Posts

The past few days have been a whirlwind of parks, hikes, overlooks and driving. Orit and I both feel like we would like to take a few days to slow down and digest everything we’ve experienced, so we changed our plans for the coming weekend and will try to stay in one place for 3 (!) nights. The day before yesterday was probably the toughest we’ve had in our trip so far. There is no external reason or constraint that caused it to be like that. In other words, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We started the day with a fairly strenuous 2.5 mile roundtrip, 1000 feet elevation gain hike in Capitol Reef National Park, to see a really nice arch. We then drove 2.5 hours in beautiful terrain to Arches National Park, and spent 3 hours exploring its various lookouts and short hikes. Though we didn’t do any strenuous hikes there, we were completely exhausted by the time we arrived at our hotel. By then we had walked more than 10 miles, some of it in rough terrain, and have been in the car for hours. Delirious, we went out for dinner, wolfed down some salad and pizza at Antica Forma, a really nice Italian style pizza restaurant, got back to the hotel, dipped in the hot tub for a bit and collapsed into bed. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. ...

Yesterday we drove to Chaco Culture National Historic Park, a little known park in the northwest corner of New Mexico. It preserves a canyon with several so called “big houses” built by Chaco people, which modern pueblo people see as their ancestors. It is another landmark showcasing the culture of ancestral pueblo people like Wupatki, Mesa Verde and Capitol Reef. The big houses might have been used for religious purposes, and were built around 1000 years ago. They show great architectural skill. Some of them are 4 stories high, and all sites are perfectly aligned with several celestial phenomena, such as the equinox, winter and summer solstices and certain moon phases. There are many ceremonial round structures called Kivas throughout the structures, and the scale is quite impressive. The buildings are built from stone, wood and clay, and have a sophisticated core-and-veneer construction which made their walls strong enough to hold the weight of 4 stories. ...

After visiting Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins, we drove to Taos. The drive from Aztec to Taos is gorgeous. You have to cross some part of the Rockies, and the high elevation meant there was still plenty of snow on the ground along the way. It was really really pretty. I was also excited to cross the continental divide. There is something so magical in crossing this invisible line where rain falling on one side will go to the Pacific and rain falling on the other will go to the Atlantic. There is very little to tell you that you crossed it, aside from the convenient sign. That we now know where it passes with great accuracy always makes me think about all the engineering achievements of the 20th century, and though today we look at some of them critically (Powell lake, anyone?), they are still inspiring to me. It also marks an important milestone in our trip. It is as if we are now starting to descend towards the south, though geographically speaking, this is not entirely true. ...

The city of Los Alamos sits on a secluded mesa somewhere between Taos and Santa Fe. Back in 1943 it was a school for well to do boys called Los Alamos Ranch School, when the government bought it and turned it into a secretive weapons program called The Manhattan Project. About two and a half years later the project conducted Trinity the first large scale nuclear test, which marked the dawn of the nuclear age. The project produced Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by Fat Man which was dropped on Nagasaki. Arguably, those bombs contributed to Japan’s decision to surrender, ending WWII in the Pacific theatre. ...

We said goodbye yesterday to our Airbnb in the Nambe pueblo. It is a very cozy Airbnb, situated in an old adobe style house that is nicely renovated. We stayed here for 3 nights and it started feeling like home. It is great to be somewhat stationary for a little bit, and have a base from which to explore. The apricot tree near our Airbnb just starting to flower At some point during our stay, our host stopped by to chat, and we talked for a long time. It was a really interesting conversation, though she did most of the talking. She started by telling us about the history of the place, and how she and her husband bought it several years ago and renovated the structures to create several Airbnbs, but how the vineyard, which is also part of the same property, was bough by another buyer. She is a retired white woman, but the property is inside ancestral Puebloan land, which is a bit unusual. After a few sentences she started referring to the other buyers as “the Indians”. She explained how water rights are an issue and how the ongoing drought makes the nearby creek have too little water for “the Indians” to water the vineyard. She also made some racist comments about how they prefer to not work the vineyard and instead get money from the federal government. I was worried about how the conversation might go from there. But then we moved to a different subject, and told us about how they recently hosted a family of Afghan refugees that were being resettled in the US. It is a dramatic story - the family, a dad, a mom and a few very young kids, comes from a rural area near the border with Pakistan, and they knew nothing of the ways of a western family. Everything was new to them - cooking inside the house, on a stove. Using an oven. A fridge. Supermarkets. Car seats. She had to explain stuff to them, using largely signs and gestures, as they speak no english, and there wasn’t always a translator available. She talked for a long time, telling us story after story about her experience of hosting that family, until it became clear we are probably the first people she’d told about it. When we discussed this later, Orit suggested that hosting an Afghan family might not be considered a purely good thing in those parts, that people might have objections and view this more critically, so she may be just keeping those stories to herself. The more we expressed our admiration to our host for her actions, the more she felt comfortable and the more her stories flowed. I was very moved by her stories, it is quite rare to get an opportunity to play such a role in someone’s life, and our host seemed to just do it because she could not not do it. It made me think of baby A, which Orit and I fostered during 2020. We also taught him about the world, we also communicated with him with more than just words. And for me, it also felt like I could not not do it. There was no other realistic option. ...

El Paso We enjoyed our one night stay at the Stanton House in El Paso. The hotel is nicely appointed, and though we didn’t make use of the spa, it still was a good alternative to camping in the rain. We had dinner at a great restaurant that felt so different from the bay area. It was clearly a place people came for special occasions, and the restaurant played its part, with lots of very well dressed waiters hovering over every table, a good wine list and some purely for show gestures, like bringing a mini coat rack next to every woman, so she can hang her purse on it. I can hear the eyes of every Berkeley-ite rolling at how un-woke that is. Why assume that only the woman has a purse? And with the constant “yes m’aam” and “yessir”, they are making assumptions about people’s gender preferences… ...

It was already a few days ago that we left Austin on our way to Houston, but it feels like much more time has passed! The drive to Houston is a short 2.5 hours on the freeway and goes through the Texas German Belt, where lots of people still consider themselves Deutschtexaner. We spent some time going up and down between the small little towns that dot the area, and sampled some of the local specialties - some Czech inspired Kolach, some Texas BBQ in a little shack that does not look like it contains such delicious food. The scenery was also nice, with cows grazing against a backdrop of rolling green hills. It is easy to see how Germans immigrants felt at home here. ...

We spent the night in Cedar City, Utah, and drove the 2.5 hour drive to Capitol Reef National Park in occasional snow showers and a little bit of rain. Despite the weather, the drive was beautiful, and though it was cold and very windy, we had lunch right at the entrance to Capitol Reef. We were originally planning to spend the day visiting Arches National Park, and spend the night in a campground near Moab. But we decided that braving freezing temperatures and a chance of rain overnight were not the experience we were going for, and that we should stay in a hotel or airbnb instead. Also, based on our experience of Zion being swamped with too many visitors and information on the Arches website, we decided to go for the nearby but much less well known Capitol Reef. I feel like on both counts it was a good decision. ...

When we started planning our roadtrip we chose New Orleans (or NOLA as many here call it) as the destination of our first “leg” of the trip. Neither of us has been here before, we heard so much about its unique culture, food, music and natural surroundings, and it seemed like a good starting point to the “deep south” portion of our trip. So it was very exciting to actually arrive in NOLA, at the end of a very long day of driving. It was nearly 10pm by the time we were settled in our hotel. We were so excited about being here, and have heard so much about the nightlife, that we decided to go out and explore. Our hotel is right outside the french quarter, to its northeast. We walked a short few blocks and found a bar with a band playing live jazz music. There were a few more nearby. It was great to hear live music in the middle of the week, late at night. After a while we ran into a band playing live music in the street. There apparently are not enough bars, and they just had to play in the street. Everyone was very loud, the bars with sound systems that blasted music especially loudly, and the street bands with very loud brass instruments and a big drum. Over the next few days we would see (and listen to!) several more bands in various bars and on the street. The music we listened to was very varied. It was mostly traditional Jazz but there was some blues, rock and folk music mixed in. ...

After a few days in NOLA we started feeling more at home. We explored the French Quarter inside and out, and visited another famous neighborhood, the Garden District, where there are nice big mansions, built by NOLAs richest people in the 19th century and preserved beautifully. People also come here for shopping. There is, of course, more to NOLA than just music, shopping and nicely preserved historical neighborhoods. NOLA was the center of the slave trade in the lower south during the so-called antebellum period. Antebellum is from Latin: Ante (before) and Bellum (war), e.g. before the war, which in the south means the American civil war. Writing the term feels a little repulsive, like wearing a MAGA hat. It also feels wrong, like saying “יורד” in Hebrew to describe someone who emigrates from Israel (the word comes from the root “to go down”, as opposed to the word that is used to describe someone who emigrated from another country to Israel, where the word is “עולה”, from the root “to go up”). That is to say, I don’t like using language that serves a very specific political purpose, one that I disagree with, where the words have been so well integrated into the culture as to almost become invisible. In the same vein, a shift has been taking place in recent years, from using the word “slave” to using “enslaved person”. As Katy Waldman points out “To reduce the people involved to a nonhuman noun … reproduce(s) the violence of slavery on a linguistic level; to dispense with it amount(s) to a form of emancipation”. ...