All Fall Down

We never get a real fall, it seems like. Things just turn brown and fall off the trees and that's it. But I looked out my window today and saw this tree in my side yard blazing yellow. It'll probably only last five minutes so I ran out and took pictures. I like the yellow and blue and the red brick all together.

You can all probably sleep better now.

My Birthday: Joshua Tree National Park

I spent my birthday last Friday wandering around (in some cases literally) and driving through Joshua Tree National Park. It's a pretty amazing place. My friend Carol and I got up pretty early, had a fifty-dollar breakfast in Palm Springs (that's the only kind they have there, actually), picked up our rental car and drove forty miles to the little-used Cottonwood Springs entrance. Palm Springs does a lot of things well, but promote nearby Joshua Tree isn't one of them. Virtually NO mention of the park in any of the promotional literature scattered throughout the whole town. NONE. Which explains why this nearby entrance is little-used, I guess.

We had decided to do a pretty good-sized desert hike, the Lost Palms Oasis hike at 8 miles. When we got there, we learned it was really only 6.8 but still: that's a long walk in the god-forsaken desert. We handled it with aplomb, mainly because it never got above 90 and was pleasantly breezy most of the time. Sand sand sand, ocotillo, sand. Oh look a rock. Lizard. Sand, cactusy thing. OOO a rock. And then ta-da, oasis. Then all of that backwards.





We then left that section of the park, the Colorado desert part, and went to the Mojave part which was like visiting Mars. Thirty degrees cooler and alien-looking. Lots of photos like this. 247 of them, actually. I sort of wish we'd hiked in this part rather than the hotter part but eh, what can you do. Then we committed some felonies and stole some joshua tree seed pods. Ha ha, eat it, Park Service.







It was a pretty cool place. Crappy gift shop, though, and if you're keeping score this year that's a LOT of crappy National Park gift shoppes. I really do need to just go up there to DC and get the Dept of the Interior t-shirts in order. It's shameful how awful most of them are.

Campasaurus Rex, Part Two! Big South Fork: Days 3 & 4

We woke up Sunday morning to hike the 6-mile Honey Creek Loop. This hike has an almost legendary status in Tennessee and has been called "the hardest hike in Tennessee" (mainly by the crazy hiking ladies from a few months ago at Beaman Park, but whatever). I have had an almost laser-like focus on it for months and it was pretty much the whole reason I wanted to go to Big South Fork in the first place. We ate chicken sausage and polenta and then got into Loretta....right as it started to sprinkle. This was bad news: in addition to not really wanting to hike in the rain, part of the Honey Creek trail is literally in a creek bed and you hike about two-tenths of a mile up the creek. If the water is high, it's not do-able at all. We headed to the trailhead, with me being wishy-washy about it all of a sudden, saying "oh let's just forget it!" and then five seconds later saying "let's do it!" and then five seconds after that saying "what do you think?" so welcome to passive-aggressive Sunday, everybody! In the end, we did decide to go ahead and attempt the hike - the weather ended up being agreeable and sunny. We got to the trailhead and started out briskly, yodelling Alpine tunes with our hats cocked jauntily and descended into the dark woods. I might be misremembering a bit of that. It's an unbelievably beautiful hike. Soaring rock walls, waterfalls (Moonshine Falls and Hideout Falls), bleeding heart.

We did end up only doing half of the hike - at the halfway point, there's a steep set of ladders that get you to the overlook above the Big South Fork and my left knee was bothering me just a bit - we still had the creek-walking to go and I was really worried I might get "stuck" and not be able to go forward or backward on a bum knee. So I played it conservatively and we skittered up the ladders and back to the trailhead a mile or so away. But! I will go back - maybe even later this summer - and hike the whole thing. Because if that's the hardest hike in Tennessee, I'm a fucking mountain goat.

Then we meandered over to the historic town of Rugby. Rugby is a preserved Victorian town that was some sort of Utopian society back in the old days and it's now all preserved "just as it was" which means I have figured out why they all died out and that's because all they lived on was horehound candy and salt water taffy, from the looks of the "just how it was" stuff. They happened to be having a festival that celebrated British and Appalachian culture and you know what that means - it's like a Renaissance Faire! I quelled my initial urge to just gun the engine and run over everyone walking around in bonnets and breeches and we walked around and looked at stuff. Native plants for sale. A lady that made pocketbooks out of old bark-cloth ("the perfect size for your Bible!" Boy was she the stupidest woman on earth or what? I almost said "yeah, about that. What do you have for athiests and/or Jews?" but I didn't.) Then! A lady who was yanking the fur off of a rabbit and spinning it into yarn right in front of my eyes! It was like magic! Especially when I asked if she was gonna pluck that rabbit bald and without missing a beat she said "yes, and then I make him a little rabbit cozy" which pretty much made my ears stand up on high alert and I demanded to see a photo of a rabbit cozy and she pulled one right out. So a rabbit gets all his fur yanked out, it gets spun into a rabbit cozy and then put back on him! I thought it was sort of like making a cow wear a leather jacket. Eh, sort of. Then we watched the crazy people who were taking this shit seriously do a maypole dance. Yes, that's a black person doing a maypole dance. Leave it to East Tennessee to whiten up the only brother in a hundred-mile radius.


Back to camp! Where we finally got the campfire going. Grilled flank steak, potatoes in foil, roasted red pepper slabs. Good eatin'! We both read a little, and stared into the campfire - which was quite large by the end of it, so much so that I had my chair like fifty feet from it, which cancelled out even needing a campfire, I guess, but la la la. Campfire! Then off to bed.

We woke up Monday and sort of lazily started breaking down camp. We packed up Loretta and headed off to the last hike of the trip, a short out and back to Twin Arches. Chicago Meg says they must be fraternal twins because they don't look alike, and then she told me a funny story about her friend Judy who has twins, a boy and a girl, and how people are always asking her if they're identical. People are so dumb. ANYWAY. The two arches are really impressive - you can't see them until you're RIGHT THERE under them. We figured out there must be a vantage point where you can see both, but we couldn't figure out exactly where it would be. We are writing letters demanding clearer signage. Then back to the car and, sadly, home. Which is not at all like Big South Fork.

Yeah, So Eight Miles Is A Long Fucking Way

This week's hike was an out-and-back at Long Hunter State Park, the Bryant Grove Trail, on the edge of Percy Priest Lake. The problem with out-and-back hikes is you see the same boring stuff on the way back that you saw on the way there. Caterpillars! Trillium! Cedar trees! More cedar trees! Then you see it all backwards. BORING! But! This was actually a pretty surprising hike. I had verrrry low expectations, but it turned out to be pretty fantastic, scenery-wise. Most of the hike was along the lakeshore - this is a lake that's famous for turning up dead bodies, but Chicago Meg and I were disappointed that we didn't see one bobbing facedown in the water. We had her dog with us, despite the big NO PETS sign (our cover story was going to be that Chicago Meg had just recently been blinded and that Cooper was her guide dog trainee and then she was supposed to bump into a tree) but we never got snagged.

Long Hunter is mostly made up of a series of cedar forests interspersed with some more open, glade-like areas. It's very unusual - one minute it feels like Wisconsin (so says Chicago Meg and she would know, so no posting about how that's wrong) and then the next minute it feels like the thickets of East Texas. It's really odd. There was almost no one on the trail ... which is good because I'm not sure how good of an actress Chicago Meg is and she might have blown the blind-act we had worked up.

We did have one lingering question. We saw a flock of, uhhh, something skittering across a field. They were shaped like pheasants but they were big like turkeys. What are those? Seriously, they were like waist-high. (That's not what's in the pic below - I know that's a heron). We saw another one of the mystery birds in the woods (and it could run fast), along with a fox. I'd never seen a fox in person before so that was exciting.

This particular trail was marked in half-mile increments and we're a little suspicious - they seemed like some AWFULLY long half-miles. Eight miles might be my limit at this point in my life because I was some serious-assed tired. We determined that the one thing missing from nature was a Coke machine. I'm not sure I'll do this actual trail again, but I'll definitely visit Long Hunter again when the seasons change. It was a surprise.

Beaman Park x 2

Saturday I dodged the rain and went to Beaman Park in between cloudbursts. It's seriously beautiful up there in the northwest corner of Davidson County, and it's particularly weird to think of it as still being Metro Nashville, which it is. You get the bad with the good: right outside the park entrance there's a trailer on cinder blocks in the creek bottom with (I'm not exaggerating) ten pit bulls, each permanently chained to a different doghouse, each placed just far enough from the other ones that they can't interact. They just sit there like fearsome quiet sentries, guarding their little shingled homemade huts.

The morning rain had Henry Creek running fairly high and all the side streams cascaded prettily into it, making me need to pee about every seven steps. I was breaking in new hiking boots and also testing out my new hiking stick-a-ma-bob. Spring hasn't quite sprung yet - I did see some reindeer moss and there were some Christmas ferns that did a good job holding over the winter, but not much else was budding up, even the trees. Whereas the trees in my yard are covered with buds. These redneck trees know something is up! They're staying clammed up. My hiking stick has a compass on it and I was very surprsed to see that nine times out of ten in these particular woods, moss did only grow on the north sides of the trees. So that was one thing I thought was an old wives' tale that wasn't. And really: don't leave any comments about how you know otherwise. I don't really care and I will delete them. Let's face it: if I wanted to read other peoples' opinions about this particular issue, I would read their blogs about moss!

It was a 2.1 mile hike - the Henry Hollow loop - and not hard at all, even though there is some significant vertical terrain. I admit that before, I could never really figure out why they called a hollow a hollow, but it's plain as day to me now. You really do see it when you're there - a steep hillside with a wide swooping curve, as if it had been hollowed out with trowel. I didn't see other people at all, which was fine because once again, alone in the woods, I had that "this would be a good place for a murder" feeling.

The next day, Sunday - THE LORD'S DAY - I went again to do the same hike with my hiking friend Carol, who also just helped Sister Meg and me refinance our house so she is directly responsible for my giant bathtub full of twenty-dollar bills. We are trying to hike every week and when Chicago Meg gets back from Gulf Shores, I think we're going to enlist her as well in what I am now calling the Saturday Morning Hiking, Bowling, Brunching and Cribbage Club. We will do ONE of those things every Saturday morning. But! That's putting the cart before the horse! And no you can't be in the club! It's by invitation only. ANYWAY! Carol was as taken with Beaman Park as I am. Next week, we're going to go do the same hike again, with another loop added on for a total of 6 miles. I think it might be cool to do this hike every week because we can monitor spring. There's supposed to be a goodly number of yellow lady's slipper out there and that I would like to see.

After our hike/gossip, we went to the new Red Robin, even though I am pretty anti-chain restaurant but I really wanted a hamburger, where I had a pot roast sandwich, which is not a hamburger at all, I KNOW, but at least I didn't have a chicken sandwich like Carol did, which I am convinced she only ordered because there was a picture of it on the menu and that way she didn't have to read all the other five-thousand descriptions of items they had. In addition to the pot roast sandwich experience, a large red plastic chicken menaced me from across the room - just look! HIS EYES ARE STARING RIGHT AT ME!. Though Carol pointed out sometime later that it was probably not a chicken at all but instead a red robin since we were at, you know, RED ROBIN and suddenly that made a lot more sense. Though in a way no sense at all; there's still no explanation about why this giant red robin was threatening me, though I admit robins seem less instantly terrifying than chickens do. Then we went to World Market (my third time in four days!) because she hadn't been there yet and then wa-la, that was the end of this meeting of the Saturday Morning Hiking, Bowling, Brunching and Cribbage Club. Except this time it met on a Sunday. Hmmm. I think I have some things to work out about this club still.

With a Banjo On My Knee

The last two days of the Alabama vacation were as great as the first two. I spent a couple of more hours on Wednesday on the Pine Beach Trail, yet another part of the Bon Secour Wildlife Refuge. This was a four-mile out and back and it went through a lot of different kinds of landscape. Maritime forest, scrubby something or other, a lagoon sort of thing and then some dunes...until ta-da, the gulf. It was a good hike but I got a little bit sunburned.


Later in the day, Chicago Meg and I tried to go get pizza but since everything in Gulf Shores closes at like 1pm in the low season, we were foiled at every turn. So we had tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for the Project Runway finale. We were definitely both Team Christian and we are both completely stymied by Jillian's apparent non-Jewishness.

Thursday I packed up the car and then I took Madeline out on the beach and she did her usual thing when I let her off the leash where she sort of runs around deaf and nuts and the fuh-reaks out when she can't find me. Then we piled into Loretta and took the Ft. Morgan ferry across the mouth of Mobile Bay to Dauphin Island. Now don't try and get all fancy and pronounce Dauphin in the French manner; pronounce it in the bottle-nosed manner, like "dolphin" without the L. Anyway, this bay is where David Farragut (another famous D.G., by the way, as his middle name was Glasgow) yiyapped about not firing until you see the whites of their eyes. Which I could totally see, as Madeline's eyes nearly popped out of her head when the ferry engine started. She calmed down eventually but one thing I noticed was that of the 18 cars on the ferry, at least eight of them had dogs. That seemed high. Anyway, you could see lots of oil platforms from the ferry, both in the bay and in the Gulf. I wonder if you can visit them? Or is it all super-secret?
So anyway, I hopped onto I-65 and made my way to Splinter Hill Bog Preserve, which is another area heavy on pitcher plants. None were in bloom but you could see all the dried up ones and that must be something else in the summertime. It was one of those trails where they post little informational things along the way and on one of them it said something like "there are eight million venomous snakes in this one square acre" which frankly is something they should say at the BEGINNING of the trail if you ask me, BUT THEY DIDN'T ASK ME so then Madeline and I turned around to get the hell out of there and that's when we saw another little sign that said WATCH OUT FOR ALABAMA BLACK BEARS and suddenly this Splinter Hill Bog trail was PISSING ME OFF. Then I remembered Chicago Meg telling me a story about how when she was in the Peace Corps (Togo!) one of the things they taught her was how to kill a snake with a rock. She said if you see a snake in Africa, don't bother with your ethics; just kill the damned thing. With a rock. So I picked up a rock for protection. I figured the mechanics of it were pretty straightforward. She didn't give me any advice on taking out a bear; I guess they didn't teach her that in Togo.

We walked back to the car and began the long drive up 65. It was almost eighty degrees when I left Snake Bog. It was thirty in Nashville when I got out of the car and we are expecting four inches of snow tonight. Sigh. Chicago Meg says she's gonna do the Gulf Shores thing again next year and I can't wait to go.

Crazy in Alabama

Oh, Alabama! You crazy barefoot inbred mistress of my heart! From the depths of my Croc-flopped soul I look at thee! My BFF Chicago Meg is on her 2nd Annual Escape From Winter working vacation in Gulf Shores for a few weeks and I took it upon myself to skeedaddle eight hours down I-65 and visit her and avail myself of a free place to stay at the beach for a few days. So far it's been insanely beautiful: near 70 every day and sunny, except for a dramatic thunderstorm last night. BUT ANYWAY! Enough about the weather. Do I LOOK like WILLARD SCOTT? But a happy Smuckers birthday to my centenarian readers nonetheless.

I loaded up Madeline and drove down on Sunday, with brief stops in both the cosmopolis of Elkton, TN (where Madeline was menaced by a giant thirty-foot-tall knife-wielding, chef-hat-wearing chicken. What is a chicken that tall looking for to eat? And also? Chickens do NOT HAVE opposable thumbs! How do they hold a knife or fork? It was a very confusing stop and I haven't even gotten to the part about the joint next door, The Boobie Bungalow. I have no idea what they do there. Perhaps it is a wildlife group dedicated to the preservation of a certain species?) and also Greeneville, AL, where absolutely nothing of interest has ever happened, other than me driving through. Oh, maybe a tornado or a civil rights march or WHATEVER but other than that, NOTHING. Especially if you judge it by the gift shops. NOTHING. So then I got off 65 and made a beeline to the Coleman Camping Factory Outlet, where I picked up two hiking poles (because that's what makes me a SERIOUS HIKER. How much shit I carry when I do it) and a red steel-belted camping cooler. I'm stopping there again on my way back. Then I got to Gulf Shores, hung a right and drove all the way out the Ft. Morgan Peninsula, as far as I could go without falling into the Gulf of Mexico. The name of the house is Dolphy Dunes. I have no idea what a Dolphy is.

Monday was mostly a little bit of beach-walking and a trip back into Gulf Shores to eat a plate of oysters at a pizzareia/oysterbar. Good, not great. I'm still sort of craving a spectacular plate of them.

But TODAY! Oh, TODAY! Fantastic. We got up early and drove back a few miles to meet our tour guide for a nature walk in the Bon Secour WIldlife Refuge. Her name was Jan and she was a lovely older lady with a Wisconsin accent. She pointed out reindeer moss and dewberry and dollar weed and several hollies and someotherthingamajigs and I couldn't hold it all in but she was very knowledgable but she didn't like it when BFF Chicago Meg said something about a muscadine grape leaf that seemed different than the other grape leaves she had pointed out. Jan turned on her heel and stomped off into the alligator/armadillo/cottonmouth-infested maritime forest. I laughed at that, "maritime forest." It sounded so fancy! It just means "woods by the beach." But it was super-pretty.

Then we had breakfast at a weird place that had 9/11 newspaper clippings all over the place ("I'll have two ham biscuits with a side of tragedy! And a small orange juice!") and then we delivered our friend Jenna to the Pensacola airport - after I spent sixty-two dollars on inexplicable things at Souvenir City and the Purple Octopus. Don't ask. But if you need a sand dollar that has been airbrushed with the phrase "Liquor Up Front; Poker In The Rear," please call me. I have a surprise for you!


Anyway. On the way to the airport we saw a drive-in liquor store and I was very excited about that. Liquor! Now with Manatee!

Then, on the way home from the airport, we stopped at Tarkiln Bayou Preserve State Park, on the Florida side of the state line. It's pretty simple and small as state parks go, but there's a spectacular boardwalk that hovers above (in summer) vast expanses of wild-growing pitcher plants and other carnivorous plants. It was pretty great and I can't wait to revisit it in high pitcher plant season. This last picture really does capture the essence of the place, and also of the day as a whole, from a morning maritime forest, to a late afternoon bayou. All perfection.