roadtrip to georgia (part two)

[zwol]

day three (Tue 8 Aug 2006)

Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona
Such a fine sight to see
It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford
Slowing down to take a look at me
— Take It Easy by Jackson Browne (performed by The Eagles)

We stopped last night in Winslow, Arizona. There's only one woman on my mind, I am not running away from her, and we're going east, but still I had the above song stuck in my head for all of today and a good bit of yesterday.

Winslow used to be the biggest town in eastern Arizona, thanks to its strategic position on Historic Route 66™ between Albuquerque and Flagstaff. Interstate 40 bypasses the town, but Winslow embraced the fame it got from that song and is smaller today, but still doing fine. There's a park downtown with a bronze statue of a hitchhiker standing on a corner (of what would have been Route 66) with an acoustic guitar; the girl in the flatbed Ford is on a mural on a nearby wall. I failed to photograph this, but standinonacorner.com has pictures. Furthermore, you can buy T-shirts.

East of Winslow you come to the Petrified Forest / Painted Desert National Park. The petrified wood deposits are actually much larger than the park, so you can buy souvenir chunks of petrified wood from any number of roadside curio shops on your way to the park. (Within the park itself, harvesting chunks is strictly forbidden; on entry we received a warning notice telling us so, with a helpful form for ratting on anyone you see doing it. It's a good policy — the in-park forest has already been sadly diminished by collectors — but I still had the ugh, they don't trust us, reaction.) Petrified forests are a strange thing to behold. There are two kinds of petrified wood in this park: the kind that still looks like wood, which is decidedly uncanny (it's a log! but it's stone!) and the kind that looks like it's made of semiprecious gems (which it is: it's agate). However, what stuck with me is not so much the wood, as the surroundings: salty-looking mounds of whitish gray almost-stone, with strange runnels carved in them by years and years of rain. Again it doesn't look quite real, but instead of postcard fare this is more like the sort of terrain you see used for alien landscapes in SF television shows.

The ancestors of the Hopi and Zuni (the term Anasazi is deprecated, as it was taken from the Navajo language and means ancient enemy) lived in this land around 1000–1300 CE. There is a ruined pueblo within the park, and we were lucky enough to get there just as a ranger was starting a guided tour. Apparently, despite the dryness of the land, there is enough water here — from summer storms, winter snows, and the Puerco River, which runs through the park — to practice agriculture on the plain next to the mesa where the ruin is. There are three different kinds of ruined rooms in the pueblo: sleeping, storage, and one kiva, which (the ranger said) is an interesting hybrid design, showing influences from cultures both north and south of here. Sleeping rooms are tiny, and one room did for an entire families; this is thought to be to conserve warmth in winter, when it gets bitterly cold on this plateau.

Just south of the pueblo is a broken rock slope on which many petroglyphs have been carved. Many are recognizable as people or animals: there's one I remember that is clearly a waterbird with a frog in its beak. The ranger said that most of these are associated with stories told in the tribe; some we still know, some we don't. Others are functional: one here, in the shape of a C in a circle, is a solar calendar. On the summer solstice, the sun shines through a hole in the next rock over and lights up the glyph. Still others record significant events: another here is a shape seen all over the region and thought to indicate a meeting of two tribes.

Continuing north through the park, you come to an overlook on the Painted Desert. This, simply, is a large region of colorful sandy sediments that have been exposed by wind and water. That makes it sound dreadfully pedestrian, but I do not have better words. I bet it's mindblowingly beautiful at sunset; alas, we got there in early afternoon, and so my photos are all kind of washed out. After all this, we were very hungry, so we stopped at the first restaurant we came to, a cowboyer-than-thou place called The Apple Dumplin' Restaurant. We did not eat apple dumplings, only sandwiches, largely composed of meat, which left no room for the dumplings. As we go east it becomes harder and harder to get food that has vegetables in it (even in addition to the meat); especially if your appetites are small, as mine and Pam's are.

The Painted Desert is not the only interesting lookout on those colorful sediments; the Grand Canyon sees some of them, and east of the desert are the Painted Cliffs, which follow the highway for some distance. I did get some good photos of these. As we continued east, we got to watch an entire series of thunderstorms making up, along a north-south line east of us. Thunderstorms seem to build out of the clouds that are already there; in the morning you have these little tiny clouds all over the sky, but by noon they start to cluster and rise in the sky, and by three PM or so you have definite thunderheads, starting to generate lightning. We arrived in Albuquerque as the rain was starting to come down in earnest.

Photos for day three start here.