Thirty-six hours, two states a day, a dizzying experience. The landscape changes dramatically, softening as we move east. No longer the red bluffs, the impossibly blue sky, the stoic junipers, our eyes adjust from the desert to the emergent green of Colorado. We lumber up mountain passes, flying down the other side, RV's and semis speeding by. And then we are in Nebraska, soft, sweet, and dreamy.

The southwest landscape seems abandoned, largely uninhabited.  A cattle ranch might signal a custodial presence, but human habitation is incidental. Small towns could blow away. Some nearly have.  Gas pumps are gone, storefronts are empty, siding is missing. Nature is dominant. Civilization holds on dimly.

Eastward a cultivated landscape appears, boundaries are delineated, planting patterns weave across gentle drumlins. Hills are cut, filled, and moved as convenient. Signs of human presence are everywhere, largely in the trace of large, agricultural equipment. 

As we cross the Mississippi, suddenly all seems tired, plowed under one too many times. Signs of abandoned nineteenth century industry remain. Roads maneuver through more complex land holdings. We move from town to town, sprawling industrial suburbs to city centers, counties no longer matter.

.........................................

We spent our first night in a sprawling Walmart Parking lot, next to a truck stop. Peering out the window. Are they moving toward us? The next night another Walmart, this time off the highway, a bucolic view out our window as we have our morning tea and depart for the next ten hour drive. Our last night, in western Pennsylvania, parked in the Amish horse and carriage area, we emerged into the evening humidity of spring. Like stepping off the airplane in the tropics in the middle of winter. The west is so dry and dusty that on our last days our noses blew red, our eyes ached, our skin felt like sandpaper.

The sunset in the west is long and the sky infinite. The afterglow extends 360 degrees around the horizon. Cool blues and purples complement the setting sun. As we move east we see the soft yellow light of the setting sun against a warm cloudy sky. All seems historical, like a Thomas Cole or Fitz Hugh Lane painting.

Familiar again.

.........................................

Our trip home was all anticipation. We arrived late Saturday night to surprise Jess and Carter, expectant parents, who then headed to the hospital the next morning to give birth to young Augustus "Augie" Byron Roberts.

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There’s no place we’ve been that Edward Abbey hasn’t been before.   Desert Solitaire chronicles his time spent as a ranger in Arches National Monument along with warnings about “industrial tourism.”  It is the introduction of “machines” into the wilderness that concerns him; the campers, trucks, motorboats, motorbikes, jet skis, etc., along with the infrastructure required to support them.  He has a reasonable alternative.  Rather than spending millions on development, have the National Park Service provide, free of charge, shuttle buses, horses, mules and guides, and allow people to explore wilderness in its natural state.  This is the sort of proposal subject to accusations of “socialism,” and was, as we now know, easily ignored.

A second force about which he was prescient was the flooding of Glen Canyon to harness the Colorado for electrical power and water rights, all under the guise of giving the public access to water based recreation in the form of Lake Powell, now revealed as a Sisyphean effort, as the Glen Canyon reaches its “dead pool” level, and the marinas have been moved far from their “lakeside” motels.

Mule Days

A bright spot in all of this was the Bryce Canyon Mules Days Rodeo.  Mules, the height of equinedom, or equinimity if you prefer, were on display doing all the things that horses generally do, but with maximum chill and insouciance.  A cross between a horse and and donkey, they bring out the best in each while leaving the less attractive and frustrating traits far behind.  It is a genetic accident of the highest order, which once discovered, has been cultivated by mule lovers from George Washington to the U.S. Army.

Mormonism

One of the things about traveling in Utah is both the invisibility and pervasiveness of the Mormons.  The overwhelming presence of the tourists obscures the fact that the Mormons own and inhabit practically everything outside the parks.  Their community, from the more isolated and often polygamist families, to the mainstream Mitt Romney types, determines much of the culture and politics of Utah.

To give a sense of the determination, dedication and perseverance of the Mormons, there is the story of  the Hole in the Rock.  

In 1880, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints commissioned a group of Mormons to establish a new settlement in the southeast corner of the state.  Two hundred Mormons, men women and children, with livestock and twenty-six wagons, set out, and after traveling seventy miles, came to an impassable drop off two thousand feet above the Colorado River.  Rather than turning back, they blasted and hammered a notch, the “hole in the rock,” and continued to construct a series of switchbacks down to the river.  Wagons had  to be lowered with ropes.  When they finally reached the river and forded to the other side, they faced circumstances nearly as difficult. The trip took four months and the trail that they had carved was never used again.

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Today's ride in Bryce Canyon will be remembered as if in a dream. Where the Grand Canyon is vast and unknowable, Bryce is intimate, personal, almost biomorphic in its presence. We wound down steep trails to the canyon floor. The creak of the saddle, the horse's exhale, hooves finding their footing, only silenced when we came to a halt to take in the view.

The horses were from Mexico, the mules from Kentucky, the wranglers from everywhere. Ours, Kyra, just of high school, was from Montana. Her last job for an outfitting company, they would leave her out in the wilderness for days. Grizzlies? Yes, lots. Bear spray? No, she said, 45 long barrel, but they really don’t bother you.

Edward Abbey has written best about the experience of the west, and while his post was in Arches National Monument, it applies throughout the canyon lands.

"Sand, sage or old man sage, a lustrous windblown blend of silver and blue and aquamarine, gleams in the distance, the feathery stems flowing like hair. Purple flowers no bigger than your fingernail are half-revealed, half concealed by the shining leaves. Purple sage: crush the leaves between thumb and finger and you release that characteristic odor, pungent and bittersweet, which means canyon country, high lonesome mesaland, the winds that blow from far away."

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

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Today it rained for the first time in weeks, making us feel at home.  Our trip has taken us through parts of the country that have experienced over twenty years of drought. With this drought come the flash floods, created by micro bursts of rain, rushing without warning through the valleys.  The earth, like a dry sponge, cannot absorb the surge. It creates washouts in the canyons and along the roads. There are fatalities.  The signs say head for higher ground—-immediately.

We decided to drive to town, and were stopped by a herd of cows taking their time crossing the road. These are the healthiest cows we’ve ever seen. Every third one stopped for a drink of freshly delivered water on the road. They paid no attention paid to us. They have the run of the Kolob Valley, moving up and down the valley, just as they please, for the best grazing on any particular day. They belong to a ranch down the road but wander freely up into the BLM lands. Boundaries are hard to locate here.

The day before we had been to Zion to hike to the Emerald Pools. Zion is very crowded, and while the Park service does a great job of managing the crowds, there are, well, crowds. We were fortunate to find our more taciturn friends down at the paddock awaiting charges for a ride through the park. Most stood there silently saying to themselves, “please don’t pick me, please don’t pick me.” The stoic, circumspect mules knew, however, that as the most reliable mounts, they would most likely be chosen for this afternoon’s ride.

We took the shuttle to the top of the park and walked to the beginning of The Narrows. A flash flood warning had been posted earlier in the day. We watched with trepidation as a group waded up the river, some in the park issued waders, others in shorts with flip flops. It’s astonishing that so many people survive their trip to the park.

As the day closed, our wonderful hosts Rob and Diane took us to a remote promontory. We told them about our day. “Yes,” they said, “that’s why we like it over here.” We sat with our cocktails in silence as the day set in the valley below.

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We sat in silence waiting for the moon to rise over Lazalu. We had just finished a group reading, some poems, some recollections, some eulogies and songs. There were nearly thirty of us sitting in the hacienda of our host, Robert Perkins, a poet, adventurer, filmmaker and artist.. This week he was hosting a group called Kift, a gathering of techno-nomads, sharing the benefits of communal living while traveling around the country in vans, tethered through the internet to their “day jobs” in Silicon Valley.

Theirs is a community of choice, made up of a diverse group, each with their own story. Most had left a life behind, willingly or not, and it was clear, as we sat there in silence after the reading, that they seemed to find love and support in this group not found elsewhere.

We had come from Coral Pink Sands the week before, a Sahara like desert, filled with roving off-road-vehicles, many boasting the usual banners. There was the constant high pitch of engines everywhere, a thousand leaf blowers buzzing in the wind.. Lazalu was a sanctuary to calm our nerves.

Shortly after we arrived there was mention of pack mules down the road. We went with Rob to visit Paul Gooch, a local ophthalmologist whose hobby, along with some of his friends, is to take pack mules into remote parts of Zion to camp in style. His website, Longears and Sourdough is a treat, if like us, you have donks on the brain.

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We glided through mint jelly eddies and ripples as we floated down the Colorado River.  We’d been taken upriver to just south of the Glen Canyon Dam, to travel down the river by kayak, through Horseshoe Canyon and back to Lee's Ferry.

The day before, we had taken our most daunting hike.  Cathedral Wash, reported to be an easy hike down to the river and back, instead turned out to be a schooling in rock climbing and seat of the pants descents.  At one point we encountered a group watching a mother below, stuck on an overhanging shelf. Her terrified son was screaming "we’re all gonna die!”  We sympathized. They backtracked, as we had many times, and eventually made it to safety.

The next day a Navajo guide took us through the Upper Antelope Canyon, an underground Zaha Hadid like vortex carved out of the sandstone. Thousands of years of sediment had accrued and solidified into stone, to then be sculpted by the flash floods that come down the ravines.

The Colorado River sustains much of the southwest, including Southern California.  In fact, Southern California probably wouldn’t exist without the Colorado River. The Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams manage the water for seven states in the west, and also provide hydroelectric power to these, as well as some states to the east.  At Glen Canyon, the level referred to as "dead pool" below which the dam can no longer produce electricity, is anticipated to be reached by July of this year.  Below that level the 100 year old agreements between the states sharing the water will be threatened as well.

Welcome to the movie "Chinatown."

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The Aquarian Mountains run north-south, parallel to a line connecting Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen with Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. Both were visionary projects, schools and utopian models for society, and in fact, Paolo Soleri spent a year and a half at Taliesen early in his career. He and his wife eventually settled in Scottsdale Arizona, founding the Cosanti Studio in 1956, and Arcosanti in 1970. *

Today, however, Arcosanti thrives as an artisanal community, largely committed to the principles upon which it was founded, centered on arcology, a structured relationship to ecology formed by minimizing the impact of urban communities. While the residents number only in the double digits, far below the 5,000 originally envisioned, the core that remain are committed to a sustainable way of living.  They grow their own food, make and sell the ceramic and bronze bells to support the school.  The day we visited we were given a tour by a young artist who after her first year of apprenticeship was now learning to cast bronze.  When someone in our tour group asked about "governance" our guide seemed perplexed, as if to say, "You're asking the wrong question."

Like so many ventures of the 1970's, Biosphere 2 for example, Arcosanti is sometimes seen as merely a commune with no scalable significance.  Yet it's hard to deny the charm of the place, and that of its inhabitants.  It is essentially an Italian hill town, and operates much in the same way, free of the automobile, of the commute, of the meaningless separation that characterizes so much of modern American civilization. Founded in 1970, the same year as Earth Day, it represents an aspiration and a path surely better than the one we are on now.

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• Soleri's reputation has been reconsidered after revelations in 2017 by his youngest daughter regarding his sexual abuse. These revelations may not have come entirely as a surprise, as Soleri had abruptly resigned from the Cosanti Foundation in 2011.

Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most well known architect, was born in 1867, two years after the end of the civil war. He had several distinct careers, beginning in the nineteenth century and ending in 1959, the year of his death at age ninety-one.  In that time he designed some 800 buildings, of which 380 were actually built. 

His personal life was equally callisthenic.  His first marriage ended after fleeing to Europe with a client's wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Upon returning, and now ostracized from the Chicago community, he retreated to Spring Hill, Wisconsin where he built the first Taliesen compound.  There, on August 15, 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, a servant set fire to the living quarters, opened the lower half of a dutch door and murdered Mamah, her two children and four others with an axe as they tried to escape the flames.

Wright's second wife, Maude "Miriam" Noel, became addicted to morphine soon after their marriage, resulting in an early separation, and shortly afterward he met Olgivanna Lazovich Hinzenburg. In 1925 he and Olgivanna moved together to Taliesen, where a fire yet again destroyed a significant portion of the compound.  Ten years later, after spurned spouses had granted divorces, Taliesen East had been rebuilt, and Wright and Olgivanna had married, they moved to Arizona to start Taliesen West.  He was seventy years old.

Wright had few resources at the time, however he had a considerable reputation. So in his final incarnation, he devised a school where apprentices would pay to come to Taliesen West, and would learn the arts of farming, building, cooking, and entertaining. They would also be expected to act as draftsmen for his remaining architectural projects. The winters were spent at Taliesen West, and the summers at Taliesen East with the apprentices handling the entire move between. It was a brilliant plan, providing Wright and Olga an extensive staff, a winter residence, and a steady income. Such an enterprise requires a certain suspension of disbelief and Taliesen West was informed by a certain theatricality in which the ritual of each of the activities was given an honorific significance. Over the years Taliesen developed a devotional following and a number of apprentices went on to brilliant, if idiosyncratic careers; Bruce Goff and John Lautner being to noteworthy.

In all of the sycophancy, it's nevertheless hard to overlook the virtuosity of the design.  Wright was a brilliant draftsman, and everywhere can be seen and felt the isometric effects of his draftsman board.  The decorative filigrees, the stained glass windows, the dentils at the soffits, the patterns in the rug all submit to the furious pace of his T Square and triangles.  The plan is set at forty-five degree angles throughout, the roofs and soffits at thirty degree angles, and where structural enclosures fail to sufficiently express the geometry, chevrons, spears, and cant strips are added.

In many ways, Taliesen West is a kind of geometric interpretation of nature, an expression of what Wright meant by an "organic” architecture.  It is a dance between Wright and the landscape that sometimes seems like symmetry, other times sometimes a submission.  It is relentless, unending, and comprehensive.  No detail is left undesigned.  No tree, rock or plant is not asked to pose for the audience.

It was the final act of the master.

This post was originally published in The Tracings.

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While many sites have warranted a full report, some have merely lingered in our mind; honky-tonk bars, small Mexican restaurants, abandoned towns. We find the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Beautiful along the way, and often in the same places. To mention a few:

The Wasteland

We visited the White Sands Monument near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 275 square miles of gypsum sand desert resembling a ski resort in all but temperature.  Strangely, below the surface a layer of clay creates an oasis like condition for the cacti, yucca and grasses that survive there.  Nearby is the White Sands Missile Range and Trinity, the site of the first nuclear bomb explosion on July 16, 1945, named incomprehensively Robert Oppenheimer, who later declared that the explosion brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

To Infinity and Beyond

We visited Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona which made no more sense today than at the time of its original venture in the early 1990's.  Rumor had it that the eight member crew became divided into two camps over the purpose of the mission, and while the cause of the dispute was never fully divulged, personal notebooks on display from the crew indicated disagreement about whether the contained environment was a "survivalist" experiment, focused on how human beings could survive with limited resources (i.e. in space) or whether it was a laboratory, controlled environment in which to study the impact of ecological change on Oxygen and CO2 levels.  Today it is the latter that has survived as the University of Arizona has taken over to study exactly such effects.  In the meantime, the considerable energy plant that was necessary to sustain the extensive mechanical systems within Biosphere 2, and which belied its sustainability premise, has been reconsidered and re-engineered to today's expectations.

The Prison Economy

We drove through Florence, AZ, home to the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex, a set of state, county, federal and private prisons. There is a courthouse and administrative complex in the center of town, in what could rightly be called a “vertically integrated” industry, as it constitutes the central economy of the region.  Lately, a federal order to shut down some of the original prisons and relocate the prisoners to other states has caused the town to wonder about its future.

Dirt and Destiny

We met a 78 year old woman named Tish who runs a donkey sanctuary outside of Benson, Arizona.  Toward the end of our visit with the donkeys we asked her about the beaten up racecars in the nearby barn.  "Oh, those are mine," she said.  One of the first women licensed NASCAR drivers, she grew up street racing in Texas with her favorite uncle, and continues to race on dirt tracks (the most challenging and unpredictable) in the Charger class.  Here she's posing with a recent car, Black Jack 21, named for the original donkey she adopted twenty-five years ago, and who still peruses the grounds.

The Theater of Small Towns

The small towns in the West come in an astonishing variety of forms. Some are completely abandoned, with only the shells of former buildings preserved or forgotten. Others, like Tombstone, have Hollywood set like streets preserved, authentic looking saloons, and regularly staged gunfights. Some, like Bisbee, are sophisticated retreats for a class that now works remotely, has retired, or simply decided to live at the edge of, but not off the grid. In these cases the anticipation of tourism merges with the cacophony and spectacle of the original Wild West towns.

Springtime in the Desert

Finally we were able to arrive at our first, true wild horse sanctuary at the Salt River.  On our first evening we were able to spot several herds both grazing in the nearby woods and cooling themselves in the river.  With each band the lead stallion was having his way regularly with the mares while the bachelors looked on in envy.  Fortunately, an ongoing darting effort with the fertility drug PZP has prevented the proliferation of the herd that has led to so many unfortunate consequences elsewhere.

The Magnificence of the Sunset

In the midst of this it must be said that the sunsets in the west are magnificent.  The sky is illuminated with the softest shades and the cool complements reflect around the horizon to 360 degrees.  One senses that it has always been this way, and at the same time wonders how long it will be.

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The Kimball Art Museum is one of the last few works designed by the renowned, mid-century architect, Louis Kahn.  Completed in 1972, it is now fifty years old, and looks no different than the day it was finished.  Louis Kahn spent most of his life as an academic at the University of Pennsylvania, completing his first major commission at age fifty in 1953.  His knowledge of history was vast, and he was very much influenced by the French Enlightenment architect, Étienne-Louis Boullée.  Some may be familiar with Kahn's library at Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, which bears a strong resemblance to Boullée's metaphysical representations.

The poetic impact of the Kimball is revealed in its details:  the arisses in the concrete formwork, the recessed control joints, the lead coins in the snap tie plugs, the reveals at the travertine, the rivulet at the portico where it meet the pool.  Each material retains its essential dignity.  Missing are the caulked expansion joints, the filler pieces, the crimpled, metal edge strips of modern construction.  Kimball is constructed of materials largely available to the Romans.

"You say to brick, 'What do you want, brick?'  Brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' You say to brick, 'I like an arch too, but arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'" 

He is implying that materials themselves are embodied with intentionality. Discovering and respecting that intentionality is what brings a building to life.

None of this is to suggest a lack of sophistication and the vaults of the Kimball are a rather astonishing example of both a theoretical as well as empirical approach to a fundamental aspiration, that of bringing even, natural light into the galleries of the museum.  It took several iterations to arrive at a vault that would deliver uniform light to the galleries, and it was August Kommendant, Kahn's trusted structural engineer and colleague, who finally proposed a cycloid vault with a brachistochrone curve.

A cycloid is the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line.  A mathematical formula attributed to the ancient Greeks, it also represents the fastest path of descent between a point A and a lower point B, where B is not directly below A, under the influence of a uniform gravitational field to a given end point in the shortest time. For a better understanding of this concept, see this demonstration.

It is useful to point out that the precedent for a top lit vault in concrete was the Pantheon in Rome, constructed in the first century A.D. which remained the longest concrete span in the world until the construction of the Palazzo Dello Sport in 1939 by the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.   In achieving a longer span Nervi used a lamella truss system based on the coffering in the Pantheon. 

The fundamental challenge of a concrete vault is to construct a system thick enough to span yet not too heavy to collapse.  By the time of the construction of Kimball, it was the development of pre-stressing and post stressing concrete with steel reinforcement cables that allowed for spans with thinner concrete.  Kommendant was a leading practitioner in this field, and for Kimball, he was proposing four inch thick concrete vaults with pre-stressed catenary cables.

The gravitational aspect of the cycloid is significant. Light seems to follow the same gravitational rules as the cycloid, resulting  a diaphanous, silver-pewter halo above the galleries, bringing out the true colors of the paintings and creating soft shadows in the works of sculpture.  During our time in the galleries we did not see a single light bulb aimed at any artwork.

Kahn was a mystic.  He operated outside the more dogmatic rules of mid-century architecture.   In suggesting what a building wanted to be, Kahn was engaging with the building as a being in an ontological way.  This idea stood in stark contrast to his contemporaries, for example le Corbusier's idea of the house as a "machine for living," or Frank Lloyd Wright's "organic," agrarian architecture, or the Bauhaus emigres, Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius, whose work stressed industrial production.

"When you have all the answers about a building before you start building it, your answers are not true.  The building gives you answers as it grows and becomes itself."

This post was originally published in The Tracings.

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Texas is a set of extremes and contradictions, Marfa being one of them. In the middle of nowhere, it is a thriving art community and a smug, tourist attraction. When you arrive you are given no clues. Like SoHo in the 1970's, you just have to know where to go. We stood on a corner chatting with two other lost souls, older women with Italian sunglasses, sharp lipstick and smart looking coats. "We're from New York.”

Everything worth seeing in Marfa is out of town. There are works by several important mid-century artists, as well as the work of several contemporary artists, and we had come particularly to see the works of Donald Judd. He had made Marfa a place to visit after moving here from SoHo in 1971, buying 16 decaying buildings, an entire decommissioned Army base, and three ranches spread across 40,000 acres.

There are two major "pieces" by Judd at Marfa. The first is "15 Untitled Works in Concrete," large rectangular boxes, all identical in overall dimensions, but with alternate enclosures and in various groupings. It is difficult to convey the impact of these works when seen in their desert surroundings. It's not just the size. It's that the work mediates the relationship between you, the earth and the sky, and with shifting light, darkness, gravity and weightlessness, challenges every reliable sense of consciousness.

Judd studied philosophy at Columbia University before becoming an artist, and was interested in Heidegger and Husserl, phenomenology and the study of conscious experience from the first-person point of view, and ontology and the concepts of existence, being, becoming, and reality.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the "100 Untitled Works in Milled Aluminum" residing in the two artillery buildings abandoned at Fort Russell. Judd replaced the flanking doors with full height windows so that the pieces, each exactingly fabricated, are engaged in the reflection of light from outside, from the polished concrete floor, as well as from surrounding pieces. They are ephemeral, at times reflective, at times transparent, at times devoid of all light with rectangular slots of utter nothingness. You sense you could put your hand through them, and yet there they stand, solid, silent, inert. Just as with the work of say, Mark Rothko, the elemental, experiential markers provoke an unidentifiable and deep emotional response.

We left town for the day, too exhausted to look at anything else. The following day, while travelling to our next venue, we passed the Prada store, a simulacrum in the middle of the desert, twenty-three miles outside of Marfa, just outside the town of Valentine. Everything about Marfa is elsewhere.

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Anyone who has spent time in Texas will understand its vastness, its majesty, its monotony, its mentality, its desire to secede, its petroleum culture (gas, asphalt and tires), the tar balls on the beaches, the ancient pictographs, the flash floods, the limestone escarpments, the drought (the driest since 800 AD), the wind that carves the canyon, the softness of the sunset, the crackle of gravel under your feet. 

Of all of the places in Texas, Big Bend is the most rugged, desolate and barren. Located along the Rio Grande in the southwest corner of Texas, Big Bend is a 900,000 acre national park of mountainous desert, carved out by millennia of water, sand and wind. On the other side, a set of parks and conservation areas nearly as large, is maintained by Mexico. It takes an hour and a half to reach any campsite within Big Bend. You keep a close eye on your gas gauge.

We crossed the border several times while we were here, the Rio Grande being only ankle deep in many parts.  The Border Patrol on both sides keeps watch, mostly to discourage flagrant violations, while at the same time allowing a considerable amount of traffic across the river each day.  Horses and donkeys wander across to graze and must be retrieved.  Trailside displays carry handmade trinkets for sale, with money collected from the jars at the end of the day.  It is a hundred miles to the nearest road on the Mexican side, so the coyotes do not come this way.  The ecology and wildlife have their own boundaries. The little towns have family members on both sides of the river.  

We crossed the border several times while we were here, the Rio Grande being only ankle deep in many parts.  The Border Patrol on both sides keeps watch, mostly to discourage flagrant violations, while at the same time allowing a considerable amount of traffic across the river each day.  Horses and donkeys wander across to graze and must be retrieved.  Trailside displays carry handmade trinkets for sale, with money collected from the jars at the end of the day.  It is a hundred miles to the nearest road on the Mexican side, so the coyotes do not come this way.  The ecology and wildlife have their own boundaries. The little towns have family members on both sides of the river.

The official Port of Entry at Boquillas was closed for many years after 911, and the Mexican towns suffered greatly from the loss of tourist trade.  The two restaurants in Boquillas are now full each day at noon.  At some point the National Park Service sought the help of the Mexican group, the Diablo Hot Shots, to assist in fighting forest fires, and they now regularly perform construction and conservation measures along the river for the US.  It's a fluid arrangement.

Nevertheless, appearances must be kept, and so when we crossed the river to ride to Boquillas for lunch, we skirted down the river, through the brush, and into the shadows of the desert valley, out of sight of either Border Patrol. 

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She had soft, brown eyes, strawberry blond hair, and legs that went on forever. Moving in the swirl of the pen she was one of hundred or so donkeys that had arrived at Sequin for a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auction. We fell in love immediately. The donks were popular today. Many were chosen as companions for equines at home, being good company with few requirements. One buyer wanted a companion for a lonely donkey at home. He left with two.

The mustangs were popular as well. Most were sorrel, a few bays, and one storybook buckskin with a dark mane, tail and toes that went for the highest bid of the day, at $280. The starting bid was $125. Most went for $135. An incentive program would return $1000 to some successful adopters after a year.

The BLM holds these auctions in several locations across the west. These are adoption auctions, meaning that you don't get title to the equine for a year, until the BLM has verified that the homing requirements have been met. "Wild horses and burros" as they are referred to, are been rounded up in ten states and brought to BLM holding facilities. The group at Seguin today is only a small number of the equines rounded up and held in the BLM pens.

Buyers are diverse: hardened ranchers, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. All have been vetted through a careful application and background process. Quiet conversations by the rails reveal an unabashed love for the beauty of these wild creatures. The auction went quickly, with nearly every equine adopted. Those that weren't would be added with others to the next auction.

One adoptee was lost shortly after boarding, an aneurism they say, perhaps brought on by the stress of the ordeal. The rest would be bound for a more secure, if docile future. Most go on to careers as saddle horses.

Of course there is more to the story. There are questions about the need for round ups in the first place; whether the "overcrowding" in the pens isn't a situation created by the BLM itself; whether the leasing of public lands doesn't in fact amount to a subsidy for the cattle industry; whether the round up business isn't just another revenue source for that industry, the ecological effect of reducing grasslands for the carbon emitting agricultural industry, and so on. But these are questions for another day.

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"You'll never find it," she said, when we inquired about the Devil's Punchbowl.  The flyers on the table at the Natchez Visitor Center encouraged us to "drive the Natchez Trace" and visit the "Antebellum Mansions," and so we visited the mansions.  We drove by some, walked around others, and toured the interiors of one or two. 

One cannot visit Natchez without stepping directly into the historical nexus of the Civil War, with all of its moral ambiguities.  Fact and fiction confound. Many owners of the large mansions had come from the North to take advantage of slave labor.  When Natchez surrendered peremptorily, the senior ranks of the Union Army included many of their relatives.  Occupation preserved their fortunes and their mansions, allowing them to stand today.

Natchez was also home to one of the largest slave markets in the South, The Forks of the Road, just outside the city limits. The Natchez Trace had provided a return route North to Memphis for crews manning the barges that floated down the Mississippi. With the advent of the steamboat, it became instead a highway for slave traders like Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, who took advantage of the failing tobacco economy in Virginia and the Carolinas to purchase slaves at a discount and sell them at a premium in the burgeoning cotton market of the Deep South. Cotton could now be shipped upstream on the Mississippi River or around the Florida peninsula to merchants in New England, and then to off to England. With the cotton gin increasing the productive capacity of the plantations, the textile industry in England and in the North, where slavery had already been outlawed, continued to drive the demand for cotto with its associated misery.  Today a small grass lot, across from a muffler shop and window tinting garage, marks the Forks of the Road.

Where fact and fiction collide in the most confounding way is the Devils Punchbowl.  The facts are that starting in about 1862, many slaves had left abandoned plantations and were headed north to freedom.  Often, sick, barely clothed and starving they arrived in Natchez to swell the population from approximately 10,000 to nearly 100,000.  Quarantined outside of Natchez, nearly 20,000 died of infirmity and starvation. Narratives compete to explain the circumstances surrounding this gruesome event.  One is that the Confederate Troops drove the escaping slaves toward the Union Army to slow their advance, thus creating a humanitarian crisis.  The other is that the Union Army created a "concentration camp" resulting in genocide. Both versions perpetuate the Lost Cause as well as the putative moral superiority of the Union. The reality is probably closer to what refugees experience when caught between two warring armies. Today the site lies just outside of town in a reconstituted landscape between Route 61 and the Mississippi. 

Perhaps our guide was correct when she said we would never find it.

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From Mobile to Galveston, there is an uninterrupted coastline of white sand beaches.  Unlike Florida where condos tend to line the beach, here a road separates the beaches, meaning that they are almost entirely open to the public, that is, since 1965, when Blacks were finally allowed, after a yearlong "wade-in" at Biloxi

Cities come and go along this route.  Sometimes it's just a gas station, a thrift shop, a mini-mart and the ubiquitous tire shop.  Other towns have a vague resort quality with a combination of casino, hotel and RV park. The economy of the gulf coast is largely supported by oil and gas industry.  Nearly half of the country's fossil fuel demand is met here. To give you a sense of proportion, the annual industry report for Texas includes:

Refinery: Crude: 250,000 barrels (10.1 million gallons) processed daily Gasoline: 170,000 barrels (7.1 million gallons) produced daily total regular and premium grades Jet-A aviation fuel: 44,000 barrels (1.9 million gallons) produced daily Ultra-Low Sulfur Diesel: 95,000 barrels (4.0 million gallons) produced daily Anode grade coke: 1,000 tons produced daily

Chemicals: Ethylene: 3.33 billion lbs/yr Propylene: 1.44 billion lbs/yr Butadiene: 0.35 billion lbs/yr Aromatic Feedstocks: 0.84 billion lbs/yr

In Texas these refineries are mostly offshore on manmade peninsulas just off the coast.  In Louisiana they lie inland, in the infinite swamp above Lake Pontchartrain. In the daytime they blow cumulous clouds of steam.  At night they produce a halo in the sky from literally millions of lights illuminating their infrastructures.  Tankers move out to the coast the coast or up the Mississippi.  Railcars move in mile long phalanxes.

There is a Southern Gothic point & click narrative adventure that purports to “immerse the player in the sinking suburbs and verdant industrial swamps of a distorted South Louisiana.”  It is also the name of an oil refinery compound in South Louisiana.  We were returning from Natchez to New Orleans when we noticed a halo in the clouds in the night sky was.  As we approached, it seemed as if we were driving up East River Drive.  A virtual city was completely illuminated for several miles, with occasional flare stacks flashing in the night. 

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/mapping-climate-grief-one-pixel-at-a-time

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On an overcast day the magic seems to disappear.   It's as if the house lights come on.  On a sunny day the sky is bigger, the ocean broader, the sand whiter.  When it's gray, the sand is dull, the breeze foreboding, and the scrub brush skeletal.

Florida is a layer of sand onto which any arrangement of concrete, asphalt, gravel, and grass is possible.  The Panhandle received two hurricanes, Ida and Sally, one year apart, and though the recovery has been miraculous, there remains a certain temporality.  Palm trees topple and are quickly replaced. Underpinnings are shallow. 

Yesterday we came upon a family from Wisconsin in a modified school bus, three kids and no school curriculum.  "We just try to answer every question they ask - kids are curious," they said.  When the sun came out  the sky turned silver, the ocean pewter, and the sand held pockets of iridescent shells.

Later we drove past Jeffrey Bezos' ship, Jacklyn, a huge, converted tanker outfitted for the recovery of Blue Ocean's rockets.  The reality of the salvage operation took away some of the  glamour of space travel.  The house lights came back on.

"Seaside has become kind of seedy and I kind of like that," said Andres Duany, one of the founders of the New Urbanism, along with his wife and partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.  They designed Seaside as a prototype forty years ago.  When we arrived today it had hot dogs, crepes and grilled cheese sandwiches served from vintage Airstreams on the main plaza, so we felt at home. 

There have been innumerable towns built since on the model of Seaside, some designed by Andres and Lizz and their firm DPZ, and some designed by their protégés in the New Urbanism movement. The principles are empirical, traditional, and based on research. The fundamental notion is that streets are what make a town.  This might seem obvious at first, until you realize that the United States is largely rebuilt in the form of gated communities.

From a sustainability point of view one of the unique things about Seaside is its density, which is unusual given its location. Houses are close together with narrow streets, gravel aprons, alleyways and walkways winding through. This sort of thing is not normally permitted under most zoning codes, which dictate single family houses on minimum acreage lots. Such restrictions not only are environmentally destructive, contributing to endless suburban sprawl, but also add to the social stratification of America and the housing crisis in general.

At Seaside, as well as in subsequent towns based on this model, a new zoning was necessary to allow each house to exist in a mutually balanced arrangement with its surrounding neighbors. The design of each house is governed by a code that reinforces the definition of the street, similar to towns like Tupelo, Savannah or Oak Bluffs. Unlike an historic district code, it is not stylistic code. Rather, it is a dimensional code where the house and the street work together to create public spaces that contribute to the town as a whole as well as to each individual house. Lawns and asphalt are prohibited. Picket fences create a continuous Robert Frost civility.

It is interesting to note that the towns that have imitated Seaside fail to incorporate its fundamental principles. A development next door has borrowed many of its stylistic attributes in an attempt to emulate the "brand" yet was unable to shed the ubiquitous developer tropes of central parking lots, ambiguous pathways and dramatic architectural features with no real purpose.

The irony is that Seaside has considerably more dwelling units than the adjacent development, and these houses, originally built for a reasonable amount, are now worth a fortune, despite existing in a density comparable to public housing.

There have been many criticisms of Seaside and New Urbanism as a whole.  Are these real towns or just resort communities with second homes? How do these communities contribute to the problem of housing in America? All of these criticisms have some underlying truth to them, and in recent years Duany and Plater-Zyberk have focused their attention instead on the potential for new communities of mobile homes as a way of addressing the inequities in the market. Still, one has to ask, when looking at the gated communities sprawling across America, what is the alternative?

Seaside provides one answer.

The mist was like a fine rain this morning, except that it didn’t fall. It just hung in the air like a cool and gentle elixir.

Last night we watched the clouds advance over the hay field, cut and fallow, and so wide you could almost feel the curvature of the earth, captured only by the hammock at the far edge.

The sun faded behind bursts of gray and silver, only occasionally revealing the turquoise sky behind. We sat quietly until all turned to stillness.

On either side of Florida's meridian is the west coast of St. Pete, Clearwater, and the pre-Castro Cuban communities of Tampa and Ybor City; and the East coast, starting in Miami and spreading North through Palm Beach, Vero, Windsor and an infinite variety of gated, golf communities.

A delineation of more cultural significance is Lake Okeechobee, separating the world of South Florida, oriented to the Caribbean,  South America, and Europe from a world that is essentially part of the American South. The people in this part of Florida are commonly known, both affectionately and jocularly, as Crackers.

The Crackers have a long history in Florida, starting as early as the late seventeenth century.  Scots-Irish for the most part, they became the custodians of the horses and cattle left behind by the Spanish. By the time Spain forfeited Florida to Great Britain in 1763, they had managed to develop a unique breed known as the Cracker Horse, made famous in an illustration by Frederic Remington.

The Cracker Horse was bred from Iberian stock, and was a small-boned, light horse. Gaited, it could be ridden for hours in relative comfort, and at a significant pace .  This made it well suited to the herding cattle that roamed freely throughout the flat landscape of Northern Florida.  With the crack of a whip, and hence the name "Cracker" the cattle were herded to their fate, serving both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War.  It is a source of significant pride to be called a Cracker today, and most are at pains to describe a genealogical heritage, no matter how convoluted or tenuous.

The cattle business is now defined by large ranches, both dairy and beef, serving most of the East Coast.  The Cracker Horse has been replaced by the Quarter Horse, a stockier breed. It is capable of of speed, though not long distances, and of cutting cattle, roping and reining, and is generally nonchalant in regard to bulls. Desirable characteristics of the breed include its gentle nature, versatility, beauty, speed, agility, and loyalty.

Bred from the Thoroughbred, the Quarter Horse derived its name in the late 17th century, having been raced successfully over quarter-mile courses, mostly in Rhode Island and Virginia.  They are the Olympic sprinters of today , just as the Cracker Horse was the long-distance runner of its day.

It is not uncommon to see a stock trailer drive by in the middle of the day with Quarter Horses tacked up and sweaty, being transported to their next detail.  Its a working life.

We had driven there from Salt Springs in the Ocala National Forest, an hour away on a dead straight, isolated road, leaving the Dollar General stores and BBQ stands far behind. We emerged into Ocala, then passed miles of post and board fencing and verdant pastures, before finally arriving at what seemed like an international airport. Large hangars housed the stables, and a grand hotel and exclusive shops surrounded illiuminated competition rings as bright as runways. We might as well have been in Qatar.

Touring the stables at an event like this you witness some of the highest and most expensive forms of equestrian breeding. Living in a kind of spa environment, they are bathed, groomed, clipped, and massaged. Their coats glisten like Mohammad Ali. Most are seventeen hands or more, with the strength required to launch over the twenty or more jumps in the Grand Prix.

In their stables they are calm, often friendly, sometimes oblivious or entranced. They are elite athletes, and professional in their demeanor. The only things missing from them is a silk robe with their name emblazoned.