Our stay in Pasadena was extended for a week of tennis fun (daily play, lessons, and ball machines) followed by a week of recovery from tennis injury (Steven sprained his ankle BADLY). At last, we are on route to the land of the red rocks, with some great sites surprising us along the way:

1)  OLDEST DIG IN THE U.S.: CAMP LEAKY- EARLY MAN SITE?? Calico, CA

Dee Simpson took evidence of early man findings from San Bernadino County to Dr. Louis Leaky (of Oldevai Gorge Fame) in London. He got funding in 1964 from The National Geographic Society to dig for biface tools used by Early Man at least 14,000 years ago at this site. Unfortunately, Leakey’s claims that this site would yield human remains from 100,000 years ago has led to questions about his competence. It appears that the lack of any other remains of human and animals at this site, and the enormous numbers of biface tools found, forms a scientific consensus that these “tools” are geofacts (created environmentally) not artifacts of human use. Carbon dating is difficult as the alkaline soil destructs organic materials. However, as some tools were heated, geothermal luminescence suggests earlier findings. The then verdant landscape with 20 inches of rain/year provided hard material (non-crystalline silicon dioxide) that flake off just a bit fatter than 1 ml. thick obsidian flakes (that rival the best surgical scalpel available today). Although this is the oldest continuing archeological site in the U.S., it is “young” compared to Early Man sites in Europe over 100,000 years old. When Dr. Leaky died in 1972, Dee Simpson, curated the site until 2000. It is an active dig and still remains the oldest in the U.S.

ZION SHOE TREE, Hurricane, UT:

There are lots of shoe trees around it seems. Legend has it that this one commemorates those who hiked the crazy exposed Angel’s Landing Trail in Zion NP where 6 have died from falls. With Steven’s blackened ankle, we passed up the chance to hike it and add our shoes.

PAH-TEMPE HOT POOLS, Hurricane, UT

7 pools, the color of travertine, cascading into the Virgin River under a mountainous ridge. Unbelievably, you rent it out all to yourselves for 3 hours at a time for private lolling and stewing. What a pleasure to shoot photos sitting in 102 degree water……Ooooh!…..Aaaaah!  There is also this little geyser providing a constant jet of warm water, especially for the ladies!

What do the Ivy League colleges have in common? Brick buildings, Autumn foliage, Ice Hockey Fanatics.

Rensselaer fall colors

One may don appropriate attire (note the fetching headware…that would be a foam hockey puck you see on my head) and root for the “Engineers”. Really. No “Wolverines”, “Tigers” or “Mustangs” for this crowd. I guess we win by outsmarting the opposition? Perhaps this was picked at the school’s inception in 1824. It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and boasts the chief engineers for the Ferris Wheel, many famous bridges, the first commercial TV, the first digital camera, creator of e-mail, and the microprocessor, and the Kindle as its’ alumni. As a parent, I am just thrilled my child is happy, has friends, actually meets with his professors, and is working his butt off like never before. He is happy that tons of hightech businesses come on campus soliciting freshman for summer jobs. He also wanted “real winter”, and I hope he is happy that “Frankenstorm”, a convergence of three weather systems, including Hurricane Shelley are beating inland towards Troy, NY. Some kinda fun, I guess? I’m just glad that my mother and I got to see the gorgeous foliage at Parents’ Weekend before the leaves got blown away.

I lived in Pasadena until I was 17. Visiting my mother here, gives us old and new venues to explore as she hosts us like visiting dignitaries. So many things here have gotten better over time (air quality, most of all) and some…well, not so much (like the traffic!). Some of the great old restaurants have been preserved, especially my old favorites like “Philippe’s French Dip Sandwiches”, where you share huge long tables on sawdust floors with all the other neighborhood folks. For jazz, cocktails and thick rare steaks, an old favorite, “Columbo’s” is still in business, although the onsite owner/manager just died two weeks ago at age 99.5, so some changes may be afoot. For new establishments, I had better Vegan food than Berkeley or SF offers, at “My Vegan” in Pasadena. That was just the food part (Thanks, Ma!).  The Arts are thriving here as well:

“FORK IN THE ROAD”, was a guerrilla public art installation, where an abandoned freeway extension left a weedy bare lot, splitting traffic exiting and entering the freeway ramps. Although the City of Pasadena removed it as a hazard, the public outcry forced the City to replace it with a permanent installation and recognize the affiliated charitable group collecting food for the hungry. Today, there was a one day visitor….a 6 ton sculpture of a baked potato chained onto a flat bed truck!  The Meals on Wheels organization and 75th Anniversary of Potato Grower’s Association teamed up to tour this sculpture across the country, doing a food collection. Lucky us, we got to see a unique pairing of Pasadena food and art …and get rid of the creamed corn and mushy peas we still can’t figure out why we bought in the first place!)

ART WEEKEND @ PASADENA  is a free, twice yearly event that encompasses so many venues that 3 shuttle bus loops leave from City Hall to showcase exhibitions of art/dance/music/food trucks in every part of the City. Although we only visited Art Center College of Design (for commercial art training), the Armory, Side Street Project (teaching math to 3rd graders by building art), and Norton Simon, it was an overload for the senses..and this was just Friday night! The weekend proceeded with food trucks, outdoor concert and art venues, including an ethnic dance festival, with great flamenco guitar and dancing.

ART PLATFORM is an annual event. The major galleries each feature one of their showcase artists.  Usually Downtown, this year in a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, we met painter Cheng Ping, with Geffen, Downtown. (Chinatown has more than 100 artists showing in the galleries there, so there is no need to go to Culver City to find the LA Art Scene). Born in Beijing, residing in Tasmania, Ping’s work is often abstracted expressions of animals in nature. Our featured photo at the top, “Myth of the Mountain and Sea-Flying Beast”, stood out at this event as, “intensely painted”, with visible brush strokes, smears and scraping, creating great layering and depth. Extraordinary, among the field of clean, stylized, digital photo-based painting and collage.  Ping was the exciting contemporary artist, in a field of modernists.

What a great art week in Pasadena and Downtown LA and all these great events were eclipsed by the biggest conceptual art event of the year..THE SPACE SHUTTLE, 900,000 pounds, on 160 wheels moving through Downtown Los Angeles!  Rolling past an enormous Donut in the dark, it was part of a truck commercial. How fun it that? How La-La is that?

High up, above 11,000 feet in the arid White Mountains of California, just east of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range and north of Death Valley, it is known for for extreme weather.  This area gets less than a foot of rain a year.  The wind blows almost constantly, and the temperature can dip to well below zero.  After an hour-drive over a graded, long, windy and rocky 12-mile dirt road, we got spectacular scenery around us before we finally reached the Patriarch Grove.  In this grove lives the largest of the oldest living entities on planet – the ancient warped, gnarled, and twisted Great Basin Bristlecone Pines.

Now just imagine this: some of these surviving Bristlecone Pines germinated during the Bronze Age (by the way, that’s between the Stone and the Iron Ages) :
– long before papyrus and ipads, when clay tablets were being used in Ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamia and Minoan civilizations;
– before one pine’s frost ring corresponded with a volcanic eruption in the Aegean in July 1626 BC, and provided a precise date for the whole set of archaeological data on Minoan civilization;
– before earliest structures of Stonehedge were being prepared;
– when, a few hundreds years later, around 2500 BC, the Great Pyramid was constructed;
– well before the World population has expounded to an estimated  30 million people; and
– at a time when, per Wikipedia, human life expectancy was about 26 years.

During my healing journey through grief back in Fall of 2008 after the passing of my wife, Aspasia, I took a pilgrimage to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.  Before sunrise, I was mesmerized and amazed by the clear crispy air under the brilliant Milky Way, meteor streaks (CLICK HERE), and then fleeting clouds, in the glowing kaleidoscopic sky.  Underneath enormous skies, the shaping of these trees started, and every tree looked different from its neighbor.  Some are twisted into a corkscrew.  Others have branches that stretch in multiple directions.  Perhaps most remarkable is the color of the exposed wood, which glows with shades of orange and gold.

Before leaving, I stood there with goosedbumps, misty-eyed on the mountain, observing life older than our written history.  The struggle for these organisms to maintain life during extreme conditions is never ending, continuing day after day, year after year, century after century, and millennium after millennium.  I noted the continuing cycle, and personally felt more ready to take a small step forward into my own continuing life cycle.

This time when returning the second time to the Patriarch Grove, in our travels a few weeks ago, I noticed my changes, while the Patriarch Grove survives with unnoticeable changes.  It made me aware, perhaps spiritually.  Certainly, everybody has their different sense of what’s spiritual, what God there is, or what creator, or whatever you want to use.  But when I walked among these ancients once again, I realized how insignificant I was in the total picture of things.  Humility, greater appreciation, and even awe, crept over me – for these Ancient Great Basin Bristlecone Pines.  Do indeed come here before sunrise – you’ll surely be moved as we were.

My first day of  law school, my Constitutional Law professor boasted that he had taught both U.S. Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor. Ironically, weeks later he candidly told us, about the time in his life when he failed in his role as a Constitutional scholar and as an American. He told of the day that he took his best friend’s family to the train to depart for a “concentration camp” (President Roosevelt’s words), based solely on their Japanese heritage, and in spite of their American citizenship. He said he never protested Executive Order #9066, in spite of his supposed ability to see the unconstitutionality of the law. It never occurred to him, as he was caught up in the same fear and hysteria as the rest of the nation after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Today, no one questions the bad judgement of the decision to imprison our citizens based on race alone. Presidents Reagan and Bush publicly apologized and made reparations, but most of these citizens lost much more than the $20,000 of compensation offered. 85% of farmers were unable to return to their land after internship. “Snow Falling on Cedars” is a moving fictional account of the impact of the loss of businesses, homes, and communities, even many years later. My Constitutional Law professor was not alone; very few newspapers or public figures questioned this policy. Those that did, notably J. Edgar Hoover (who stated immediately that there was no “factual data” to justify the mass relocation) and Attorney General Francis Biddle (who believed this action clearly violated the U.S. Constitution), were ignored, and the War Department prevailed. Our Courts remained silent and all of California’s congressman unanimously stated their support for removal.

Did the public know that of the 110,000 jailed for being of Japanese descent, many were children. Specifically, of the 11,000 Americans jailed at Manzanar, 85% of those prisoners were under the age of 18 and solely American by citizenship? Would the public even care that we were enclosing 9,335 children behind barbed wire, with soldiers in guard towers keeping guns trained on them? That is the problem with fear and hysteria; it robs us of the ability to think rationally, one definition of “insanity”.

We have documents like the Constitution to guide us, when our faculties fail, when we cannot think straight due to our emotions. I believe my professor told us this with the hope that his students would question our nation’s decisions, and mount effective protests when fear twists our minds to believing that our finest laws and values should be abridged to handle the momentary hysteria. Benjamin Franklin warned us of the same dangers when he wrote, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”. The next time you hear someone arguing to disband the 4th Amendment right to privacy in favor of “Homeland Security”, go read your Constitution, and ask what we will become as a nation led by fear, instead of by principle.

A visit to this site south of Lone Pine, CA wedged between Death Valley and the Eastern Sierras is a moving reminder of our failure to heed the warning. Extreme temperatures and winds are predictable in the high desert, yet these citizens built their own jail, including beautiful Japanese gardens, enduring fine masonry still evident in the two existing Sentry Huts.  500 citizens worked in a factory here making camouflage nets for the Allies, the War Bond effort was active in Manzanar, as were the internees who joined the 100th Battalion and fought the Germans in Italy.  The National Park Service provides a free, and inspiring way, to understand what these citizens endured, with hope that by educating ourselves, we won’t repeat our mistakes, when our fear and hysteria escalate, when we do not feel safe and in control.

If it hadn’t been 106 degrees in Death Valley (still, far better than 124 degrees on July 11th this year…), and if we hadn’t blown a tire due to heat damage, we would not have slept in one of the biggest truck stops in the US:  Barstow, CA.  Furthermore, we would not have been on alternate Route #66 at 6 AM where we could limp along at 30 mph to Victorville, for a matching replacement tire. Without this juxtaposition of events, we would have missed the very whimsical, Bottle Tree Ranch.

One doesn’t expect to find an art installation on a 2 lane highway in this barren high desert arena. Elmer Long has lived at that sight for 42 years in Oro Grande, collected over 400 bottles in the desert and roadsides, and created a fantastic and delightful “forest”.

Art from found objects is always unique, often goofy, sometimes with a theme; Bottle Tree Ranch is a celebration of the history of car travel in the 1950’s when Route#66 was a swinging cross-country route.

 Sculptures made of car parts, gas pumps, abandoned toys, musical instruments, and….just unidentifiable weird and beautiful stuff, it is free and open to the public.

So, wander around and enjoy his “trees”.  Long live roadside art, making  us slow down, and enjoy the ride.