| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Riding around takes at least a couple of well-spent hours.
Outside the park I bought myself a bolo tie. I had earlier set myself a goal of finding one I liked. I had saved $30 on the guided tour so I was feeling expansive. Also I wanted to buy from a Navajo. I found a tie I liked at the first of a row of stores. After looking at several stores I went back to the piece I liked. It turns out Evelyn had liked other pieces of the same style. Evelyn has good taste. That's why I married her. I think that is why she married me.
We stopped at a Navajo cafe. Evelyn saw it recommended in one of the books. It was nearly empty but the customers there were Navajo, so that was a good sign. I ordered something called a 'Navajo taco,' one of the house specialities. It turned out to be a big piece of Navajo fried bread (an oval about seven inches by eight inches) covered with chile beans and beef, then topped with lettuce, tomato, and grated cheese. $4.95. I later realized that on their menu 'Navajo' was a euphemism for 'large enough to kill a paleface.' It was good though.
On the way back I wrote in my log. We stopped to take a look at the sky. I think for the first time ever I could actually see the Milky Way.
We did a wash and watched 'Alfred Hitchcock' before bed.
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We checked out of the room. We were there for three nights, but I did not particularly like the way the motel was run. (This is the Rodeway Inn in Flagstaff.) The first day we got there I had tried to cool the room and the air conditioner was not working. I reported it to the desk and they told me that the air conditioning is turned off because this is the cold time of year. I told the manager it was 78 degrees in the room and it was uncomfortable. He told me if they turned on the air conditioning they'd have to turn off the heat and it would get too cold at night. We weren't going to spend that much time in the room so I let it go, but in the evening the room was still a little warmer than it should be.
That night was the night we were at the Chamber of Commerce and I saw both a brochure for the Rodeway Inn and another that summarized motels in the area and both claimed the Rodeway Inn Flagstaff had heating and air conditioning.
That night I checked the smoke alarm and found it dead. The next morning I told the manager the battery seemed to be dead. 'Oh, that is all right. It is on the electrical system.' 'You have the smoke alarm on your electrical system?!' 'I'll check it.'
Again I didn't push it, but it was an out-and-out lie. At least I hope so. The electrical system often goes out if you have a fire. That's why you have batteries in smoke alarms, so they are independent of the electrical system. Clearly standards were slipping below legal levels and the manager was willing to let things continue that way. We'd been in precisely two motels where things had been run in what I think was a slip-shod manner. Those were precisely the two motels run by Asian Indians. Later in nearby Winslow, Arizona, I noticed for the first time that a lot of motels say on their signs 'American-owned.' They looked a little seedy also. But I am guessing that Asian-Indian-owned motels are getting a bad reputation.
Our first stop was Lowell Observatory up on Mars Hill. Percival Lowell is of course the Ross Perot of astronomers. He was from a wealthy family--the Lowells of Massachusetts as in Lowell, Massachusetts--and was given a very rare gift at age seven: a telescope. This started a life-long interest in astronomy. He got a doctorate from Harvard, not in astronomy but in mathematics. (If you're good at something, you get a degree in it. If you're just plain good, you get a degree in math. Scientists need the physical world to spur them; mathematicians can work in the abstract. Of course, I'm a mathematician.) He sent scouts to find a good place in Arizona. They picked a hill outside Flagstaff. He had a particular interest in Mars, never really discovering a whole lot of interest himself. He got hung up on the idea that Mars had canals. He charted Mars including the canals; he wrote books on the canals. Lowell did more than any other scientist to popularize the idea that Mars might be inhabited. Probably Lowell's greatest contribution was to provide facilities to others.
We were at the observatory about a half hour before it opened so we walked around the grounds. Clearly for their day these facilities represented a nice place to work. The tour started in a domed building that might almost have been an observatory. A student explained who Lowell was and a little about what was being done currently in astronomy research. There was one self-appointed jerk who complained about how much the Hubble telescope cost and how they couldn't get it right and how much more it would cost to get it fixed.
They had a device called a blink comparator that allowed you to superimpose two star photos, going back and forth to see differences. It had the two photos that established the existence of the ninth planet. That discovery was also made at Lowell Observatory.
From there the tour went to the actual observatory. The 24- inch refracting telescope seemed pretty crude, very much like a home-brew. Lens covers were made from pans from Mrs. Lowell's kitchen, for example. It was set on weights and counter-weights so the telescope could be moved by hand.
The woman leading the tour tried to keep her discussion at a low and entertaining level, almost a ditzy level.
After the observatory, we went back to Sunset Crater and Wupatki. Earlier I described how this volcano created the good farm land of Wupatki. You are no longer allowed to climb the volcano itself, but you can walk around its lava flows and there is a selfguided tour you can take. Most of what you see are strange formations of lava and the plants trying to take hold again near the volcano. Of course, a half an hour's drive away the plants took hold very well. That was what attracted Anasazi to the area. We spent an hour or so on the lava fields near Sunset Crater and then saw the part of the Wupatki ruins that we'd missed two days before.
The previous cliff dwellings we had to see at a fair distance. Not so at Walnut Creek Canyon. You can actually walk into the cliff dwellings--such as they are. They are mostly just rock outcroppings with a few rock walls added. You climb down about the height of a seventeen-story building and are on a narrow ledge with cliff dwellings on your left and nothing but a nice view on your right. (Well, that's exaggerating, but at times you were very near the cliff.) I explained to Evelyn that legend said that the milk cows were kept off at one end of the ledge and that was where the Sinagua of 850 years ago would go for their milk. 'Really?' she asked. 'Oh, yes. It was ledge-end-dairy.' The Sinagua must have had little fear of heights to live this close to the cliff.
When we were done, I looked up at seventeen stories of stairs. 'Hmm,' I said. 'What are my options?' 'March or die.' I marched.
We spent the night in Winslow, Arizona, which is very nearly as ugly as Arizona gets. It was a small town that got built up because of a railroad stop. In the days before dining cars, the train would stop and the passengers would rush out to try to order dinner. Usually the restaurants would be very slow about delivering food. The conductor would call 'All aboard!' and the passengers would pay for meals that were never delivered to them. In fact, they were meals that were never even prepared. The restaurants knew ahead of time that the train would leave too soon. That was what they were paying the conductor for, after all. Very early on, the town had a reputation for overly enjoying the advantages of having tourists. Even today, as we drive through town, the place looks a bit seedy. Motels that do not look well put-together have big signs saying 'American-owned.' We stayed at a Super 8 Motel which wasn't too bad. We ate at a Mexican place recommended in one of the tour books. It was just okay. A fifth-grade teacher in the booth behind me was telling a friend how fifth-graders had broken into the library at night trying to steal the book fair money. Oh well.
We stopped at the grocery for provisions. I only mention it because of a piece of conversation I caught in the checkout line. '... he said she needed to lie down and take a nap. She was having a stressful day. Isn't that ridiculous? Dogs don't have stressful days!'
Back in the room I saw the very tail end of a Perot talk. Then there was a half-hour political ad for what sounded like a real crack-pot party, the Natural Law Party. One of their plans was to teach all criminals in prison transcendental meditation so they could overcome their anti-social tendencies. This the candidate claimed was a proven solution.
After that, there was a good two-hour documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wrote about that in my last trip log. What I said there was based on an article I read somewhere about how the crisis was resolved. I'd given my reasons for blaming Kennedy for the crisis. This program had a lot more information and could easily have contradicted what I'd said. Actually, while it did not explicitly come out and say that Kennedy's adventurism was at fault, that was certainly a conclusion one could draw.
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We had breakfast in town, then headed out for one of the local attractions. Let me tell you about it.
This is another of those big disasters in history. Something like 47,000 B.C., there was one of Earth's greatest natural spectacles in Arizona. Over a flat plain there was suddenly a very bright light in the sky. It silently got brighter and brighter until it more than outshone many times the sun. Suddenly the plain exploded with a force greater than any man-made nuclear explosion. The sky, which earlier had been incredibly bright, went black and hot rocks fell from the sky. Trees were flattened for miles around, their tops pointing away from the explosion. No plant or animal survived for many miles around. A chunk of nickel-iron eighty feet in diameter had been captured by Earth's gravity and slammed into the Arizona desert. It left a hole more than 570 feet deep and better than three-quarters of a mile across and two and a half miles around.
Of course, a big hole in the ground is dramatic to look at for several minutes. But then what? Well, a small but rather nice museum was built around the Barringer crater--as it came to be called after Daniel Moreau Barringer, who acquired the land and first demonstrated that it was a meteor crater. Most science museums, I find, are aimed at about a fifth-grade level. The science museum in Phoenix is all pretty much aimed at pre-juniorhigh kids, though older people can still enjoy it. They don't use big words; they don't try to teach enough so the visitor might get bewildered. Not so at the Meteor Crater Museum. They use big words--some I'd never heard before. They have an interesting computer program to allow you to pick one of a fairly large number of video programs. You can say you are interested in knowing about objects in space, then choose the solar system, then Neptune. You then get a program of about five minutes telling you about Neptune, including new information from Voyager. They show you footage about the big black spot and tell you about the storm and a second one they found. There are also two video lectures and one audio lecture. |
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