Monday, 13 April, 2015

Santa Fe to Holbrook Az

Painted & Petrified 

The National Parks pass pays off. We have driven from Santa Fe through Albuquerque and past Gallup into Arizona and finally to Petrified Forest National Park. At the gate we are handed a map which locates and describes views and geologics and behaviours. The third part, which in detail proscribes trespass and theft is accompanied by a reporting form on which one is encouraged to describe the offense, noting location and time, and to fill in the blanks describing the miscreant's car with license number if possible. Okay.

We don't realize at first that the Petrified Forest will not appear until well after intermission, and what will occupy our attention for the first 30 kilometers south of Hwy 40 is the Painted Desert. This is not a disappointment. The desert air is so clear that we can see (barely) San Francisco Peaks—Humphreys Peak (the highest at 3,850 meters) is just north of Flagstaff about 160 kilometers from the incredible array of shapes and colours right below our vantage point. (We will be able to watch the Peaks up-loom all the next driving day. It helps to be at an elevation of 1500 meters to begin with.

Enough numbers...here's some eye candy:

  
    ....next slide...

...and finally, the Petrified Forest:

We exit at the bottom of the park and head back north to Hwy 40 to our Motel in Holbrook. Dinner is at Tom & Suzie's Diner. Our server, the nicest neck-tat banger imaginable, tells us that the diner is owned by a Japanese couple, explaining both the panko-crusted pork chops and the paper cranes.

Back at the Best Western Adrian passes out about 9:30. (We must have gotten in and out of the car a couple of dozen times.) I manage another hour of selecting and tweaking photographs until my apertures close down to roughly f64.

A Note on Selfies:

Purely in the spirit of inquiry of course, as I myself practice a form of self-inclusion: the ironic, or is post-ironic interrogation of the practice? by recording the self-inclusive activities of others in a variety of contexts: Alcatraz, Auschwitz, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Here's one from tomorrow's visit to the Barringer Meteor Crater:

I wonder if it's a simple an impulse as tagging in a more distributed version. Or better perhaps, an social-media-ready barbaric yawp. I celebrate myself/And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you. Or considering the selfie's ephemeracy, might it be as mournful as Thomas Gray? Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air..