The Lincoln Highway adventures will resume tomorrow, Monday.This week: a history of hos the road got started, using Donald Davidson, the historian at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, sharing fascinating vignettes about Carl Fisher, who founded both the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Linciln Highway. He decided there needed to be a road that ran all the way across the country, all 3,700 miles or so. Then I heard from a woman in Kearney who has the actual 1916 Lincoln Highway official tour book. People had to camp. There were no motels; camogrounds were few, although eventually, tourist camps sprung up along the way. If it rained, mud kept cars off the road.Fascinating!

Lincoln Highway Lovers

I am reveling in storytelling on my job this month. On June 29, the nation will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln Highway in Kearney Neb. because it is exactly halfway between New York and San Francisco.ahaving the time of my life on the job this month. There will be parades, parties, demonstrations, historic exhibitions, shows, etc. So much excitement for a little town of 30,000 people. USA Today is sending a reporter. A German journalist rode the Lincoln Highway this spring and had a story (in German) in a German magazine.

I am writing a feature per day up to the June 30 extravaganza, and the people I am writing about amaze me. Yesterday it was a coupole from Michigan who run a club called the Tin Can Tourists. They like to camp. They drive their RVs all over the country, camp, hike, just have “clean wholesome fun.” About 50 of them are leaving Hayesville, Ohio, Sunday for Kearney.

I talked to a couple in Canton, Ohio, who have spent eight years orgzanizing a caravan of 125 historic cars, beginning with 1913 models. One group leaves from New York (Times Square) Sunday; the other from san Francisco. They will meet in Kearney next Sunday. The couple organizing this took a trip across Route 66 in 2003. They did it in 17 days; they drove a Lincoln that the Lincoln Mercury folks gave them for the publicity their trip generated.) They had such fun they turned around and began planning this trip as soon as they got home. They’ve planned it for eight years.

Then there are the Lincoln Highway Lovebirds, aged 88 and 100l who will drive from Pittsubrgh, starting Sunday. They were widowed and married seven years ago. The woman said, “He’s the love of my life.” These two chatted like a couple of 40-year-olds. They MET as a result of the Lincoln Highway. She was president of her Lincoln Highway Association and needed a speaker for an annual meeting. Someone told her about a man who had crossed the Lincoln Highway with three fellow Boy Scouts and three leaders back in 1926, before it was even paved.
She found him online.He came and spoke. The next year, he went to San Francisco to speak again, and she was living there with her children by then, and the Lincoln Highway Assn. asked her to meet him at the airport and drive him around. She did. Sparks flew. They were married within a year.

So many stories. So many fascinating, lively people!! I am having a ball. People are coming from Norway, Russia, GeGermany and Spain, too.

My blog is back!

Friends: It is June 16, 2013, and after a two-year absence, I am resuming this blog. I loved writing it, and I have missed it. I have had some e-mails fits and starts and snags since a hacker got into my account in January, so it was difficult to resme writing there when I feared that the creeps who got into my account might also bust into yours.

So…I am just starting my second year in Kearney, Neb., where I am covering business, lifestyles and features for the Kearney Hub, a six-day-a-week paper in Kearney, a town of 30,000 people three hours west of Omaha. If you look at a map of Nebraska, find I-80, and where it dips a bit in the middle of the state, that is Kearney. The freeway follows the Platte River, which is why it does a little wiggle by Kearney.

I miss trees. I remember Ohio, and how rich it was with trees of all shapes and sizes, crowded together in the woods and parks and neighborhoods, with forests to hike in and camp in, and little rivers bubbling through them. I took all that for granted. That does not exist here. At home, trails are laid under the shelter of leafy trees.

I find the prairie fascinating, esp. the way the land rolls, and rises like the sea, then softly recedes back into flatness; and this morning, I hiked the prairie. My friend Lori Potter went out to a Nature Conservancy prairie to take pictures, so I went along. She likes to focus on wildflowers and birds, so she did that, and I just hiked for 40 minutes, out under the sun. There were no trees!

I expected shade and woods and all, but no, this was out on the prairie, with prairie grass about knee-high, and some wildflowers, and as I walked birds would suddenly rush up and fly away from the prairie grass. There was a herd of cows at least a half mile away. The slowly began to amble up towards my trail (a path mowed on the prairie grass, not a “trail” like in the woods at home.

I could hear birds and see the sun, and from far away, I heard train whistles from the long freights that criss-cross the Union Pacific tracks a few miles north. i wondered what it would be like to work outside in the sun, with the songs of birds, every day. I was just a little bug under tht sprawling sky and land and distant train whistles.

iver,  so if you look south,towards the river, you will see a little wall of green against that enormous sky, I I haum.nausturninf I am resuming this blog aftrl

Sheep and chickens!

I have a new job at Ghost Ranch: on weekends, I’ll feed the farm animals – seven sheep and about 15 hens and one rooster. I am thrilled.

I’ve always been fascinated by farm animals. i’d head to the county fair and linger in the barns with the cows and sheep – even the smelly pigs! I’ve always imagined living on a farm. Now I will feed the sheep and hens/rooster every day, be sure they have water, even use a pitchfork to stab some hay and put that in the sheep pen, too.

Kris, a volunteer here at Ghost Ranch from eastern Nebraska, has been doing this all fall, but she’s going home Nov. 27. The ranch hands (Bennie and Sabino) feed the critters during the week, but they aren’t fed on weekend, when Bennie and Sabino, who live nearby, are off.  The animals survive – but Kris has been feeding them then,  and she worried about them, esp. in the winter.

So I said I’d love to do it. I’ve never had relatives on a farm, never wandered into animal pens; I did milk cows during a church youth group week in Middlebury, Vt., but that’s the extent of it. Kris showed me how to do it yesterday. I spent the afternoon in the pens on the northwest corner of the ranch, under the bright sun, dumping food into the containers and pitching hay.

There are seven sheep. two seem to be the alpha sheep; the rest just bumble along behind them. They are growing fat coats for winter. As for the hens – they peck around, lay eggs dring the day, and I will collect those too and give them to kitchen and maintenance workers at Ghost Ranch, all of whom live nearby.

I can’t wait to do this. It is something very basic that humans have done for centuries – my grandparents did it – but which I, born and bred in a post-World War II suburb and sent to college and undertaken a profession –  have never even attempted.

My cousin’s children in Bennington, Vt., live on a farm. They grew a few crops this summer, and they just slaughtered pigs. They are educated but they are learning to live off the land in ways most of us never do. I will keep you posted!

 

Dwindling crowds

The cottonwoods have dropped all their leaves, and crowds are dwindling here at Ghost Ranch. The last guests from the RAH! (Roll Around Heaven) class left after the dalai lama from Bhutan gave a peace service/offering (?) Friday.

The First Presbyterian Church women from Albuquerque were here for the weekend, but by Sunday night, the dining room that seats 300 had just two tables of people – about seven volunteers and a few B&B guests.

Last night, we put little candles on two tables. We wanted to serve wine, but the dining manager said that was a no-no.  We have just a handful of guests – a couple from Long Island touring the Southwest for their 45th wedding anniversary. They went to Las Vegas and San Diego, then drove north on Route 1 to San Francisco, the Napa Valley; went to Lake Tahoe and Reno, then flew to Albuquerque and are here at Ghost Ranch for a few days. The husband was here about 11 years ago. They are friendly and talk a lot – typical New Yorkers.

There’s also a young woman from Brainerd, Minn., who got gift money from her uncle for a three-week road trip. She went to Sious Falls, S.C., then Grand ISland, Neb., and will be here for a week. I told her to drivve over to the rez to visit Joe. He and Janice are going to New Orleans for Thanksgiving, but Joe said Ramson will be in the shop, and there might be dances or ceremonies. Ramson is a terrific talker and interpreter. She’s very intrigued and may go.

We also have a woman, a landscape designer from San Diego who is healing a broken romance. She said “something” made her drive here. She’s overwhelmed. I took her to Mass Sunday at the monastery 13 miles out in the Chama River canyon.  She wants to stay at least until Sunday so she can go to Mass again. She is hiking today. She has discovered our labyrinth by the mesas, too, and the Japanese peace garden. She is soaking it all in.

It is quiet, like the season. All is winding down here. We now soak our own dishes after dinner so the kitchen folk can go home early.

Two young women hiked to Box Canyon this morning and saw fresh mountain lion and bobcat tracks. The rule here is: don’t hike there alone. A coyote is hunting daily on our alfalfa field. Today at dawn, he howled, and another animal wailed. I think the coyote found his breakfast.

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Adios, mouse!

My little roommate is history, dispatched off to mouse heaven with a slop of peanut butter on a mouse trap. Bennie and Antonito in the kitchen told me they have a “new kind” of trap that grasps the mouse with glue, but my fellow volunteers (all of whom had mice in their houses) swear by the common trap. It worked – but I may keep it baited all the time because mice will come in, seeking refuge from the cold.

We had a little snow last night that dusted the mesas and was lovely this morning. I keep writing about the landscape, but it is awe-filled. The alfalfa field gently slides a mile out to the highway (U.S. 84) and we can see way beyond that, out to the Chama River and the Jemez Mountains beyond; it is grand, and when I go outside in the chilly morning and walk a half mile up to breakfast, I never fail to feel reverence and joy, even after much time here.

Last night we volunteers had our weekly Monday night evening of togetherness at Beth and Kris’s joint house out by the campground. We worked a jigsaw puzzle and some knitted, and we talked, and it was quiet and restful. All four women there will leave by Dec. 1.

I am one of just two volunteers who will stay all year. The other is Carol, the librarian, who spends weekends in Albuquerque because her son, 30, has a degenerative disease that struck him at 14, and he is dying. She worked for artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived and painted here, and she has lived on the Navajo and “two other” Indian reservations, and I am anxious for some time to sit down and talk, but that will come here. It always does.

I had breakfast this morning with the two southern California men who run Stillpoint, a two-year course for spiritual directors that meets here four times a year.

Tonight I will go to a class being taught this week by Jessica Maxwell, a lively redhead who used to write for Audubon and National Geographic and similar quality magazines – but who kept having spiritual experiences – like seeing her father’s face in the sky, smiling, after he died. Her sister, elsewhere, saw it too. They had no religious training and thought it was all blather.

She thought she was crazy, seeing her father’s face in the sky, until she chanced upon a professor from Oregon who confirmed all this – and much more. She now writes best-selling spiritual books. We have become fast friends; she is so much fun. She insists we all experience surreal things but keep our mouths shut because society shuns the spiritual. If it can’t be “proven,” it doesn’t exist.

Her class of 12 meets after dinner and tonight they will see a spiritual movie, and she invited me to come – insisted that I come. She wants me to sit in on her class all day, but I’ve been proofing the 2012 Ghost Ranch catalog, 72 pages – and I cannot go.  The proofing has been fun. Tomorrow I help the staff prepare for the board meeting this weekend.

Even with my mouse, I am so grateful, so blessed, so happy to be here, so in awe of the landscape and the full moon, and the stimulating people here. I have been reborn here.

Home, at last, in New Mexico

I am back home. I drove down the mile-long dirt driveway into Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, N.M., at 3 p.m. Sunday,  and I stopped at the “City Slicker” cabin (yes, from the old movie with Billy Crystal) along the road, on a high ridge, and nearly wept with joy. Spread out in front of me was a panorama of mesas, a cloudless sky, and far off, tiny rustic Ghost Ranch buildings settled almost invisibly into the mesas.

I was home. Where my heart lives.

My friend Ted was here, having hiked with the Sierra Club at the ranch that afternoon; he volunteered at Ghost Ranch with me last year and now rents a house about 25 minutes south of Ghost Ranch. He helped me unload my car; then we sat and drank wine outside, by a golden cottonwood, dwarfed by the grand mesas to the north and east, and mountains to the south and west, and I knew I was home.

At 5:30 I had dinner with old friends – so many hugs, laughs, a stimulating discussion on health care – and then I took my laptop to the cozy, comforting, beloved, 24-hour Ghost Ranch library. I found a little carrel by a window – one of my favorite places last year – and worked on my Sun News column, due this week. Then I came back to the little house that will be my home for the next year, and hopefully, long beyond that.  It was very dark. I forgot my flashlight. but I stood and looked up, at the stars, and my eyes adjusted.

I am working in fund-raising and all week I’ve been going over donor records and folders, weeding out those who no longer give. Monday was Halloween, and in the afternoon employees dressed up and hiked to various offices getting treats. I had no costume, so I ws one of two judges, stationed in the dining hall where employees got caramel apples, freshly made. Such fun.

It’s the people who are unforgettable – old friends and new ones. This week there is a big writer’s conference here, and I had breakfast this morning with a woman from Springfield, Ill., a mother of six, who, with her Presbyterian pastor husband, run a successful drug treatment program for the last 18 years.  She hopes to write a book about it. Another woman at the table is a retired community college president from near Ventura, Calif.,  not far from where Sara and Peter used to live.

At lunch today I ate with one of the writing workshop instructors, from Omaha, who started out in banking, hated it, and now writes and edits full time. with him was a Methodist minister from near Pittsburgh who retired so he could write books. And tonight I ate with a Presbyterian minister from Traverse City who wants to come to Ghost Ranch after she retires next year.

There is so much to say, to listen, to learn.  There are 200 people or so here, each with a story. Tomorrow will be the third meeting of the lunctime book club, when anyone can eat near the fireplace in the dining hall and discuss their favorite books.

I awoke to tiny snow flurries this morning and saw black, angry clouds over the mountains to the southwest, but within a few hours the sun was out. Snow covered the ground north of here, an area towards Colorado which is higher than our 6,500 altitude. The snow was a novelty, as were the growling gray clouds, but it dissipated. 

I am living in the cozy back half of a house – little living room, tiny kitchen, big bedroom and bathroom and a desk in a spacious hallway where I can get the Internet. I have found posters etc. for my walls. It is very dark at night; I am getting used to that. Tonight I heard coyotes not far away. At night are more stars than I have seen since I left here a year ago, a sky freckled and spattered with tiny pinpoints of light, creating lovely patterns, and to the southwest, a swelling moon. I look up in awe.

It is quiet and still. I do not lock my door; I am adjusting to that.  And I was told to drive my car at least once a day, even if just the mile-long dirt road around the ranch alfalfa field (our main road), so mice and rats do not climb into my engine for the winter to keep warm, and nibble on my wires. That happened to someone here last year and repairs cost $200.

My housemate (she has the front half of the house, but our living spaces are separate) is away weekends because her son, just 30, is dying of a degenerative genetic disease. She is about my age; she is running the Ghost Ranch library – and years ago, she spent weekends with artist Georgia O’Keefe, who used to live here, two miles out another dirt road. She seems sweet and cheerful despite the agony of her son wasting away – she says this place gives her strength. I want to hear all about Georgia O’Keefe. She asked if I wanted to share the cost of satellite TV this winter, and I smiled and said no. I don’t need TV.  

I am so content and happy. I prefer little dirt roads and paths here, and mountains and mesas, and walking to work from breakfast – I even like walking TO breakfast. My house is a half mile from the dining hall, but the scenery is so glorious that it is a joy. And my old friends and new friends and new people and new stimulating ideas – I think I have, at last, died and gone to heaven.

City life: $$$$

Back in the city for six months, I still struggle to adjust. I stand outside looking in.

After eight months at Ghost Ranch in 2010, I see it all with new eyes, as if they are still wet from birth. Stores. So many stores. They advertise, hold sales, offer coupons, whatever it takes to get people inside. This is what Americans do: they shop. Buy this, buy that, whether new tires or a new toothbrush or a new sweater. They redecorate their houses, lay new carpet. They buy newly styled tops for summer. They buy buy buy.

Since I lived in a lovely, lonely place a half hour from a gas station, I stopped buying. Instead, I read.  I wrote. I hiked. I explored, went camping, watched the moon, hiked at dawn. I withdrew from the world and spent Sunday mornings at Mass with just 18 people far, far, far from stress-filled cities. I lived with crows and wolves and mice and an old mare named Lady, who died in November and is buried at Ghost Ranch, in a back pasture, below the mesas.

I see no sense in spending money. I go to the drug store for toothpaste and contact lens solution. Period. End-of-season sales, new clothes, new shoes are of little use to me. I did get new sandals in May because my others fell apart after eight years; that was my only big purchase.

Meanwhile, I read articles about people redecrating their living rooms. Building new homes from scratch with a custom builder, getting $400 tattoos, splurging on dazzling new cars.  This is America: work to earn money, then spend it.

We spend, spend spend. No wonder America is trillions of dollars in debt. It’s our hobby.

New Mexico moon

I haven’t written here for weeks. I have been in Cleveland since July 1 and on hiatus. Then Saturday night, after my mother’s 90th birthday party at a rural winery in Ashtabula County, I stepped out onto the little deck outside the private party room. I looked up, and there, peeking out behind clouds, was a full moon.

I haven’t seen the moon since I returned from the west in July. It fades into oblivion in the suburbs, where people seem too busy working and commuting to look up into the sky at night – and trees often block the view.

But there it was, a whispering veiled sleepy full moon, hanging, a silent, warm memento of the enormous Western sky and the moon that I saw there every night, hanging above the mesas and Pedernal in New Mexico. I knew its cycles; I watched it grow and swell and bulge from a yellow slit in the sky to a full round globe ready to burse; and then it would fade slowly, disappear until very late at night….how I miss it.

That moon was like a little night light from the wonders of the west. The light is still on. What am I doing in the city among cars and traffic, stress and noise, a hectic place where I will never again feel at home?

That lovely moon gave me a distant hug and reminded me that my heart waits for me in the silent glory of the West.

Soap is cheap

I’ve gotten a couple of curious e-mails about my wretched existence at the North Rim suggesting that perhaps I am a snob for not happily settling in.

My grandparents on my father’s side were raised in Appalachia, the lovely, impoverished hills of Kentucky. We’re relatives of Daniel Boone. We’ve all been to the sagging, empty little house she grew up in (gone now) and the little graveyard that climbs up a steep hill across the scrawny road from their house. They left there, their cow in tow, heading to Middletown, Ohio, so that they, and we, would have a better life . We all have. They ran a grocery store and raised nine children, nearly all of whom went to college and prospered; and their  grandchildren became architetcts, librarians, writers, teachers, computer wizards, musicians, etc. Nobody gave them anything. They did it themselves.

As my grandmother always said: nobody is too poor to buy a bar of soap.

Many folks at the North Rim never learned that. They left beer cans on the ground. They trashed the place. They scoffed at posted rules about computer use, so management shut the computers down. They siphoned gas out of the cars that a few of us had. Rich or poor – rich people can be boors, too – who wants to live in the midst of this?

 Management cared nothing about its employees. No toilet paper, no cleaning products, no hangers, no lamps, nothing in the dorms beyond a bed and a three-drawer chest for each person. No chairs, no lounge, no place to sit, literally. They could have informed us in a letter: “workers must bring toilet paper and Lysol….” and  I’d have brought those items. They didn’t. No doubt there’s a curious story there.

I made friends with many co-workers. I didn’t care who they were or how many tattoos they had. I never ate alone. When I got there I noticed people eating alone – plenty of folks did, gulping down food with sullen looks on their faces – but I never did. I socialized. In fact, when I left, I was surprised at how many people I wanted to say good-bye to after just six days. People in the kitchen, including the Navajo dish-scraper who was teaching me Navajo words. A Navajo woman who’d left the rez years ago and now lived in Scottsdale. She sold Indian jewelry in the rim gift shop.  The assistant front desk clerk, a white woman.  Eric, who was black and gay, the very first person who greeted me when I arrived.

When I went into the rim gift shop to buy shirts for my grandchildren before leaving, I saw more people I knew – the postmaster, in his 60s, who donned a helmet and rode his bike to work every day. A few other employees in the gift shop – white college girls (sorry – probably too “upper class” for Joe.) The white female ranger who led the campfire program on squirrels. I said good-bye to Jim, the gay concierge in the lodge, whose mother had moved into my room. The older men who ferried the employees to their job in little white vans – I knew all of them too.

Oh, and the little toothless jockey who’d been thrilled when I talked to him behind the lunch counter, when I stood and listened to his stories and didn’t hurry to a table despite my hot food. He was a friend from that day on. A tattooed room cleaner who told me she cleaned 14 rooms a day, 30 minutes each per room; and you leave when you’re done, not when you’ve put in eight hours, she said.

Intriguing people. I knew some who’d left, like the Australian exchange student who fled in the dark of night; and the girls from the Phillippines who were worried that their visas would expire, and one of them did, so workers in the chuckwagon staff collected a few dollars to help her,  and vowed to hide her if immigration authorities ever showed up. The old guy who drove the employee-activity van. One night, I ran into him at the rim. Nobody had shown up for his trip to see the full moon rise over the rim, he said, so he came alone.

 

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