The House on the Rock

We toured Sections 1,2, & 3 

Sue & I spent five hours wondering through the House on the Rock.  I don't know what to think of it.  I need to let the faces of all those dolls sink in.  I need to let all those walls of carousel figures sink in.  It was so dream like to walk through rooms of doll houses and then turn a corner into more rooms of doll houses.  We got the serious creeps around that part of the tour, and then there was the tower of dolls. four stories high. The porcelain stares of all those old antique dolls turning towards you on that marry-go-round tower, one after the other coming at you, looking, and passing.  Level upon level looking you straight in the eye. Suddenly someone puts a token in the robot circus wagon and the place lights up with wild circus parade music.  I got a little worried wandering when they were going to let us out of here.  It was like wondering through someones obsession. Rod Serling was going to be toking a cig around the next corner. "They thought they were entering a museum, to view oddities under glass, but to view so many objects on display in one day has an effect on your mind. Welcome to the twilight zone." What is really on display here is human obsession. Someone puts another token in and the orchestra of mannequins bust into the Blue Danube. I look up and there are elephants over me with half naked ladies standing all over them....   Did you see the bottle with the model of the baby doll laying in a coffin?  Or a few doors down of the street of Yesterday the doctors office with the jars of tape worms?  The label said, they melt away unsightly fat, and are easy to swallow; all the minute details of such a huge collection. Some of the rooms had openings high on the walls that allowed me to view parts of exhibits I had seen 30 minutes before. THe walls are all painted black to appear invisible, high ceiling low ceiling.  They are trying to imitate a dream environment. This place is museum without a curator.  Just put everything on display, no editing, an Andy Worhol movie, a stroll through the old thought bog. 

Into the Yellowstone

July 14th 2014

       Years ago as a youth I looked at an extended calendar that showed the turn of the century, 1999 going into 2000.  I discovered myself shocked, afraid at the sudden thought that my parents were going to be dead of old age by the turn of the century. I saw their deaths like a mountain range rising up before me.  It was a profound shocking sadness.  As I thought about it I got the idea I need to get through this on my own.  My parents never said anything to me about dying.  They never sat me down and said they were going to die and I should feel this way or that way.  This was a feeling entering my life, and I needed to deal & define it my own. 

       Now here on my own, enjoying coffee at sunrise in Wyoming, a pure red sunrise, no clouds only red air, deep red air. Rock Springs, Wyoming.  (my Father was born 100 years ago yesterday) Every time I see a sunrise it is good. One sunrise deserves another.  We drive north into a woodless land. The hills rise like a slow stormy sea. The car and camper toss like a boat. The Wind River Mountains appear like a coastline in the Northeast.  Small herds of wild horses dance through the waves of sage, the foam of their tails confused with the clouds.  We enter the town of Pineridge, on the banks of the mighty & majestic Green River.  The taillight on Neda is out.  We stop at an auto parts store, replace it, and enter the mountains of the Hoback River.  Its an easy valley glide into the crowded tourist streets of Jackson Hole.  We pass its city park with its arches of elk horn entrances, its pizza bars, and rafting shops, it’s level ground mountaintop easy access businesses, and mountain-man fast food, teenage delights of wilderness, dangerous, quick and manly. The town quickly ends.

      The Tetons appear to the West.  Their jagged tops streaked with snow, an impenetrable wall of indescribable beauty.   All we can do is snap a picture and hug.  Thirty three years of marriage and here we are speechless and in love. 

On into the Yellowstone we go.  Past Yellowstone Lake, up onto the great divide.  We stop at Isa Lake. It’s really just a pond that bleeds into both sides of the great divide. It is covered with lily-pads that Sue photographs; yellow flowers we have never seen the type before.  

Animals We Have Seen

 A list of animals we have seen as of July 20th

 Tick   

  Gray fox

   Prong-horned anilope

   ground squirrels

 Montezuma quail

 Mexican free tail bats

Cave swallows

Rattlesnakes

 Mountain goats

Giant Lichen Orb Weaver

Tarantula 

Tarantula Killer wasp

Mediterranean Gecko

Lesser earless lizard (white rare)

Javelinas

Roadrunner 

Bison (buffalo)

Big-horned sheep

Mule deer

Prairie dogs

Gray ground squirrels 

turkey

collared lizards

Horned-toad lizard

Audad Sheep

Red Fox

Moose

Elk

Camel

Llama

Raven

Staller Jay

River Otters

Cowgirl

4th of July Parade

We are traveling towards our next National Park the "Black Canyon on The Gunnison."  We are spending this evening in the little town of Salina, Utah.  I took in its 4th of July parade.  Sue decided to relax at camp. I went downtown and set my camp chair up on the sidewalk in front of Mom's Dinner and a bright blue building with the sign, "Pool Beer" written across its front.  I peeked in through its dusty windows.  It looked like it had been closed a long time.  At the beginning of the parade an airplane flew real low down the street and dropped a bunch of T-shirts, tote-bags and candy.  Some of the shirts landed on the roofs. The color guard appeared at the front of the parade; serious looking old fellas on horseback carrying a large American flag.  Everyone on the sidewalks rose to their feet, took their hats off and put their hands over their hearts.  There was no music only the clip-clop of the horses, and the flag flicking in the wind.  The procession of twenty riders passed. Then everyone sat down and applauded Miss North Salina and her runners-ups waving from a mile high 4x4 monster wheel pick up.  A few clowns on ATVs doing circles & wheelies followed, then a car dealer & his family throwing candy at he crowd.  There was a guy standing beside me on the sidewalk drinking out of an open container.  He grabbed the edge of one of the American flags that were displayed up and down the street, held it out towards us and said, in an angry tone, "These colors don't run." Me and the other people on the street looked at each other and wondered who he was talking to in such a tone.  We were all perplexed.  He was obviously someone who dearly needed to be put back in the parade and seated alongside  Miss teeny tiny Sevier County."  Her float filled with attendants was passing by behind him.   A girl so small she could walk upright under all the 4x4 pick-ups in the parade. A girl with a smile and wave as big as the Monster truck tires that pulled her float. She looked like someone enjoying the fourth of July.  He dearly needed to be put on her happy float, given a tiara and allowed to be one of her attendants.

Never Tame Your Inner Wlldness

6/29/14

I used the “I” touch as an alarm clock. It used the sound of a harp to wake us up at 5:00am. Our sleepy shadows milling about in the flashlight beam, lazily bumping into each other as the coffee machine gurgled. We were going to see the sun rise over Bryce Canyon.  6:09 am, is what my GPS said the sunrise was at this exact location. We had 40 minutes to drive up to Bryce Point.  By way the crow flies its not too far, but it looms over our campsite to the West; a white cliff with no evidence of its mad capped hoodoos at this distance.  I pour a second cup of coffee into my thermos & started the car. The first tones of twilight showing the silhouettes of the ridges.  The Park gate is open 24 hours. They let anyone in at this hour.  

Its a cold wind on Bryce point.  We bundle up in coats & scarves. Hats are impossible. Cuddling a cup of warm coffee we sit on the extreme edge of the cliff cosy & waited.  

We didn’t come here to see the sunrise. We came here to see our souls rise. Our souls that scientific stew of poems we perpetually stir.  We came to feel our souls rise and perhaps be visited by ancestors; the memories of our grandparents or Mom & Dad. 

    The sun shyly shuffled around behind the Aquarius plateau, the highest plateau in North America.  Then one pink finger tip at a time it crawled into the line of caves along the rim of Bryce Canyon shooting its fingernail Polished eyes into their inner most recesses.  You know how flamboyant the sun can be when it first gets out of bed. It’s all Freudian & spry.  Then like melting ice cream it drizzles its rays down the white eroded slops onto the hats of the red hoodoos.  All tied together like a child's pull toy; an insane child's pull toy. Is that a window or an eye?  The sky was monochromatic; morgue-Elvis-blue except for one tiny cloud running north as fast as it could with a red butt. The light doubles all the formations with crisp shadows slowly moving beside each stone figure, and then there were sections where the light was changed and thrown back onto walls that have seen no sun and this caused an effect where the rocks glowed from the inside, like a bed of charcoal just right to flop a steak onto, bedsprings glowing from love making, but the mountain rolls over the wind rises, and all the woman squirrels line up and do that woman thing dance just as the last bit of the bottom of the sun pulls its bare-feet up over the horizon and traipses over the land with all its heat and brightness. All of us on the overlook oooed and awed, and giggled a little bit at the nakedness of it all. The light got all over our faces and cloths.  People from around the world were up there on that overlook, they got all splattered, and are going to be forced by there deep psyches to write post cards home about the experience. I love the wildness the National Parks have retained in its system.  There is no such thing as a wild system.  Nothing is systematically wild. Never develop or tame your inner wildness; Wildness is always self-defined, and changing; topless dancers at truck stops in the middle of the desert, girl scouts earning their first badge, a fingertip of sun light on a chipmunks nose. 

      The rangers keep asking us to name the rock formations or the cliff-faces in Arches or Canyonlands, or the stalagmites in Carlsbad. I have to move to the back of the tour group because the world is just one big giant erotic hallucination to me.    

The KOA Campers of Masa Verde

All gray & slagged with sleep

It’s a long walk to the clean

brightly lit

warm seats

of flush toilets

and piped in top 40 hits

      from the 60’s

Its a long walk

Nothing is convenient

   The urinal is too bright

           we are spoiled rotten just to be here

We are born crying

Nothing is convenient

Nothing is easy

when you’re old

No matter how organized we get

or how well dressed we become

We are all naked cliff dwellers camping out back at the source of our adventure.