Fourteen Days in May, and Three in June

A Pinterest photo

Frederick March played U. S. President Jordan Lyman in the 1964 movie, "Seven Days in May".  President March wanted to bring the Cold War to an end by signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviets, and the generals in the Pentagon did not like the idea.  Bert Lancaster played General James Scott, and General Lancaster plotted to overthrow Frederick March in seven days.  Jiggs Casey, played by Kirk Douglas, and aide to Lancaster, alerted Frederick March.  

Don't let the names or the plot bewilder you, which was my intention.  The plot has almost nothing to do with this blog article, or with "The Russian Thing" in Washington, D.C. right now, except that our most recent excursion with our Casita took place during the last fourteen days of May, and the first first three in June.  

Our grandson, Spencer Weis, was graduating from high school in Decorah, Iowa, so we added a few days to our itinerary to loop up into Minnesota where some of our favorite people and memorable winters live, don'tchaknow?  


 Our plan was to find a route to the Upper Midwest that we had not already worn ruts into, stopping somewhere pleasant each night .  It was not a marathon we had in mind, but a relay of easy days.

The first night we stopped in Alamogordo, New Mexico, which is not a part of Mexico any more, and which, so far as I could tell, did not have a fat poplar, either.  It did have rain and almost freezing weather at night.  I am not a hero when it comes to setting up camp--which is not camp, but just connecting water, electricity, and cable lines--while wearing Tucson summer clothes.

Our plan was to meet Mark and Patty in Clear Lake, Iowa, and our route involved stops in Raton, New Mexico (Rat, or Mouse), and Goodland, Kansas, and somewhere between Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska.  Then we heard from Patty that the forecast was for rain in Clear Lake, and they had a teardrop trailer, which involved some outside living, so they suggested we skip Clear Lake and come directly to Minneapolis and stay with them a couple of days.


That did not take much debate.  Make it a rule:  if the choice is between a campground--even a pleasant campground on a lake--and staying with Patti and Mark, go to Minneapolis!

Cooper, our guard dog, settled onto Patti's lap to keep an eye on things.  We visited Minnehaha Falls, just to see what living in a place with water was like, and to eat fish tacos.

Our original plan had been to attend Spencer's graduation ceremony, but Midwest graduations have more people than available seats and, anyway, the party for his family and friends was a week later, so we elected to attend that, which meant we had time to follow the Mighty Miss'sippi down to Hastings to see Carmen and Pete, whom Mari had known almost forever, and I have known since Mari.

(I am learning how to pronounce Southern things by listening to John Grisham's books on tape while traveling, so that when The South Will Rise Again! I might be able to pass for a White Christian God-fearin' patriot.  Good luck to me!)

Carmen (who is recovering from every damned thing that can go wrong all at once) and Pete (who cannot decide whether his name is Jerry or Pete) took us to the river where a plaque on a bench indicates what everyone thought of their son.


We watched a riverboat take the last of its barges through the locks on its way to St. Paul.

Hastings is a most interesting small river town, not just because of the river and its history, but because of people like Jerry and Carmen and Pete.


We explored the falls on the Vermillion River and a grand old home of Somebody Civil War who settled in Hastings for the same reason that Pete and Carmen did:  it is a pleasant place.

I must say, though, that the Vermillion River is not vermillion.

We put the pickup into reverse, and went back to Minneapolis to spend a night with Joel and Susan, pinning them down for a night before they left to spend what was left of the holiday weekend with extended family at a lake in Wisconsin.  Before they drove north, and we south, we went to the Nokomis Beach Cafe again, where for years we met more mornings than not to debate politics and religion and books and baloney with more fury and passion than cool Minnesota Nice requires.  The Cafe is one of our favorite places on earth.  For that we can thank Dennis and Mary and all kinds of good people and dumb debates.

But it was Spencer we had come to celebrate, and we did!  In the same house where Mari and I had once lived, and where Gail grew up, which she and Marty bought when they returned to Decorah to raise their children, Spencer greeted nearly every human being he had ever known who came to be glad with him.

Spencer's friends came to enjoy being with him, and to hassle him.  His relatives admired how tall he had gotten over the years since they had first caught sight of him wearing nothing but a diaper and a smile.  He still has . . . no, the smile . . . and he admitted, after the first hour or two, that his face hurt from using it.

He really wanted to tell everyone how hard his Dad and Mom had made him work just to get things ready, but he is a genuine hero, so he just smiled and said Hi!, and Thank you!, and Do your feet hurt, too?

Mari Many Quilts had gone into high gear a month before we left Tucson, to create a quilt for Spencer, with patches designed to suggest what his life had been like, until now.  There were soccer balls and canoes, Luther College symbols (next stop in life), music icons and oreos and their dog, Boomerang, and probably a Weis Buick (Not!).

Spencer's little sister had been told not to embarrass him by telling everyone what he was really like, so she didn't do that.  She made up stuff, instead.

Gail and Marty tried not to look like proud parents, but that was pretty much a hopeless task, so they pretty much looked like proud parents.

Spencer's so-called friends wore T-shirts with Spencer's picture on them, just to make Spencer feel glad to be out in public with them.  (It would take that.)

We, almost ready to follow Horace Greeley out west, again, bought a cooler and a stack of Mabe's pizzas for Michael, who thinks that both he and Mabe's pizzas are Italian, while Mari got on the internet to locate every place between Iowa and Arizona where we could buy dry ice.

Semi-determined not to take the same route going home to Tucson, we stopped first at Saylorville Lake between Ames and Des Moines, and then near Oklahoma City which, to our surprise, did not have a tornado warning.  We had to make do with thunderstorms on the horizon, and the horizon across the Great Plains is huge.

Mari could not resist Toot-Toot's for reason of its name alone.  And that led to stopping in Shamrock, Texas, on a portion of Old Route 66, to try to buy lunch at Tower Station and U-Drop-Inn, which no longer sold lunch, even though Elvis Presley and been served when he and the Inn were both alive.

 The Station showed evidence that it had recharged electric cars since at least 1915, and still did. The Tesla stations were proof that Tower Station was still powerful in memory and our culture.  The original owner is said to have drawn the outline for the building on the ground with a nail:  Some nail!  Some building!

 Our destination for that day was Palo Duro Canyon in West Texas, near Amarillo.  It is the second largest canyon in the United States, after the Grand Canyon.  It is 120 miles long, as wide as 20 miles, and between 800 and 1000 feet deep.

It hides.  One can drive for hours, watching the flat prairies, and not notice that nature has carved a massive canyon over the last million years.

It was in Palo Duro Canyon--Hardwood Canyon--that a whole nation of Comanches and Kiowas could find refuge there from winter on the plaines, and from assassins in Army uniforms.  Once it was the policy of this nation to exterminate the stubborn peoples who said that this was their home, their land, and that it had been so since the first peoples lived on earth.  There is evidence in the canyon of human habitation for ten to fifteen thousand years.

Colonel Ranald Mackenzie was sent the canyon to remove the Indians living there, and take them to reservations in Oklahoma.  He did.  They confiscated 400 of the best horses owned by the people they found, and shot more then a thousand of the rest of the horses, to destroy their ability to hunt and provide for themselves.

We have a shameful history, we who speak of American Exceptionalism, of being a Chosen People.


Who chose us?

Driving west, again, the next day we made our last stop on the way home in Las Cruces (The Crosses) where, for the moment, the Rio Grande has water in it.  That is not always so.  Sometimes the Big River slides dusty toward the border with Mexico, before it finds free water again on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

It is a big, beautiful land.  Sometimes it is a big, beautiful country.  The land makes one believe that we can be a beautiful people, if we look at the land; that we ought to become so.