hello goodbye

I made it, and this may be my last chance to post for the remainder of the week, since I'm leaving tomorrow for a Gates Scholar retreat/orientation in the Lake District of northern England. The retreat is a chance for the Gates folk to bond for a few days before the term officially starts, not to mention visit a beautiful corner of the island where Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others went for inspiration.

To make Cambridge any cuter, I think you would have to tear the whole place down and rebuild it out of candy. I arrived by bus -- called a "coach" here if it's a long-distance trip -- to a scene of people lounging and playing football on the lush grass of Parker's Piece. (Parker's Piece, I have since learned, will play a starring role in my daily commute.) The town's winding, narrow, frequently-name-changing streets are packed with shops, restaurants of every ethnic variety, and centuries-old churches and academic buildings. I'm living in a house of eight people on a residential street, a bit of a hike from most of my other buildings of interest, but that should get better once I have a bike. I have met two of the housemates so far, an Italian and a Brit, who by pure coincidence are both studying aerospace engineering.

Unfortunately, I have been thwarted so far in most of my efforts to piece together the logistical elements of my new life. I am still without an e-mail password, a bike, a "mobile", a "chequing" account, an academic gown, a key to most of the buildings at Emmanuel (my college), and various other critical things-- mostly thanks to my having arrived on a weekend, but also in part because of Cambridge bureaurcracy. Trotting off to the Lake District for a few days won't help matters either, but I will at least have Friday and maybe part of Thursday before things really get hectic.

Given my seeming preoccupation with border security, I would be remiss if I didn't discuss my customs/immigration experience. I had a layover in Dublin, and the Irish immigration officer spent a total of about 0.01 second glancing at my passport, remarking that I was moving on to the UK, stamping it, and sending me on my way. At Heathrow, much to my surprise, I didn't pass through immigration or customs at all, presumably because of the EU common travel area. Much different from my '05 experience, when I was doing the opposite-- a layover in Heathrow en route to Dublin-- and I had what felt like a long Q-and-A session at both airports. If I didn't already have a shiny student visa, I might have been disappointed about not having a stamp to commemmorate my official arrival in the UK.

That's all for now... there's been a lot coming at me, so hopefully I will have my head more in order on the far side of the Gates trip. More soon!

pictures: south dakota to chicago

Attempting to cook breakfast in high winds. In the background, our teepee.


In the foreground, the model of the finished Crazy Horse memorial. In the background, actual progress to date. (See that little spot of sky that will eventually be between Crazy Horse's arm and his horse's mane? You could put a 10-story building in there.)


Looking presidential.


Badlands sunset.


Adorable Badlands critters.


Clark Griswold Awards I: Wall Drug.


Clark Griswold Awards II: The Corn Palace, in transition from its 2008 to 2009 version.


Clark Griswold Awards III: The Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, MN. We're between his legs, to give you a sense of scale.



The crew at Monoma Terrace, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in downtown Madison. We got an impromptu tour from a talkative Gambian (not to be confused with Zambian) man who worked at the parking garage. Seeing my Alaska license plate he announced, somewhat improbably, that Sarah Palin is his "shining star." To my chagrin, in the days since then I've realized he has lots of company.


Me with the Chicago Powers clan by "the bean" in Millennium Park.

pictures-- alaska to montana

Danvers, Massachusetts / Mile 5,883 -- Sorry for the delay in getting these posted. Here's the just a teeny sampling of pictures from the first leg of the trip (more to come later-- unfortunately it's a little tedious uploading these to blogspot and getting them to stay put):

Feeding fry bread to Obama at the Alaska State Fair, Palmer


This is more or less what the Alcan looked like for the last two hours before the Canadian border.

The border: I am in Canada, Sam is in the U.S., Elise is in some kind of legal black hole.

Roadsize hazards in the Yukon: buffalo!

Liard River Hotsprings, BC, in all of their stinky glory

The Athabasca Glacier, which is along the road connecting Jasper and Banff National Parks

Lake Louise, Banff. The picture really doesn't do justice to the freaky blueness of the water. But I love how it looks like me, Elise, and the boat were photoshopped in.

I still like my "leaning piles of tiramisu" analogy. Left, pretty Banff scenery + me being a jackass. Right, a delicious dessert.

Our final morning in Banff.

The Continental Divide in Glacier National Park (Montana).

Along Going-to-the-Sun Rd. in Glacier. If you have a magnifying glass, you can see my car in the lower left.

Cheyenne graves at Little Bighorn (added in 1992 if I'm not mistaken).

the magical mystery tour's hard day's night in suburban chicago

Niagara Falls, Ontario / Mile 5,273 -- It has been an eventful few days, so I’m going to breeze over a lot… several Midwestern states may get short shrift. Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan: sorry, guys.

But I did want to report on our weekend in Chicago, which, as expected, was one of the major highlights of the Great American Road Trip. We stayed in the suburb of Highland Park with my Uncle Kevin, Aunt Robin, and cousins Rachel (10) and Aaron (6). Kevin and I have managed to cross paths several times in the last year with weddings and football games and such, but I don’t get to see the rest of the family very often. Rachel and Aaron are adorable and precocious kids and great fun to be around. I viewed the Chicago leg as family time and didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what we might do, but we did check off a fair number of sights within the Windy City, including an night at a couple of jazz clubs, a walk around Millennium Park, and a trip to the top of the Sears Tower.

On our second and final night we enjoyed an evening of refined suburban debauchery. Just steps from Kevin and Robin’s house is an outdoor concert venue known as the Ravinia, where almost every night during the summer the locals spread blankets out on the lawn and enjoy food, booze, and live music. On Saturday, a Beatles cover band called American English provided an eerily perfect imitation of the Fab Four, and in period dress and hairdos to boot. Along with a bunch of Kevin and Robin’s friends, we ate, drank, and danced the night away. At one point Elise expressed amazement that Kevin and I come from the same stock, and she remarked that I have an “inappropriately funny” family, a comment that I took with tremendous pride.

Unfortunately, Samantha had to bail in Chicago—something about having to work on Monday, I didn’t really understand—so now it’s down to me and Elise. After getting our state-visitation cards punched in Indiana (at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore) and Michigan (old town Lansing and riverwalk), we arrived tonight at Niagara Falls, the first place on our route since Glennallen, AK that I have already been to. The falls were not part of the original plan, but Elise had never been and wanted to see them, so here we are. Tomorrow night we descend on Williams College and crash with my brother, and then Tuesday the Great American Road Trip finally comes to an end.

the clark w. griswold jr. awards for excellence in roadside attractions

La Crosse, Wisconsin / Mile 4,382 -- Just so you know that our trip hasn’t consisted entirely dour and depressing stuff, here’s a few of my favorite screwball attractions from the last couple of days, all of them worthy of National Lampoon’s Vacation.

• Wall Drug. The Paris Hilton of roadside attractions, Wall Drug is famous for being famous. At one point it really was just a drug store. Its notoriety began when the owners, struggling with lousy business during the Great Depression, starting giving out free ice water to passing motorists. Since then it has grown into a tourist monstrosity, with dozens of stores and restaurants, mechanical dinosaurs, fountains, photography exhibits, and a player-piano-type contraption with all the instruments of a bluegrass band. Its notoriety rests mostly on the Wall Drug billboards that litter I-90 in both directions. (I saw one as far back as Montana.) The amateurish billboards advertise Wall Drug’s offerings of cowboy goods, 5-cent coffee, free donuts for Vietnam vets, and often just the glory of Wall Drug itself. The place is incredibly tacky, but you have to give it props for marketing genius. If it’s not in every business school textbook in the country, it should be.
• The Corn Palace. Erected to the greater glory of corn, the Corn Palace is a multi-purpose civic center in Mitchell, South Dakota, that has been decorated every year since 1905 with murals made almost entirely of corn. Each year, the murals follow a different theme, and the corn artists are currently transitioning to 2009’s theme of great American attractions. (Naturally, the place of honor belongs to the Corn Palace. Mount Rushmore comes in second.) How dominant is the Corn Palace in this community of 15,000? On the front wall of Mitchell’s City Hall, located right next door Corn Palace, is a large billboard advertising the hours of the Corn Palace—presumably so that it wouldn’t need to take up precious space on the palace itself.
• The Jolly Green Giant. As was the case in Wyoming, we did not spend a night in Minnesota and had no planned stops there. Since I-90 passes through a fairly uninspiring band far south of the Twin Cities, we were hard-up for a roadside attraction that would allow us to claim to be visitors to the Gopher State. Luckily, the travel gods arranged for us to get low on gas right around the wonderfully named town of Blue Earth, home to a 54-foot likeness of the Jolly Green Giant. We took some pictures with His Jolliness, and we also found an exhibit commemorating the completion of I-90. Much like the transcontinental railroad, I-90 was built from two directions at once, meeting on a gold-painted stretch in Blue Earth that was meant to evoke the golden spike. I was shocked to learn how recently the interstate was completed: 1978. We further burnished our Minnesota-visiting credentials by once again reading the state’s history from Lonely Planet, listening to A Prairie Home Companion from Samantha’s iPod, and listening to John McCain’s acceptance speech live from St. Paul.

"the red man has great heroes too"

Interior, South Dakota / Mile 3,709 -- This leg of our road trip was supposed to be mostly about great scenery and gigantic presidential heads, but for me the real show-stealer has been the heartbreaking history of the Native American people in this region. I don't think I was completely prepared for the emotional impact of that history. Perhaps it's because in Alaska, the Native community has fared well in comparison with the lower 48. Don't get me wrong, the Alaska Native community has serious problems to contend with, and the list is largely the same as in the rest of the country: poverty and unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, and the loss of language and culture among the youth. But due to a number of factors -- geography, Alaska's relatively late annexation by the white man, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act -- Natives are numerous, relatively prosperous, and a force to be reckoned with in Alaska. That's a very far cry from the status of Native people in South Dakota.

About ten miles from Mount Rushmore stands the world's biggest sculpture, a massive and massively unfinished statue of Crazy Horse that is being carved painstakingly into the Black Hills. Currently, only Crazy Horse's face is finished; the head of his horse is the next step. The statue is so huge that each of Crazy Horse's pupils is 5 feet in diameter, and the hole in the mountain that will eventually be the space between the man's arm and the horse's back could hide a ten-story building. The four heads of Mt. Rushmore could into the single head of Crazy Horse. I'm sorry to say that we never actively planned to visit the Crazy Horse monument, but I am glad that we did, and I might have placed a higher priority on visiting if I had known that I am part of the memorial's intended audience.

You might think that the Crazy Horse statue is in some ways a response to Mt. Rushmore, and you would be right. Construction began in 1948, seven years after Mt. Rushmore was completed. The Sioux chief Standing Bear, who commissioned the work, told the sculptor, "my fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too." Crazy Horse, a warrior chief, was never defeated in battle, never consented to live on an Indian reservation, never signed a meaningless treaty, and most likely was never photographed. (His likeness is a composite made from oral descriptions from elders who as young men saw him in the flesh.) The sculptor, a Boston-born Polish American named Korczak Ziolkowski, also had a compelling story. He began work on the monument with rickety equipment and only mountain goats to keep him company. Since his death in 1982, his wife and seven of his ten children have carried on the work. Korczak reminds me a lot of Rodney Clark, a dear soul with whom I worked in Alaska, and who possessed a lot of the same qualities: grand ambition, wild-eyed optimism, involvement of his entire family, and the willingness to adopt other people's causes as his own.

I think the Crazy Horse monument captures the pride of Native Americans very well, but it's a sad pride, a pride rooted more in the past than the present. It also seems fitting somehow that the monument is unfinished and doesn't seem likely to be finished in my lifetime. Naturally, the monument and everything else we have been seeing inspired some pretty intense discussion among the three of us, particularly as we puzzled over what the appropriate response of a 21st-century white person to all of this might look like. We've all spent the last few years in "helping" professions of one kind or another, so our discussion about Native issues fit in with the larger questions we share about the appropriateness of the kinds of "helping" that we have been doing--and whether "helping" is even the right approach to the world at all, or if we should aspire only to not be part of the problem.

We did visit Mount Rushmore too, and despite the complications to one's American pride that this part of the country can bring, I enjoyed that monument as well. It helps to remind myself that human history has been about 95 percent barbarism, and the American experiment -- however many glaring imperfections it has had in practice -- is a rare flash of light in that darkness. The dead white guys on the mountain were far from perfect, but as Standing Bear implicitly acknowledged, they're "great heroes" too.

indian country

A teepee, near Custer, South Dakota / Mile 3,539 – In trying to reconcile my American pride with the darker chapters of our history, nothing presents quite as big a challenge for me as the shameful treatment of Native Americans. Perhaps slavery is a bigger source of cognitive dissonance for many Americans, but the lasting effects of slavery are at least still part of our national discussion, and it still feels possible to heal those lingering wounds through social and cultural change. On the other hand, there would appear to be nothing that we can do now to erase the stain of centuries of large-scale killing and dispossession of the Native peoples. Indeed, America as we know it would not even exist without it—and I don’t know if I could un-wish it without running into some kind of logical contradiction.

Those kinds of thoughts were bubbling through my mind as we visited the memorial to the Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s last stand. The battlefield is located among the starkly beautiful, rolling brown grasslands of southwestern Montana. Given the cognitive dissonance mentioned above, I was curious as to how the battle would be presented to visitors. For the most part, I found the displays to be evenhanded, in a bad way. The battle was some kind of “clash of cultures” rather than a tragic event where lots of men on both sides died because of greed married to the apparatus of the state. I was encouraged, though, to learn that Congress and the first President Bush had the park renamed in the early 1990s. (Prior to that, the name had memorialized Custer). More than a century after the fact, a monument was erected to the Natives killed in battle, and red headstones were added to the places where they died just as white headstones mark where Custer and his men died. A typical headstone reads something like this: “Closed Hand, a Cheyenne warrior, fell here while defending the Cheyenne way of life.” It’s sad that this kind of recognition took so long to happen, but it provides a much more true, more useful, and ultimately more interesting story.

South of Little Bighorn, I-90 leaves Montana and lops off the northeastern corner of Wyoming. We weren’t going to spend a night in the Cowboy State, nor did we have any particular stops planned there, which gave rise to a discussion of under what conditions one could say one had “been to” a particular state. None of us had been to Wyoming before, and we all wanted to add it to our tallies with a clear conscience. Clearly airport layovers don’t count, and we all agreed that a drive-through alone is not sufficient. Beyond that, our criteria differed. Elise had the most permissive rules, to the effect that merely peeing in a state qualified one as a visitor. Mine are a bit more stringent; if a night was not to be spent in the state, then a visit to some site of historic, ecological, or cultural significance would most likely be required. The town of Sheridan looked promising, but our turn off the highway yielded nothing more than a drive through a very empty downtown (it was after 5 p.m. on Labor Day) and a stop at Starbuck’s, where we all became official Wyoming visitors by Elise’s rules. As we continued down the highway, I read aloud Lonely Planet’s segment on Wyoming history, and we listened to Wyoming public radio. (Fun fact: Wyoming gave women the vote and the right to run for office a half-century before women’s suffrage became part of our Constitution. Wyoming’s motivations were not entirely magnanimous—the all-male legislature was hoping the gesture would help reduce a 6-to-1 gender imbalance—but it was a progressive move nonetheless.)

By that point I was beginning to feel like I had officially been to Wyoming, but we made one final stop at a dive bar in Gillette for dinner and, I hoped, a local brew. Unfortunately, the bartender informed us, Wyoming does not produce any beer; “Wyoming is not that cool,” she said. This bar had a feature I had never seen before: a blackboard in the men’s room, which at that time attested to a certain gentleman’s eagerness to perform unspeakable acts and listed said gentleman’s phone number. Perhaps the blackboard is an effort to reduce graffiti by providing a different, um, creative outlet? At any rate, after witnessing that and having a bizarre encounter with a drunken local, I decided I would officially claim to have visited the great state of Wyoming.

dispatches from big sky country

Missoula, Montana / Mile 2,753 –

An unexpected visitor: “Shawn, there’s something circling our tent! It sounds like something big!” Samantha’s voice woke me in the predawn gloom on our last morning in Banff. I tend to treat animal-outside-the-tent worries with skepticism, whether they’re coming from a tentmate or, more commonly, my own overactive imagination. But there was definitely something going on outside, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. There was a padding sound, first on one side of the tent, then a moment later on the other side. The parts of our tent seemed to be rubbing against each other in a strange way. Finally, Elise—who you'd think would be least likely to figure this one out—realized what was going on. On the last morning of August, a thick, wet snow was piling up on the ground, weighing down our tent fly and periodically falling in big sloppy chunks to the ground. After two years in Africa, Elise said that she couldn’t wait to see and touch snow, and she got her wish.

Banff recap: With or without a layer of snow, Banff is gorgeous. The mountains around the devastatingly quaint Banff town are striped with ancient layers of sediment, and in different places the magma beneath the Earth’s crust has pushed them up in odd angles, so that they look like jagged, leaning piles of tiramisu. On our first day, we went paddling on Lake Louise, which is an impossibly bright turquoise color thanks to the glacial silt in the water. Lake Louise is world famous, but there were also a number of unexpectedly interesting sights. One was an area of land that is still scarred from a 1992 fire that was set intentionally by the Canadian park service. Since Banff became Canada’s first national park, naturally occurring forest fires have been beaten back out of understandable concern for life, property, and nature. The problem is that fires are an important part of a forest ecosystem, so taking them away has produced a lot of blandly uniform climax forest and caused the decline of species that thrive at other stages of forest succession, such as moose. So now Parks Canada intervenes by setting fires intentionally, when conditions are right to keep the fire in control and minimize unwanted side effects. It was just an interesting reminder that even what we think of as “wilderness” almost often bears the marks of its neighboring human society. Banff’s forests are no less a product of human intervention than another forest that has been clear cut by loggers.

Crossing the border II: Is it a job requirement for border control officers to be assholes? Or is that just part of their training?

Glaciers, under destruction: We spent our afternoon today in Montana’s Glacier National Park, and thanks to some very uncooperative weather, we only saw one glacier through a layer of fog. Before long, however, people will count themselves lucky to see even that much. According to the (U.S.) National Park Service, Glacier is projected to lose all of its glaciers by 2030. I have seen evidence of retreating glaciers firsthand in Alaska, but nothing quite so depressing as the thought that the national park that is named for glaciers will lose them all before my 50th birthday. The park is using the receding glaciers pretty aggressively as an educational opportunity, which I think is the best outcome that can be hoped for at this point.