish I could have seen it.

That’s what the internet is for, though. In some ways it teaches us stuff and exposes us to things we might never have known otherwise. In that case we’re all the better for it.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/centralia-graffiti-highway-buried?utm_medium=atlas-page&utm_source=twitter&s=09

Stories From My Mother: The Unknown Story

(My mother Sarah, her mother Georgia, and her mother’s mother Sarah Lillie)

I like to type random old family members into Google and see what I find. I don’t belong to any genealogy sites. I just like to sort of free range search for interesting information. A few hours ago I stumbled across something that’s shocked me to my core. Nothing sinister or criminal. Just a sad, tragic story that reminds me that the internet is a powerful tool in some amazing ways.

This is a story not about or by my mother, but it’s deeply connected to her. As I’ve done many times before, I typed in her father’s name and that led me to a memorial grave location site I’d never seen before. There are links by the names of his family members. I clicked my grandmother’s. There I found her parents and siblings. There I found a tremendous surprise.

Grandmother had two sisters who died the same days they were born. I had never heard a word about this. My mom knew so much about her family and lived to tell me about it that I’m sure she would have told me if she’d known. I think it’s possible that Grandmother herself didn’t know. Families may not have spoken of such things to their children in that era. She was born in 1882, one year after little Lucy who was born and died in 1881. Maud was born and died in 1873.

I can’t help imagining, what iffing, wondering. What a terrible ordeal it must have been for those babies’ parents. My maternal great grandparents. Their mother especially, to have endured pregnancy in the stifling heat of rural Victorian West Tennessee. The uncertainty, the pain, most likely intense fear, then to have the child either be stillborn or die before the day was over. Twice. The grief must have been unbearable.

(My grandmother Georgia, Uncle General’s wife Aunt Georgie, and Uncle General)

I feel grief myself, now that I know, more than a century after their brief lives. I grew up knowing Grandmother’s two younger brothers. Her youngest, Uncle General (his name was Andrew Jackson Somers, but everybody called him General), in particular. I adored him and would sit on the floor beside his chair and get him to tell me stories from his life, much as I did my mom. Now, I have to imagine how I would have known Great Aunt Lucy and Great Aunt Maud too. There would have been uncles too, if they’d married, and possibly a lot of cousins. All unknown to me and my family, because those two girl babies were lost to us.

I’m glad I found out. I’m glad to know now about this small unknown portion of my extended family. I wish they’d survived. I wish I’d been able to grow up greeting Aunt Lucy and Aunt Maud with the same joy I felt in Uncle General’s presence. If they would have been anything like their brother General, or their sister Georgia, or great niece Sarah, they would have been extraordinary.

Remembering J. B. McCage, The Hero Uncle I Never Knew

Thinking about my father’s youngest brother, J. B. McCage, though not just today. I always knew he was lost at sea, during World War II. Exactly how was a mystery. My family had a misconception, thinking the collision of his ship the Destroyer USS Ingraham was with an ammunition ship in proximity to New York Harbor. I don’t know how that became the bit of the story of his death I always thought I knew.

Over the years, as the internet became more and more sophisticated, I’ve searched periodically, trying to get more information. A few years ago, I finally found what I didn’t know I was looking for. His ship was guarding a convoy on its way to Iceland and the U. K. when it collided with the oil tanker Chemung and sank almost immediately. The accident set off the ammunition Ingraham was carrying.

The descriptions I’ve found of his ship’s missions, often under threat of German U-Boats, are impressive. It’s so wonderful to me to know that this young man who grew up on the same farm I did, got to travel to far lands and was a hero every day on that ship, as it fought to help win the war. He had also served on the USS Vincennes. I don’t know much about that, but intend to research it eventually. I do know that at some point he crossed the…Tropic of Capricorn, I think, because I found a certificate about it among family “heirlooms”.

My family was very proud of him. I can only imagine how his mother and siblings would have felt if they had had computers and been able to learn of the way he lived on the edge of disaster on the Ingraham and died a hero by merit of his dangerous service. On the other hand, I’m glad they didn’t have a way to know what I now know. I found a description of what that terrible collision between a warship carrying ammo and an oil tanker would have been like, with many of the crew dying in burning water.

I almost wish I’d never read that part. I have such an imagination that it’s so painful I don’t think of it often. When I do, i’ve come to imagine not the possible fear and terrible pain of his final moments. Instead, I choose to think his final moment was a flash of the cool green ponds where we both fished in our different lifetimes, a waft of remembered heavy honeysuckle fragrance at dusk, and a moment when his mother may have said, as he left the farm for war, “I’ll be waiting for you, Jay, I’ll be waiting.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ingraham_(DD-444)

https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?156408

Edit: The picture above is the only one I have of Uncle J. B.. There was one in his navy uniform that my mom gave to his sister, Lucille. If only there had been a smartphone with a camera in every pocket back then….

Shopping At Last

After a year of lockdown, we’re venturing forth to grocery shop and run errands. Fully masked, fully sanitized, and fully glad to be back out in the world…if in a somewhat minor way. Baby steps. These troubled and worrying times require caution and care in a way we couldn’t imagine just a couple of years ago.

These days shopping comes with a need for the ability to judge distance. Am I six feet from that woman in front of me? On the other hand now we don’t have to worry so much about ramming our cart into ankles in front of us. Not that I’m prone to doing that. I’m usually the ramee, if it’s going to happen. It’s not easy to politely deny damage done through the proverbial seeing of stars, but it can be done. Not limping away, as you discretely rub your wounds is an equal challenge. So the six feet distancing is a good thing for the easily ankle bumped.

We also need to figure out strategic hand sanitizing. How many squirts? How often? How under the radar? It’s a delicate dance between squirting enough to cover as much hand landscape as possible, and risking accidentally bestowing an eyeful of rubbing alcohol from your spritzer to a stealthy shopper. Sneakers are awesome, but they’re also way quiet.

Then there’s the problem.of the little girl on aisle seven who seems to be in the process of coughing her lungs out. The unmistakable sound of some kind of germ spewing activity starts just as you enter the aisle. What to do? Well, I suddenly remember some essential item two aisles over and beat a hasty retreat. If I’m lucky, I can beat an even hastier retreat when I’ve lingered too long over saltines…to sea salt or not to sea salt…, which leads to the activity of the day being more about avoiding the mobile coughing fit than buying at least a week’s worth of groceries at once.

I’m sure the list will grow, as time passes. I wonder what the necessaey precautions were like during the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. It would have been difficult to maintain social distancing during a square dance in ye olde barn. Or in a one room schoolhouse. Perhaps it made city sidewalks less noxious, as more people stayed home and that made less horse poop deck the streets. Corsets and celluloid collars perhaps gave way to the wearing of loose comfortable clothes…no, this was the post Edwardian Era. Social strictures of fashion were easing toward the Roaring Twenties, flappers, and prohibition. Those poor souls had more to worry about than pandemic chic and whether to wear their jammies in the daytime, with WWII still haunting their every waking moment…and most likely their dreams.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe, but there are many ways we’re lucky to live in even our troubled modern times. It can just be so easy to forget how fortunate we really are over all, in the face of all the tragic misfortune faced by so many. There are days when the news reminds us to be grateful for the privilege of mundane things like seeing a golden sunset, eating dinner with the one we love, and even the simple chore of grocery shopping. I’m grateful everyday. But I don’t always feel it on the deep level that sometimes sneaks up on me with a surprisingly intense moment of joy.