The Texarkana Trip

Day 1: Thursday, May 6, 2021

If I were one to believe in omens, I would not have come on this trip. For one thing, it was postponed twice for bad weather and once for really bad weather. But I decided to come anyway.

I had an appointment with my cardiologist this morning; planned to leave directly from there. I always schedule my doctors' appointments as early as possible in the day, on the assumption that, by the time they've seen 2 or 3 other patients, they're way behind, and I don't like to wait. (I used to have a personal rule that I didn't wait more than 30 minutes for anybody. Yes, I was then even more arrogant and self-centered than I am now. Long years of marriage has, to some extent, forced an adjustment.) 

So: my appointment was for 8:45. This particular doctor starts his day at nine. That gives the nurse time to check me in and go through the rituals of vital signs. (All were good, it seems.) So I have a few minutes to wait for the doctor to show up.

Twenty minutes go by. I'm reading The Coyotes of Carthage, by Steven Wright, and it's entertaining enough to get me through. At thirty minutes, I'm staring out the window at the downtown skyline, noticing what you can and cannot see from there (new Thompson Hotel, no; Milam Building, yes). As forty-five minutes tick by, I'm playing with the model of the human heart and pressing the "sleep" button on the electronic sign on the wall, as I'm damned tired of being told how to avoid getting the flu or Covid or anything else passed from person to person by air. As a hour passes, I open the exam room door to ask someone if maybe the doctor has been called to an emergency -- it's no problem for me to come back another day. Not like I have a lot to do. At an hour and twenty minutes, we have a sign that the doctor is in the house. His office door is open, but he's not in there. 

Now, this trip is planned in only the loosest sense. It's just an excuse to get out on the open road, in a place with trees, and just go. I mean, the highlights I've been able to stitch into a "plan" for Day One consist of a statue made of junk; a defunct city hall; a small dam; and an old adobe house. The only place of genuine interest to me -- as opposed to some place included merely to give specious purpose to the route -- is a dinosaur park east of Austin. 

Well, so the doctor comes and says his bit, cursing me with ten years added to my sentence upon this mortal coil. Mainly we talk about what I do with myself in retirement, because he's thinking of retiring (still; he's asked me these same questions three years in a row now; he says he plans to retire in maybe ten years, so I'm thinking I should come up with some more interesting answers than "play on the computer" and "watch soccer" and "build stained glass windows.") I recommend he keep working as long as he enjoys it, and we set an appointment for another next year.

By now it's after 10:30. Before leaving town, I want to empty the P.O. box -- sometimes it fills up with junk and there's no room for the good kind of mail -- and also I'm hungry. So I run by the post office, which is just down the street, toss the junk and stow the gold, and head down to the best of the four taquerías along McCullough south of the post office. There's no place to park, a surprise at nearly 11AM. So I get on the freeway, and decide on impulse to head into Southtown, where there are oodles and gobs of newish restaurants. Turns out there are also oodles and gobs of road closures and detours, and within about 15 minutes I've had enough. I find an unexpected freeway entrance and make use of it.

First stop: a giant stag that stands guard over an unremarkable subdivision in the city limits of Converse, Texas, a town of about 20,000 that nestles up against the county line east of San Antonio. It's built out of what look like mainly auto parts. I saw similarly styled rescue sculptures in South Dakota, and it can be impressive. This statue would be impressive for its size, if nothing else -- it stands at least thirty feet high. But it's also, really, quite beautifully done. Plus, its impressive just for the fact that some land developer was willing to pay the cost of having such a thing erected. One really doesn't expect such people to have the aesthetic bent, does one?

From there, on to Seguin, seat of the next county over from San Antonio. The interstate was built several miles north of Seguin's downtown, so the urban sprawl lately visited on the city is well away from the interesting parts of town. But I'm not really interested in those interesting parts of town today. They require an extensive commitment of time and a desire to pass that time wandering up and down the sidewalks of an old country town, speaking to everyone. They are places of old friends and historic preservation cliques, and small local businesses such as today's city dwellers see only on television, and in black and white. 

The Doll House

No, I'm there for two things: Los Nogales, the oldest building in town, and the Safford Dam on the Guadalupe River. In the case of the first, the navigation app on my phone took me to a dog-run log cabin on Live Oak Street. Okay, seen a lot of those ol' cabins around the country; well-preserved, but not what I'm looking for. Looked up the place on Wikipedia and finally got a physical location for it: just maybe 50 yards away, on the opposite side of the street, with the nondescript back of the building facing where I stood so it would look nothing like the photo on the web site where I'd found it. In fact, I had seen it, and thought it was a tool shed. Walked over, was suitably impressed with the tininess of the house where somebody actually lived out a long life. Equally impressed by the Victorian-gingerbread "doll house" next to it, which someone had built --built!-- for an orphan girl, one of many who were carted all over the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s looking for adoption-inclined families.

Then to the Dam. It's interesting because (a) it was designed by locally-famous architect Robert Hugman, and (b) it's curved in a sort of S-shape. It's actually built on a ledge of natural rock that stretches across the river, and is the site of the area's first power plant, still operated by the city of Seguin. But I found the view of the dam was much better from the bar on the opposite bank, than from the city park the navigation app took me to. 

From there, a stop at a convenience store where I got a cup of too-sweet coffee and figured out how to listen to audiobooks from my phone on the car stereo. (I paired the devices back last year when I bought the car, but I guess they've forgotten each other during the pandemic. It's happened to so many, I know....) That made the drive both more enjoyable and more frustrating, since my navigation app kept interrupting the audiobook -- always at vital moments, of course -- to tell me to turn left in a quarter mile. I finally had to silence the navigator, which meant that I got simple electronic-tone alerts to let me know that I'd missed my turn. Well, the lesser evil...

I'm using Roadtrippers, a site I found many years ago on line. It's been through a number of changes over the years, but I've found it reliable enough that I finally bit the bullet and paid for the full membership. This is the first time I've actually used it for navigating, in conjunction with the usually-reliable Google Maps. 

One drawback of Roadtrippers, though, is that it lists seemingly everything, usually without photographs or any information beyond a name and location. Sometimes the listing is sufficiently intriguing to get me to check it out; as happened today, when I went to see Neiderwald City Hall. (Neiderwald used to be a city, since subsumed in the urban sprawl of Kyle or Buda, I forget which.)

This is what I found:

I didn't bother to get out of the car for that.

Next came the Dinosaur Park. I got there just as it closed. Then a sculpture gallery that's out of business; then a small art gallery in downtown Bastrop, where I passed a satisfying half-hour, though I was disappointed by the calibre of glass on display. I'd expected more, and better, from the description of the place. But it was air-conditioned, so I sat inside to check email and consult my trip planning app.

Then the Dime Box Museum. Dime Box is a town famous for its name. The museum was, of course, already closed. 

At that point it struck me that I was not enjoying my wander. The roads were too choked with traffic, the "sights" along the way too dull or mundane. So I turned off the navigator, dragged out the old-fashioned paper map of Texas, and set off down a random road heading vaguely south and east. That was when the trip became enjoyable, The sky was a gorgeous blue, the air was cool in the shade of the trees and warm in the sun. On the backroads I found no traffic, just curves, sweeping or sharp, and beautiful meadows and woods and creeks. I found myself in Brenham, famous for the Blue Bell Creamery (which I may go to in the morning, if it's open when I leave). Had dinner at a seafood-and-steak restaurant next to my hotel -- a place that got four and a half stars on TripAdvisor, so we know that that website is unreliable. It wouldn't get two chili peppers from me, if I were still doing restaurant reviews, and there would be mention of the smell of the fryer grease, which may or may not have been plant-based when it was new, possibly back before the pandemic.

Day 2: Friday, May 7

Blue Bell Creamery. In many people's minds, and not without justification, it is Brenham. Having once spent a very nice long weekend in the town without going to the Creamery, I can testify that there's more to Brenham than the one famous business. But Blue Bell, easily the largest local business, is also the only thing the town is famous for. That being so, to have been to Brenham, twice now, and not gone to the Creamery, would be too snobbish for words. So this morning, I went to the Creamery. Conveniently, it was on my way out of town, and also conveniently, it opened at 8AM, the precise time I was passing by. 

At the Blue Bell Creamery

You may have heard, there's a pandemic going on? It's true, and I know this because Blue Bell Creamery isn't giving tours during the pandemic. Also the observation deck overlooking the processing floor has been converted into an employee break room, since nobody's been coming to the Creamery to see how the magic is worked. But the gift shop is open, with its extensive selection of coffee mugs, ice cream scoops, t-shirts and baby clothes; and more importantly, the ice cream shop is open, selling about two dozen flavours of one of the world's best ice creams -- certainly the best large-production ice creams -- for a buck a scoop. Hard to believe I only got one, at eight o'clock in the morning. 

That was the start of a relaxed, I might even say laid back day. I looked at the planned route on RoadTrippers, and looked at the map, and decided, Naaaaahh, not gonna do that. So I studied the paper map, picked out a route to the northeast on the smallest roads shown, and headed off through the verdant East Texas morning. (I really need a new Texas highway map; wish I'd thought to bring the big map book that I left in the other car.) I went through such charming communities as William Penn and Independence (where I did not stop to see the home of Sam Houston's widow) and Clay, then into College Station, where I hiked a couple of easy trails in Lick Creek Park, a sort of tame wilderness area on the southern edge of town. 

After that, I headed up the road to Bryan, to see the Brazos Valley African American Museum, one of the few East Texas attractions I was genuinely interested in. It's a small museum, with a small budget. One section of it is devoted to the individuals who did things important to the civil rights struggles since the end of the Civil War; that part was interesting, even though the information presented was mostly superficial. All the Big Names were there, but it also included short biographies of a great many people I'd never heard of, people whose contributions to the cause should be more widely known. 

The rest of the museum was devoted to purely local history, and was presented in a vague way that was, frankly, unedifying to me as an outsider. There were a few items of furniture, the sort of things that everybody, black or white, would have had in their homes in the early 20th Century; displays of personal effects of local individuals, but with no explanation of why they were represented in the museum; and there were a couple of dozen transcripts of oral histories that contained only the blandest of descriptions of life in the Brazos Valley, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. The impression I got is that, if there was a struggle going on, these people were way outside the war zone. Having read several of the transcripts, I now know that one woman's favourite holiday was Thanksgiving, because the whole family got together at the ancestral home in a nearby farm community, while another woman's favourite holiday was Easter; I don't recall why. 

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Greenville Riot in Tulsa, when the most prosperous African-American community in the country at the time was utterly and completely destroyed by rioting whites ginned up by the usual (and, as usual, false) accusation that some black boy made improper advances to some white girl. That massively cruel and destructive event should be the focus of intense national attention, especially in the current political environment. It perfectly illustrates the worst aspect of Black history since the Civil War: that every time Black folks prospered a little, they had it taken away, usually violently. But this museum of African American history had exactly one mention of the event, a single 4x6 photograph of the smouldering ruins.

Nueces Bluff Overlook

After that, I drove northeast through Madisonville (where I stumbled on a very good lunch at Walker's Cafe, on the courthouse square) and Crockett (where I forgot to visit the spring where Davy Crockett drank; oh, well...) to the Nueces Bluff Overlook. I always like vistas, so I was excited at the prospect of a prospect. I didn't have high expectations, of course: There are no truly high hills in East Texas. But I did anticipate a view of the Nueces River from a high vantage point, with rolling green hills stretching away into the distance. What I got was a view of trees from a relatively high vantage point, with rolling green hills stretching away to the next ridge, about 8 miles away. The river was directly below, but the forest was so thick that it couldn't be seen. Not even a hint of it. I'm guessing that, when they built the overlook's platform, you could see to the bottom where the river lies. Not any more.

So, the stops today were disappointing from first to last, but at least the drive was fun and the weather was, once again, perfect. And I got  "nice car" comments at almost every stop, which is a balm to my vanity. That's important, for no good reason.

 

Day 3: Saturday, May 8

I thought Rusk and Palestine, the two towns thirty minutes apart that are joined by the steam-powered Texas State Railway, were about the same size. Turns out Rusk is much smaller, as I found out when I looked into hotels and restaurants. I only needed one hotel, and found that in Rusk, but the dining choices seemed to be limited to fast food, fried chicken and barbecue. So dinner was a couple of hard-boiled eggs and an apple from the supermarket. Breakfast was in Palestine. 

The Howard House, Palestine

There were a number of historic buildings listed on RoadTrippers in Palestine, all grouped closely together, so I decided to take a look at them. A couple appeared to be open to the public, but none looked to me to be worth more attention than a quick drive-by. I took some pictures to post to RoadTrippers (because I get a little irked at how many entries there have no information beyond a name and location) and moved on.

My next stop was the site of the Killough Massacre, where in 1838, 18 settlers were attacked by Indians and killed or kidnapped. It was, according to the marker erected over a century later, "the largest Indian atrocity in East Texas." In my present mood, I wonder at the hypocrisy of those who would defend the Indians but condemn modern Americans who react violently to the same sort of immigrant invasion; of those who would defend the settlers but damn the same sort of immigrant invasion; and those who would call for vengeance against the perpetrators of 18 atrocities in East Texas, but shrug at the perpetrators of hundreds and hundreds of atrocities in Tulsa. It's complicated, but there's enough wrong to go around.

From there I headed northeast, in the most roundabout way I could find, until I reached Carthage. There, alongside a freeway, is a sculpture illustrating the well-known story called Footprints In the Sand (where a man thinks the Lord abandoned him because he looks back and sees only one set of footprints). The display at Carthage consists of a trail of footprints, first two sets, then one, and farther on a statue of an oddly large and squat Jesus carrying an old man who looks at Him with an expression of babyish incomprehension. The entire tableau is surrounded by benches and walls that serve mainly as places to put the names of all who contributed to the construction (and there are a lot of them). Matthew 6:1 comes to mind.

From there, I went into town to see the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame and Tex Ritter Museum. 

a typical display

The Hall of Fame follows the standard format for such institutions: display cases dedicated to each inductee, filled with personal items donated by them, a few photographs, and a brief hagiographic account of the honoured one's life. A large part of the space is given over to Ritter, who certainly earned his place in the Hall of Fame, and also had the good fortune to be a local boy. (There's also a small display devoted to Ritter's famous son, John, who is probably even better known than his father.) But there are many displays of many country music musicians, and a free juke box to hear their work on. 

I ended up spending so much time going through this surprisingly interesting museum that, when I came out, it was really too late to continue the planned trip. If I drove on toward Texarkana, as I'd intended, I'd arrive there too late to see the only thing that interested me, a car museum. But since it was really the drive itself that appealed, I figured I could just as easily go the opposite direction, back towards home, and save myself the anticipated day-long drive on Interstate highways from Texarkana to San'tonio. 

The Davy Crockett Spring

And so that's what I did. It also provided me with the opportunity to see the one thing in Crockett, Texas, that I was curious about, the Davy Crockett Spring (see Day 2, above). It turns out to be a plain ol' 1960s-vintage water fountain, nonfunctional, set in a pile of brown stone.

Really glad that was literally on the way.

And because I, apparently, touched a wrong control on Google Maps and spent a good long time trying to verify that I really was heading west, as the car's rearview mirror claimed, and not east, as the Google Maps display showed, I drove right through Bryan, where I'd figured on getting a room for the night, without even seeing it. And by the time I'd figured out what the deal was with the Maps display, I was close enough to home to just head on down the road.

Not all the pictures from this trip are included here. If you want to see them all, click here.

The End?

A report out of Washington today (from a web site called "The Hill," under the byline of one Alexander Bolton) says that:

Senate Republicans, including those who do not plan to vote to convict former President Trump, say this week's impeachment trial has effectively ended any chance of him becoming the GOP presidential nominee in 2024. 

Maybe that's true. I hope it is. But what those Senators don't seem to realise is that voting to acquit Trump may well be the end for themselves, as well. 

Pretty much anyone who has paid any attention to the political shenanigans of the latter-day Trump regime has seen his tweeted call to come for a wild time in DC on January 6. We all heard his bullshit warnings in October that the election would be stolen from him; we didn't believe it then, most of us (and those who do, frankly, are determined not to be swayed by fact), and we don't believe it now. We heard his November claims, as they escalated in lunacy through more than 60 failed court cases unsupported by a single material shred of evidence, that the election was stolen from him. We who think for ourselves recognize it as the purest sort of self-serving crap. We suspected then, as we know now, that the Republicans in the Senate are mostly toadies living in fear of "getting primaried" by the reactionary fringe. (Who, in all honesty, can still believe that Lindsay Graham has any kind of political backbone? There are less supple jellyfish off the shore at Myrtle Beach.) And we heard what Trump said to the little army he had gathered on the Ellipse on January 6, and we saw what they did to the Capitol on receiving their marching orders.

A vote to acquit, after the case that the House Managers have presented this week, will be certification that the Senator casting that vote would endorse a self-serving lie at any cost to the nation, rather than acknowledge the obvious; and that they would rather try to save their own asses than the representative democracy this nation is so justly proud of. 

When they come up for re-election in two, or four, or six years, America will remember this vote unlike any other the Senators may have cast in their careers. Maybe they will get "primaried" by the far-right; maybe they will survive that. They need to take that risk, for the sake of this Nation.

But when most Americans get into the voting booth for the general election in 2022, or 2024, or 2026, the question they will have asked themselves beforehand -- the thing that will be the most determinative of their decision -- will be, How did this Senator vote on Trump's second impeachment? A vote to acquit should prove inexcusable. 

The Republican Party is already feeling the turmoil caused by being hijacked by its lunatic fringe. If Trump is not convicted in this open-and-shut impeachment -- and I suspect he won't be -- the GOP will be unable to survive. It will have to splinter into at least two groups: one will be a collection of far-right lunatics who would support the likes Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Josh Hawley (it being better to reign in hell than serve in heaven); the other will be a more mainstream group of conservatives who have had enough of the schlock-show not just of the last four years, but of the last twelve. Neither group will have enough support to govern, and the Democratic Party will have its own way for the foreseeable future. 

As a Republican (almost but not quite a former Republican), I think that would be better for America than what we have had lately. I'll take it.

A Prediction

I read today in an AP story that “The Republican numbers are going to pick up,” according to a Republican pollster. This hopeful comment was prompted by the "avalanche" of early voting, mostly by Democrats.

I doubt it. I suspect that many, if not most, Republicans -- that is, the reasonable portion of the Republican party, not the rabid reactionaries of Tea Party ilk -- will quietly stay home, unable to bring themselves to cast another vote for the stock clown that won the race four years ago. That, plus the diminution of help from Russia, will result in a win, possibly even a landslide, for the Democrat.

Will it be as bad as it could be? Will the Republican party also lose its majority in the Senate, as voters turn from scaramuccia to arlecchino? Will enough of the spine-challenged members of that once-august body find themselves dragged down to defeat on the coattails of the fact-challenged incumbent? As a Republican, I hope not; as an American, I hope so. And as a Texan, I wish it were Cruz, the 21st-Century McCarthy, running for re-election this year instead of Cornyn.

It is what it is.

Blog Posts from the Park City Trip

To read the posts from this trip in order, click on this link, then click "newer post" when you get to the end.

To see the pictures from the trip, click on this link.

And by the way, I got the last two counties in Utah on this trip. That makes 34 states completed.

Oh, and in case you're curious: no, I didn't make it home on Saturday. Had a flat tire outside Lordsburg, had to drive to El Paso at 50 mph on the spare tire to get a pair of rear tires. Front tires will be replaced next year. (And, some good news: turns out my deductible for the slashed roof is only $100. Having that car insurance is finally going to pay off.)

...And the Rest: Park City Trip

To read the posts from this trip in order, click on this link, then click "newer post" when you get to the end.

To see the pictures from the trip, click on this link.

After another breakfast at our now-favourite bagel place, we both started off on Wednesday feeling the need for some exercise, so I checked my All-Trails app and found what looked like a trail suitable for a fat ol' guy with mobility issues, at a place called Willow Creek. It turned out to be a nice easy mostly-paved two-mile-long path around a small city park out in the northern reaches of Park City. We followed that up with a stop at the Kimball Art Center, which is listed as a museum but isn't; it's a bunch of small studios where Suburban Housewives (if such exist) learn to make the kind of ceramic and painted projects that were once the special province of eight-year-olds at summer camp.

We took the radical step, then, of driving into downtown Park City, the congested five or six blocks of Main Street that, heretofore, we had experienced only on foot. During the day, parking is free, which was a nice surprise, so we found a place on Swede Alley and walked over to the Park City Museum, an unexpectedly large building containing three floors dealing with the city's history, from its founding in the 1880s as a silver-mining center, through the customary Tragic Fire That Destroyed Most of the City, to its rebirth in the 1950s as a ski destination. Notably, Park City was the home of the first and last skier's subway, as a mining company tried to repurpose its existing tunnels and shafts for access to its new ski runs on the mountains above its defunct mine. The experiment lasted but a single season, as the mine was so leaky that soaked passengers on its 16-passenger train would step out into the freezing atmosphere of a Utah winter and "immediately freeze like a popsicle." And of course, the Sundance Film Festival figured prominently in the most recent parts of the town's history.

After a couple of hours at the museum, we walked up the hill to our preferred people-watching spot. Unfortunately, there was a gigantic SUV parked in front of that spot, so we retreated across the street to a bar that offered seats right by a window looking out onto the sidewalk, and there we indulged ourselves with beer and diet coke (and a $5 hamburger special that turned out to be one of the best burgers I've had in a long time). The best thing about people-watching isn't the people -- they are ordinary in every way -- but in the conversation and memories they provoke. How else could two people sit for an hour or two, watching tourists and dog-walkers traipse up the steep slope of Main Street, Park City, and back down? It's not like these were celebrities promoting their films; that happens in late January, when I, for one, am unlikely to ever be in a snow-prone area.

After a spell back at our condo, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and doing laundry (just because), I made Curtis pick a place for dinner. He stoutly resisted making a decision until it became clear to him that if he didn't pick a place, we weren't going anywhere. He finally made the painful choice, a place called The Boneyard up on Kearns Avenue, which is The Other Major Street in town. Turned out to be a pretty good choice. I had a chicken pot pie that was too much food, and got to watch the Netherlands:Mexico friendly on delayed broadcast from across the room.

Our plans for the final day in Park City involved a trip down to Jurassic National Monument, which is two and a half hours south of our condo. We decided, for that reason, that rather than come all the way back up to Park City just to check out on Friday, we'd check out on Thursday and then stay that night in Panguitch, which is a lot closer to Las Vegas. And a room in Panguitch isn't much more than the money we would save by not having to drive that distance. (The Sacramento Jag uses premium gas. One of the odd things I've noticed is that, while regular gas here costs way more than what it costs back home, premium is about the same price in both places. Go figure.)

So we packed up the car, turned on the dishwasher, and headed off to see the fossils. Grabbed coffee at a 7-11 (best coffee I've had in PC) and picked up some bagels at a place in Heber City (French Toast -- not good -- and Asiago) to eat in the car. We stopped to see Bridal Veil Falls just outside Provo

and then let Google Maps take us to the country's newest national monument.

Instead, it took us to the Bureau of Land Management Field Office in Price, Utah, where the one guy working there wasn't surprised to see us. He showed us where the monument is on the map, and explained the route in excruciating detail, of which my mind focussed on the thirteen miles of "well-maintainged dirt roads".

The monument is a working dig site at a place called the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry. Like Dinosaur National Monument, but on a much smaller scale, it has two small metal buildings covering the active dig sites, where hundreds of bones are being excavated in the painstaking way of modern paleontology. There are a number of hiking trails that take you around the monument, some quite long, but that might be a project for another trip, when I'm not wearing a brace on my ankle. And when I'm driving the Subaru, which I don't mind taking on dirt roads (aka gravel roads), well-maintained or not.

The most interesting facts about the place, to me, are these: (1) the proportion of preserved carnivores is much higher than the proportion of preserved herbivores, and there's almost no preserved plant matter; and (2) no one has yet come up with an explanation for why so many fossils would be preserved in this particular spot. It wasn't a marsh or watering hole, it wasn't a bend in a river where carcasses might wash up, and it wasn't the site of a disaster -- in other words, the fossils were laid down over a long, long time, not in a single cataclysm. There's no discernible reason for this particular fossil field to exist.

The only other stop we made was at Butch Cassidy's boyhood home, right next to the highway in Centerville, Utah, a few miles from Panguitch. A local somebody has contributed to the preservation of this part of the famous criminal's history, which is a one-room log cabin and a small outbuilding. Interesting factoid: the real Butch Cassidy was better-looking than Paul Newman, while the real Sundance Kid was no Robert Redford.

Leaving Panguitch this morning (Friday) I took Curtis through Cedar Breaks, which I had seen eight years ago and thought as beautiful as Bryce Canyon. Curtis agreed.

I then dropped him at his house in North Las Vegas and headed east towards home. Thanks to a number of slowdowns on the highways for construction and accidents, I've only made it as far as Tucson, which is now my Least Favourite Place In The Whole World: dusty, somewhat sleazy, and thirteen hours' drive from home, so I may not make it back tomorrow.

And here's a link to all the pictures from this trip.

Another Day or Two: Park City Trip

This is the second post covering the trip to Park City. You should read them in order. Here's a link to the first post of the trip; when you get to the end, click on "Newer Post" at the bottom left.

The confusion about the car museums in western Colorado has left a sizeable hole in our plans for this trip to Park City. We had just enough things planned to all but fill the days here, and the fact that the museum in Gateway is apparently not open this season, despite the info on the web, means we have a day to fill in a place that, let's face it, isn't really filled with things of great interest to two fat ol' retired lawyers. 

Tomorrow is that day, so we're going to be kind of grasping at straws to find something to do. But that's tomorrow; meanwhile, yesterday and today have been pretty good.

 First of all, we found a breakfast place that we like, one with light meals available, and drinkable coffee. We went there yesterday morning, & liked it well enough to go back this morning.

Yesterday we drove into Lehi, which is a suburb south of Salt Lake City. It features a number of interesting museums (and a well-regarded botanical garden, but we didn't see that). We started at the Museum of Natural Curiosity. It's a children's museum, but we went anyway, and to be honest, we really enjoyed it. Mainly because, that early, there weren't any kids there and we could play with all the stuff ourselves. Usually, there are kids swarming all over the exhibits, and it just seems too rude to elbow the little bas... uh, brats aside so we can see, for example, how an Archimedes screw works, or how air blows brightly coloured plastic balls through clear plastic tubes, or how a tornado feels. We spent at least a couple of hours there and had fun, although by the time we got to the last part of the museum, there were enough kids there to be In The Way. All in all, though, we timed it pretty close to perfectly.

After lunch at a fru-fru cafe in a building dedicated to new age stuff -- think expensive yoga classes and spa treatments -- we went to the Museum of Ancient Life. That is, dinosaurs. Oh, they had all kinds of stuff about Carboniferous forests and pre-Cambrian shellfish and stuff -- the boring stuff -- and there were, you know, things about ancient man hunting mastodons and all. But it was about dinosaurs. Four big exhibit halls, two about dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs. A full Supersaurus skeleton (not actual fossilized bones, of course, but every bit as impressive), so big that it was impossible to get a photo of the whole thing. (It's actually hard to see one end from the other.) A brachiosaur skeleton looking down on you. A pair of T-Rex fighting over a dead Edmontosaur. Stegosaurs and allosaurs and ankylosaurs and mosasaurs and pleisiosaurs and all kinds of other 'saurs that I never heard of. I loved it.

shoe for scale

We took the scenic route home over Guardsman Pass to cap off a really nice day; and we kind of stumbled on a pretty good place for dinner, after our first choice turned out not to be open. (bad Google Maps!) 

This morning we were back at our preferred breakfast place, and after a stop at Walgreen's for some supplies, we sat out in the parking lot discussing what to do. See, today was going to be a day with a hole in the schedule, too, so I had thought about driving up to Flaming Gorge, just because it's pretty there and it would take all day. But when we got right down to it, I didn't want to do that. It would have felt kind of pathetic, driving all that way through counties I'd already been to just to pass the time. We might as well have stayed home and watched TV.

Then Curtis found a listing for a car museum in Salt Lake. (It's not listed on the web site I have bookmarked.) It seemed to have a pretty good collection, about a hundred cars (the only other car museums in Utah are the Toyota Land Cruiser Museum -- thanks, but no -- and a little thing up in Ogden with eleven, count 'em, eleven cars). We decided to go. 

As I was finishing my cigarette I said to Curtis, Call and make sure they're open. We are trying to get used to having to do that. He called and left a message. I found a different number for the museum, and called it: not in service. So we were just about to be back to the Flaming Gorge plan when the guy returned Curtis's call. 

It's not actually a museum anymore. It was, but the guy has shut it down & now it's just his private collection of cars, spread through three buildings near downtown Salt Lake City, and yes, he'd be happy to open it up for us. He was on his way back from Breckenridge but would be there in about an hour. We got there in about a half-hour, and waited out front until he arrived. He opened up the buildings and went about his business while Curtis and I wandered through his collection of cars. (There used to be about twice as many, but there was a will contest and ... hmmm. What we saw was what he had left after the contest.) 

1960 Coupe deVille

Olds Toronado

Packard with guidelamps

The cars weren't pristine restorations set behind velvet ropes. They were cars in every condition, crammed into the available space. It was OK with him if I opened hoods and doors now and then, and I couldn't resist playing with the fuel-filler cover on the old Cadillac Fleetwood -- you know, the kind hidden in the taillight. There were lots of Cadillacs and Lincolns, including less-often-seen models from the '50s; there was a '64 T-Bird convertible hardtop (my mother's dream car); a '28 Rolls, and '37 Cord, a '29 Auburn, a couple of Packards, some Nashes, big Chryslers, a '64 Imperial convertible and the gigantic GM cars from the '70s.

I don't know how long we spent prowling through this guy's collection, but even considering the unpolished state of the display, this was a real treat. Goes a long way toward making up for the disappointment of Rangely and Gateway. 

This was a great day. We have nothing planned for tomorrow.

Waste Not ... uh ... something something

 So we had a "bonus week" available, a not-quite-free stay in a condo provided by the company that we book through sometimes for our annual Condo Week trips. There are some restrictions, mainly that we can only book a month and a half in advance. We've had this bonus week for almost 2 years, and have sat on it thinking that, eventually, we'd want to use it. Then Coronavirus showed up, and suddenly it's not something my wife is interested in.

We were going to let it go by the way -- it expires near the end of this month. Were we going to the Lake this October, like we usually do around the time of the Huntsman Games? Would I get to make another trip in the Sacramento Jag? Did I even want to? What about the dog? Things seemed to conspire against it, so we reconciled ourselves to the thought that it would go unused. The Huntsman Games were cancelled; Nancy, who usually meets us out at the Lake, had her schedule all disarranged by the virus; I injured my foot in Jackson this summer and my mobility is limited. All kinds of things were keeping the planning in flux, so finally I just decided: I was going to see what was available, and just go somewhere. 

Park City, Utah, is the choice I made. I contacted my old friend Curtis, who lives in Las Vegas; he and I have gone hiking every October for a few years, in conjunction with the Huntsman Games. I could collect him, we could go up to Park City, and spend a week in a condo doing whatever it is people do around Park City in October. I could be back in time for the rescheduled trip to the Lake in the second half of the month. I would get to take the convertible, I would get to visit the two remaining counties in Utah, I would get to go to the two car museums I wanted to see in remote parts of western Colorado, and we could have our traditional hike-and-kvetch trip. Hiking would be limited this year, because of my injury, but kvetching is undiminished by the pandemic. It'd be great.

Well, so far, it's only good. The drive out, on the freeway, was of course as boring as three days on the freeway can be (athough it was better on the third day, after I collected Curtis, who can make conversation). I spent the first night, Wednesday, in a dreary little mom-and-pop motel in Lordsburg, New Mexico. It seemed okay until I decided to take a shower, and found that there was no cold water available. And the hot water was really, really hot. Thursday night I was at the Strat, in Las Vegas. This is the hotel with the 1200' tower with an amusement park on the top. The room was reasonably priced, even with the "resort" fee, and I had a nice view toward the east from 20-something floors up.

sunrise from the hotel

I didn't see the amusement park, but I did go up to the bar for a look around. Vegas is a sleazy-looking place in the daytime, but at night it looks as exciting as everybody seems to think it is. Vibrant, colourful, flashy, as long as you don't look too close. Downstairs in the hotel there's the usual over-the-top casino, designed to disorient. I walked through it a few times on one quest or another, and managed to get lost almost every time.

In the morning, I loaded up the car in the parking garage (one of the reasons I picked this hotel is that they offer free parking in their garage) and headed out to get Curtis. When I got to his place and got out, I found two slashes, about 5 inches long, in my convertible top. I'm just guessing the work of the passenger in the white Toyota that parked next to me in the garage. So that free parking will turn out to be the most expensive parking I've ever had. 

The drive from Curtis's house to Park City is, according to Google Maps. a little less than six and a half hours. We managed to do it in about ten. I mention this because I don't know where all that extra time came from. I mean, I always manage to exceed Google Maps' estimates, because I don't quite go the speed limit usually, and I make a lot of stops along the way. But three and a half extra hours ... well, that may be some kind of record. 

I was really only concerned about it because I knew we'd have to check into the condo. But around 4:30 that afternoon, the condo office called my landline to give instructions on how to check in. Ain't it lucky, there was someone to hear the message. (Actually, there is a sign on the office window with a phone number to call for late check-in.) 

It being late and already dark, all we did Friday night was walk up the road to "downtown", about 8 blocks away. Lots of cars but not many people out; but all the restaurants were full and each had a few groups waiting for seating. We first located a place that would be showing the Aston Villa:Liverpool match on Sunday -- first things first -- and then turned our attention to somewhere for dinner. 

In the relentlessly trendy heart of Park City, we were unable to find any truly satisfyingly ordinary place to grab a light supper. We ended up at some overblown fusion place that may actually have a name, but the only thing that attracted us was the fact that there was nobody ahead of us in line for a table. The restaurant's virus protections were over the top (a good thing): the server who took our order was not allowed to touch anything on the table; they had designated employees going around collecting menus. When it was time to pay, they gave us a sanitizing towel for the credit card. Impressive. The food was good, and only moderately overpriced. The ambience was nice -- we sat outside, with a propane heater nearby to keep the slight chill at bay. 

Saturday, having verified on line that the car museum in Rangely, Colorado, was open from 10AM to 6PM, we went for breakfast in Heber City and then drove east. It's about three hours, each way, and included passing through one of the two counties I had yet to visit in Utah. The sky was clear, though oddly hazy at the edges when we left Park City. The route took us through national forest lands, with trees and rivers and reservoirs in the first half of the trip, and high desert after that. There is, I am always reminded, a stark beauty to desert landscape, and this trip was no exception. It was almost as colourful as the Painted Desert: greys and reds overtopping each other, browns dark and light, mountains in the distance ... except that there didn't seem to be any distance. In fact, throughout the day, the visible horizons got closer and closer, and the scent of wood smoke got stronger and stronger until the sun turned red at four in the afternoon. Ah! Fires out west! That explains it.

smoke from forest fires

So after our three-hour drive to Colorado, we pulled up in front of the Rangely Auto Museum. Which was closed.

feet on the ground: Kennedy Station

We had lunch in a little Italian place in town, then headed back through the smoke. I took a detour through the little community of Bonanza, Utah, just for the variety, and along the way we found a historical marker for Kennedy Station, a stage stop on the route between Vernal and the Dragon Mine.

 

 

sheep parade

 We also got stopped by a flock of sheep running across the road in single file on their way to a watering hole. After watching them for a few minutes I decided just to plow my way through, as there appeared to be about twenty minutes' worth of sheep yet to cross. They were still crossing when they went out of sight in my rearview mirror.

So now it's Sunday. Breakfast this morning was in a grill a few miles up the road. There aren't a lot of choices in this town. This place wasn't bad, but the service was ... uneven. Hint to waiters: when someone orders coffee, that should include cream, sugar, sweeteners, and a spoon. And when you refill the cup, it's best to stop pouring before pulling away. And even in a fancy-schmancy resort town like this, two dollars for a single slice of toast is too steep.

Well. So. Sunday noon and we head down to Main Street, where we earlier identified a bar that would have the Aston Villa:Liverpool match showing. That match proved to be a metaphor for this entire trip so far: exciting, engaging, intensely disappointing. Villa beat the Reds, 7:2. Sadness overwhelms.

But not for long. After the crushing defeat, we walk farther up Main Street to the top of the town, thinking of making a small hike to the Ontario Tunnel, which turns out to be a drainage culvert. Somehow that lacked appeal, so we went back down the hill a ways and found a shaded bench where we planned to do a little people-watching. That turned into hours and hours of people-watching, and so far that has been the best part of this trip.

On Trump

I watched about three minutes of Monday night's "debate" between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, then flipped away confident that I'd gotten the gist of the performances; news from every source Tuesday morning confirmed the accuracy of my conclusion. But thinking about it on the long drive across country on the Interstate got me to wondering, not for the first time, about Trump's supporters. They make up about a third of the electorate; they are all adult enough to vote, and drive, and have at least an average education, and presumably they are largely able to function to some degree in the real world. I know a couple of these people pretty well myself, and I know that they, at least, tick all those boxes. How, then, can anyone still support this man, after three and a half years of lies and failure? (I even read an entire book, Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild, hoping for some insight on the question.)

I've had conversations, in person with one and by email with another, and both of the Trumpistas that I know stick resolutely to their support for him. They have no articulable basis for it, beyond "I like what he's done" -- though they can't really say what that is. When I look at Trump's accomplishments, other than the lies and the cover-up of those lies and the denial of reality and the readiness to brand any uncomfortable fact "fake news", I see next to nothing. 

I see a very, very bad tax law change, which redounds to the disadvantage of most people, including both my Trumper friends. I see the missile attack on a Syrian air base in response to that nation's use of chemical weapons (at least Trump did something, even if halfheartedly; Obama, despite his "red line" warning, did nothing). I see the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court (Gorsuch is a knowledgeable and, I think, reasonably mainstream judicial thinker, with respect for principles and traditions, though I wouldn't say I necessarily agree with his outlook). I see the Kavanaugh appointment; however questionable the man's behaviour may have been when he was in college and drunk, I think, after a certain amount of time, it's just too late to hold that against him. (Plus, I think there's a certain amount of unfairness in using the mores of the 2010s to judge the behaviour of a 20-year-old living with the mores of the 1980s; it's kind of like condemning the founding fathers, now, because things they did that were commonplace in the 1780s are considered reprehensible in the 21st Century.) It's too early to form an opinion of Kavanaugh's respect for the rule of law and the traditions of American jurisprudence, and to be honest I'm not all that optimistic about him as a justice; but I'm prepared to be persuaded one way or the other. So let's give Trump the benefit of the doubt and say that the Kavanaugh appointment can be chalked up on the Accomplishment side of the ledger.

And that's about it. One of my Trumper friends said he liked Trump's stand on immigration. (That was the only particular he could articulate.) I have no opinion about it, one way or the other: I don't consider immigration a big deal, though I understand why people in the formerly lily-white midwest, and in the historically black-and-white south might be frightened out of their minds (as they seem to be, from here) by all the taquerías suddenly sprouting up in their quaint little farming communities. It can be scary to be suddenly confronted with a noticeable number of people who talk with a different accent and eat strange foods, I suppose, if all you've ever known for generations is steak and corn and coleslaw at the church social. 

But one of my Trumper friends lives in San Antonio, a city that has had a very, very large population of people whose roots are in Mexico and Central America. (At one time, I calculated that my wife and I were the only "anglos" on our street, but I think now that I had forgotten about the elderly couple who lived across the street and a couple of doors down. One of them, at least was anglo -- a term that, around here, just means "not hispanic".) Most of them are from families that were long-settled here when Travis drew a line in the sand. Some of the more recent arrivals speak with that accent that we call "Mexican" because Mexicans are by far the largest part of the group; or speak only Spanish. Either way, they get by; their children -- whether "dreamers" or native-born citizens -- are indistinguishable from the rest of the population. They are as American as my friend or me, and here in South Texas, they are no kind of "threat" to our way of life. Hell, they have influenced and defined our way of life, mostly for the better, as much as any ethnic group. (The other large ethnic groups here are German and Polish, who are distinguishable only by their family names; a fair number of Blacks, whether descended from slaves or more recent arrivals, who seem to me to be about as integrated into the fabric of the city as everyone else, unless they hold themselves apart (as some people are wont to do); growing populations of East- and South-Asian people, groups just now getting large enough to start moving out from the concentrated enclaves that immigrant groups seem always to start with;  and smaller numbers of Arabic and Caribbean people, who are mainly recent-enough arrivals to still stand out for their accents and their overly-polite uncertainty about How We Do Things Here. They'll get over that, presumably, and their kids will be mostly indistinguishable when their time comes.) My friend has no cause to be so agitated about immigration here: all these people, where ever they came from way back when or last year, they're here now, and they're part of us. (The other friend lives in South Louisiana, where there are blacks and whites, and the whites are either Cajun or otherwise. I can see where he might have a knee-jerk reaction to novel ethnic changes.)

So I can see how people in places where large-ish new concentrations of immigrants from non-European places can be disconcerting; but I see it as a temporary issue, one of perception and unfamiliarity rather than any kind of real undermining of American values. I can respect my friends' discomfort with immigration without agreeing with it. What I can't respect is Trump's shameless playing up to that prejudice, and his unconstitutional diversion of funds appropriated for other purposes to his boondoggle border fence. (I know, he likes to call it a wall, but it's not a wall, it's a fence, and not a very effective one at that.) And let's not even talk about the cost of this project.

And then there's Trump's "muslim ban," the exclusion of immigrants from a bunch of what he considers "shithole countries". This policy amounts to nothing more than a tawdry bit of window dressing on our side of the question, much like the old exclusions of East Asians that provoked our first immigration policies many decades ago. Those policies at least had the questionable virtue of being in line with general attitudes, back when the American melting pot was as ethnically homogenous as fondue (except for the black folk, but they didn't count back then, did they?).

So I would say that Trump's actions on immigration are a failure; though I will give partial credit for the ending of "temporary protected status" for some groups. The formalist in me thinks that, if we're going to allow people to come to the US on a temporary basis because of humanitarian concerns, that protection shouldn't last a lifetime. If those people who came here 30 years ago want to stay on, let them apply for green cards or citizenship, or go back home. (I admit to not knowing what's involved in applying for either green cards or citizenship, but when you get right down to it, it doesn't matter. They were allowed in temporarily, and then they should leave just like a guest who comes for a visit.)

His trade policies are a failure, too. His trade war with China has produced nothing but bills for American taxpayers. His modifications to NAFTA have produced nothing but hot air and semantics. 

Trump's murky dealings with Russia have produced nothing for the US as a nation, though it sure seems to be doing something for Trump, personally. Who knows what. 

Trump's threats to abandon NATO have caused unrest among our best friends in the world, and have produced only a grudging increase in defense spending by some of those friends, and a whole lot of ill will. I won't deny the propriety of his insistence that they live up to their commitment to spend two per cent of their GDP on defense, but I sure think that result could easily have been accomplished without all the fuss and bother that his hack-handed methods produced. Partial credit, then.

He gets no credit for his handling of the ongoing morass in Afghanistan. I know my own views on how to handle that situation; he has, apparently, none of his own. Another failure.

He promised to "drain the swamp," an idea he got from Mussolini. (Trump probably doesn't know who Mussolini was, but somebody he talked to during the campaign must have once read about Mussolini's promises to drain actual swamps.) Look at the people he's brought into government -- the "best people, the very best", according to him. They are quacks and dilletantes, self-serving hacks and antisocial zealots. The decent ones, though few in number, were mainly in and out in a few months, hired and fired more or less on a whim. Many of them were outright criminals. Trump's vaunted judgment of people -- vaunted, that is, by him -- gets a failing grade from me. I believe he could have picked better people at random from a list provided by the DMV of any state.

Somebody (Steve Bannon, I bet) convinced Trump early on that Iran was getting away with something because of the 6-nation agreement they entered into. So Trump pulled the US out. Okay, he's in charge, he gets to make that decision, even though everyone else involved thought there was no problem with it. But then he tries to use the agreement's enforcement mechanism to re-impose sanctions against Iran. Hey, fool: you aren't a party to the agreement anyore, you can't invoke its remedies any more than, say, Cambodia or Bhutan can. Amateurish move. 

North Korea makes wild threats against the US and its ally, Japan. Trump conducts his personal diplomacy, promising either a non-nuclear Korea or war. Which do we have now? Kim ran circles around our dealmaker-in-chief.

The economy was doing alright until the pandemic hit. He gets a little credit for letting Obama's methods of promoting recovery from Bush's recession play out. But take back some of that credit because of Trump's self-serving lies about what he's done. He campaigned on the promise of 3% growth; he's failed to attain that, and in fact the economic recovery, the long, slow economic recovery from Bush's recession a decade ago is less impressive under Trump's aegis than what Obama accomplished in the latter part of his administration. 

And then there's the handling of the pandemic. Trump didn't create the virus, of course, but he saw it coming and did nothing to prevent disaster. It was a conscious choice, to eschew national health-protection policies in favour of a "states' rights" checkerboard of more or less effective responses.  It was a conscious choice to not stockpile the equipment that would be needed -- a choice determined by Scrooge-like attention to cost and not much else. When he flipped on that decision, it was a conscious (and un-American) choice to prefer giving aid to "red" states over "blue" states. It was a conscious choice to disparage the opinions of those people who should -- and do -- know best how to prevent the wide spread of disease. It was a conscious choice to press for relaxation of protective measures despite the advice of people who understand disease. It was a conscious choice to muddle the population's understanding with talk of medicine-show cures, to politicize basic protective measures like masking-up; to question with no factual basis the epidemiology; to broadcast claims, based on ignorance and hopeful assumptions, that kids don't get sick, that warm weather will solve the problem, that it's safe to go back to school and back to work and back to normal. And it was a conscious choice to do all of this just in the hope that miracles would occur and he would look good when the election came around. Trump's handling of the pandemic is a total and most abject failure, epitomising the most repulsive consequences of his unfortunate personality: arrogance, self-importance, lack of empathy, ignorance, willful stupidity, incompetence, laziness and poor judgment.

When you add up Trump's accomplishments and failures, they don't add up to much. When you then take into account his sleaziness, his inability to focus, his loucheness, his incompetence at administration, his frauds, his lies, his nepotism, his disrespect for -- well, everyone, his inappropriate and autocratic insistence on loyalty to himself instead of to the Constitution .... I mean, the man even cheats at golf.

Trump famously said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it; his supporters wouldn't care.  Based on the unwavering support of that third of the population who seem to think the man walks on water, despite everything he is and everything he's done or not done, I'd go even further. If Donald Trump hosted snuff porn films on television, his supporters would first call it fake news, then they would blame the victims' parents for not having raised them better, and then they would say, Hey, Trump's just trying to make a buck; What's wrong with that?

What Russia Has on Trump

rawstory.com

On a recent show, Rachel Maddow asked Michael Cohen about a time when Trump flipped a house in Palm Beach, Florida, and made a profit of about fifity million dollars. What Trump said, according to Cohen, was that the purchase of the house by a Russian oligarch, presumably one of the criminal coterie surrounding Vladimir Putin, was a means for Putin to launder his personal fortune. (“‘The oligarchs are just fronts for Putin,’ Trump told me. 'He puts them into wealth to invest his money….'”) Putin, in Trump’s mind, controls substantially all the money in Russia.

Like many people, I’ve often wondered what vile secret Russia holds over our 45th President. There have been rumors of the most salacious sorts, involving sex and prostitutes and lies and cover-ups. Imagination has run wild, there being nothing in Trump’s life story to restrain it; indeed, since a man is known by the company he keeps, and Trump keeps the worst sort of morally-challenged company, imaginings can take on a life of their own, and become a sort of entertainment. No form of corruption seems implausible for Donald Trump.

But it occurred to me, while listening to Cohen talk about his former boss, that imagining all those tittilating perversions are, in Trump’s case, unnecessary. His lust for power, and its surrogate, money, is so great as to  suffice to explain Trump’s obsequious fawning over Russia; and all it would take for that particular spectacularly venal upscale grifter to sell out his country, to expose its secrets, to betray its interests in favor of his own, is the lure of future payment on a scale worthy of the Romanovs. I now think that Trump is kowtowing to Putin because Putin has enough money — who knows from where — to keep Trump rolling in gilded luxury for the rest of his life after he leaves office.

That belief, that it’s just pure greed keeping Trump in Putin’s corner, got another boost when I heard Peter Strzok promoting his book on the same program a day or two later. Near the end, as Strzok talked about his conviction that Russia “has something on Trump”, Strzok said Trump was compromised by the lies he’s told. But Strzok referenced the shame, the embarrassment, that an ordinary person would feel when caught in a blatant lie; that shame is why liars can be coöpted by a foreign power.

Trump, though, is no such ordinary person: he has no shame whatsoever. Truth is irrelevant unless useful. Being caught in a lie is an inconvenience to Trump, not a moral stain. In other words, Trump isn’t being blackmailed into betraying his country; I now think he’s doing it as an investment.

This discussion between Maddow and Strzok took place on the day after Trump’s recorded interviews with Bob Woodward first surfaced, and on the very day that saw Trump insisting, falsely of course, that he hadn’t lied to the American people about corona virus when he’d called it a hoax, and the day he claimed that he had brought “so many car plants” to Michigan — he brought one, at the most; and just a few days after he started denying, despite independent confirmation, reports that he’d called our war dead and wounded “losers” and “suckers”.

When Trump gets caught in a lie, he doubles down. We’ve all seen it, ever since he glided down the fools-gold escalator. He denies saying what he said, and lies bigger, and if that doesn’t work, he just walks away from it like from a debt in a bankruptcy, knowing that soon we will all have forgotten about the lie he told and the lie he told about the lie, and we will have moved on to some other ludicrously false bauble sprinkled on the public consciousness.

Risk Assessment

In response to my last post, Meaningful Numbers, I got this link from a reader. It will take you to a map that shows, on a county-by-county basis (and we all know how I feel about counties) what your chances are of coming into contact to a corona virus carrier at large in your community.

https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/

In using this tool, you should note the slide bar at the lower left, allowing you to view risk scaled to the size of the gathering you are contemplating attending. You should also note that the data assumes there are ten times as many infected people than are reported in official figures. I wouldn't have doubted that figure a few months ago, before widespread testing became available. Even now, the public's indifference to getting tested, even here in San Antonio, where testing is free and easy, leads me to think that ten times the reported figure probably isn't off by much; and it's best to err on the side of caution in this case.

If you're thinking of going where there'll be a number of other people, a place where social distancing will be difficult, unlikely or impossible, that web site will help you make an informed decision as to the risk it entails. But you should also remember that, if you go, and you're exposed, there is still the After-Time to think about: a time when you will return to the company of your loved ones, when you may yourself be the infected one, when you will be the source of illness and death for everyone around you.

Meaningful Numbers

 You see it all the time, on all the news channels: brightly coloured maps showing how many cases each state has. New York, California, Texas and Florida are dark red, because they have so many cases.

But that's not a particularly meaningful bit of information. Of course those states have the most cases: they have the most people. 

A better map would show the infestation of corona virus as a percentage of population. On that map, the dark-red states would be Louisiana, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey, Alabama and Georgia; each of those states has more than 2,000 cases per 100,000 people. 

Close behind would be South Carolina, Rhode Island, DC, Nevada, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Texas, Arkanss, Delaware, Maryland, Iowa, and Illinois, each with more than 1,500 cases per 100,000 people.

California would be in the middle group, along with Nebraska, Connecticut, Idaho, Utah, North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma, Indiana, South Dakota, Minnesota, New Mexico, Kansas and Wisconsin, each with 1,000 to 1,499 cases per 100,000.

All this shouldn't make the authorities, or the people, in Texas and California feel much better about the whole thing, but it would give a more meaningful sense of how bad things are in various states.

If you want to know where your state stands, go to https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-us-maps-and-cases/ and click the column heading "...per 100,000 people." Bear in mind, too, that the great majority of cases in the northeast -- New England, New York and New Jersey -- are cases that came up in the early stages of the pandemic, before we knew as much about how to stop the spread. 

An even more useful map would be one that showed the states' relationship based on positivity rates. Positivity rates are the best indicator of how fast the virus is spreading in an area. The worst places on that map would be Mississippi (21%), Texas (19%), Florida (17.5%), Alabama (17%) and Nevada (16%), Washington (15%) and Idaho (also 15%). You can find these statistics at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/testing-positivity, but I don't know where you can find an actual map to illustrate these statistics in a quickly-understandable way.

Condo Week 2020 Blog Posts

To read all the blog posts from our trip up to Jackson Hole, in order from first to last, click here, then at the bottom of each, click on the "newer post" link.

Condo Week 2.0: In the Books

This is part six, the final part, of the posts for this year's Condo Trip. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to take you to Part One; then click on "Newer Post" at the bottom left when you get to the end.

Thursday night in Denver (or some suburb thereof) our hotel had some technical problem, so no TV and no Internet. Somehow we didn't care. We talked half-heartedly about where to get dinner from the many take-out and delivery places nearby, but none of them interested us ... so we skipped dinner. Yeah, that happens all the time. I think I had an apple from our little stash of food.

We were up pretty early on Friday morning and out of there. I noticed that only about half the people around the hotel, staff and guests, were wearing masks. In the rest of the state that we saw, it was more like 80%. But people were keeping their distance from each other, even in the elevator. So that's something.

We got off the interstate south of Springs

Hines Creek Valley

and headed west, to Custer and Archuleta counties. In between we had a very nice lunch at the Three Barrel Brewery (with tables outside under a shade, so Carly could join us), and enjoyed the beautiful views off US 160 in the Rio Grande National Forest. But the main thing is that now I've been to all the counties in Colorado.

After that, we came down into New Mexico and went through Santa Fe, where I picked up a Subway sandwich. We stopped a couple of hours later in a little village south of I-40 and ate dinner at the city park as the last of the sunlight faded. Then we drove into Vaughn, about 20 miles further on, and got an inexpensive ($49, plus $10 for the dog) room at the Desert Motel, just the kind of place I always like to find: clean, cheap, no frills. This one comes without air conditioning, but apparently one doesn't need A/C in central New Mexico at the end of July. It was plenty comfortable.

Breakfast was at a Denny's in Roswell. On their "patio." They closed off the parking lot on one side -- the west side -- and lined up half a dozen tables in the shade of the building. Presumably in the afternoon they move the arrangement to the other side. I don't know what they do for lunch, when there wouldn't be any shade.

The audio books we've listened to on this trip were Reasonable Doubt, by Charles Todd -- a whodunit set in England in the 1920s; Murder in Mayfair, by D.M Quincy, a disposable mystery set in London in 1814, most remarkable for making almost no mention of any historical figures or events (I believe the name Napoleon came up once, but that's pretty much it; what's the point of "historical fiction" if you're not going to tie it into anything that makes a time unique or interesting?); Blue Moon, by Lee Child, an entertaining action story set in some unnamed American city, and featuring his crime-fighting hero Jack Reacher (I couldn't believe my luck when I found there was a Reacher novel I'd never read or listened to); The Evil Men Do, by John McMahon, another present-day crime thriller set in Georgia -- these novels make me wonder: when did fictional detectives quit being idiosyncratic, like Poirot and Marple and Queen and Stout, and instead all become flawed? Is anybody else tired of hearing about how the detective has to not only solve the crime but overcome alcoholism and the demons in their past all at the same time? That's not to say McMahon's book wasn't interesting -- it was -- but after a few of these novels they all start to feel formulaic. (On the other hand, there's Jack Heath's detective Timothy Blake, a cannibal who savors his flaws.) We also started Alan Furst's novel Under Occupation, a spy thriller set in occupied France, but didn't finish it. Usually we just abandon whatever we were listening to when we get home, but this one's not very long and I'm enjoying it, so I'm going to listen to the rest of it on my own.

And here, once again, is a link to the picture album for this trip.

And again: if you're reading this in your email, please click on the link to the actual blog before you delete it, so it'll register as having been seen. My blog visitor numbers are pathetic, and you have it in your power to do something completely altruistic that will make a certain someone happy. You don't have to actually read it again when you visit the blog; though I think it's always worth reading again....

2020 Condo Week 2.0: Nearing the End

This is part five of the posts for this year's Condo Trip. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to take you to Part One; then click on "Newer Post" at the bottom left when you get to the end.

The weather on Tuesday was perfect for a day spent indoors. This was fine, as we had planned to spend the morning at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, a little way north of town. We got there just after opening at 10AM on a cool, rainy day. I did not melt, nor did I clump. I only got a little wet on the walk from the car to the entry.

The museum started off some years ago as a collection of landscapes featuring local scenes and fauna. As it grew, its ambit grew to include all of North America, then all fauna everywhere. I'll let you speculate as to why this happened.

Outside the museum are a number of monumental bronzes: buffalo, of course, and elk, and other local critters, all quite beautifully done. Inside are more bronzes, but also a good-sized collection of paintings, mostly of mountain creatures but including big game from Africa, Europe and Asia. For me, though, the main draw was the landscapes. A moose statue is nice but it's nothing compared to the real thing; a painting of beautiful scenery, on the other hand, is almost as good as the actual thing. A painting of antelope on the scrub of southern Wyoming takes me back, not because of the antelope but because of the scenery. Elk in snow before a range of mountains does the same thing, again not because of the elk but because of the mountains. It's places I remember.

(On East Gros Ventre Butte, which looms over Jackson from the front of our condo, there is a single tree growing near the top, away from all the other trees, and situated exactly on the crest so that it stands against the horizon. I found myself staring at that one tree and thinking about a single tree similarly situated on a rise in Kenya

Kenya, evoked daily

; I had taken a picture of it that, to me, evokes the isolation of that bit of the world: there is the tree, and nothing else. You can slap as many animals down in front of it as you like, but it's the tree that takes me back to that time and place.)

I decided to cook that night -- one can only do takeout so often -- so we went to the supermarket and bought ingredients for conchiglie in salsa russo, and since we were there we also bought bread and cheese and had cheese sandwiches for lunch. After we got back to the condo I realized I'd forgotten an indispensable ingredient, tomato sauce, so I walked over to the fru-fru little market a block over for an 8-ounce can. It would've almost been cheaper to take an Uber back to Albertson's; I couldn't believe what they charge: $1.99 for a little can of sauce that's no better than what I can get back home for 34 cents. Well, at least it gives me something to bitch about.

Sherry knitted the evening away and we once again watched some old movies on TV (The Apartment, and something else I don't remember). This being the Year of the Pandemic, I guess I can't mind too much spending so much of our trip indoors like that, but I hope it isn't going to feature on future condo weeks. It'd hardly be worth leaving home; after all, we get all those same channels and more on our own televisions.

Cache Creek

On Wednesday we took a walk across town, then up into Bridger-Teton National Forest, up one side of Cache Creek and back down on the other. It was cool and dry, and we got started really early, when the fog was still in the valleys around us. There were very few people about until the very end of the hike, when we started to encounter a number of people on mountain bikes. 

After our first hike last week, up the side of Snow King Mountain, I felt like I'd stepped hard on a sharp rock with my left foot. It bothered me that day but was fine the next day. Then when we hiked up Cascade Canyon, I made it a point to wear hiking boots instead of tennis shoes. When I put the boots on I felt much better in them, so I figured it was just because the soles of my sneakers are pretty soft, compared to the boots, and the boots' insoles are much thicker. Still, after the hike my left foot kind of hurt again. I didn't think much of it. But yesterday, after hiking across Jackson and up the creek and back down, when we reached about six miles I just couldn't go any farther. Sherry walked the last 2 miles back to the condo and got the car to come pick me up. When I got home and took my boots off ... Oh. My. God. I could not walk at all. It feels like I have a stress fracture in my left heel. (That's just a guess; I can't think of what else it could be.) This morning when we were loading the car I put my shoes on, and found that I could at least walk with a limp. I have an appointment with the podiatrist Monday. Meanwhile, I'm afraid to take off my shoes.

Carly & Aspen
we still can't tell them apart

Today, Thursday, we got an early start leaving Jackson, and reached Golden to pick up Carly around 5pm. Now we're in a hotel just south of Denver. Tomorrow we'll get off the main roads and go through the two remaining unvisited counties of Colorado, then drive across New Mexico towards home. I figure we'll be there by Saturday night, but maybe not. We'll see. Not going to rush it.

Here, once again, is a link to the picture album for this trip.

And again: if you're reading this in your email, please click on the link to the actual blog before you delete it, so it'll register as having been seen. My blog visitor numbers are pathetic, and you have it in your power to do something completely altruistic that will make a certain someone happy. You don't have to actually read it again when you visit the blog; though I think it's always worth reading again....