Southeastern Idaho

"This is pretty flat," says John a few seconds after he asked me to flick him in the ear..."Flick you in the ear?, I question.  "Yep!  To keep me awake."

About now, after a Sam's run for final supplies before entering The Deep Dark Woods, and after two Sam's pizzas chugged down with 1 cup of Coke Zero, refilled 6 times, the kids are plugged into their respective electronics for their half hour shift.

Johnny starts a conversation, "He guys, did you know that the Winter Olymipics happen in less than a year?"  "Oh no!", the girls rejoin.  He goes on to tell them it's in Winter 2014.  "Oh!  Neat!" "Do they have an opening cermony?  Is it just as important?"

Jamaican bob-sledders receive some attention, along with the fact that they're importing snow for the event....(could be true)  

On, and on we drive, through potato and beet fields, through stunted corn ("It'd be 4 ft tall in SC",John says, with pride. Baby wheat, a foot tall, stretches over the rolling fields towards hideous windmill farms. An irrigation spray cools the skin of our steady van and washes some hardened bugs from the windshield.

Questions arise, "How do those things move?"  (See the irrigation sprinkler below)

How do you keep the weeds down?

Why do they (farmers) do this?

Ben pipes up that "I didn't jump over the water thingy"....he's playing Temple Run...."I'm beating you monster!!  I didn't jump on the bridge...."(Is he really two??)

Kirsten threatens to take Luke's game away if he doesn't shape up....

We discuss that the Tetons are part of the Rockies, and that Lassen is in the Cascades.

Within minutes of our Sam's trip, about 20 min,  John is eating an apple, sweet, to wash down pizza.  I guess it's better that he's eating than having me flick his ear!  The landscape has gotten steadily hillier. Soon we'll be in low mountains, for this rolling farm land is actually foothills.

This is beautiful country, over here....I know it is heavily irrigated, and Twin Falls, ID is considered teh dessert, but it doesn't look like one here.  The blazing heat, about 100 degrees today, rivals anything SC has to scald us with.  They say it is unseasonable hot.....right!!

Before our well planned stop at Sam's Club in Idaho Falls, we made an emergency "pit stop" at a Shoshone Bannock Tribe owned and operated gas station/convenience store.  We dashed in only to find the bathroom was being cleaned....ohhh, ooooo!!  Sensing the urgency, the Shoshone worker, with a caution about the damp floor, quickly reopened the restroom allowing all the squirmy waiting in line women entrance.  "Ahhhh!"

The Shoshone were tall.  statuesque.  Beautiful people, with gentle spirits.  I could tell that.  The worker told me that he lived on the reservation.  "It's different over there."  "What do you mean?"  "They don't sell alcohol or tobacco", he says mildly.  I tell him that in NM, Navajo country,  billboards line the highway warning about drunk driving, a huge problem among the natives.  I shake his hand, feeling one with my country and its people.  Am I an elitist?  Perhaps.  But this human interaction is the best I can do... I feel a longing.  Is that God's unity calling me into the depths of the Trinity?

All's quiet.  The electronic switch has been made in peace.

John muses about the Snake River. "It sure is green..."  I snap multiple pictures, trying to capture the essence of this paradise.  But I fail to digitalize my memory, and miss some photos of fishermen protected by floppy hats, standing in rowboats casting their line.

Brian says, "Skunk!"  AGAIN.  "Anna's perfume!' Kirsten jokes, AGAIN!

And on we go, toward the Tetons and Yellowstone!

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In reverse order, that is east to west our journey from Idaho Falls (Land of Sam's samples) towards The Tetons (Land of wildflowers sun-bathing among slender evergreens piercing the blue, welcoming sunbeams to their land.

The mountains, a 50 min drive from Idaho Falls' flatlands.

Farmsteads nestle in the rolling fields.

The Snake River

Irrigation sprinkler

Flatter farmland.

Yellow flowered crop.  What is it???

It sure is green"

Silence

As we descend into  Jackson. Nobody talks only the smell of the brakes speaks. It speaks of fear!

We've descended a 10% grade into Wilson, WY.  population: 6100; elevation:  6100!  

We're 63 miles out from Yellowstone, but this Teton County area, and the valley in which we're located right now are stunning. Breath taking views, worth a breath holding approach.  

We descended along the ancient pass into Jackson Hole.  9000 year old artififacts left by the Land's first inhabitants present themselves occasionally.  Modern folk hike along the trail, intentially stimulating the senses in a manner nature perfected over eons.

Fire! 30 minutes into Idaho!

WE've seen a cloud for miles now and thought it MAY be fire, or not.  It was!!  It  is huge!!!!!! We're about to drive though the cloud and said a prayer for the safety of all, including ourselves driving though the cloud.  the kids craziness stopped immediately...  Some cars are stopped alongside the road.  I wonder if they are displacedThe  farmers?

We can't figure out what is burning since there are NO trees...only vast.flat prairie

...

It stinks too.  Almost like a burning farm. 

I think the fire is far away.  But the smoke is thick here.

The bottom few pictures show Idaho right at the border.

The kids are singing God Bless America!!  craziness has begun again....hotel is just around the corner. We've been 10 hours.  The time has changed and now it's an hour later...

Refreshing "eye candy": #isthatanoasis?

It's NOT a mirage!  I can even smell the dusty rain!!!  We're located in the 

"Middle of Nowhere, Nevada", which is "Everywhere Nevada". The rain lasted 45 seconds, at most....now, dust billows into the air casting a haze over the mountains in the distance. (Battle Mountain...three hours NE of Reno.)

One of the three trains we've seen in as many hours, traversing the country.  I've read that settlers and Native People could see and hear the trains for  10s of miles.

I'm munching organic baby carrots, a few that I picked up off the floor 2 SECONDS after they'd fallen.  Actually, they didn't hit the floor, but rather landed on my Keen boots stuffed and intertwined with white, size 13 (girls), Wal Mart sneakers... I've kicked off my Chacos and shoved them under the front seat in hopes they don't fall out at the next stop in 3 hours.

The kids, Ben included, sing "Jar of Hearts" behind me....quite out of tune, and perhaps on purpose he keeps croaking, "catch a cold", "who do you think  you areeeeeee...".  Grace, chirps no echos, a second behind the speakers, "catching hearts, storing them in your jar of hearts..."  Now come the ABCs belted out while some nameless College boy's nameless tune intones...it's not obnoxious.  Just vanilla.

....only 290 miles to Elko, then 150 more, TODAY, and it's only 1:02...and I've eaten two day's worth of calories!  John decides NOW is lunch time.  He eats the turkey, salami, and provolone sandwich I made an hour ago, and searches for his Camelbak (while driving 80mph on Cruise control)  He could look awhile since I passed it back to Ben earlier.  He  never drank it, preferring to hurl it forward, well, he actually batted it back at Kirsten:  65 mph.  (For the sake of accuracy, and so that you never think I'm writing fiction, I stand corrected on the previous Camelbak story.  Apparently Ben not only didn't hurl or bat it back, but sucked it dry.  It must've been another object: say the blueberry muffin, that went flying, probably faster, but it wouldn't hurt as bad when it landed on your cheek.....now I'm told the metal baseball bat, meant to protect us from bears and cougars, became a projectile in his hands.  The javelin now sits at Kirsten's feet.)

Kirsten returned the now-empty water bottle to her father, via a convoy of hands, from the back of the car to the front.  I refilled it with water from a sterilized milk jug so that John could take 4 Motrin for HIS headache:  from the glare, the altitude, too many peanut m and m's?  The spare water source reminds me of ED, the Lassen Parks Cafe owner?/manager? who kindly offered, not only to refill it, but to sterilize it, from the milk residue remaining after we chugged it minutes after returning from our snowy 

"swunter" (summer/winter) hike down to sulphur pits.  Pits  that continue to boil for centuries, consuming the surrounding dry-scape daily. (A boardwalk collapsed into the cauldron  last year.)  The lukewarm milk hit the "dry spot" generated after several hours on the trail, under an altitude intensified sun.  

Very soon, however, we needed water!  The gracious German immigrant, Ed, willingly accommodated.  He loved Rebekah's "Raised Right!" tee shirt with the elephant on it!  He admired our family, and after a few minutes of conversation, where I told him I was giving my children "America", he reached out, asking, if he could shake my hand! He then asked to take our picture to put on the Lassen Facebook page!   These integral "people-to-people" encounters, act as a liaison   connecting me to the place and the experience.  I believe we graft a bit of their goodness, borne of life experiences, onto ourselves, slowing become one people, connected across time and space.  He will live in more than my blog, and I know our family gave him hope and brought a smile to his face as he shared a bit of himself over the serving of swirl, soft-serve ice-cream to weary,sunburned hikers.

A dust storm swirls around the dessert to my right/south.  Dry mountains stand guard, against what or whom I can't imagine: Kit Carson? (about an hour NE of Reno, at this point)

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In the pictures below I tried to capture an Oasis, just a tad North-east of Reno. Very few water sources exist here, which isn't a bad thing if you're a rattlesnake.  However, I noticed a lush line of grass and trees skirting the base of a small mountain. At some vistas I saw a fairly quick-flowing brook bringing the green Midas touch to the desert.  All of this could become a spiritual meditation, so let your heart turn to those Bible stories if you're so moved.  I think of Jonah sitting in the desert, and God causing a tree to grow up over him, shading him, reinvigorating his wearied, fearful soul.  What river has God allowed to run through my life?...that musing is for another blog......but I do perceive the sacred out here.  I do understand America's aboriginal people's unity with themselves, and each other, as an extension of their unity with nature's own life-nurturing harmony.  

The natural world, fires and floods included, serve to create, and recreate God's Garden.  Each event serves a good, over time; and,  even a rock cannot cling to its past, for given a cataclysmic event, a volcano eruption, or, over time, the forces of pressure and the heat it generates, must succumb to a newness: igneous, metamorphic rocks.  But this progression is God's will.  The "progressives" of today, fail to understand that progress in the natural world makes sense, for instance wild flowers bloom in the ashes  left from a lightening-hit sparked wild fire. 

 For post-modern progressives,  "progress" leads to regression...

life literally dies:  eg abortion kills; 

 fails to thrive:  through divorce, which is also a death. 

withers away: through enmity, petty grievances left unchecked or unaddressed. 

suffocates:  through the busyness of life, which allows no time to sit and appreciate the stark contrast of a smooth, azure sky, juxtaposed with barren mountain crags.  The oasis mediates between the two, allowing hope to flow between the worlds.

The first Americans understood this innately.  So did a German man I met along the road in Lassen as we prepared to hike down to Bumpass Hell sulphur pits.  He had worked hard, saved his money, quit his job and has been traveling America for over a month on his functional, slender wheeled motorcycle.  I noticed spartan belongings folded into the metal cases suspended from his bike, as his sole companions.  He hunched alone,securing the thick straps of his boots, his lanky frame covered in an over-all of dusty, element-proof material.  In this way, he shielded himself from  harsher weather, keeping his own counsel, while not detached from his world.  For, while my family scoured, first our van and then the trail head for water, he silently listened, letting our situation:  a three mile hike with limited water, unfold.  I finally spoke to him, "Where ya headed today?"  Reply, "On my way to Alaska."  "Oh, very neat! We're headed over to Yellowstone tomorrow..."  After a few minutes, and a few revelations (he needed to live, not work), he offered us a gallon of water for the trail!  He had a substantial stash apparently.  I declined, saying we'd make do...and we did...remember the Coke Zero?  I shook his gravelly hand, telling him,  "It makes me feel good to know that you're out there!  Thanks!!"  And off he zoomed.  And down the trail we trooped, Ben swaying on John's unbalanced frame in his backpack intended for a baby.  Not MY baby who is almost three!!

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I believe the stream below must be fed by winter snow melt.  There's no other source!  Also, as you can tell, the barren surrounding bares witness to a harsh, dry climate.  No wonder Nevada tourism relies on gambling and prostitution as licit revenue sources, a point which calls to mind the axiom:  you may ever do evil to achieve a licit end!