Progress

Yesterday's facebook status alarmed my mother:

Area of growth goal of the moment: realizing I can't do everything. I can do anything, but I can't do everything, and that is a huge challenge for me to recognize.

I wasn't with her, but I bet it went something like this:
1. WHO IS THIS CHILD this is not my child
2. OH NO SOMETHING IS WRONG WHAT CAN'T SHE DO
3. Maybe she's growing up?
4. What's wrong? What can't she do?
5. TOLD YOU SO.

I love my mom. She and my grandmother did tell me so, many times over. I had to come to it on my own though, and I'm trying to. Honest. I'm making a concerted effort to be conscious of this and decisive about things. 

This came very specifically from having a lot of decisions to make at once right now about my life now and next year and sharing a geography with Mike and not and working and traveling and not. Last time I had a lot of important decisions to make all at once, I made them in the wrong order and ended up unemployed and very, very frustrated (though I also ended up out west, which aside from being frustrated with myself over these things, has been really cool).

What are these new and crazy and all at once decisions? I applied to YAV a while back, seeing it as a viable option to get my butt back to Africa and do some service. It's a yearlong service program through the Presbyterian Church (USA). My intake interview was just a week ago, but so much has changed. I was very narrowly focused on Kenya and East Africa, but am now looking at final interviews in Boston, New Orleans and Chinook, MT.

It's me, so I made a list of decisions I was working on, which prompted that facebook post.

• Chinook or New Orleans or Boston
• go to the in-person interviews (not required for domestic placements) in Kentucky, or go to Zion and Bryce when Mike's cousin visits us for spring break
• what to do this summer

While that first one will depend on my interviews in the next week and the mutual discernment process that I am so loving, I have decided to pass on Kentucky (for now, Bekea, I promise I will visit someday), and I have accepted the kind offer to return as Program Assistant at Johnsonburg for the summer (that job being something I love, something that I feel is productive, and lacking other prospects, something I can be sure of for the summer until I start with YAV at the end of August).

Progress, and more decisions to come.

Mojave Desert

We've taken to adding a prefix to anything we (Mike, his fellow teachers and I) don't understand: "weird desert ______". It's fitting, especially given some of the crazy and beautiful things I saw in the Mojave Desert last weekend.

Last Saturday, a few of us went to Joshua Tree National Park. The drive there down CA-95 was nauseating, not in appearance, but in the up and down and up and down and up and down of the road. We're not even talking serious mountains here, just a road that dipped and rolled with a horizon that looks deceptively flat. I'm to blame for the route though. I picked it because Google Maps suggested it took the same amount of time as the bigger highway, and figured it'd be more scenic. It was actually really interesting to look at-- desert as far as you could see, which I'm learning includes a lot of weird desert plants, more than I ever would have guessed. The southwest is actually not like the Sahara, I've learned.

Something we thought was especially interesting was that as we paralleled the train tracks, was this intricate sort of graffiti made out of sticks and different colored rocks. People's initials, dates, names, images. I've never really seen that before.

California Route 62 drives along the edge of Joshua Tree National Park for a while, but not one Joshua Tree was spotted until we were well within the other side of the park near Twentynine Palms, CA. They are almost Dr. Seuss like. I can only imagine their weird shapes are a long-perfected adaptation to windthrow or something, knowing that root systems and branches have some balance to them. The weirder looking their crowns, perhaps the weirder looking and more anchored the roots? I don't know. They were really bizarre but very, very cool to stare at as we hiked and visited different parts of the park.

In addition to weird desert trees, the geology in the park was pretty weird looking. Everything was smooth and rounded and curved, as though a child was given some green, brown and grey crayons and told to invent a new planet. It was very beautiful, but kind of eery. I've never seen anything else like this place.

We stayed in Barstow, and the next day, Mike, Dustin, Hannah and I headed to Death Valley National Park. My ears rejoiced as we hit sea level, and despite how hot it was at -282 feet (close to 90 degrees till the sun began to decline), it was a really cool place. You can see snow capped Telescope Peak (part of the range that Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental US is in) from the salt flats in Badwater Basin (the lowest point in the US). There were mountains in every color, a stunning natural bridge, weird salt formations, and of course, weird desert plants. I was amazed at how much was growing in the park (not much, but more than nothing).

After a good rest in Pahrump, NV (another weird desert gambling town) we spent the next day meandering back to Bullhead City, with a stop at Red Rock Canyon just outside of Las Vegas. This place was really beautiful, and really unexpected. For one, the desert heading into Vegas seems so barren and empty (although we were proven wrong later, there are way more plants, including Joshua Trees, visible when you drive south from Vegas during daylight); the desert in this park had a lot of weird desert plants, and even some wild horses. Again, the rocks came in every color, and the wind erosion created some really great rock scrambles. We were able to sit pretty high on top of some red rocks and have a great view of the place.

The drive back to Bullhead City was pretty direct, but like I said, we saw way more plants than we knew were there. Having only flown into Vegas at night, I've seen some of the brush by the road, but it mostly looks like you're on the moon when you drive through the Mojave Desert. It turns out, the incredible darkness of the desert is hiding all sorts of yucca, Joshua trees, distant mountains, and other weird desert things. Really cool. Well, warm, it is February, and it is up over 60 degrees most days already...

Won't you get hip to this timely tip:

Get your kicks on Route 66!



I've been meaning to take one of the "primitive roads" in the area for a while, just to explore the desert a little. I've also been curious about more of Old Route 66, so it was all too perfect when my Grandma Day mailed me an article that she thought I'd like (I love when she does this): The Mystique of Route 66 from Smithsonian Magazine. (That article is really great, and I've been to most of those places in Arizona.) Consider me inspired.

I've driven some of Old Route 66 before, up to Peach Springs and the entire length of it in Illinois. I definitely dig it as a slice of Americana, but I think today's adventure really kind of solidified my affinity for this road.

Today I took a primitive road from Bullhead City to Oatman, and hopped on Old Route 66 (a BLM Backcountry Byway!) for just about 30 miles of hairpin turns and switchbacks through high desert and desert valley. It was a really pretty drive, and I barely saw anyone until the road paralleled the Santa Fe Railroad and wound into Kingman. There's not much out there-- a little general store about halfway along that advertised sodas and souvenirs and had a port-a-potty in the parking lot, an assisted living home (really just a small ranch house), several long lines of mailboxes with no homes in sight, countless "primitive roads", and a lot of desert plants thanks to the recent rain (or snow, depending on the elevation).

I actually came back to town via Old 66 too, but it felt way shorter despite stopping more. There were a few pullouts along the way, including one that had some old steps carved into the side of a stony hill-- I clearly stopped to climb up and check the view (it was lovely). Back in Oatman, the burros were down from the mountains, and I enjoyed seeing them again, especially the little baby guy, who's bulked up a lot! I paid a little more attention to the rest of Oatman now that I've been there a few times. I have a new favorite road--


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You probably can't read that sign, but it says Snob Hill Road. Really. In a tiny, sparsely populated village with mostly rundown trailers, Snob Hill. I laughed.

Now I really want to drive more of Old Route 66, The Mother Road. Obvious short-term solution: from Oatman to the California border (Needles), which would include driving through the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge. I felt pretty darn American, driving down the road, Coca-Cola in hand, listening to Ray Charles sing "America the Beautiful".

those shoulders

Today would have been my Aunt Janet's 54th anniversary with my Uncle Fred, whose great legacy gave me a final push to apply to a mission program.

Appropriately, today was my interview, which was really just the first of many conversations along the way through a "mutual discernment process". It was a good talk that lead me in a direction I didn't particularly expect, but I think it's good.

I'm thankful for this possible opportunity, and as always, thankful for the love from and within my great family.

The Geography of Cousins

These thoughts occurred to me a few weeks after arriving in Arizona:

Almost all of my cousins (and there are more than 30, including in-laws) live in New Jersey. Well, almost all of my family (including aunts, uncles, grandparents and my immediate family, that puts the count well over 60) lives in New Jersey. And until very recently, I'd lived there for all but college (four wonderful years in Virginia!).

I always liked New Jersey, but something about being teased about my "homeland" in college, and then returning back to NJ into a graduate program in which hardly anyone else was from NJ, made me really defensive about my love of my home. I think the actor Zach Braff said it well, "I think when you come from a place that's made fun of your whole life... and you love it, you get defensive, and you want to sing its praises to people. I love New Jersey. I think it's made me who I am."

So back to my cousins-- there are very few who live outside of New Jersey: the Virginia cousins, the Kentucky cousin and her family, and I have another Virginia cousin and her family who I haven't seen in a long time, and a cousin in Tennessee with his family who I haven't seen in even longer, and a couple of cousins right over the border into Pennsylvania. But yeah, a lot of family in New Jersey.

Thanks to the marvelous internet and my lot of free time, I've been able to talk to some of my cousins (and a lot of other wonderful people in a lot of places!) more lately. But I think about that, and I think about how I label them by where they are in my head, and wonder, wait a second... am I the Arizona cousin?

Good grief, that can't be right. No. Can't be. I've been here a month now, but it's not like I've got an Arizona license, or changed my address or anything. And goodness knows I've got proof I'm from New Jersey.

 

Or I like this one better that my older brother edited:

(Hey, I'm not the only one whose love of New Jersey is... strong.)

I'm probably not the Arizona cousin, because it hasn't been that long and it isn't forever. Also, I'm the cousin who routinely gets asked where I'm off to next, so I'm not even sure I'm the/a New Jersey cousin so much as the nomadic relative that no one can particularly keep track of.

I guess what I realized through this stream of consciousness is, my sense of place is out of whack these days. "Sense of place" is one of those squishy geography things that I was terrified to teach in Human Geography last fall, but turned out to be one of the best conversations we had in class all semester. The term "place" implies some sort of charisma or meaning or uniqueness to it, giving it a more particular definition than the more vague "space" or the only spatially specific "location". (See, I learned things too when I taught.) On the other hand is "placelessness" which is what happens when the uniqueness of a place is replaced with repetitive, uninteresting, indistinguishable scenery, thus losing its meaning.

So my out of whack sense of place is coming from feeling this great love for and connection with New Jersey, and not being there, and not feeling such a personal attachment to Arizona, but being here. I mean, Arizona has been a pretty cool adventure so far (NRCS outings, London Bridge, tree rocks, red rocks, volcanic rocks, burros, new environments to explore and ask questions about in general). But it's not home, and knowing that it's only temporary is really going to prevent me from getting used to it and feeling any sort of settled here.

And I can't think of it as more than temporary because both Mike and I prefer the east coast. We like our families. We like our friends. We like the ocean and the forests. But in the meantime, here we are. I like to think that I'll figure out what's next for me soon, and then we can figure out what to do as a team.


And in the meantime, I'm pretty sure I'm not the Arizona cousin, but rather the cousin who is in Arizona... for now. But there are a lot of really exciting possibilities for the future, and I probably don't even know half of them. And that's kind of exciting in and of itself, but that unknown is also kind of affecting my personal sense of place. I guess that's not an entirely bad thing though. It's kind of become its own adventure, figuring out what my adventure is going to be...

Oatman

About 15 miles southeast of Bullhead City is "the ghost town that just won't die"-- Oatman, Arizona.

Of course, it takes way longer to get there than you'd think. There are two options: it's 13 miles down the road from Mike's school (which is about a half hour away) (so 27 miles/45 minutes total), or there's an unpaved county highway directly from Bullhead City that's 10.5 miles shorter but takes almost an hour, according to Google maps. We took the paved route, but it still felt like we were driving to another time and place altogether.

It's a pretty clear view from Mike's school to the mountains to the east, so we were wondering where this little town would pop up. Turns out it was hidden behind a small ridge after the road we were on connected with Old US-66... having driven across it across Illinois and elsewhere around Arizona, I've seen some of the bigger, more developed parts, but man, it is just a windy little road that is barely paved when it goes through Oatman. I imagine driving the whole thing would be really cool and interesting though.

It was a quiet morning out in Oatman. We probably saw 8-10 burros wandering around, apparently descendents of the beasts of burden brought to the area by early settlers. The town was named for one settler in particular, Olive Oatman, whose life was for some reason spared when the rest of her family was killed by one of the local tribes. She was traded to the Mohave people, who tattooed her face and apparently treated her fairly well, and was eventually traded back to a white fort for some blankets and horses.

We had an early "lunch" of fry bread and Sarsaparilla at a little inn in town, and just wandered up and down the main street to see the burros and people watch a little. It's a quiet tourist area. We were also there on the early side. Passed a lot of cars heading in that direction as we went back to Bullhead to do some grocery shopping. It was a nice change of scenery though, and I loved loved loved the little baby burro (burrito?):

 

I know it looks dead, but it was just napping.

I think I might go back via the dirt road next time I have the car...