Down through Dixie. Saturday 4/6 to Monday 4/8, Mahwah, Lexington, Scottsboro, and New Orleans
America is a roadtrip country. You just can’t travel it well by bus or train like in other countries; car culture reigns supreme. The bus routes are there, but are often inefficient, indirect, and expensive, and don’t even get me started on the railway options, like AmTrak. It’s funny because it’s not like the US has always had bad public transportation, since the US had such a lead role with developing railroads in the 19th century as it completed its conquest of the West, and the trains were still pretty good into the 20th century from what I’ve heard. The US just doesn’t value public transit as much as other countries. Sure, European countries are smaller, but it’s not just about size—even in the contained Northeast of the US the railroads between Boston and DC are shit, and larger countries like Canada and especially China have incredible cross-country rail systems. There’s also the issue that once you get to any city, you definitely won’t find any public shuttles taking you to nearby attractions like national parks. The buses and subways within US cities tend to be not so great either compared to those of other industrialized countries.
So when it comes to traveling the US long term, driving your own car is the best option, being cheaper and more efficient, even with the gas. That is, if you are in the position to already have a car in the first place, considering all the expenses for loans, insurance, maintenance, and the license and registration stuff, which hey, thankfully I am. I did briefly entertain the idea of doing it by bike (a lot of people do), but I would need to set aside at least a year for that, to be able to see all the things I want to see. And I’m not badass enough to do it by motorcycle. Going by car will also mean I can sleep in the back when I’m not staying with friends or Couchsurfing hosts, like in more remote areas like national parks; the few hostels in the US aren’t that cheap, even compared to the hostels in expensive Europe. And I can carry around a good stock of groceries too, since food in the US ain’t cheap either, like I’ve been having it in the Middle East and South Africa.
I come to terms with the fact that I’ll be doing this in my car for two months, and in the couple days leading up to my trip at the beginning of April I pimp out my electric-green 2006 Subaru Outback, Josephine. I take down one of the back seats, cozy it up with a sleeping bag, pillow, and some blankets over it, with my legs stretching into the trunk and my head poking out into the backseat. In the other half of the trunk, I put in a cardboard box and a cooler filled with some ice packs that I’ll stick in the freezer whenever I’m staying somewhere with access to one. The day before I leave, I raid my parents’ kitchen and basement for any food they’re not eating and fill my car’s new mobile kitchen with it. I’ve been talking through the outline of my itinerary with my parents over dinner this past week. They warn me that I’m trying to squeeze in too much into two months, especially considering that much of my time will be spent driving. “I don’t think you realize how big this country is, Benjamin,” my dad says. Are they right? Probably. Am I going to seriously take that into account? Of course not.
They give me a send-off Saturday morning, and I set off down south into Pennsylvania, going around to the west of DC to avoid the traffic. Most of this territory is the historic land of the Lenape Indian peoples. There are still some of them around the region today, a few on small reservations, but most living in cities and towns, including my own hometown of Mahwah—the Ramapough Lenape. I’m not going to say too much about Mahwah here, since this is about me traveling beyond my home, but I should at least mention some of the struggles that have been going on just a few miles away from where I grew up. The Ramapough aren’t just a passive group of poor Indians. Even 300 years after their land was occupied by the British, they still have been resisting, pushing the town to give better roads and fire department service for their neighborhood, and taking legal action against industrial waste from the old Ford auto plant polluting their area.
Most recently, they set up a prayer camp site on their own land in protest of a planned pipeline. After they were harassed by the town and a neighboring association, the Justice Department actually sided with them a few weeks ago, and said that the town had violated the Ramapoughs’ religious rights. While the tribe is recognized at the state level by New Jersey, it still is one of the few that doesn’t have federal recognition. Some politicians have accused them of trying to get recognition only so they could open a casino, with little evidence. In 1993, an Atlantic City casino owner named Donald Trump actually brought a lawsuit against several tribes in the area for competing with his casinos, in which he accused the Ramapough of trying to do that as well. It’s a good thing that asshole never, like, became president or anyth—oh…wait.
The people living in the Ramapough community of Mahwah—not just pure Indian but many mixed race, with some white and black heritage—have been marginalized by most of everyone else in the town for two centuries now; I can tell you firsthand that I saw their children excluded in the schools when I was growing up. While I was never directly mean to any of them in person, I still consider myself to have been complicit as one of hundreds of other students in collectively excluding them. I didn’t know why they were the outcasts. I didn’t think about it in racial or class terms (consciously at least). They just were the outcasts, because enough people said they were, because their parents had said so, so I just went along with it. “Mahwah” comes from the Lenape word for “meeting place,” but there hasn’t been much real meeting going on between people from different backgrounds for most of the town’s history.
I’ll leave this lamentation of life in Mahwah at that. Back to the start of this next journey. I’m not that far south or west yet, but I know that I’m in rural America when I stop in a small town in Pennsylvania to use a bathroom, and there’s a full painted portrait of John Wayne in the bathroom above the toilet. Not just a little wrinkled poster—an actual framed painting. I cross into Virginia, and after a few more hours reach the nice country hills of Lexington, historically the lands of the Monacan people. I stop by the house of Peter Del Vecchio (who I’ll just refer to as Mr. DV, since he was my old music teacher and it’s still odd to refer to him by his first name). I have a nice reunion with Mr. DV and his wife Patti, and he shows me around the nicer parts of town before sunset, and have get some southern barbecue for dinner. They host me for the night, and I catch them in the morning for a bit. They tell me more about how Lexington is a big pilgrimage site for lots of neo-Confederates and white nationalists; Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are both buried here, among others. Every January, mourners of the Lost Cause of the South descend on Lexington for Lee-Jackson Day, often leading to tension with the more liberal residents of the college town.
I thank the Del Vecchios for hosting me as I start my trip, and late morning I head into town to see some of these holy sites (purely out of historical interest of course, I imagine if you’ve been paying even the slightest attention this whole time you’ll guess that I’m not exactly a big Confederacy fan). There’s the cemetery with Stonewall Jackson’s grave and statue, with a few mini confederate flags people have stuck in the ground around it. By far the main attraction is of course the building where Robert E. Lee is buried on the campus of Washington-Lee University. After the war he became president here, and other than that had a pretty quiet retirement. The chapel that was built when he became president contains his tomb. There’s a family in front of me waiting to get in, and a curator at the door lets us know that confederate flags aren’t actually allowed on campus; they had to take one away from a guy earlier that day who had tried to enter with one. “Can I have it?” the father in front of me asks, only half-jokingly. I enter and walk up to see the impressive life-sized marble sculpture of him lying above his burial place, and check out a bunch of other historical items, including a stone marking where his horse was buried.
Mid-afternoon I get back into the car, but I soon hear a faint grinding scraping kind of sound from the engine. Car troubles this early in the trip! It’s hard to find a mechanic’s place that’s open on a Sunday in small town, but I see one on Google a couple miles away. It’s just a guy in the middle of the woods with a yard full of cars and trucks people have dropped off. As I drove here though the sound went away; the man’s friendly and still takes a look at it, but doesn’t see anything wrong. I thank him and continue onwards. The rest of the day I keep going southwest through Cherokee country, stopping at Scottsboro, Alabama pretty late, starting a pattern for the rest of the roadtrip of me sightseeing during the day while things are open, and driving mostly later in the day into the night. No friends or family, cheap hostels, or Couchsurfing hosts in Scottsboro for me—time for my first experience trying out my little bed in the back of my car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. There’s actually an entire website that lists all Wal-Marts in the country you’re allowed to sleep at, mostly the 24-hour ones; they really don’t care as long as you don’t cause a scene. I make a turkey sandwich for dinner, and I end up sleeping pretty well actually.
I’m woken up around 7 AM by a tornado warning buzzing on my phone, but it’s not coming too close by me, staying a couple counties away. I get some breakfast out of the back—some cold toast with cream cheese and jam, cereal with a little box of dried milk in a plastic bowl, and an apple—not gourmet, but adequate. I brush my teeth outside the car with my water bottle before realizing I can just go use the Wal-Mart bathroom. There’s not too much to see in Scottsboro. But besides being the site of the infamous 1930s trial of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of black men falsely accused of rape, Scottsboro is also of (more pleasant) interest for the national Unclaimed Baggage Center. It’s exactly what it sounds like, a giant thrift store where airports across the country send any baggage that passengers never pick up. It’s mostly clothes, but there’s also a room to other things people left behind on the conveyor belts, like electronics, sports gear, books and CDs, unused toiletries, and the like. They have some of the crazier items they’ve received over the years on the walls, like medieval weapons, instrument, animal skins, but those aren’t for sale unfortunately.
After claiming some of this unclaimed baggage for myself (some snazzy shoes and sunglasses, along with some more practical picks of discounted sunscreen and bugspray), I get back on the road and continue on through Muskogee-Creek lands of Alabama and Mississippi for the rest of the day. I don’t have time for many other stops, though I pull over to the side of one country road where a couple farmers are selling stuff, and I buy some jam. I also get out in Tuscaloosa to see the ruins of the old state capitol that burned down before continuing straight on to New Orleans New Orleans (Chitimacha and Choctaw Indian land). It’s dark by the time the city comes into view, and I pull up to the house of my Couchsurfing host for the next few days, James.
There is a house in New Orleans. Tuesday 4/9 to Thursday 4/11, New Orleans (Chitimacha/Choctaw territory) and Houston
James, a few years older than me, definitely had one of the most unique Couchsurfing situations I encountered in all my travelling. For the past six years the guy’s literally been building his own house here at the edge of the Lower Ninth Ward, and he’s had a couple hundred Couchsurfers come through over the years to help him work on it, and it’s actually close to being finished now. He had a professional company come in to drive huge thick 30-foot long stilts into the ground at the start, so most of it is one storey off the ground. Other than that, everything else built he’s gotten the material himself for, and built it with the help of the volunteers. It’s good planning ahead in a part of the city that was one of the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, largely because the Lower Ninth was already neglected by the city in the first place, being one of its poorest black communities.
James knows what he’s doing, and directs guests with less construction experience in how we can help. The house is close to being finished, but there are some finishing touches James is making. During the day I help him and his friend Tom, mostly with putting up beams and panels for the wall around the garage/storage area on the bottom. There’s also another guest, Sarah, who has some time off from the oil rig she’s been working on out in the Gulf. She’s now making her own Subaru trip up to her family in South Dakota, and she’s a lot better at this whole thing than me—she’s set up curtains for her car windows and a bookshelf and everything. I learn from her that what we’re doing is apparently called “rubber tramping.” I like that, not sure if my mom would. Anyway it’s cool helping James at the tail end of his huge project, and I get to improve my use of power tools while I’m at it. He doesn’t have an official name for the place, but over the years many of the guests have taken to calling it Jamestown (House of the Rising Sun was probably too easy). Tom also shows me the garden they have, including a bunch of mini kumquat trees.
In the evenings, I of course enjoy what makes New Orleans still my favorite city in the US. I’m definitely not gonna try to say that I “know” New Orleans after only a couple short visits here, but from what little I’ve seen, I still think it’s got the best food, the best architecture, and of course the best music, even if it is wicked humid. I mean the people here despite all they’ve been through literally play jazz at funerals, what more do I have to say? There’s music everywhere, every night. I don’t bother with Bourbon Street this time, but I do make a pilgrimage to French Street, where every block there’s at least one blaring brass ensemble just letting it rip. James thankfully ha some extra bikes that Sarah and I borrow. Wednesday night I get to catch up over some crawfish with Harry, one of the other delegates from the Palestine trip back in November.
I also stop by the Lower Ninth Ward’s museum, where I learn more about just how bad Katrina and its aftermath have been. I had heard just a bit about the continuing neglect for the poorer black residents of New Orleans before, how years later they still haven’t recovered, but I hadn’t realized just how much the damage has lasted even 14 years later. Areas like the Lower Ninth suffered the most flooding since they were least protected by the dysfunctional levees, and many of the destroyed houses still haven’t been repaired. Because of this, most of the refugees who still haven’t been able to return to their homes in the city are black; the population of the Lower Ninth went from 15,000 before Katrina down to less than 3,000 after the storm.
Common Ground Relief is probably one of the most prominent local organizations making sure that the communities of New Orleans are more ready for the next storm, whenever it comes. The collective was started right after Katrina to set up mutual aid for food, medical care, and rebuilding, and is now focused on sustainability and rehabilitating the city’s coastal wetlands, which have been ruined for decades by oil and gas companies’ pipeline construction, making the city more vulnerable to flooding. You can donate to Common Ground here: https://www.commongroundrelief.org/
Thursday morning I say thanks and goodbye to James and company. I drive by downtown one more time, get a catfish po’boy for the road and head west, enjoying the drive along the bridges over the swampy bayou with the Gulf coast on my left. “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” comes on the radio as I enter Texas on the dark empty road. I had wanted to get to Austin tonight, but it’s getting late, so I settle for another Wal-Mart parking lot outside Houston, after passing by several oil refinery complexes on the road, infernal glowing iron fortresses in the night.
Lone Star. Friday 4/12 to Sunday 4/14, Houston, Austin, Fort Stockton, and Big Bend National Park (Apache lands)
I have my first Waffle House experience ever the next morning. I then waste no more time continuing to Austin, through the historic land of the now almost-extinct Tonkawa people. This is now the furthest west I’ve ever been (I don’t count that time my family flew to Alaska when I was a kid). I get to my Couchsurfing host Quinn’s place in the afternoon. Quinn’s pretty busy, so I don’t see him much over the next couple days, but he’s still glad to be able to give back as a host after he’s been a guest himself so many times.
With its unofficial motto of “Keep Austin Weird,” the city does have a quirky reputation, though how much longer it will continue to keep that weirdness in the face of ongoing development is a debate among locals. What I personally end up finding weirdest about Austin is the physical layout of downtown, the actual location of the nexus of weirdness. There’s plenty of street musicians, dive bars, and pop-art further out from the city center, but the main holdout of it all is downtown at East 6th Street. As I head there, I’m amused to find it literally tucked between the skyscrapers of the business district. There’s the main avenue with its offices, luxury stores, fancy restaurants, and more high-end bougie clubs, then just turn a corner onto Dirty Sixth, and bam, it’s anarchy—dive bars, greasy spoons, street performers, strip clubs, food trucks, crust punks, skaters, metalheads, potheads, skinheads (not of the neo-Nazi variety hopefully), deadheads, regular heads, wastoids, hippies, hipsters, some juggalos probably, pagans, Satanists, atheists, definitely not a lot of monotheists, sado-masochists, tourists, locals. The kind of place where you stand out, if you normally don’t stand out when you’re anywhere else. I had expected this kind of scene, I just hadn’t expected finding it sandwiched right in the middle of the more gentrified downtown. I don’t know what I really had pictured, but it’s great. It’s another style of decadence, a rougher, less-polished decadence than the luxurious type around the corner I had passed on my way here.
I use my short time Saturday just to wander and see more of the odd Easter eggs around the area, random things like Buddha statues on the street and carvings on trees. The main attraction I find out about is the “Cathedral of Junk,” which a guy named Vince has been building in his backyard since 1989. It’s a huge structure, with two floors, built from all sorts of stuck I can’t even begin to list, though there are definitely lot of old bicycle pieces. A lot of stuff he’s added is junk pieces people have donated. Whatever stuff Vince made the main frame from, it’s strong; it’s withstood countless storms, and city inspectors have come several times to see if it’s structurally unsafe, and have found no weak spots. The place has gotten famous enough that almost 30 other people stop by during the afternoon I’m there, and Vince has rented it out for some weddings over the years. I spend easily over an hour looking at all the random smaller decorations inside, like records, animal statues, half a dozen Mr. Incredible action figures. While some local artists hail him as a phenomenon, Vince himself is pretty unpretentious about the artistic meaning of the whole thing, saying he’s just done it because it was fun. L’art pour l’art.
I also ask around at places like music stores if anyone’s seen the Youtube-famous street performer GOAT (the God of All Texas) around recently, but they tell me he only comes out closer to the summer usually. Oh well, I’ll have to find GOAT another time. I thank Quinn that night since he’ll be gone in the morning, and the next day I get back on the road to drive across most of central Texas—if I want to spend more time around the southwest, I have to pick up the pace. Making my way through the vast expanses of Comanche and Apache lands, I don’t see much besides some old towns with German heritage.
I don’t have many cool or funny road stories over the course of the roadtrip, but on this particular day driving across Texas I do actually have one weird encounter. Over halfway through the drive, around Sheffield, I pull into a gas station, but all the pumps are shut off—I try to get into the building, but it’s completely closed down and dark inside. I’ve still got a quarter tank, so I get ready to continue to the next station I find, when an older couple pulls in, and they make the same discovery. They’re running very low, so I drive to the other side of the highway to see if the station there is open—that one isn’t either, there’s another woman in a van trying to find one too. I go back to the couple at the first station to tell them, and accidentally walk in on the older guy squatting behind the store, with his wife holding a roll of toilet paper for him. I apologize quickly and wait for them back by the pumps, and I look up the nearest station that’s open—30 miles away near Fort Stockton. They can’t make it, so they give me some cash to buy a container so I can bring a few gallons back for them. I’ve never gotten a chance to be a hero like this before!
I zoom off on my mission, and at the station I buy a container to fill up for them, and fill my own tank. I race back the 30 miles to the other station, ready to do good and help these people out, and I pull into the station…only to find that they’re completely gone without a trace, car and all, like the Russian in the Pine Barrens episode of The Sopranos. I feel so blue-balled. I was really enthusiastic about doing some good for other humans, fellow travelers, and now I’m just stuck here with a smelly can of gas in my trunk. And that will remain the biggest mystery from my road trip—how did they get out in the end? Did someone else who happened to have extra gas stop by and give it to them? Did they manage to get towed? Was it aliens? They could’ve tried driving on to Fort Stockton and stalled, but I didn’t see them pulled over. Did they try driving back east to the last station they had seen? Hopefully they didn’t think I tried to steal the bit of money they gave me—they knew it would take me an hour, and that’s how long I took. I probably should’ve given them my number. Ah well, hopefully it went well for them.
I drive back west back to the gas station where I got the container so I can fill up myself, and I see the other woman again who had been looking for a station further back too, and I tell her about the older couple mysteriously vanishing after I brought them back a container—she commends me and says she hopes it still pays off for me somehow. I then ask someone working the store if I can return the gas can with the receipt, but since it’s already been filled up they won’t take it back. Annoyed, I look around at a place to dispose of it; I’m not gonna haul around the smelly thing in the backseat. In the end, I drive behind one of the pumps and just furtively leave the container there for someone to deal with. As the sun starts to set, I now turn south toward the Rio Grande River for the last couple hours. At one point my engine starts making that grinding sound again that I first heard back in Virginia, and I pull into a parking lot to drive slowly and examine it, but after turning my car back on again, it goes away. I’ll have to get that checked in the next city I stop in. I drive into the park and check a map for the campsites, and after some searching come to one. Sleeping in my car in the great outdoors here is much more pleasant than a floodlit Wal-Mart parking lot.
La frontera. Monday 4/15 through Wednesday 4/17, Big Bend & Terlingua, Marfa, El Paso, White Sands, and Albuquerque
Monday morning I’m woken up early by a man tapping my window—turns out I’m on a private campsite for just his family. I frantically apologize and tell him this is my first stay in a national park, but thankfully he’s cool about it, and I drive off. This land around the Big Bend was historically of the Chizo Indians, later displaced by Mescalero Apache. I have my breakfast outside the nearest visitor’s center, and when they open up I buy a national park pass that’ll let me get into any one across the country for the rest of my trip. I’ve only given myself one day to explore this one, so I set off for one of the half-day hikes up Lost Mine Peak, where according to legend Chizos revolted against the Spanish enslaving them to work the mines. It’s great finally getting to see more of the nature here, as I’ve mostly just been zipping through towns and cities this past week. The peak overlooks the eastern half of the park, along with the cliffs around the Rio Grande river in the distance, and I entertain myself and some others with my harmonica at the top of the mountain before heading back down and driving to the park’s main attraction.
I pass some abandoned buildings from the frontier period on my way through the valley, including an old store that served ranchers from both sides of the border during the Mexican Revolution years. I then reach the majestic bend of the Rio Grande, or what Mexicans call the Rio Bravo. It really is a sight—a towering sheer ridge of desert cliffs with the mostly calm water cutting between them. I wade across a shallow stream to join a clump of people gathered at the mouth of the canyon for a closer look. I notice that my water bottle is running low when someone says “Hey, there he is again”—it’s the same woman I ran into in the gas station yesterday after I tried to bring gas to the stranded couple! I guess most people driving these parts are on their way either to or from Big Bend. I ask if she maybe has some water to spare for my bottle, and she says of course, especially after she knew I had tried to help those stranded people. So I guess it was worth something trying to help them, in the end.
She heads off soon, and I continue to take in the view. Just through the cliffs and on the other side of the river are the lands of Mexico. As the afternoon gets on, I say good-bye to the river and start north again, stopping in the tiny old mining town of Terlingua. Official population is 58, though that doesn’t take into account Big Bend tourists staying there at any time, or the 10,000 people who gather here every November for the annual National Chili Cook-off. Apparently in the 1970s, the cook-off’s organizers sponsored a Mexican Fence-Climbing Contest to ridicule the US government’s plan to reinforce fences along the border. Some people I met in the park recommended I go to the Starlight, where locals sometimes gather outside to jam with their guitars and banjos. I get some chili and wait, and finally as the sun sets some of them begin to assemble on the porch, singing and plucking away. It’s a beautiful scene for the eyes and ears, but really just as they’re getting started I have to pull myself away, since I already told my Couchsurfing host I’d be arriving tonight.
I drive two hours north to the artsy town of Marfa, and my host Carrie welcomes me. We don’t talk much yet since it’s getting late, but she tells me I can still catch the famous Marfa lights nearby. I had heard a bit about this before, so I get back in the car and drive just out of town to a little observatory place that has some telescopes on a porch overlooking dark fields. The Marfa lights phenomenon is very well-known to people all around this region. For years going back to the nineteenth century, Americans as well as the local Indians of the area have described mysterious sightings of floating flickering lights in the distance at night. I don’t see much at first, but after some time staring through one of the telescopes, I see some little lights twinkling in the distance! They definitely don’t seem like cars or any electric lights or fires, from the way they’re moving and blinking. Locals have attributed them to everything from UFOs to ghoulish spirits, though most probably they’re some sort of atmospheric reflections of distant car lights and campfires in this landscape, according to the scientists. But if you ask me, The Truth Is Out There.
A couple other people are there that night too, and express their wonder at what we’re all seeing. There’s one guy in from Santa Fe, Joerael, a mural artist who actually has a pretty legit website. We talk for a bit, and he gives me some recommendations for things to see around the Southwest, including a lesser-known spot near Monument Valley called the Valley of the Gods. He also gives me some warnings about travelling through the border regions in general, warning me not to go wandering around places in the countryside at night—some paranoid ranchers might pull their guns out and shoot my silhouette from a distance if I get too close to their property. Not that I was planning on being in any such situation, but it just further shows that Josephine and I definitely aren’t in Jersey anymore.
I part ways with the Marfa lights and Joerael, and head back to rest up at Carrie’s. She’s a wonderful host, and puts together breakfast in the morning. She’s lived all over the country herself, in cities and villages, and finds herself now in Marfa because it’s Marfa. Unfortunately I happen to be there on a Tuesday, the one day of the week when pretty much anything art-related in the town is closed, and of course I’ve got my damn schedule laid out for the next couple weeks. I also ask about the “MarfaSaysNoC3” signs on a lot of people’s lawns—turns out that artsy Marfa has caught the eye of Coachella, and they’re trying to start an annual festival here. Residents have rallied against it, not just for the potential social disruption but for the environmental disruption of having thousands of people descend on the fragile desert around the area. They say they already get enough tourism for their economy, and they want to keep it sustainable. Can’t have anything good stay small and real long enough before some big company comes around trying to cash in on it.
I thank Carrie as she heads off to work, and I head west to El Paso, driving past the oil fields of the Permian Basin, historically the lands of the Sumas and Jumanos peoples. While all the art stuff in Marfa is closed today, I do get to see the semi-famous conceptual art piece of a Prada store in the middle of the desert. A few other people are there at the same time, and one British guy turns to me and comments, “It is rather a load of bollocks, isn’t it?” I get into El Paso in the evening and meet up with my host for the night, Keko, and another guest of his, Mark. Keko tells me a bit about how El Paso and Ciudad Juarez across the border in Mexico had largely been a single city of its own for decades, with people crossing over the border quite freely, before the years of stricter border controls, cartels, and drug wars. Still today, plenty of people live on one side and go to school or work on the other. Keko’s also the first one in my journey I’m able to practice some Spanish with (besides a few of the other backpackers I’ve met on the other trips), and he shares some of his own experiences traveling around Latin America.
I thank Keko Wednesday morning before he has to go, and he advises that I don’t try driving into (and especially out of) Juarez; it’ll be much quicker if I park near the crossing and just walk over. I won’t have much time, but I figure if I’m this close to the border, I might as well go over for just a few hours while I can. Crossing into Mexico isn’t too hard. I walk across a bridge over the Rio Grande—up here, it’s now more of a large stream than a full river, drying up more in recent years from climate change and overuse. I enter Ciudad Juarez without even having to flash my passport. Once one of the most violent cities in the world, Juarez these days is much safer than it was ten years ago. It has been picking up a little again in some parts this past year, so I still make sure to keep to the main downtown, even during the day. While culturally the two cities may still be very linked, and there are plenty of Spanish signs and sounds in El Paso, here the English disappears, and I can see the beaten sidewalks and pavements, their infrastructure funding probably gone to more urgent needs. Still, as with any more troubled city I’ve been in from Bethlehem to Johannesburg, the inhabitants here are just ordinary people living their lives. There’s one woman who sees me trying to use an ATM, and she tries to help me, talking rapidly in Spanish, most of which I can’t make out. I wasn’t having much of an issue with the ATM, but I still appreciate her offer to help. I’m really gonna have to brush up on my Spanish more before I go to South America later this year.
I explore around the center a bit, visiting the old railway station, now a museum with a lot of cool stuff from Pancho Villa and Juarez’s role in the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. In the afternoon I get lunch at the Kentucky Club, founded by Americans during Prohibition to sell alcohol legally over the border, and a likely birthplace of the margarita. The tacos here are definitely some of the damn best I’ve ever had—simply ingredients, not more complicated than they need to be. It’s tempting to go back, get the car and drive further south into the vast lands of Mexico, but I’ve got my plans: I’ll get to Latin America come December. For now, I’ve still got the rest of this overly ambitious road trip.
I walk back to the bridge crossing, past a huge line of cars waiting to get inspected going to the US side. Crossing into the US as a pedestrian with a passport isn’t as hard—I show it to them, pass through some scanners pretty quickly, and I’m back. For those following the news, I also probably don’t have to mention that while crossing from Mexico into the US is easy for me, there are of course hundreds of migrants being detained nearby in ICE’s “service processing center,” and there are hundreds more asylum seekers around Juarez hoping to soon make that same walk across the bridge that I just made, a walk that was so easy for me just because of my status from being born in another part of this country, hundreds of miles away in New York. As always, I am not guilty for the privileges I have—I am just angry, angry that so many others are denied them.
As I start the car, I hear some more of that grinding sound from the engine again, and resolve to get it checked tomorrow before my week going through the desert to Grand Canyon. I head north into New Mexico and stop off at White Sands, which is exactly what it sounds like—a whole range of hills of what looks like bright white sand in the middle of the grassy plains. They’re actually a bunch of gypsum crystals that made their home here thousands of years ago, when rivers flowed to deposit them here, where they were left when the region slowly dried up. Driving further in, it really is one of the more surreal, and tranquil sights I’ve ever seen. I easily lose track of time here as I relax on the dunes. As the sun sets I get back into the car and continue north, past a giant pistachio nut for some reason, and approach Albuquerque; I’m now entering the lands of the Pueblo peoples. The host I initially had for the next two nights had to cancel, so I find my way to another Wal-Mart parking lot paradise for the night.
Indian country. Thursday 4/18 to Sunday 4/21, Albuquerque, Chaco Canyon, and Durango & Mesa Verde
Thursday morning I have my usual car breakfast, taking in that Wal-Mart parking lot morning air and checking nearby Subaru shops on my phone. I also see that another host, Tara, responded to me on Couchsurfing asking if I still need a place to stay that night—I tell her that would be great, and I keep her updated on my car situation. I drive to one of the Subaru places, and thankfully they have time to give Josephine a look. After waiting a bit, the guy comes out and tells me that the fan belt is almost shot—if I hadn’t taken it in, I could definitely have ended up stranded somewhere on my way to the Grand Canyon. It’s a pretty simple issue, thankfully there’s not a long wait; they’re only gonna have to keep the car for one night. They have a service driver who can drop me off where I’m staying, so I check in with Tara, and she says I can come on over.
I look around as he drives me through Albuquerque, and it’s definitely one of the most unique-looking cities I’ve seen in the US so far, besides New Orleans with its old French colonial architecture. A lot of the houses and other buildings here look like the traditional adobe-style buildings of the southwestern Pueblo tribes. It looks cool, though I later realize probably pretty appropriative of native culture. The style is apparently called Pueblo Deco/Revival; architects started using it around all of New Mexico in the early 20th century. Anyway, I soon meet Tara, and the half dozen dogs jumping around her house (most of them she’s sitting for). A great place to be waiting for car repairs. Tara’s a friendly woman around in her 50s, and has plenty of travel and Workaway experience herself. She’s out most of the day with family. I don’t do too much the rest of the day; Albuquerque’s not as eventful as nearby Santa Fe, but I get to check out my first Native American museum of the trip, which gives me a good primer on all the tribes in the southwest area, especially the different Pueblo groups and the Navajo. I get back in the evening and do some planning for my route the next week going through New Mexico and Arizona to LA.
In the morning, Tara and her friend Tom make sure I get to sample some of the best Southwestern food around at a nearby joint before she drops me off at the Subaru place. Josephine’s all repaired! Before leaving town I of course drive by the house they used to film Walter White’s house in Breaking Bad. The poor woman living there now used to have good relations with the people making pilgrimages to see the house from outside, but some real dumbasses over the years have ruined those good relations by tossing giant pizzas onto her roof, trying to reenact the scene from the show where an angry Walter does that very thing. She’s now put up a big black fence around the property, with a sign that says “Please just take your photos from across the street, don’t bother us.” I snap my picture quickly and go on my way.
As I leave town I stop to see a bunch of old nuclear missiles and warplanes from the Cold War years at the national nuclear museum. Much of the uranium that was (and still is) used to power these weapons was mined on Navajo land, and caused lasting damage to the air and water; the radiation especially poisoned the mostly Navajo workers in the mines. There since have been reparations to the affected workers and their communities, and the federal and Navajo EPAs have been working to clean the region up for over twenty years, but the pollution from the old mines has been extremely persistent. You can donate to the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, which supports affected communities and clean-up efforts across the Southwest, through here: https://swuraniumimpacts.org/
I head west towards Chaco Canyon, and pass by some of the Pueblo reservations, pretty regular looking rural communities from a distance; there aren’t many of their traditional adobe houses in use today. The landscape and the roads get very empty the further I go. Some sections are just dirt roads, and most of the radio stations I tune through answer me with static. I’m at the edge now of the vast continuous stretch of land that covers a quarter of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico and Utah, delegated by the US government to be the reservation of the Navajo Nation, the biggest reservation in the whole country. I continue searching for a radio station that’s not static, until suddenly I get one and hear an unfamiliar language. Not English, not Spanish: it’s the first time I’m hearing the Navajo language, Diné Bizaad (Diné being the true name for their tribe; Navajo was the name the Spanish would use, which they in turn got from the Pueblos).
The station plays some traditional-sounding music with a kind of chanting, though at some points also plays country music with the familiar choruses about trucks and cowboys, like so many other stations; the Indians down here have adopted (and contributed to) the general cultural elements of the Southwest for years. It’s nice to hear, while I’m driving through the still mostly empty land, past some farmsteads and ranches, land which must have been even more beautiful still when its original inhabitants walked and rode their horses wherever they pleased 150 years ago. But I also hear a couple of radio ads warning about drunk driving, more than I’ve heard anywhere else in the country I’ve driven, and I see some billboards as well with similar warnings. It’s all clearly part of the fight against the alcoholism, and the associated drunk driving problem, still rampant among Indians today.
Following Google Maps, I at last turn onto the dirt road leading me to Chaco Canyon. It’s a very rough half-hour stretch. I wonder why the roads going to a national park would be so bad, and later learn that it’s because the roads are still within Navajo Nation territory, which doesn’t have enough resources for maintaining good infrastructure (as is the case with many rural roads off the main highways around the country in general). Bad roads sound like just an annoyance at most, until you realize that they make it hell for the locals trying to get to school, work, and health clinics, especially when the dirt roads turn to mud roads in rain and snow.
I pull in to the park as the sun sets and can tell it’s a nice desert valley, though I can’t see the ruins themselves yet. This time, I park in a common campsite, avoiding my mistake of stumbling onto the private one in Big Bend. I get some sleep after making my turkey sandwich dinner with matzoh, for the first night of Passover. Saturday morning I drive straight to the first set of ruins and have my breakfast taking in the scenery. The canyon isn’t that deep or narrow, more of a wide valley between low ranges of cliffs on either side. And oh man, the ruins—I wouldn’t even call them ruins, with how intact so many of them still are! The Ancestral Puebloan peoples (formerly referred to as the Anasazi) started building this particular town and its surrounding villages over a thousand years ago, though indigenous humans had probably inhabited the area several thousand years before that. There’s evidence showing that they hauled in all the stone and timber far distances to this spot. Chaco remained one of the biggest cultural centers in the region for around two hundred years, connected to trade routes stretching from present-day California to the Gulf of Mexico, until people gradually abandoned the site around the year 1150, most likely due to perpetual drought. It still is a sacred ancestral site for today’s Pueblo and Hopi Indians, some of whom make pilgrimages.
I walk through the doorways and passages of the buildings—the main great house, Pueblo Bonito, is huge, with over 600 rooms. Thankfully, at least in April, the site isn’t that crowded, so I’m able to enjoy a lot of nice quiet moments around this wondrous place. It’s weird to think that I’m still in the land part of the United States of America—it sounds cliché, but I do really feel like I’ve been suddenly transported to another place, more so in a way than when I’ve seen ruins in other countries. I just don’t associate ancient ruins with being in the US, in part because how the indigenous Indian presence is largely invisible for American kids growing up, especially back East. I continue to explore, and I notice the underground foundations of the round kivas, which were covered with wood ceilings when still occupied, and were used as chambers for religious ceremony by the Pueblos.
There are also some faded rock paintings and carvings on the cliff faces next to the buildings, which I and other park visitors try to make out. They show mostly human and animal figures, as well as many spiral symbols, which symbolize the sipapu, the Hopi word for the portals that humans first climbed out of from the previous worlds below and into the current world in the cosmology of Puebloan religion. Later in the afternoon, I get back into the car after taking one last look around, and drive out on another rough road. I can see some small oil wells further off the roads—a lot of the land surrounding Chaco has been leased to oil companies, and some New Mexicans, and Navajo, are fighting to restrict further drilling that could hurt the historical site, not to mention people’s health.
I head back to the highway and north a couple more hours. Soon, I get my first view of the Rocky Mountains in the distance as I approach the southwestern corner of Colorado. Just about a hundred miles, and I’ve gone from dusty desert to forested valleys under snowcapped mountains. The snowmelt from the peaks around here feeds into the Rio Grande I’ve seen flowing further south. I stop in the folksy town of Durango for the night, and Sunday I head to the next ancient native site, Mesa Verde. This was the other main center of the ancestral Puebloans in the region a thousand years ago, and later abandoned for similar reasons with the drought period.
While the remains of the buildings here one aren’t as big as those I saw in Chaco, these ones are cool because they’re actual cliff dwellings, and look like they’re almost carved from the sheer rock faces of the mesas; I have to drive pretty high up into the mesa to enter the site and see them. These ones definitely give me a throwback to Petra in Jordan, or the Mar Saba monastery. The park currently doesn’t let you walk through the ruins, due to concerns about erosion and collapse; one of the other visitors there mentions to me that he was able to actually walk among the buildings on the cliff face when he first visited years ago. Still, the main site of the Cliff Palace is just amazing, and there are some telescopes stationed around the mesa that give views of smaller dwellings in more distant cliffs. There are also all around great views of the surrounding mountains and valley. But once again, I’ve gotta be off on my Southwest speed-run, and I drive back down the winding roads of the mesa and head east into Utah, away from the Rockies and back into the desert.
Valleys and canyons. Sunday 4/21 to Thursday 4/25, Valley of the Gods & Monument Valley, Tuba City & Grand Canyon, Flagstaff, and Los Angeles
Late Sunday afternoon I make a quick stop at Fort Bluff, one of the remaining artifacts of westward colonialism, and a Mormon trade post from when they were moving west. Much of the public land I’m driving through here was part of the Bears Ears National Monument protected area proclaimed towards the end of the Obama administration, but Trump reduced over 80% of the monument a year later, largely to protect the uranium mining interests in the area.
As the sun starts to set, I pull off the highway onto a dirt road and cross a stream to the Valley of the Gods, the place that Joerael in Marfa told me about last week. As the name suggests, the Navajo traditionally believe the huge rocky monoliths hold the presences of gods. I know I keep saying everything around these parts is amazing, but something about the Valley of the Gods is truly special. The landscape has a way of captivating me that few others have, with its plain foreground of desert earth, and the stoic rocky monuments, gods’ presences in stone further in the distance, yielding to nothing except for the desert winds and occasional rains slowly eroding them, particle by particle, over millennia. I imagine the gods themselves don’t care that they will lose this valley and its stones to time some day; they will just find other majestic natural places to set down their presences. The loss of these divine abodes here will be a loss for any local people left, not for the gods. Since these gods, as all others, have been around since creation, they probably didn’t even start with their presences here, while the currents of the ancient ocean were forming these monuments; they chose to fill this valley with their presences after the valley was created. Or maybe they were already here in whatever the valley was before it was a valley, and they willed that the forces shaping the earth should make the valley. But of course I’m just casually speculating; I don’t even understand my own god, so it’s definitely not my business to speak with authority about other people’s gods.
The fact that barely anyone else is there helps too—after pulling over to a small hill that I sit on watching the sunset, over the course of an hour less than five cars drive behind me into the valley for the night. Probably within another 10 years, especially with tourism information available readily on the internet, this place too will be as packed as Monument Valley down the road in high season, as enough people hear about it, and then the littering will grow, and the casual drinking will start, leading to more heavy drinking and full-blown tailgating parties, and they’ll have to start getting park rangers and charging admission for the whole place. And lest I sound like I’m just grumbling about other tourists, I’m very aware that I’m one of those people, leading the way into this still mostly unspoiled halcyon. Maybe I’m earlier, not part of the later crowds to come, and I don’t leave a mess, and by myself I’m not loud, but I can’t deny that I am another tourist. I may not be directly pushing anyone off their land, but in a way, I am at least a temporary colonizer in this place, even if the valley and its gods welcome me as just another living being, a curious and wandering human from far away in eastern Turtle Island, with ancestors from a land even further away across an ocean, a soul whose intentions at least are good. So I admire and thank the valley, and hope I’m not misunderstood.
I get some pretty good views of the stars after sunset, though it’s a bit cloudy, and I sleep very peacefully in my trunk bed. Monday morning I get treated to the valley’s sunrise experience, and after my usual breakfast I leave my car and take a nice hour-long walk along the road further into the valley, passing a few other people outside their cars and trailers. I get some real nice close-ups of some of the gods’ rocky homes. As the morning heats up, I head back to the car, take another moment of gratitude for the valley, and drive out back to the highway and down to the better-known Monument Valley (Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii in the Diné language, I’m not gonna pretend I know how to pronounce it). I can see the huge iconic monuments miles away before I arrive at the park’s entrance. I try to show my national parks card, but realize that the place isn’t actually part of that system—it’s run by the Navajo Nation itself, you have to pay separately (which I’m fine with). The place is packed with tourists, even in April, and I hear more foreign languages here than I have in a while.
I get out and take my first look at the three main monuments. There may not be as many here as in the Valley of the Gods, but these ones are huge, more imposing in their solitude, with the empty red-orange desert behind them, rising up in cinematic contrast with the clear blue sky. There’s a reason this place has been used for filming so many western movies. In the visitor’s center, I read some more information about the park and preservation. The attraction is a huge source of revenue for the Navajo, and the associated tourism brings in visitors to the surrounding area spending their money on food, accommodation, and souvenirs. But it’s more than just an attraction; it’s a site just as sacred and once tranquil as the Valley of the Gods I stayed at last night. It’s the common dilemma that other sites around the country and the whole world face, the benefits of tourism to a certain site versus the disturbance to the locals, often poorer indigenous peoples—empowerment or exploitation?
The many cars driving the several mile-long circuit down in the valley next to the monuments are also having the gradual effect over the years of causing the monuments to erode faster than they would just from wind and rain, the rattling in the ground from the cars shaking the cliffs ever so slightly. So in order to not contribute as much to that (and so I can brag later when writing this on the blog about how noble I am for trying to preserve natural places), I leave my car parked and just take a little walk down into the valley close to the bases of the monuments, instead of driving. There’s not that much more to say about this valley after my poetic musings on the Valley of the Gods, but seeing these ones up close, it’s pretty incredible to see how almost perfectly shaped they are, formed by the ancient ocean that once covered this whole region thousands of years ago.
I head out and drive further south in the afternoon. I soon realize that I’ve now driven from Utah into Arizona, though here more than I ever I realize how bullshit state borders are, no less than the arbitrary border between New Jersey and New York close to my home. I’m driving through the heart of the Navajo Nation right now, but besides more beautiful land, there’s not too much else to see except some of their small towns. From the outside at least they’re not too different from other non-Indian rural towns except for the occasional traditional hogan dwelling. I had known ahead of time that any Indian country I travelled through wouldn’t actually look too different in terms of houses, supermarkets, and clothes, except for whenever they have any festivals going on. Within the towns, however, I am sure the culture still is different in many ways, especially in that many do still speak Diné Bizaad.
I make for Tuba City/Tó Naneesdizí (more of a large town really) that night, a little way’s east of the Grand Canyon. To the south is the Hopi Reservation, its own enclave in the middle of Navajo territory. I had looked around on the Couchsurfing app for potential hosts, but there aren’t any around here. So beyond just giving my observations on their land, and some basic facts about their culture and status today, there’s unfortunately not much else I’m able to share about the Navajo from a first-hand account. After sleeping at a truck stop that night, Tuesday morning I do see that there’s a small museum in Tuba City, so I check that out. I won’t bore any readers too much with talk of museums, but one interesting thing I will share is that many Navajo, as well as other tribes across the country, appear to actually be more patriotic than you’d think, despite the whole history of ethnic cleansing thing. The couple museums I’ve seen so far, while mentioning issues like public health and land rights, make it a point to say that these Indian communities still feel loyalty to the country they are now a part of—even if that country conquered them brutally. And it doesn’t seem not just a top-down narrative from tribal leadership that directs the museums, either; I have seen a lot more American flags outside people’s houses than I had expected.
There’s also the fact that more Indians per capita have served in the US military than people from any other ethnic/racial group over the past century. The museums that I’ve seen have also been proud to show this as well, especially the story of the Navajo code-talkers who helped fight the Japanese in World War II; I even pass a Burger King that has a small gallery honoring them inside. Ironic, since the US had tried to wipe out that very language which ended up helping the army win a war. I imagine that more Indians being in the military might be because poorer rural Americans in general tend to enlist more than those in suburbs and cities (though many Indians today live in urban areas, not on the rural reservations). But again, a lot of this is just my own speculation, and I just don’t get the opportunity to dig deeper while I’m here.
I do some gift shopping for friends and family back east from the town’s trading post, and have an early lunch at the restaurant next door that serves some Navajo food, so I get some hearty stew with a type of frybread, though some Indians reject frybread as being “traditional,” since they started making it from imported ingredients like flour out of necessity after being forced onto the reservations. And that’s it for the most of what I can call a “Navajo experience.” I then drive just over an hour west to the Grand Canyon at last, the climax of my week going through the Southwest. There’s good reason why it’s one of the biggest tourist destinations on the continent; it really is a breathtaking mile-deep, 20 mile-wide hole, with the Colorado River snaking through it down below. The colors are just fantastic, and change every couple hours as the sun makes its way across the sky.
There are some remains of old native sites around too; indigenous groups related to the Navajo and Hopi, who call the canyon Ongtupqa, had lived in the canyon itself over the centuries; many Puebloans like the Hopi believe that the Grand Canyon is the sipapu that the first humans emerged from, and they still make pilgrimages to it as a holy site. I take it in as much as I can at the main overlook, and walk along the main path along the southern rim (protected by a fence), though I step off the main path onto a secure area of the cliffs, and make sure to not get too close to the edge. I do see some absolute idiots getting very close to the edge, especially with selfie sticks. There are on average 12 deaths in the park each year, though to be fair only a few of those are from actually falling in; the rest are just from other causes like heat exposure and dehydration. Anyway, to not end on a completely morbid note, from this slice of the canyon I watch the brilliant colors morph into a golden late-afternoon early sunset, and pass the time with some other tourists, two German guys and an older couple from Oregon.
While it’d be great to stick around until the very last rays of the sun, I’ve got my host down in Flagstaff to meet. I drive a couple hours south, and meet Elliot, an immigration lawyer, and another one of those hosts who’s lived all over the country. He gives me some advice for the rest of my trip going west, recommending some more Bureau of Land Management land I can stay on tomorrow night. Most importantly, he lets me use his TV to catch up on Game of Thrones. I thank him in the morning, and Wednesday get my kicks on Route 66, picking it up again after briefly having been on it around Albuquerque last week. I mostly drive through the lands of the Yavapai; their reservation is to the north of the road. Old Route 66 is no longer actually the main road, having been replaced in most sections, so I pull off the main highway to an old stretch of it and hit up one of the classic roadside diners, Delgadillo’s, in the afternoon before continuing into California. I stop on top of a large hill on public land overlooking the Mojave Desert for my last night going west. I casually explore a bit around here the next morning, taking in some of the Joshua trees, emblematic of the Mojave region.
Then it’s time for me to make the last leg going west, and as I wrap up my trip in the Indian country of the Southwest, I realize that I’ve always been in Indian country, and wherever I go in the US, I always will be, even if it’s not part of an official reservation. It may have happened over 200 years ago back east, and the indigenous have less of a presence there than here out west, but I myself still grew up in Indian country in New Jersey—that of the Ramapough Lenape.
After a few more hours, I roll in to the City of Angels in the afternoon. I’ve done it, in three weeks, from sea to shining sea. I squeezed in a lot in too short an amount of time, but I did it. I unfortunately don’t have any epic moment where I actually get to the Pacific Ocean and collapse on the beach or anything; I just head for my friend Stuart’s place, where I’ll be staying for the next couple nights.
Foreign Fields 