A frontier of beauty and grim tidings

The United States Census of 1890 was interpreted as disclosing that a frontier line — a point beyond which the population density was less than two persons per square mile — no longer existed. In an 1891 bulletin, Robert Porter, the Superintendent of the Census, wrote, Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports. ¹ Taking his cue from the 1890 census and the 1891 Porter bulletin, in 1893, the historian Frederick Turner made a speech titled The Significance of the Frontier in American History at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which he concluded by claiming, The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. ²

Nearly a century after Porter failed to identify a frontier line in the vast statistical abstraction of the census, Frank Popper of the Urban Studies Department at Rutgers University used that 1890 population density metric to identify 143 counties in 1980 with fewer than two people per square mile, all in western states, with all but the Alaskan counties to the east of the Sierra–Cascades, concentrated in the Owyhee–Bitterroot valleys of the Northwest, the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah, and the Great Plains from Montana to Texas.³ The argument Popper was supporting with his examination was that the frontier remained and could be found on a map and that, contrary to prevailing thought, it was still making history.

What is the frontier? Rural areas in the U.S. are now generally defined as sparsely populated regions outside urban centers, while frontier areas are a subset of rural areas characterized by very low population density and significant geographic isolation. Various government classifications, such as the Rural‐Urban Continuum Codes and Frontier and Remote Area Codes, help distinguish between these types based on factors like population size and distance from urban services. The areas that Popper called out remain the frontier. My brother John and I took a motorcycle ride this month through all of those in the Lower 48 but the Great Plains, and it was instructive to visit them, having superimposed over my inveterate curiosity a consciousness of penetrating a frontier that had never disappeared.

Huxdotter Coffee in North Bend has become our semi‐official launch pad for trips headed east or south, and Monday morning we fueled up there on lattés and breakfast sandwiches, not leaving until they had also made our lunch. The weather was cold and wet, and it would remain so throughout much of the day, but heated grips and jacket with a fully extended wind screen make riding the BMW in those conditions comfortable and uneventful.

We drove out of Washington state at Maryhill on the Columbia River via a route that traversed the land of the Yakama Nation. The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation were consigned to their reservation in 1855 by treaty with the Territory of Washington and, to this moment, are fighting for untrammeled rights to all of the land that was granted to them in that treaty.⁴ Riding my motorcycle across their sovereign territory and knowing that the treaty continues to be violated reminded me that land acknowledgements, while conciliatory, are but a wan gesture; we daily embarrass ourselves by making such pronouncements without focus on remedying even the most blatant of contemporary outrages: our state is squatting on 92,000 acres of land that belong to the Yakama tribes, everyone agrees this is so, and yet still the tribes must sue for satisfaction amid the cunctations of American government. Yes, but: precedent, one sniffs. To which I say that the doctrine upon which those precedents are founded is established in the decrees of crusading popes, such as the 1452 bull Dum Diversas of Nicholas Ⅴ authorizing Alfonso Ⅴ of Portugal to capture and subjugate the […] pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ and reduce their persons to perpetual servitude, and that we have had quite enough of that: stare decisis is mootable per current judicial practice in the United States where a political cause is exigent, and it is thus that the impediments to making the Yakama people whole should be superannuated.

Generally, when driving in open country as we were in northern Oregon, bends and wrinkles in the road are easily explained by terrain or other natural obstacles, section lines, and railroads. Crossing railroad rights‐of‐way often involves pairs of sharp turns that align the pavement orthogonally to the tracks. I get wistful when there is an inexplicable twist to the road, because I am certain the surveyor’s job had been complicated by local politics, and wish I knew the story behind the chosen geometry. One such jog in the road is at Wasco when leaving to the southeast after the turn at the Bank of Eastern Oregon. There was no hazard, and we continued on our way unchecked, but I swiveled my head as we passed, looking for an explanation why the road does not proceed straight ahead, and found nothing.

We ate our sandwiches at Burns Park, which is named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns and located next to the entrance to the Gilliam County Fairgrounds in Condon. The county insists that it is an RV park, and, indeed, it features seventeen hook‐ups for such things, but it is also a lovely wedge of grass and trees that shares its driveway with the Gilliam County Historical Museum — open Wednesday through Sunday from May 1 to October 1 — and the sunshine and breeze of a quiet midday break from the rain and cold made this another of the many places on the continent I will think upon fondly in consideration of those who set aside land and budget to maintain a space where all may pause to be refreshed.

The town of Condon was named after Harvey Condon, a land speculator whose uncle, a Congregationalist minister and self‐taught geologist named Thomas, was, in 1865, the first to record the fossilized imprints of the leaves of ancient plants in the Painted Hills to the south of Condon, which today are a feature of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. I was happy when we made the turn from Highway 19 onto Rowe Creek Road, which, though its purpose is local access to farms whose owners do not mind so much driving on gravel, benefits from being a shortcut to reach the Painted Hills via Twickenham, where the road crosses the John Day River. We have all seen sedimentary rock exposed on a hillside: layers of stone sandwiched together, each of a different hue or texture, deposited over eons. The Painted Hills are of that type, except the colors of each layer are vibrant and saturated, as if fresh from the brush of an artist who has just now left the room and will return momentarily. The painting tells the story of thirty‐five million years of tropical forests, vulcanism, and savannahs in ash and clay. Among their many striking qualities is that the hills are compact and few, Nature having prepared only a small canvas upon which this extraordinary display could be created. It is sights such as these that may be found only by pursuing gravel roads to their ends that buoy wonder about the embellishments to the landscape that pass unattended as one speeds through the world and redouble the care given to the study of maps.

John and I slept with bags and tents for years before a growing inclination to want a fluffy pillow and an electrical outlet finally drew us indoors each night. We have made a point since then of trying to stay in places with a bit of character, rather than at Holiday Inn Express. The Historic Central Hotel in Burns, Oregon, was perfectly suited to our preference for occupying rehabilitated spaces with walls that are not quite plumb and fire sprinklers that were grafted onto the ceilings decades after they were built. My shower was hot, and the bed was heaped with blankets, which made everything as required. We walked across town to The Pine Room for dinner, where a serviceable meal was waiting and business seemed good. The people of Burns and their neighbors have been coping with extensive flooding this month, and conversations at the tables around us seemed tempered by the strain of bearing up against the fretfulness and uncertainty that had been delivered along with the rain.

We would finish crossing the 1,490 square‐mile endorheic Harney Basin Tuesday morning, a region that receives an average of six inches of rain per year and where dryland ranching is the basis of the economy. The 293 square‐mile Malheur National Wildlife Refuge within the basin is part of the High Desert Wetlands ecoregion of Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada, where water collects seasonally upon the poorly‐drained soil and where mat muhly, wildrye, sedges, and rushes awaited the northern pintails, sandhill cranes, and songbirds of spring. In 1845, Stephen Meek, a fur trapper, convinced one thousand emigrants and their two hundred wagons to depart the Oregon Trail at Vale to the northeast, then accompany him through the Malheur Mountains and into the basin, where no wagons had traveled before, upon his promise to shepherd them along a shortcut to the Willamette Valley, and thus entered history as members of the party succumbed to starvation, thirst, and exposure while Meek, lost, sought the way to relief.

Malheur is French for evil hour. More loosely, it means calamity or misfortune. While the tragedy of the Meeks Cutoff is in the distant past, the flooding this month is a disaster awaiting resolution. Unmentioned in the local news today was another tribulation entailing water that threatens the people of the desert, which is that the groundwater is disappearing from the basin. Household wells have been running dry here for years, pumping sand where water once rose from the depths. The state declared its first critical groundwater area in 1959 in Cow Valley to the east but for the last sixty‐five years has enabled excessive pumping throughout the desert; for years, the state has allowed water to be pumped without first establishing how much water is actually available. It stopped authorizing new wells in Harney County in 2015, but still the groundwater recedes from the surface as existing wells drain the aquifer; in the basin, over 97% of their output is used to irrigate fields of hay that feed beef and dairy cattle. Rights to the use of water in the American West have always been viciously, even murderously, contested, and that is so in the Oregon desert, but the land here appears unwilling to carry the making of such a living much longer despite the elegant language of contracts and the faineance of bureaucracies, and the history of such places is to relinquish them to neglect. I watched as the hopeful people of Burns gathered themselves to repair the damage from the spate and thought it a pity that it is the overdrawing of water that may be the cause of their destruction.

We began with a nice chat early with the woman running Bella Java & Bistro in Burns while enjoying the scratch‐made breakfast sandwiches she placed before us and as she prepared our lunches for later. She told us when asked that the schedules of the few gas stations along our route were not dependable, due to a mix of ownership changes, lack of staff, and the endemically lackadaisical attitude toward time that city folk impute to those whose lives have been ensnared by the seasons of the desert, but that upon the last occasion she had to pass through Fields, the gas station was open and appeared to be thriving. Outside, a taco truck parked in the lot across the street was decorated with several pithy sayings, including: Because when you stop and look around, life is pretty amazing. I had to agree.

The morning was overcast and cool as we rode across the flat surface of the basin and into Catlow Valley south of the Malheur refuge. The scenery here is gorgeous. Snow‐capped mountains line the horizon beyond fulvous scrub that covers miles of earth, with views uninterrupted by the silhouettes of artifice: a vast and ancient place, we were bantam figures intruding on its solitude. Ahead and to our right were the Pueblo Mountains, which we would be following into Nevada, the exposed rock of which is up to 250 million years old, all tilted forty‐five degrees in a series of parallel horsts that extend for thirty miles to form a landscape of steep and rugged ridges. To our left was Steens Mountain, the description of which alone establishes it as a formidable presence; seen from the road, it brought to mind Miðgarðr, the wall around the world built by Norse gods.

The largest fault block mountain in North America, Steens Mountain rises more than a mile above the desert floor and stretches for more than fifty miles. At 9,733 feet above sea level, its summit is the highest point in the desert, to which leads the highest driveable road in Oregon and from which four states may be seen. The surrounding 170,202‐acre Steens Mountain Wilderness encompasses up to 100,000 acres of livestock‐free wilderness — the first No Livestock Grazing Area wilderness in the United States — contained within a larger cooperative management area that is the product of a compromise in 2000 with local opponents of a proposed Steens Mountain National Monument. In its shadow, the Alvord Desert to its east is an eighty‐four‐square‐mile playa upon which only five inches of rain falls each year, with more blocked by the massif from encroaching beyond its western slope. John and I later agreed that this morning introduced us to a region among the most beautiful we have seen in all of our travels together.

The annual Harney County Migratory Bird Festival, scheduled to begin April 10 this year — two days after we had passed through — is held in honor of John Scharff, who was the first on‐site manager of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, a position he held for over thirty‐four years. In the years before the Second World War, he and his friend, Glenn Mitchell, were prowling around Steens Mountain when they came upon one of hundreds of deserted cabins in Harney County. There they found a poem tacked to the inside of the cabin door, wherein its author expresses a wish for his life after death; in part:

”And, if there is a choice of place to spend
Uncountable years to come,
I wish to be left to the desert’s peace
And the warmth of the desert’s sun.

”For I know the soul that I once possessed,
Turned loose on a sagebrush sea,
Would hug spooky knees to a spectral chest
In ghostly ecstasy.”⁵

Rattlesnakes and scorpions are here. Golden eagles and sage grouse, too. The area is home to wild horses that depend on its meager rainfall, descendants of horses escaped from early explorers, settlers, miners, and Indigenous people, and herds developed by breeders who knew the animals could largely take care of themselves in the sagebrush steppe, so they were turned loose when the market was down. Every twenty years or so when a war developed somewhere, buyers would show up paying top dollar for horseflesh, keeping the wild‐horse ranchers in business until the next European monarch required plunder.

As predicted by our friend in Burns, the gas pumps were active at The Fields Station in Fields. The Station was founded in 1881 by the entrepreneur Charles Fields as a roadhouse on the stagecoach line between Winnemucca, Nevada, and Burns, and today, in addition to selling gas and sundries, it boasts a café, motel, and what is described as the second‐smallest liquor store in Oregon. The café offers what is widely regarded as being among the great milkshakes, and a handwritten sign on its wall lists a running total of milkshakes sold for the current year, which I failed to note while there (10,539 were sold in 2021). Because the high‐octane pump is near the highway and some distance from the buildings, it is prone to drive‐off thievery, so the power to the pump is shut off each night, and one needs to present oneself to the cashier inside to have the power to the pump switched on in the morning. There are also picnic tables lined up before the main building, and we decided to take advantage of the tables to break for lunch. While this was being settled, five small aircraft buzzed the place, then turned to a reciprocal heading and disappeared beyond the trees. Within a few minutes, all five were taxiing down the highway toward the parking lot where we were standing, and each of them pulled off the highway to park in a row beneath some of those same trees. Out jumped the pilots: one from Wyoming, one from Utah, two from Idaho, and one from Oregon. The woman running the cash register said, This happens all the time. They were all there for lunch.

The Oregon Revised Statutes prohibit landing an aircraft on public roads except in emergencies (ORS § 837.090), but not only was no one around to object, the reason the Fields Station high‐octane pump is situated out by the highway is so that the wings of refueling planes can clear the buildings. As is often the case where vigilantism once reigned, the de facto has overmatched the de jure. The stakes for living in the high desert are tradition, isolation, and change; those who have paid the ante call the game.

It was running into the obstacle of aircraft in our path that came to mind when, back on the road shortly after lunch, we were held up by a herd of cattle using a one‐mile stretch of Highway 205 as a transhumance corridor. Knowing that, at the end of 2024, the number of cattle in Harney County was eleven times greater than the number of people (≅85,000 vs. 7,402), it was interesting to be reminded that an even smaller consequent of people is all that is required to drive hundreds of docile creatures forward as it has been done for thousands of years. I was thinking, too, of the cattle mutilations that have been reported in the county since the 1800s, episodes of carcasses found with intact hides and their tongues and reproductive organs surgically removed, void of all their blood, with no understanding of how or why the animals were killed. The details are unnerving enough that a common theory as to the cause is aliens. That there is something diabolical alive in the desert seems plain from the considerable evidence. After we sat for a while watching as the number of cows on the asphalt dwindled, one of the mounted wranglers waved us through with a caution to go slow and be mindful that cows are not bright and startle easily.

Into the wild roses of Nevada — The Battle Born State — we rode, past Denio and Paradise Hill to Winnemucca, where the forgotten Winnemucca to the Sea Highway concludes after a 494‐mile wander beginning on the Pacific Coast at Crescent City, California. Hauled from the beaches of Crescent City in 1965, a portion of what is claimed to be the largest piece of driftwood ever collected marks the end of the route in Winnemucca near the Buckaroo Hall of Fame, with an attached sign reading: Gateway to the Pacific Northwest & the Blackrock Desert. The seven different highways from which the route was assembled still exist, but the unity of purpose that promoted the designation in 1962 decayed long ago: the state took down its signs marking the route in the 1970s. We made a left turn at the intersection where the marker sits and continued on our way.

Well into the Great Basin Desert, we arrived in Battle Mountain, Nevada, in the late afternoon and unpacked for the night at the Big Chief Motel, billing itself as The absolute best place to stay in Battle Mountain. I had read the Gene Weingarten article from 2001 in The Washington Post, a brutal humor piece wherein he anoints Battle Mountain the Armpit of America at the end of a search that had solicited nominations from his readers,⁶ one of whom wrote, Take a small town, remove any trace of history, character, or charm. Allow nothing with any redeeming qualities within city limits — this includes food, motel beds, service personnel. Then place this pathetic assemblage of ghastly buildings and nasty people on a freeway in the midst of a harsh, uninviting wilderness, far enough from the nearest city to be inconvenient, but not so far for it to develop a character of its own. You now have created Battle Mountain, Nevada. In my experience, this description was fit for any number of places, and I was keen to discover for myself whether, more than a score of years later, Battle Mountain keeps company with the worst of them and if the Big Chief Motel cleared what may have been a low bar.

Battle Mountain is the seat of Lander County. The matter of its attractiveness as a place actually was poisoned upon arrival for me because I knew that, four years ago, a rally was held in town to celebrate the fact that the county had become the first so‐called “constitutional county” in Nevada, its commissioners having passed a resolution stating that any conduct contrary to the United States Constitution, Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights will be dealt with as criminal activity, and paying $2,500 to join the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. A quick study of the background of that association and its aims makes plain that none of that is normal; it was and remains an extremist right‐wing threat to the res publica dressed in tactical clothing and fearful of brown people and of wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID‐19 but, judging from its public statements, ready to foment insurrection against state and federal governments. Six then‐serving Nevada county sheriffs had been present at the rally in support of its cause. I cannot now find an unambiguous mention of the resolution in the online minutes of meetings of the Lander County commissioners, nor does a copy of the declaration itself make an appearance in the folder of documents hosted on its website, but a sufficiency of coverage in the media from the time makes clear that such a resolution exists. The commissioners of adjacent Elko County, on the other hand, who unanimously passed an identical resolution a few weeks later on June 2, 2021, are proud to make a copy available: NO 2021-19 A Resolution to Join the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association(PDF).

A proposition I read long ago often comes to mind whenever I enter the ambit of an isolated community. In What’s the Use of Small Towns? in the autumn 1966 issue of Landscape, Albert Solnit wrote, Much of the population in many American small towns would be either marginal or unemployable in any city. In their hometowns, such people usually have the advantages of roots, family, some kind of standing within a group, and often have their own homes. Solnit argued that small towns in a developed country have limited economic potential when in competition with cities, but that their citizens are likely better off remaining than moving only to discover they are not equipped to cope; that, while, in contradiction of the Romantic poets, people are not ennobled by being left alone with nature, the potential environmental attractions of rural locations should be obvious, and called for a movement toward better access to such areas in the form of roads built in conjunction with the fostering of local initiatives aimed at the restoration and perpetual husbandry of the surrounding natural resources. Sixty years on, the populations of a majority of nonmetropolitan counties of the frontier have lately been growing, not due to an advancing birthrate, but because of internal migration. My own experience tells me these migrations are of the cohort of the population that fled the cities during the pandemic, but I have no data to prove that is so; they do, however, imply that the environmental movement begun in the 1960s works as Solnit imagined, providing seekers of clean air and open space places to go. In the meantime, those rural communities, such as Battle Mountain, where in the last decade MAGA and thin blue line agitprop erected by reactionary dullards has appeared, symbolizing a barricade sheltering their prevailing theory of living consisting of the need to torture and destroy a world they are incapable of understanding, affirm for me their marginal demographic. The American experiment cannot endure these betrayers; it is correct, even mandatory, to vilipend such people. Declaring that one’s county is aligned with the neo‐Nazis might be a political bêtise back home, but here in Battle Mountain — despite the interstate freeway we built to help them escape their insularity — they held a party, and the sheriff brought his friends.

We walked to El Aguila Real for dinner, where, for thirty years, locals have stared out the windows at the Sheep Creek mountains and unironically imagined themselves Masters of the Universe. A vacant lot across the street where curbstoners have parked their cars is the least decrepit use of the highway frontage for blocks in either direction. Combined with a built environment that is utilitarian and uncared for — fitting for a group at the center of one of the largest gold‐producing regions in the world, one that has appropriated the mantle of the beleaguered and advances itself as the vanguard of a white nationalist uprising — I decided we may indeed have neared America’s oxter.

Battle Mountain hosts an annual bike race on a long, straight, flat stretch of Highway 305 at the outskirts of town. The World Human Powered Speed Challenge draws teams from all over the world as they attempt to break the human‐powered land speed record (currently 89.59 mph). After breakfast on Wednesday at Press Coffee House, we rode south over the portion of the highway that is used as the race course. The event this year is scheduled for September 7–13.

In the Big Smoky Valley, where to the east the Toquima Range and to the west the Toiyabe Range harbor peaks approaching 12,000 feet, the showstopping landscape was a timely reminder to check my preconceptions. We often think of Nevada as merely a place of unbroken horizons and scorched desert, which of course is not true in the least, and the ride down the valley separating these two ranges was a thrilling way to clear my vision.

We had stopped for sandwiches at Etcheverry Food Town before leaving Battle Mountain and ate lunch at the Tonopah Historic Mining Park visitor center in Tonopah (Here, visitors aren’t just guests; they are part of a Legendary Experience). From that hillside vantage, the town looks beat up, tired, and gray — typical of many mining communities in Nevada and elsewhere. The legend is that the history of the town began when its founder, Jim Butler, stumbled upon silver‐rich deposits while chasing his runaway burro. The ballyhooed Clown Motel in Tonopah calls itself America’s Scariest Motel because of its decor of clowns and the cemetery next door. We did not drive past the motel, but I have a good idea what it looked like, given the circumstances.

At a moment south of Tonopah in a place where the Joshua trees are unseen, we rode into the blue palo verde and goldenheads of the Mojave Desert,⁷ home of the hottest air and surface temperatures recorded on Earth and of the lowest elevation in North America. It was 94℉ when we arrived in the desert city of Las Vegas at the close of our day.

We took a break for two days in Las Vegas, where we were joined by our wives who had flown in for the occasion. We all stayed at the Park MGM and ate dinner together Wednesday at Tom’s Watch Bar across the street. On Thursday, my wife and I ate a completely decadent breakfast at Primrose inside the hotel, then went shopping, taking a break to dare The Big Apple Coaster at the New York‐New York hotel, which was worth whatever absurd amount of money it cost us to ride. Our lunch that day at Alexxa’s was quite good, and after dinner later at Eataly back at the Park MGM, we joined John and his wife that evening to attend a game between the Las Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken professional hockey teams (the Kraken lost). Finally, on Friday, we all sat down to dinner together at The Bedford in the Paris hotel, after which we took in a nighttime performance of Mystère by Cirque du Soleil at Treasure Island.

Having said goodbye to our wives, and with the Great Basin Desert behind us and the Mojave Desert at our feet, our route on Saturday was to visit the two other biologically defined North American deserts, and we were on the road before sunrise that morning to account for the weather forecast, which told us to expect to be hot for the entire day once the sun got to work. A stop for breakfast at Einstein Bros. Bagels as a prelude to our departure from Las Vegas gave the sun time to catch up to us, and we headed for the Colorado River in the company of a bright morning. I discovered that the barriers on the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge over the river at Hoover Dam are so high nothing of the dam 1,500 feet away can be seen from the road deck of the bridge, which, given the propensity of us all for slowing down to gawk at such things, makes sense when read from the memoranda of a safety engineer but also served as a reminder that a freeway may not be the optimum thoroughfare upon which to travel as a tourist, given at least the absence of wide spots and turnouts at the shoulder of the road where one might come to an abrupt stop to focus a camera on the surroundings. As we regained solid ground, we had entered Arizona, where the first message the state had posted for us was that texting while driving was illegal, and after which, just beyond milepost one, a sign welcoming us to The Grand Canyon State appeared. The Mojave Desert soon gave way to the Sonoran Desert, and onward we drove.

There is much to report from the Sonoran Desert, despite its barren identity. To the south of us, the Lower Colorado River Valley portion of the desert challenges Death Valley as the driest and hottest place in the United States, and we were ready to testify despite the early hour. The summer monsoon brings surges of wet tropical air and frequent but localized violent thunderstorms to the desert, but today was cloudless and arid. The saguaros that line the road produce the official Arizona state flower but are entirely unlike any flowering plant in the gardens at home. Of human occupation, there is little but poverty on display within view of the Interstate. Old trailer homes clearly occupied on desolate plots of land, most heaped with cast‐off appliances, cars, and other unrecognizable hulks picked clean of any useful bits, or else collected in piles where they are returning to earth without having been given the least attention for years, dominate. Weathered For Sale signs, many hand‐painted, stuck to the ground on land adjacent to the highway, with nothing to suggest why anyone would pay Good Money to own any such trash‐strewn, naked scab of real estate that is in truth so worthless God has forgotten he created it, amaze. The Gila River, one of the longest rivers in the American West, crosses the Arizona desert on its way from New Mexico to join the Colorado River at Yuma, Arizona, southwest of our drive this day, whence large riverboats were once able to navigate upstream to Phoenix. The river was just to our right as we crossed the state below Phoenix, thinking of the Gila Wilderness to the east in New Mexico, the first federally designated wilderness in the nation, and the first protected wilderness area in the world. These days, the river is drained nearly dry by the time it leaves Phoenix, as dams and diversions spare but an intermittent trickle where the cotton and alfalfa grow. At Globe, we merged onto the Old West Highway to be carried over the Gila River and into the Chihuahuan Desert.

When we pulled into the Best Western Plus parking lot in Safford, Arizona, at 2∶15 p.m., it was 96℉ and had been in the 90s for hours.

The pandemic appears to have severed what was known as the Salsa Trail, a self‐guided road tour dreamt up in Safford in 2005 intended to promote the discovery of good Mexican food in southeast Arizona. Although the related annual Salsa Fest is on the calendar for September 26–29 in Safford this year, finding a list of the restaurants proposed as destinations along the abandoned Salsa Trail proved impossible, so we agreed that JD’s Grill House would get our dinner business by virtue of its proximity to the hotel.

I have long remembered a line I read as a teenager from Centennial, a novel by James Michener, describing the prejudices of the white settlers of the region: Certain Americans in western states, having lost their Indians and with few blacks at hand, naturally turned to hating Mexicans. I was raised understanding that the most foul of language was that which slurred another for their appearance or heritage. My dad did not care for the word shit, but he was quite clear on his priorities for our habits of speech, which, of course, were an articulation of our habits of thought, and the idea of race as a framework for illiberality in our household was anathema, so, while I accept the fact of the animus in the United States directed toward non‐white people, it is altogether repellent to me, because my parents did not raise a bigot. The Michener novel was set in eastern Colorado, but today I had stopped one hundred miles from the U.S. border with Mexico not long after driving through the Arizona county where Joe Arpaio, who once styled himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” for twenty‐four years led a department that, in the words of the U.S. Department of Justice in 2011, engages in racial profiling of Latinos; unlawfully stops, detains, and arrests Latinos; and unlawfully retaliates against individuals who complain about or criticize MCSO's policies or practices,⁸ leaving little doubt the reference in the novel to the racism of [c]ertain Americans in western states can be linked in the twenty‐first century to a majority of voters in the largest county in Arizona. Arpaio, a member in good standing of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association whose likeness was featured on its promotional material, lost his bid for re‐election in 2016 and was found guilty of criminal contempt of court in 2017, but today, the Maricopa County sheriff is one of his chief deputies, who himself was implicated in the court case over the racial profiling of Latinos by the office and held in contempt of court in the process. These people encourage us to patronize their Mexican restaurants as they remain enamored with the conjecture that they can rid themselves of the children of Mexico. The motto of Arizona is Ditat Deus, which means God enriches, referring to the copper, silver, gold, fertile river valleys, and grazing land that the territorial leaders of 1863 wished to promote. One struggles to find where it also says, Brown people not welcome.

We ate breakfast Sunday in downtown Safford. The City of Safford completed a downtown streetscape beautification project in 2015 and in 2019 created a downtown entertainment district to foster nighttime businesses. Music was being broadcast at 7∶30 a.m. from loudspeakers mounted to light standards when we arrived there to eat at The Main Street Bean, presumably to make sleep more difficult for the unhoused population atop the benches added in 2015 — although I am sure the city would deny that purpose. Imagine being the radio station played as noise to keep the homeless off the park benches; that would make an unhappy station manager.

To our south was Bisbee, which lent its name to the notorious kidnapping of nearly 1,300 striking mine workers that took place there in 1917. Until it was bought in 2007 by Freeport–McMoRan, Phelps Dodge, the company behind what became known as the Bisbee Deportation, also owned the Morenci Mine, now the largest copper mining operation in North America, which exploits one of the largest copper reserves in the world, and where we made the turn north today to head toward our distant homes. That mine was established in 1871, and it was fascinating to drive for miles virtually through the middle of its open pit as work went on around us, still extracting ore more than 150 years later, even on a Sunday morning. The portion of U.S. Route 191 from Morenci to Springerville — previously U.S. Route 666 until the state tired of replacing highway signs and still known as The Devil’s Highway — is also Coronado Trail National Scenic Byway, built upon the trail used in 1540 by Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado as he searched for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. Half a millennium later, the avidity for mineral wealth remains unabated here amid the jagged volcanic mountains, Mexican blue oak, piñón, and alligator juniper still caught in the vortex of distant syndicates. I remember the violent labor actions in the company town of Morenci in the early 1980s that led to profound disruptions of the organized labor movement in the shining city on the hill of Ronald Reagan and thought of the Guillermo Portabales lyric, Trabajo para el Ingés. Qué destino traicionero. As the melody of Al vaivén de mi carreta rang in my head, I waved at the drivers of trucks working at the mine on what could have been a day of rest if not for the intemperance of capital. Sudando por un dinero que en mis manos no se ve.

A ride on the Coronado Trail was the reason we were in Morenci, and we made a midday of its 460 curves to climb our way north to its high point in the White Mountains, 9,383 feet above sea level. The 1926 lodge at Hannagan Meadow halfway along the trail showed signs of activity, but I otherwise have the recollection that we encountered maybe only one car headed the opposite direction and unhesitatingly recall how vanquished cares became as I attended to its sublime and rugged way.

Bidding farewell to the conquistador and west of Springerville, the road made a foray into the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, where many of the approximately 17,000 enrolled members of the White Mountain Apache Tribe live. Our lunch was sandwiches we had purchased earlier from Safeway in Safford that we ate at a picnic table in the parking lot of a Circle K in Show Low, Arizona, beyond the limits of which the reservation continued. The brink of the Mogollon Rim, a two‐hundred‐mile‐long escarpment of limestone and sandstone, is here at Show Low, which is on the page ahead of Three Way, Tombstone, and Tortilla Flats in the encyclopedia of novelties of Arizona toponomy. Idling through town on Deuce of Clubs Avenue, I noted that The Trumped Store was open for business, offering Patriotic Apparel for Patriotic Americans!

In the Louis L’Amour novel The Sackett Brand, forty gunslingers from the Lazy A ranch have vengeance‐seeking Tell Sackett cornered beneath the Mogollon Rim.

For years, I have heard about how necessary it was for me to visit Sedona, Arizona. Oh, Sedona! would say the knowing correspondent. If only you had been there. My wife, who hiked up Cathedral Rock last spring in the Red Rock territory of Arizona and returned home enthralled by the landscape within which Sedona is situated, declared herself unimpressed by the town itself. The ride toward Sedona along Red Rock Scenic Byway confirmed for me the beauty of its setting, but today I became rueful that its promoters for all these years have so accustomed themselves to nostalgia as to misguide their enthusiasm, because I now know that Sedona is a shopping mall with a traffic jam in the middle of it. Whatever small‐town charm, world‐class beauty (as the city characterizes itself) may have once inspired the sojourner to rally betwixt its hackberry and mesquite has vanished from sight in terror of choked roundabouts, bubble tea shops, and frenzied tourists.

In Flagstaff, there were crisp white sheets and good bath soap in my room for the night at Bespoke Inn and a good meal served on the bartop at Uptown Pubhouse. It was just last year that Flagstaff had played host to a layover during an expedition that John and I had made accompanied by our wives to the Grand Canyon, and this visit was equally pleasant, though brief. We were up early on Monday for breakfast at The Station Cafe And Lounge, then throttled our way onto the lonely road to Utah. The weather was perfect and would remain so throughout the day.

At the Arizona and Utah border, we entered Monument Valley, the landscape that represents the American West to generations of moviegoers, its stratified remnants of siltstone buttes colored red and blue‐gray having appeared in films as diverse as Easy Rider and Forrest Gump. To the north on the far side of the San Juan River, we skirted Valley of the Gods, which is of 250 million year‐old sandstone once part of Cedar Mesa, now eroded into buttes, monoliths, and pinnacles of red and purple stone. Ascending the 1,200 feet from the Valley of the Gods to the top of Cedar Mesa is most directly accomplished via Moki Dugway, a gravel road that requires only three miles to make the climb and is named for the Pueblo people encountered here by the Spanish. Built in the 1950s to transport uranium ore to Mexican Hat twelve miles away, the road has achieved legendary status in the community of motorcyclists for its switchbacks and vertiginous grade. Our ride up the hill today was the fifth time we have managed to include Moki Dugway in our travels, and it was just as much fun today to take in the view as it has always been. We ate our lunches while sitting on a rock midway up the slope overlooking the valley below.

John’s oldest daughter was scheduled to arrive in Moab, Utah, in the late afternoon, which is where the two of us were also headed. We had a great ride through familiar country to Monticello, where last year we had made a right‐hand turn into Colorado, and today we continued north into the province of the La Sal Mountains, where the highway enters Spanish Valley to follow the Old Spanish Trail to Moab. The 2,700‐mile trail evolved in the early nineteenth century from a combination of footpaths of the Indigenous people, early Euro–American trade and exploration routes, and horse and mule routes. The National Park Service today is an active steward of its history as an important pathway for trade — both legal and otherwise — in the decades before the Mexican–American War. The old trail deposited us safely in Moab, where we later united with my niece for dinner at Zax, bringing a fine day to a happy conclusion.

After a restful night at Red Stone Inn, I was at the entrance gate to Arches National Park at 7∶00 a.m., hoping for good light to take some pictures amid the densest concentration of natural stone arches in the world. John was spending the day hiking with his daughter in the park, and we did cross paths later in the morning long enough to agree it was a splendid day. Though I failed to make a useful picture of it as evidence of having been present, Delicate Arch within the park may be as iconic an emblem of the American West as the features of Monument Valley, having appeared on license plates and postage stamps; the rest of the park scenery is at least as remarkable.

After a few hours of contented sightseeing, I made a stop for a late breakfast at Love Muffin Cafe back in Moab, then drove to the north entrance of Canyonlands National Park, also not far from Moab, for another round of sightseeing and awe. The park encompasses the confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers, which divides the park into three districts. It was to the Island in the Sky atop the mesa that I traveled, where, from one thousand feet above the surrounding terrain, I would be able to make a survey.

The three of us convened at The Spoke on Center back in Moab for dinner that evening and to share tales from the Colorado Plateau upon which we had all ventured for the day. John and his daughter had hiked aplenty within Arches park, and had some great pictures to share of Delicate Arch and from the trails taken. The streets of Moab were overrun by others who had brought with them very expensively outfitted vehicles suitable for driving far off the pavement, but I could report having seen none of them from my perch in Canyonlands park, despite the hundreds of miles of unpaved roads to be found within its boundaries.

I needed a squirt of air in my tires Tuesday morning on the way toward the park, so I stopped at the first gas station outbound from my hotel with an air compressor and rang up $1.50 on my credit card to use it, only then to discover that the plunger within its hose fitting was retracted so far into the fitting that it would not depress the valve stem on my tires. Fucker. Three gas stations further down the street at Exxon they had free air that worked (220 North Main Street).

John and I waved so long to my niece on Wednesday morning after breakfast at Cafe Italiano and rode north on Dinosaur Diamond Prehistoric Highway, veering away toward Great Salt Lake where the byway and the Price River diverge. The weather was cool with no rain, and the ride uneventful — much of the day was spent on freeways. We bypassed Salt Lake City by exiting I–15 to ride on rural highways to its southwest, where, along the way, we slowly drove through the middle of a law enforcement action in Grantsville, Utah, that entailed easily fifteen cop cars and one armored vehicle, later learning that someone had perished at the scene. We ate the sandwiches prepared for lunch earlier at Cafe Italiano while stopped at the Grassy Mountain rest area off of I–80, where we studied the Cedar Mountains in the distance. The mountains were landmarks to nineteenth‐century emigrants attempting to save three hundred miles to California, bypassing the normal route into Idaho by instead using the Hastings Cutoff route through the Great Salt Lake Desert sand dunes and mud flats. From Hastings Pass in the Cedar Mountains, it was seventy‐five waterless miles to the Humboldt River in Nevada, and the bypass was in use only from 1846 to 1850.

Casinos do not let a wasted meter appear at the Utah and Nevada border wherever people may gather. Seen from the freeway, I think the back wall of at least one casino sits directly on the state border, just an easy exit off the freeway in West Wendover, Nevada. Feeling not a moment of temptation to try our luck at the slot machines at the border, we pressed on to Elko, Nevada, to end the day. Our occasional riding partner Doc had driven to Elko from the Puget Sound Basin to join us for a couple of days as we continued toward home, and we converged for dinner at Machi’s Saloon & Grill, where the meal was hot and good, but the place was covered in MAGA spoor. I can certify that Stockmen’s Hotel & Casino in Elko is tired. My notes read, The room is clean but the thermostat does not work, there is no Wi‐Fi, the end of the building where I am looks like a bomb shelter after the bomb went off, and the rest of the facilities need to be refashioned. Whatever it was I paid for the room was too much.

Starbucks in Elko was the only game in town for breakfast Thursday. We picked up sandwiches there for lunch, and mine was hard as a rock and flavorless four hours later at Jack’s Creek in Bruneau, Idaho, typifying one of the many reasons we try to avoid corporate food when on the road: it is reliably awful. It was 38℉ when we left Starbucks with partly cloudy skies and a strong breeze, and it was snowing as we soon rounded the bend at Wild Horse to catch the Owyhee River along the Mountain City Highway. It snowed nonstop until we were closing in on Grasmere — almost 70 miles — not sticking to the road, but it was 28℉ for a long time and the wind howled throughout.

The wind finally relented under cloudless skies when we tucked into the canyons riding up Highway 55 along the Payette River, where the temperature hovered in the 50s for the rest of the afternoon into McCall. The river was full of green water and just glorious as it somersaulted its way downhill; the Class V run on the North Fork of the Payette River is often ranked as the most challenging whitewater river reach in the world, including a drop of 1,700 feet in the sixteen miles above Banks, plain from the seat of the BMW as I climbed the reciprocal path into Long Valley, where the river is impounded by Cascade Dam. From the highway north of the dam may be seen the spire of a church where homesteading Finns in the nineteenth century had established a community in the valley prohibiting the vending of intoxicating drinks and the maintenance of lewd or indecent resorts.⁹ As often happened during the colonization of the American West, when a railroad appeared in Long Valley it favored a route elsewhere, so its economic benefits were inaccessible to the Finnish settlement, causing its eventual abandonment.

Payette Lake was fittingly covered with ice when we arrived at its shore in McCall. Our dinner Thursday evening at Rupert’s, a short indoor stroll from our rooms and beyond the lobby at Hotel McCall, was quite satisfying, helping gird us for the forecast 21℉ outside temperature the following morning.

As forecast, when I got out of bed Friday, it was 21℉ outside and was not much warmer when we pulled away from the curb shortly afterward, having first paused for breakfast at FoggLifter Cafe. The sky — crystal clear and deep blue — shed pure rays of sunshine onto the scenery northbound out of New Meadows on Highway 95 as I began to feel the pull of home at work on idle thoughts. We would soon enough be rounding the corner into Washington, but not before enjoying this ride during an exquisite morning in the Rocky Mountains upon the verge of the Hells Canyon Wilderness. The sign at Riggins announcing our return to the Pacific Time Zone reinforced the signal that we were homeward bound.

We treated ourselves to a trip up the old White Bird Hill road to the summit south of Grangeville. I recall being on the old road as a kid and how filled with dread my mother was that the brakes on the car might fail at any moment as we descended the hill; the climb out today was a fun alternative to roaring up the adjacent four‐lane divided highway that has been built in the decades since then.

We stopped in Pullman, Washington, to see our brother Bill, whom Doc had not met previously, and ate our sandwiches sitting in the sunshine and musing on the benefits of being in no particular hurry. It was, though, eventually time to continue down the road, so we took our leave from Bill and threaded our way out of town. Doc stayed with us until Othello, then peeled off to head to Wenatchee for the night, leaving John and me alone to cross the Cascade Mountains and complete our circuit of the continental frontier. After a celebratory stop for a cold drink in North Bend at Huxdotter Coffee where we had met days earlier to commence our ride, the last few miles home for me were uneventful and a happy conclusion.

Russell Conwell (1843–1925), an American minister and writer, became famous in his lifetime for a lecture he composed titled Acres of Diamonds, which he popularized while on a speaking tour in the early 1880s and delivered thousands of times before his death forty years later. The central idea of the work is that one need not look elsewhere for opportunity, achievement, or fortune; the resources to achieve all good things are present in one’s own community. This narrative of abundance and triumph played to the American conceit of ruggedness and independence, and Conwell was delivering it during the heyday of the imaginary vanishing frontier and nostalgia for bucolic life that would find its favorite illustrator in Norman Rockwell. Yet homesteaders in the United States settled more land in the first two decades of the twentieth century than during the entirety of the nineteenth century, a migration of people toward the unfamiliar that countered those who argued on behalf of stability and contentment: in 1913, the busiest year for the filing of homestead claims during the entire homestead era and the year Rockwell began his career, Americans claimed eleven million acres of federal lands.

In her 1987 book The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Limerick reminds the reader that such settlements were provisioned through invasion and displacement and posits that the many parts of trans‐Mississippi history can best be understood as a series of ongoing conquests or contentions for power and their intentional and unintentional consequences and that, as she wrote in a subsequent commentary, the conquest of North America came to no clear, smooth end. Limerick asserts that the American West was relegated by the federal government to the status of a colony through the establishment of a regime of exploitation and oppression of even its white population; I returned home having seen that many, perhaps even most, communities of the western frontier today subscribe to a monolithic delusion organized around the principle that they are besieged and in need of rescue by a talentless authoritarian who will abrogate the laws and customs that bind them and settle their grievances by allowing them henceforth to do as they please unfettered by differences of opinion on how to run a civilization.

I am the inheritor of land that was homesteaded by my forebears in the nineteenth century, a tether to the imperialist era of manifest destiny that is not obfuscated by the machinations of speculators and also to the ambition of a man and a woman who crossed an ocean and then a continent to bend a few acres of its arboreal wilderness to their purpose of providing for themselves and, by virtue of their enterprise and fertility, me, a few generations later. I was raised in the tradition of dissenting Presbyterianism to believe that our purpose is not simply the salvation of our souls and those of others, but the realization of an ideal commonwealth — a republic of legal and social equality. While on the road in the vast, enduring frontier, its grand features spoke for the ghosts of my ancestors to explain the promise they saw in its magnitude, while the speech of its present inhabitants echoing the vituperation directed by their political leaders at any evidence of progress made toward a more perfect union filled me with hostility and disgust. I have the audacity to hope that we will eventually reject the Christofascism animated by the current majority who have exercised their franchise in the United States, but it is hope moderated by a careful look at the history of our country and the state of its current affairs.

Update December 13, 2025

The Oregon Water Resources Commission on Thursday designated the Harney Basin as a critical groundwater area, giving the state broader authority to restrict how much water may be pumped from the aquifer — as much as 70% in some locations over thirty years commencing in 2028.¹⁰ It seems incongruous to me to decide that consumption must be reduced by seven gallons in ten at a place or places, but that there is no urgency in doing so. The maelstrom of politics enveloping the commission on the subject of Harney Basin must surely be intense, leading to seemingly nonsensical choices such as that.