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| The Shiprock in New Mexico |
Tom Sheppard
7/9/2018
This summer, I had the opportunity to do some serious driving. I estimate that I drove about 6,800 miles. Just under two-thirds of these were along a route familiar to me already between Charlotte, North Carolina and Salt Lake City, Utah. The last 2,600 miles, or so, had the same end points, but instead of going through Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, this last trip I went through Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Because of taking this alternate route, I got to see some of the country I had not before experienced.
My wife and I got to see the hills around Crescent Junction, Utah at sunrise. Moab, Utah early on a sleepy Sunday morning. Hole in the Rock, Utah and Wilson's Arch, as we dashed past on the highway.
The landscape in Southern Utah was amazing and breathtaking.
From Monticello, Utah (which bears absolutely no resemblance to the home of Thomas Jefferson, by the same name), we headed East, by Southeast, through Cortez, Colorado.
That Southwestern corner of Colorado seemed filled with green farmland. Sometimes the fields on the hills were plowed right up to the edges of the houses, not giving up hardly a foot of ground to anything but the harvest.
From Cortez, we went south into New Mexico, and what a dramatic passage it is going from the green hills of Colorado into the barren wastelands of the New Mexico desert! Most of that land is part of a reservation for Native Americans. If you travel there, it will become obvious that the US Government was allocating lands which it deemed worthless and probably hoped that the natives would die out in such a harsh and barren land, another part of the push to exterminate them.
Shiprock (pictured at the top of this post) in New Mexico is quite a spectacular formation. It stands alone in the middle of a great plain, inside a very large basin. It is visible for many, many miles. As the road angles past it, the rock seems to change its shape.
When I first saw it, as we approached from the North, it reminded me of the depictions of the Druids Keep from the Elfstones of Shannarra by Terry Brooks. It seemed to have two great horns extending up from each side, its face in shadow from the morning sun.
As we traveled to see it from a more easterly direction, it began to evoke a shape more appropriate to its name, looking like some tall-masted ship sailing across the desert, leaving a ridge of stone in its wake.
In New Mexico, it was easy to see who had money. Those with money had trees near their house. Everyone else, had only the dirt for landscaping.
Most of the rest of New Mexico, from Shiprock to Gallup, through Albuquerque to the border of Texas west of Amarillo is mostly a blur. The land got a little bit more green and hilly from Gallup onward.
Texas was big, flat, green, flat, wide open, and did I mention it was very flat? From an overpass on the highway I could see so far that I could have watched a dog run away for a week before he went out of sight. By the time we hit Wichita Falls, Texas, where it got a bit hilly, it was fully dark, so I didn't get to see any of what was making the road go up, down and around. It might have been hills, it might have been crazy highway engineers, or it may have been dodging around the bends in the river.
Our route angled across the top of Texas from Amarillo through Forth Worth and over to Shreveport, Louisiana. Louisiana was green, rolling country all the way to the Mississippi.
Crossing the Mississippi, I was able to see the heights above Vicksburg. They were a key patch of ground in the US Civil War. One of my mother's ancestors is reputed to have fired the last cannon shot in defense of Vicksburg. Once the heights above the river were taken, the town fell and the Union was able to effectively control the waterways from New Orleans to Ohio. This was the first deadly piece of the Union strategy to successfully cut the Confederacy into pieces, and set the stage for Sherman's March to the Sea, including the burning of Atlanta.
Our trip too went to Atlanta. But, where Sherman went through Tennessee into Georgia, we went through Mississippi and Alabama, up Interstate 20. Although we didn't burn Atlanta, like Sherman did, I envied him the opportunity given the state of traffic as we hit town just in time for the evening rush hour on the evening before the Fourth of July Holiday.
From Atlanta to Charlotte it was familiar road, traveled many times for me. We sailed past the Revolutionary War sites of Cowpens and Kings Mountain, as well as past the Gafney Peach in Gaffney, South Carolina, made somewhat more famous by Kevin Spacey's House of Cards TV series.
In my road trips across this country, there are only a few states I have not traversed at all. North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts are the only states in the lower 48 I have not visited. I have also missed Hawaii and Alaska.
The opportunity to see this land from ground level, instead of just flying over it at 20,000 feet, has given me an appreciation of the people who pioneered as well as those who live there now. When I consider the prospect of traversing the plains from Omaha, Nebraska along the Platte and the North Platte and into the high plains of Southern Wyoming I stand amazed at those who rode out on wagons, pushing handcarts, walking, or even riding a horse. The eastern half of this nation, East of the Mississippi, is very different terrain than what lies West of the Mississippi.
Where the East overflows with rivers, forests, and hills, the West interrupts vast flat expanses of grassland and desert with bursts of rugged hills and mountains, some forested, most not. A sight like the red desert hills of Southern Utah is unimaginable anywhere East of the Mississippi. It feels like stepping into a totally different planet.
Although I am a child of the West, born and raised in Montana, I don't hold much partiality to one sort of terrain over another, with one exception. I lived for nearly 10 years in Northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Around D.C., there is little in the way of dramatic natural formations, either of hills, valleys, or even vast expanses of water. The largest objects which arrest the eye of the traveler, or occupant, are the monuments, office buildings, and bridges. All of these are man-made objects.
I believe that the absence of natural, intimidating, landscape features in D.C. gives the inhabitants there a skewed perspective on the place of man in the cosmos. Seeing the greatest features being only man-made, makes the subconscious adopt the notion that mankind is the biggest thing going.
In contrast, when you stand on edge of the ocean, look up to a mountain peak, or across the twisted landscape of canyons or desert, you know. Man is no more than a speck in the picture of this world, much less in the cosmos. In spite of our abilities to adapt to our environs, and our limited abilities to adapt our environs to us, we really don't make much of a dent at all in the makeup of this world.
A big earthquake, a tsunami, a flood, a hurricane, all have the ability to wipe the earth clean of any trace of our having ever been here.
Because of taking this alternate route, I got to see some of the country I had not before experienced.
My wife and I got to see the hills around Crescent Junction, Utah at sunrise. Moab, Utah early on a sleepy Sunday morning. Hole in the Rock, Utah and Wilson's Arch, as we dashed past on the highway.
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| Welcome to Moab, Utah |
The landscape in Southern Utah was amazing and breathtaking.
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| Red Rock Formations in Southern Utah |
From Monticello, Utah (which bears absolutely no resemblance to the home of Thomas Jefferson, by the same name), we headed East, by Southeast, through Cortez, Colorado.
That Southwestern corner of Colorado seemed filled with green farmland. Sometimes the fields on the hills were plowed right up to the edges of the houses, not giving up hardly a foot of ground to anything but the harvest.
From Cortez, we went south into New Mexico, and what a dramatic passage it is going from the green hills of Colorado into the barren wastelands of the New Mexico desert! Most of that land is part of a reservation for Native Americans. If you travel there, it will become obvious that the US Government was allocating lands which it deemed worthless and probably hoped that the natives would die out in such a harsh and barren land, another part of the push to exterminate them.
Shiprock (pictured at the top of this post) in New Mexico is quite a spectacular formation. It stands alone in the middle of a great plain, inside a very large basin. It is visible for many, many miles. As the road angles past it, the rock seems to change its shape.
When I first saw it, as we approached from the North, it reminded me of the depictions of the Druids Keep from the Elfstones of Shannarra by Terry Brooks. It seemed to have two great horns extending up from each side, its face in shadow from the morning sun.
As we traveled to see it from a more easterly direction, it began to evoke a shape more appropriate to its name, looking like some tall-masted ship sailing across the desert, leaving a ridge of stone in its wake.
In New Mexico, it was easy to see who had money. Those with money had trees near their house. Everyone else, had only the dirt for landscaping.
Most of the rest of New Mexico, from Shiprock to Gallup, through Albuquerque to the border of Texas west of Amarillo is mostly a blur. The land got a little bit more green and hilly from Gallup onward.
Texas was big, flat, green, flat, wide open, and did I mention it was very flat? From an overpass on the highway I could see so far that I could have watched a dog run away for a week before he went out of sight. By the time we hit Wichita Falls, Texas, where it got a bit hilly, it was fully dark, so I didn't get to see any of what was making the road go up, down and around. It might have been hills, it might have been crazy highway engineers, or it may have been dodging around the bends in the river.
Our route angled across the top of Texas from Amarillo through Forth Worth and over to Shreveport, Louisiana. Louisiana was green, rolling country all the way to the Mississippi.
Crossing the Mississippi, I was able to see the heights above Vicksburg. They were a key patch of ground in the US Civil War. One of my mother's ancestors is reputed to have fired the last cannon shot in defense of Vicksburg. Once the heights above the river were taken, the town fell and the Union was able to effectively control the waterways from New Orleans to Ohio. This was the first deadly piece of the Union strategy to successfully cut the Confederacy into pieces, and set the stage for Sherman's March to the Sea, including the burning of Atlanta.
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| The Siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi |
Our trip too went to Atlanta. But, where Sherman went through Tennessee into Georgia, we went through Mississippi and Alabama, up Interstate 20. Although we didn't burn Atlanta, like Sherman did, I envied him the opportunity given the state of traffic as we hit town just in time for the evening rush hour on the evening before the Fourth of July Holiday.
From Atlanta to Charlotte it was familiar road, traveled many times for me. We sailed past the Revolutionary War sites of Cowpens and Kings Mountain, as well as past the Gafney Peach in Gaffney, South Carolina, made somewhat more famous by Kevin Spacey's House of Cards TV series.
 |
| Gaffney, South Carolina Peach Water Tower |
The opportunity to see this land from ground level, instead of just flying over it at 20,000 feet, has given me an appreciation of the people who pioneered as well as those who live there now. When I consider the prospect of traversing the plains from Omaha, Nebraska along the Platte and the North Platte and into the high plains of Southern Wyoming I stand amazed at those who rode out on wagons, pushing handcarts, walking, or even riding a horse. The eastern half of this nation, East of the Mississippi, is very different terrain than what lies West of the Mississippi.
Where the East overflows with rivers, forests, and hills, the West interrupts vast flat expanses of grassland and desert with bursts of rugged hills and mountains, some forested, most not. A sight like the red desert hills of Southern Utah is unimaginable anywhere East of the Mississippi. It feels like stepping into a totally different planet.
Although I am a child of the West, born and raised in Montana, I don't hold much partiality to one sort of terrain over another, with one exception. I lived for nearly 10 years in Northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Around D.C., there is little in the way of dramatic natural formations, either of hills, valleys, or even vast expanses of water. The largest objects which arrest the eye of the traveler, or occupant, are the monuments, office buildings, and bridges. All of these are man-made objects.
I believe that the absence of natural, intimidating, landscape features in D.C. gives the inhabitants there a skewed perspective on the place of man in the cosmos. Seeing the greatest features being only man-made, makes the subconscious adopt the notion that mankind is the biggest thing going.
In contrast, when you stand on edge of the ocean, look up to a mountain peak, or across the twisted landscape of canyons or desert, you know. Man is no more than a speck in the picture of this world, much less in the cosmos. In spite of our abilities to adapt to our environs, and our limited abilities to adapt our environs to us, we really don't make much of a dent at all in the makeup of this world.
A big earthquake, a tsunami, a flood, a hurricane, all have the ability to wipe the earth clean of any trace of our having ever been here.
Tom Sheppard is a business consultant and coach to small business owners and individuals. He is a recognized author with dozens of titles in business and fiction to his credit. One of his endeavors is to help those who want to see their own book in print. He does this through his trademarked Book Whispering Process (TM).
The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.
(c) Copyright 2017 A+ Results LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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