Raining and Straining

Last time, while enjoying my way across South Dakota, I mentioned that my ultimate destination was Seattle, Washington.  Just as life is (hopefully) a marathon, not a sprint, my goal was to amble around all three of the Pacific Northwest states a bit in order to refresh my impressions of them.  Seattle was the finish line.

Note that I said THREE states, referring to Washington, Oregon, and enough of Northern California to be included.  You could throw in the Canadian province of British Columbia, which is assuredly in the Northwest and, last time we looked, borders the Pacific Ocean.  But hey, this is not Ted Landphair’s Anglo-America, much as British naval captain James Cook would have liked to hold us to his 1778 claim of all the lands north of the Columbia River in the name of the king.

Idaho, which is up that way, too, sometimes horns into definitions of the region, even though you’d have to drive or tramp at least 725 kilometers (about 450 miles) from any place in that often-overlooked state to watch the sun go down over the Pacific.  We did drive through Idaho’s northern panhandle, which, perhaps longingly, keeps Pacific time.  And Idahoans, like Oregonians and Washingtonians to their west, are nuts (or beans) about coffee.  That’s where the “straining” comes from in today’s title.  Rain band after band off the Pacific, and frequent fog and mist in the mountains of Idaho as well as the coastal states, put people in a mood for a long conversation over a tall mocha java.

But sorry, Idaho.  Love your potatoes.  God bless your daredevil kayakers and whitewater rafters on the Snake and Salmon rivers.  And let us know some time why Aryan cults seem to dig your woods.  But you’re a Rocky Mountain State, and we were just passing through.

Our journey to Oregon and Washington, and warm memories of California’s Sequoia country, confirmed the region’s association with trees.  Enormous green ones, by the millions or maybe billions.  Washington is the Evergreen State, and on the Oregon flag there is a stand of Douglas firs next to a prairie schooner — a wagon with a billowing cloth roof in which many an early traveler arrived on the Oregon Trail.

Everywhere you go, the scent of evergreen needles, fresh-cut timber, and the tangy smell of Pacific pine cones amazes, braces, and lingers.

Deep in the woods, especially amidst the lowland fog in the Cascade and Coastal mountain ranges and the rainforest in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the smell of new-fallen rain refreshes, too.  (Magically, soaring glaciers somehow rise out of the warm mists.)  West of the mountains that follow the coast, the days — sometimes day after day after day — can be drizzly and dreary; the Olympic Peninsula, in particular, is lapped by moist ocean air that rides above the Pacific’s Japanese current; the Peninsula endures an average 371 centimeters (150 inches) of rain per year.

But despite what the locals tell you, the average annual rainfall in Seattle and Portland — both well inland — is one-third that, and 13 times less than the rain totals on Mount Waialeale on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, the rainiest spot on earth.  Except in the wintertime, Pacific Northwest cities don’t stay damp and gloomy for long.

Smells of the sea remain in one’s memory, too, for the people of the Pacific Northwest take to sailboats, cruise ships, fishing boats, and a veritable armada of ferries as readily as they travel by car.  Beaches are plentiful but often far too rocky, and the water too nippy, for swimming.  The faint odors there are of kelp and fresh driftwood, including whole sodden trees washed downstream and into the sea from logging camps.  There is the smell, too, of halibut, tuna, and Dungeness crabs hauled ashore in giant trawlers and tiny fishing boats, as well as that of salmon smoking on grills along the piers and in commercial smokehouses in every good-sized coastal town.

There’s often a bouquet in the air, too, around the thousands of hectares of apples, cherry, and loganberry orchards and strawberry fields.  Oregon and Washington are leading producers of zesty peppermint and of flowers grown for bulbs and seeds.  The forests, canyons, and mountain meadows abound with wildflowers — lupines, fragrant lavender, Indian paintbrush, phlox, and aromatic wild roses.  And the Pacific Northwest boasts cultivated perennial gardens on the scale of southern England’s.  Portland isn’t called the “Rose City” for nothing.

And what of the ever-present scent of coffee from thousands of coffeehouses, espresso bars, carts on the street, booths inside grocery stores, and ethnic restaurants?  My VOA colleague Art Chimes tells me that he once pulled into a Seattle gas station and found, right in the island containing the gasoline pumps and window-washing fluid and Squeegee, a narrow espresso kiosk from which a barista was busy handing lattes out the window.

America’s addiction to upscale coffee began in Seattle in the 1980s and spread like a pandemic south and east.  Now there are, what, maybe 25,000 specialty coffee shops across the country?  Residents tell you this is a byproduct of the area’s high-tech sophistication and laid-back lifestyle.  (Washington’s official motto, taken from the Chinook dialect, is Alki, meaning “by and by.”)

And then there’s that rain.

Tea houses have sprung up like spring rhododendrons, too.  Perhaps it is not the product alone, but also the process (more straining) that fascinates the region, for it is the epicenter of a microbrewery tsunami as well.  Portland, which pours coffee and tea with the best of them, also boasts 50 or so microbrewereies and twice that many brewpubs.  “Craft” brewers can be found throughout the rest of the region as well.  The eruption in the number of small, neighborhood breweries coincided with the buyouts and consolidations of nationwide brewing companies marketing pasteurized, pale (Northwest aficionados say “watered down”) lagers and “light” beers.  Regional breweries like Pyramid in Seattle, BridgePort in Portland, and Humboldt in Arcata, California, grabbed a niche with stronger ales, porters, stouts, and pilsners — also often bottled but not usually pasteurized.  Taste, not a long shelf life, is their forte.  I love eccentric Northwest brands such as “Hair of the Dog” out of Portland and “Mia and Pia’s” from Klamath Falls, Oregon.

Somehow, despite the idle chatter at the brewpubs, coffeehouses, tea parlors, and Internet chat rooms, work gets done.  A surprising amount of it, considering the region’s woodsy and marine traditions, is on farms and ranches east of the Cascades.  There, the smells include those of new-mown wheat and alfalfa hay, mounds of freshly harvested potatoes, cattle clustered at feed lots, and sheep bunched together for shearing.  The rain shadow cast by the coastal mountains leaves these flatlands relatively dry and warm, producing a long and frost-free crop season of 250 days or more each year.

The Pacific Northwest’s imposing snow-clad peaks — Ranier, Hood, Baker, Shasta — have no special scent save for the bracing air of the great outdoors.  It is in the high country — and in the region’s deep ravines, along its wild seashore, across the wooded San Juan Islands above Puget Sound, on thousands of freshwater lakes, and throughout the length of the wide Columbia and wild Snake and other rivers — that hunting, fishing, rafting, birding, and jouncy off-road driving are passions.  The Snake cuts a gorge along the Oregon-Idaho border that is deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Of course, the Spaniards who first poked around the coast of the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1500s were not interested in sights or smells.  They were looking for glory and gold.  They claimed the lands but did not bother to establish settlements along the rocky shore.  British explorers like the aforementioned Cook, searching for a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, followed two centuries later.  Russian trappers sailed there, too, eventually establishing a colony at Fort Ross in Northern California.  When the sea otter supply played out a few years later, most Russians departed for home, leaving behind a few churches and other structures.  Fur traders of many nationalities soon followed into the Pacific Northwest’s interior.  They included Robert Gray, a Yankee trader from Rhode Island, who crossed the bar of the Columbia River — which Gray named after his ship, the Columbia Rediviva — in 1792.

The pathfinding expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, sent west to map the wilderness by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, followed that river to the sea 13 years later.  John Jacob Astor made a fortune from his Pacific Fur Company, established in 1811 by his minions in Astoria, the Oregon country’s first permanent settlement at the mouth of the Columbia, and the first American town west of the Rocky Mountains. 

A concerted incursion of other Americans, led by Methodist and Catholic missionaries and “mountain men” from the Rockies, began in Oregon soon thereafter.

That’s “ORR-ih-gunn,” by the way, not “ORR-ih-GONE,” if you want to keep peace with the locals.

The trickle became a human tidal wave beginning in the 1840s with the arrival at the land office at Oregon City — now a suburb of Portland — of farm families from the Midwest.  They had trudged from Missouri along the Oregon Trail to what were advertised as the “gates of Eden” in the fertile Willamette Valley.  Imbued with “Oregon fever,” they came mostly on foot, leading their teams of mules, horses, or oxen that pulled all their worldly possessions.   To their surprise, it was not the rugged Rocky Mountains that proved to be their greatest impediment, for a broad and gentle pass through them had been found in Wyoming.  The most arduous climb was indeed at Eden’s gate, over Oregon’s Blue Mountains, which offered no passes at all.

All the while, the Americans sought to push the British northward, preferably to latitude 54° 40’ in the Yukon, and James J. Polk sounded a rallying cry in his successful race for the U.S. presidency in 1844: “Fifty-four-forty or fight!”  Knowing that its claim to the Pacific Northwest rested largely in the hands of a few Hudson Bay fur company traders and the valiant Northwest Mounted Police, the British took what they could get in a treaty struck two years later.  It conceded all lands south of the 49th parallel (save for the protruding southern tip of Vancouver Island) to the United States but, in return, put an end to Americans’ designs on Canadian territory.

In 1848, the Oregon Territory, including what is now all of Washington and much of Idaho, was organized.  Settlement proceeded in two distinct clumps: one to the south of the Columbia around Portland, and the other along the eastern shore of Puget Sound.  In 1853, the northern reaches broke off as their own territory, named “Washington” after the first U.S. president.  Truncated Oregon became a state in 1859; Washington lost some of its lands to Idaho Territory and waited 30 more years before becoming the nation’s 42nd state.  For much of this period the bulk of Northern California was a wilderness, but the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in Sacramento spurred rampant development.

In the years since, the Pacific Northwest’s economy has grown largely because of its timber and agricultural riches, its extensive mining, hydroelectric and nuclear energy production, aluminum smelting and refining, and, later, aerospace and computer industries.  The economy has also benefited from tourists like Carol and me, drawn to the region’s boundless natural wonders that include volcanic peaks like mounts Ranier and Hood, and the remnants of Mount St. Helens — a volcano that erupted in 1980 and around which, despite some forest regrowth, barren hillsides and charred timber can still be seen.  Today St. Helens is the official “national volcanic monument,” though the closest that visitors can get is an observatory eight kilometers (five miles) away, where the still-steaming lava dome, crater, and landslide deposit can be seen.  Crystal-blue Crater Lake in southern Oregon is set in the depression left by the explosions of another, now-extinct volcano.

A comprehensive tour of the Pacific Northwest might begin, though, in extreme Northern California.  This is a land far different from the rest of the Golden State.  It is a trove of national forests, wild rivers, precipitous mountain roads, and craggy coastline akin to green Oregon.  The far-northern California counties are a dense, woodsy place where not just ice and deer pose road hazards; so do gray-pine cones, which fall like rocks and damage vehicles and noggins.  From there, reservoirs, dams, and aqueducts divert water to the state’s arid Central Valley and on to glittering Southern California.

Close to the Northern California coast looms the majestic Redwood Forest, home to the world’s tallest — and some of its oldest — trees.  One, called the “Immortal Tree,” is thought to be 950 or more years old.  The Redwood Highway, or “Avenue of the Giants” through Humboldt Redwoods State Park leads visitors past and even through living trees.  They grow there and only there, in the humid coastal climate of Northern California and southern Oregon.

With all that grandeur, no wonder Humboldt County is California’s “art capital,” with more artists per capita than any other county.

Up in Oregon, pretty Portland is a remarkably self-contained city by design.  Under Governor Tom McCall in the late 1970s, and with the cooperation of county and suburban officials, it drew a simple line around the metropolitan area.  This boundary has expanded outward, but its rigid purpose is still largely in place.  Inside the line, carefully controlled urban growth is permitted.  Outside — sometimes even on the other side of a street — forests, farms, and open space must be maintained.  Developers howled at this idea.  They warned of a loss of jobs, but the opposite has occurred.  Factories and high-tech campuses arose, and both the population and home prices soared without unchecked sprawl.

Still, downtown Portland is home to the nation’s largest urban wilderness in Forest Park.  The city even tore up a downtown freeway and replaced it with a delightful riverfront park whose many festivals have helped keep residents in town and downtown alive at night.  There’s also a long, dedicated transit mall, much of which is closed to automobile traffic.

Oregon even has its own Mardi Gras, of sorts.  It is the annual Graffiti Weekend each July in Roseburg, gateway to Crater Lake and the Oregon Caves National Monument.  The name springs not from scribbling on building walls but from the 1973 movie “American Graffiti,” director George Lucas’ popular paean to the 1950s.

In Eastern Oregon — wheat and high-desert country — ranchers raise everything from antelopes to llamas to reindeer.  And the land across the Columbia in eastern Washington is just as remote and dusty until one reaches the irrigated orchards around towns like Pasco and Walla Walla.  The latter’s name derives from an Indian word for “many waters.”  So important is agriculture in the area that an official of the local chamber of commerce once sent me a list of tourist attractions that included the sweet onion.

Spokane, farther north along the Idaho border, rightly brags about its picturesque falls and an imposing clock tower erected by the Great Northern Railway. A lot of railroad and mining barons built beautiful homes near it during the “Age of Elegance” at the turn of the 20th century, just as “country leisure” brings lots of newcomers to little Washington towns from Spokane to Seattle to this day.  (I recently wrote about one of them, a new city called Sammamish, in a VOA feature story, at http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2009-09-11-voa28.cfm

Seattle, an increasingly prominent and globally competitive city in the midst of a metropolitan area of 3 million people, is the region’s most notable crossroads of peoples, cultures, technologies, and transportation.  It is a place where Yakima apples go out and New Zealand kiwi fruit comes in; where tourists from across America come to buy salmon at Pike Place Market or get on a cruise ship to Alaska; where more than 500 international firms have a presence; and where the value of goods shipped to far-off Japan is nearly double that sent to nearby Canada. 

(We interrupt for a cute Seattle/kid story.  My editor, Rob Sivak, tells me that he and his family love the Northwest — Seattle in particular.  One day, as they were leaving on a trip there, wee daughter Monica asked where they were going. “We’re going to Seattle,” Rob replied.  “Oh,” said Monica, looking puzzled.  “Who’s Attle?”)

Named for “the Emerald City,” See-Attle ranks third in the nation in percentage of professional and technical employees, and third in percentage of adults who have competed college.  The Boeing aircraft company and Microsoft computers, the region’s largest employers, are among America’s largest exporters.

Taken as a whole, the Pacific Northwest tests the limits of hyperbole: spectacular, sublime, panoramic, a racial melting pot with a pronounced Asian accent.  And — remembering especially a steaming cappuccino in Seattle, a pint of fresh-brewed pilsner in Portland, a bite into a freshly cut peach near Bend, Oregon, and a blast of cool air in the pines along Lake Sammamish on my recent visit —  the adjective I like best in describing it all is . . .

Fragrant.

***

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Akin.  (Usually used with the preposition “to.”)  Similar to.  Having the same quality as.

Barista.  From the Italian, it refers to one who grinds beans into coffee, specifically behind a shop counter rather than at home.

Jouncy.  Bumpy and jolting, bouncy.

Noggin.  An informal word for one’s head, especially used when describing a knock on, or blow to, the head.

Paean.  Pronouncded “pee-AWN,” this is a shout or song of praise.  The word was used in hymns of thanksgiving to the Roman gods.

South Dakodak

If you’re like me, you sometimes look back at an earlier period in your nation’s history and think, “Those were the days!”  We romanticize the slower pace and what today seems like their relative innocence — even if reality was something else again.  I’ve already told you that I sometimes linger over old photographs — I’m thinking of a grainy one of a family posed in front of an 1870s Nebraska sod house — and wonder what those people were thinking and what their days were like. 

And even though I’ve never been much into automobiles, I love to read about the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Henry Ford’s Model T, as Smithsonian Institution historian Roger White once said, “put America on wheels.”  Ordinary America, not just big shots who could afford the fancy touring cars produced before Ford’s assembly line came along.

By the way, South Dakota is the subject of this posting, but bear with me.  It took a long time to get places in those early days, and we’re puttering our way west and will get there by and by.

With the Automotive Age came a national wanderlust that continues to this day.  People formed “touring clubs” and headed out.  Ford, inventor Thomas Edison, tire baron Harvey Firestone, and even President Warren Harding were among thousands who joined caravans of “camping cars” that stoked the nation’s appetite for outdoor recreation.  They called themselves “the Vagabonds.”  Auto enthusiasts prodded their state politicians into paving, widening, and connecting meandering roads, and auto clubs gave them enticing names like “Lincoln Highway” and “Yellowstone Trail.”

Then the federal government assigned numbers to many of them, and gasoline companies gave away maps so drivers could find their way clear across the land.

The mechanized rush hither and yon was on, and people — families, especially — needed places to eat, sleep, and amuse themselves along the way.  Thus was born a disjointed network of one-story “motor courts,” greasy-spoon diners, nightclubs and taverns, and repair shops of varying caliber whose neon signs beckoned weary wayfarers.

Hang in there.  We’ll be in South Dakota soon.

My own nostalgia — if that’s the right word, for I wasn’t yet born — peaks at the thought of offbeat and oddball “roadside attractions” of those times that endeavored to separate travelers from their money.  I’m talking snake farms, spooky caverns, mangy zoos, exotic rock and fossil collections, Christian theme parks, muddy fields where dinosaurs were said to have roamed, real and phony Indian trading posts, aquatic gardens (some with “mermaids”), “funhouse” amusement parks, and museums of every description.

Let us not forget architectural “curiosities” as varied as the entrepreneurial minds that created them: “mystery houses,” a swimming pier inside a blue Plexiglass whale, a restaurant shaped like the familiar figure on a syrup bottle, the “world’s largest” spinach can or rabbit; and what tourists were assured were the world’s smallest church or horse or man.

What does any of this have to do with South Dakota?

Well, the No. 1 motoring destination in those early days was the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone — that geologically tremulous place with the spraying geysers such as “Old Faithful,” which is still reliably erupting with a 60-meter-high column of boiling water and steam every hour to hour-and-a-half. 

Yellowstone sputters in Wyoming, the state just to the west of South Dakota.  But by 1941, the Coyote State itself had a monumental tourist magnet, literally, way out near the Wyoming border.  It was the epic sculpture of four U.S. presidents, carved and blasted over 14 years into the face of Mount Rushmore.

But to get there, or on to Yellowstone and the Pacific Northwest from the populous East, Midwest, and South, families had to cross the wide, largely empty South Dakota prairie.  Did I say “wide”?  Picture yourself in a noisy, smelly, hand-cranked Model T with the wife and kids, jostling along South Dakota’s early cracked and dusty roads for 550 kilometers — 340 miles — in search of Mount Rushmore.  

They became eager customers of some of the most abundant and creative roadside attractions in the country.  And the same can be said today, although the quality of South Dakota attractions has taken a quantum leap from the days of dairy stands and pony rides. 

Carol and I recently crossed the entire state en route to Seattle, Washington — not on a teeth-rattling, two-lane road but on a modern, high-speed Interstate highway.  And while you can’t pull over on I-90 any time you feel like it for a cuppa joe at a roadside diner, or check out an Indian cultural center or Scandinavian church without driving far ahead to the next exit, there are interesting, family-oriented, and quirky places to explore all across South Dakota’s single east-west expressway.

So many that we took to calling the state “South Dakodak” — a play on the name of the American camera-maker — because of its wealth of photogenic and fun attractions.

We started, as most visitors do, in eastern South Dakota and worked our way west.  Barely out of Minnesota is the state’s largest city, if you want to call a population of 125,000 “large.”  It’s Sioux Falls, an old slaughterhouse town where at least one stockyard and meatpacking operation survives.  The city gets its name from falls of the Big Sioux River.  Don’t expect roaring Niagara Falls.  These are pleasant cascades, but the surrounding bluffs give one a clue that the terrain is about to change.  Rocks, if not the Rockies, are no longer just our imagination away.

Sioux Falls is a sort of outdoor art gallery.  Downtown streets are dotted with 50 sculptures, loaned to the city by artists from around the world and replaced in toto every year.  Their creators are paid $500 apiece to deliver them and another $500 to come pick them up if they haven’t been sold.  About 20 percent of the “SculptureWalk” pieces DO find buyers, and you can even lease one for awhile if you like.  Talk about making an impression at a cocktail party! 

The artists can also earn up to $15,000 if their works win awards in an end-of-season judging.  End of season, meaning before South Dakota’s savage winter snowstorms come a-howlin’ down from Manitoba.

In Fawick Park stands a bronze replica of Michelangelo’s Statue of David in all his, um, glory.  He is NOT for sale or rent.  Thomas Fawick, an art collector, early automobile maker, and inventor of everything from landing-craft clutches to golf-club grips, donated David to the city and a replica of Michelangelo’s Moses, wearing a few clothes, to Augustana College across town.

Truth be told, while I admire and enjoy imaginative sculptures, I rarely let out a “wow” when beholding them.  I’m especially unmoved by most “folk art,” which to me looks like something I could have slapped together from metal squares and Popsicle sticks in eighth-grade shop class.

But I let out wow after wow on a grassy plateau about 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Sioux Falls, near the minuscule town of Montrose.  My eye, like that of just about everybody tooling down the Interstate, had been caught by an 18-meter (60-foot)-high sculpture of a bull’s head.  A funky one, with horns of exaggerated height.  A modernist interpretation of the extinct Egyptian longhorn, perhaps.

So we took the Montrose exit and wound our way up to “Porter Sculpture Park,” which displays a field full of unpredictable, bizarre, and quite lovable works of a fellow named Ron Porter.  There’s a small admission charge, but we found the place unattended, with a sign inviting any and all to come on in.  Porter, who swears he can’t draw or paint a lick but is pretty handy with a welding iron, even touts the park as “a great place to walk your dog.”  I can’t begin to describe all the wacky sculptures — you can see a couple of Carol’s shots of them — but they include much-much-larger-than-life depictions of tools, schools of fish, skeletons and bugs, buzzards, and freaky looking sort-of-humans. 

A lot of people who are whizzing past Porter’s big bull are heading for Mitchell, a bit larger eastern South Dakota town, there to behold the vaunted “Corn Palace.”  Mitchell was an almost-new town in 1892 when the residents got together and built an extraordinary auditorium entirely — save for its wooden frame — of corncobs.  It was the showpiece of the fall harvest season and that year’s “Corn Belt Exposition,” and a challenger to a “grain palace” established in Plankinton, a rival down the road. 

Plankinton’s grain-clad structure lasted just two years.  Mitchell’s Corn Palace, though twice rebuilt, pulls in tourists every day of the year to this day. 

You can walk right in and stroll the corridors, looking at historic photos like the one of “March King” John Philip Sousa and his world-famous band, who performed at the corn-y opening.   The auditorium floor below holds souvenir booths until the men’s and women’s basketball teams of Mitchell’s Dakota Wesleyan University take it over for their seasons. Then the trinket-selling moves to a separate building across the street.

Several varieties of corn in eight colors — including Indian corn ears in multicolor “calico” — adorn the palace’s facade.  Each April about 275,000 ears of dry corn, for which the city pays a farmer $150,000, are cut, hauled into town, and affixed to the building in thematic designs that differ each year.  Mitchell makes its money back, and then some, on postcards and corn-related souvenirs; the Corn Palace brings in about $30 million a year in all, counting motel stays, gasoline purchased, and corn dogs consumed.  That’s a whole lot more revenue than other prairie farm towns of 3,000 people can boast.

The “palace” didn’t look so grand in years when severe drought or hailstorms damaged the corn crop.  The town stopped trying to cover the spires and minarets altogether after high winds knocked a couple down.  Hungry rats with wings (pigeons) have been known to strip a section or two of kernels, and a summer of intense prairie sunshine can dull the building’s sheen.

If you’ve never heard of Mitchell, I guarantee you’ve not heard of Murdo, South Dakota.  That’s a town, named after an early settler and cattleman, Scotsman Murdo MacKenzie, that would almost certainly have dried up and blown away had local Chevy car and John Deere tractor dealer A. J. Geisler not opened a place called the Pioneer Auto Show in 1954.  He then sweet-talked the state into putting an exit ramp at this nondescript town of 600 when the Interstate reached central South Dakota.

To call the Pioneer Auto Show an antique-auto museum would be like calling the Taj Mahal a pretty building.  True, but inadequate.  As you’d expect, there are almost 300 vintage cars of all descriptions, but also 60 tractors, 60 motorcycles, assorted jukeboxes, a Wurlitzer circus organ, slot machines, toys, an old and intact gas station, and, incongruously, shelf after shelf of rocks.  One of the astonishing 42 buildings cobbled together to make the place, you see, holds the National Rockhound and Lapidary Hall of Fame.  (As you would, I had to look up “lapidary” to discover that it relates to the cutting and polishing of precious gems.  Not diamonds or rubies, but prairie rocks and fossilized cross-sections of plants, polished to a fare-thee-well.)

Seventy-two-year-old David Geisler, A. J.’s son, presides, charming women and kids and even the men who escort them.  He walks people past the old fire engines, pausing to clang their bells; points out classics among the cars — ah-oo-guhing their horns; and spins yarns about everything he passes, including the Elvis Presley motorcycle and the “prairie town” out back.  Don’t get him started about the leather license plate or the eight-wheel “Octo Rod” car. 

Altogether, the Pioneer Auto Show — plus rocks and such — is more than anyone could comprehend in a short visit.  Which, of course, is the point.

More manageable, three exits down the road, is a place where the buildings themselves are the draw: more than 50 of them at “1880 Town.”  In 1972, ranchers Clarence and Richard Hullinger began assembling authentic structures from the Dakotas’ “Wild West” era, starting with those that a production company had moved to the nearby plains for a movie shoot.  Filled with period furnishings, the buildings include an old-timey bank, Wells Fargo express office, saloon, blacksmith’s shop, and 14-sided barn.  Costumed marshals, outlaws and a “loose woman” or two mingle with visitors, who can rent western duds for themselves and their kids as well for hammy photographs.

1880 Town is billed as “the ultimate destination for fans of ‘Dances with Wolves,’” and for good reason.  The producers of that Kevin Costner epic vehicle about a disillusioned, white Civil War veteran in the land of the Indian gave the Hullingers props and photos from their film as well.

About half an hour onward, you can detour into a different sort of Wild West: the loop road through the South Dakota Badlands.  The Lakota called these 99,000 hectares (244,000 acres) of barren buttes, pinnacles and spires that encircle the nation’s largest mixed-grass prairie maco sica — literally, “land bad.”  Now protected, or at least patrolled, as a national park, this forbidding place also holds the world’s greatest fossil beds of early mammals from — you guessed it! — the Oligocene Epoch.  (And what an epoch it was!) 

After a drive or hike through desolation, you’re ready for an ice-cream sundae or a cheeseburger and fries.  Even a glass of ice-cold water.  In the 1930s, in fact, free, chilled water was enough to pull people in to a little drugstore in the town of Wall, which wasn’t much bigger than the store.  Today, Wall Drug is so enormous and kitschy that it bills itself — with not a lot of argument from others — as “America’s favorite roadside attraction.”

It’s really no more than a big-box store for shopaholics, snack-food addicts, and people who are curious what those hundreds of Wall Drug signs along the freeway were about.  Want some cowboy boots and spurs?  Christmas ornaments any time of the year?  Gold bracelets?  “Indian” bows and rubber-tipped arrows?  A stuffed jackalope?  Wall Drug T-shirts that confirm you were there?  You’ve come to the right place.

And yes, Wall Drug has drugs — the over-the-counter kind. 

If you need a contemplative break from shopping excess, Wall Drug has even set aside a little room as a chapel.

You’ll recall that I mentioned Mount Rushmore as one of the powerful magnets that lured early tourists across the farmland and Rocky Mountain foothills of remote South Dakota.  In 1923, the state historian came up with the idea for a REALLY BIG sculpture to promote tourism.  He convinced sculptor Gutzon Borglum to take on the project, which was funded from private sources and the federal government.

Borglum envisioned granite likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt carved into the face of Mount Rushmore.  His plans called for the presidents to be depicted from the waist up, but only their faces — 18 meters each from chin to the tops of their heads — were completed when money ran low.  But the work, for which Gutzon Borglum hired more than 400 unemployed miners as laborers, continued for 14 years. 

In order to achieve correct scale, Borglum created a studio model in which three centimeters equaled four meters on the mountain.  And translating that model to giant visages required more than mathematics or hammer-and-chisel sculpting.  Using dynamite, whole boulders had to be blasted most carefully, both to protect workers and to be sure a presidential nose was not blown away.

Today Mount Rushmore, way out in the rugged Black Hills, draws more than 2.5 million visitors a year from around the world.

Those hills have long been sacred to the Lakota tribe, which bitterly opposed building the monument, arguing that the United States Government had given the hills to the tribe forever in a 19th century treaty.  But whites had won the Indian Wars, and the government brushed aside these objections.

So, on behalf of native peoples throughout the Americas, the Lakota commissioned one of Borglum’s assistants, Korczak Ziolkowski, who had completed a giant carving of his own on Stone Mountain in Georgia, to create their own mountainside memorial just down the road — sacred hills or not.  "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too," Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote in the letter of invitation to Ziolkowski in 1939. 

Together, they chose Chief Crazy Horse as the subject.  A Lakota warrior, he was infamous among whites for leading the war party of Sioux and Cheyennes that trapped and massacred flamboyant U.S. Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his 215 cavalrymen at “Custer’s Last Stand” along the Little Bighorn River in neighboring Montana in 1876. 

When the Crazy Horse Monument is completed a generation or more from now, it will likely be the largest sculpture in the world.  Some time this fall, I’ll be writing about it in a VOA “Only in America” feature story to which I will link in this blog.

Not far from Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore is Rapid City, the hub of the Black Hills, where you can’t help but come face to face with more U.S. presidents.  Not real ones, as you must have guessed, and not big granite guys.  These are bronze chief executives — 40 of them so far — the creations of five South Dakota artists.  They’re arrayed in memorable poses at downtown streetcorners. Ronald Reagan, for instance, appears in jeans, work shirt, and a cowboy hat, as if he’d just cleared some brush at his Rancho del Cielo in California.  Teddy Roosevelt sports his Rough Rider hat, kerchief, and sidearm.  A smiling John F. Kennedy holds the hand of his young son, “John-John.”  Three other, more obscure presidents — Chester A. Arthur, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison — will join them and the others this fall, along with Abraham Lincoln. 

Just about everybody has heard of him. 

Our last stop before leaving “South Dakodak” was a fascinating little park that at last had the feel of good-old-days roadside wonders.  “Dinosaur Park,” featuring “towering dinosaurs of the size and appearance of dinosaurs that roamed Western South Dakota during the late Cretaceous Period!” sits high above Rapid City.   Kids (and spry adults) are actually encouraged to climb on the five really big, painted-concrete, prehistoric reptiles, which appeared way back in 1936. (That’s the Cretaceous Period, isn’t it?)

A paleontologist at the South Dakota School of Mines convinced the government to send Works Progress Administration crews to build these creatures during the depths of the Great Depression.  Even the curator of the National Museum of Natural History, far away in Washington, D.C., consulted to be sure the beasts looked plausibly like Stegosaurus, Tricerotops and their ilk from eons ago.  Now, of course, they look like cartoon characters or Thanksgiving-day parade parodies. 

All the better to create a delightful diversion after a long drive across a wide state.

I’d like to, but can’t, close by telling you that you’ll find lots of even-quirkier roadside attractions elsewhere, along the narrow state highways that survived the sprawl of Interstate expressways.  The truth is that except in a few short or remote stretches, including some remnants of historic U.S. Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles, most little “tourist traps” that thrived in the early days of motorized travel died of visitor starvation when the Interstates passed them by.  Pockets of development beside exits off the superhighways are now the place to grab hunks of travelers’ cash, and there’s no room there for Indian arrowhead shops or snake farms. Unfortunately.

****

One Dakota, Two Dakota

If you’re curious, South and North Dakota lie in what was once land traversed by nomadic Plains Indians.  The Dakota branch of the Sioux tribes gives it its name.  The United States claimed that land in 1803 as the northernmost part of the “Louisiana Purchase” of vast inland territory from France, even though few French or Americans had dared to live there.

The discovery of gold in the Black Hills, plus the coming of the railroad, prompted a settlement boom that led to the creation of a defined “Dakota Territory in 1861.  And one gigantic state it might have been had the territorial capital not been moved from Yankton in the southeastern corner, near Nebraska, to Bismarck, far to the west and north.  Sectional squabbling ensued, making two distinct states almost inevitable.  They entered the Union together in 1889, separated by a long, straight boundary just below the 46th Parallel.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

By and by. At some time or occasion in the future.

Jackalope. The fanciful combination of a jackrabbit and an antelope, with horns as well as long ears Newcomers (or “tinhorns”) to the U.S. prairie were often sent out to hunt the nonexistent jackalope, whose doctored photos they had been shown.

Kitschy. Lowbow or quirky, but deliberately so.

Tremulous. Quivering or trembling.

Vaunted. Famous, renowned.

WisSCONsin

On a just-completed cross-country trip, Carol and I drove, languidly and admiringly, through a tidy place full of cheery people, picture-postcard farms with bright-red barns, and white-fence towns with names like Oconomowoc and Ashwaubenon — Indian words that locals articulate as fluidly as they order a beer and a brat. That’s brat as in bratwurst sausage, pronounced “brott,” not “bratt” like the unruly child.

The place is Wisconsin, whose middle syllable gets an extra pounding from the natives for some Scandinavian reason. It’s “WisSCONsin,” the state that’s north of Illinois, west of Lake Michigan, and east of Minnesota and Iowa in the American heartland. To the even-more-frigid north lie Canada and a peninsula that strays over from the state of Michigan.


If you want to see “Small Town America,” savor some great cheese and sausage, listen to accordion music, dance the polka, and freeze in the winter, Wisconsin’s the place for you. The coldest days I’ve ever spent were in Madison, the state capital, in January, when the wind off frozen lakes Mendota and Monona just about broke my eyebrows.

Wisconsin borders two Great Lakes (Michigan and Superior), holds 8,500 smaller ones, dots its horizons with innumerable silos and a few respectable skyscrapers (in Milwaukee), and boasts four delightfully distinguishable seasons, ideal for agriculture. Winters, especially in the Northwoods, seem never-ending, Wisconsinites admit with a smile and a wink. That’s what mittens and snowshoes, cross-country skis and snow tires were made for.

Wisconsin is SO cold, and SO rural, and SO wholesome that its neighbors make fun of it, using a northern equivalent of the “hillbilly jokes” that bedevil residents of the American Mid-South. You hear a lot of “Sven and Ole” Swedish and Norwegian jokes, too, given the Swedish and Norwegian ancestry of many Wisconsinites.

Here are a few knee-slappers about the Badger State — badgers being chubby little burrowing carnivores with ornery dispositions completely unlike the even-tempered humans around them:

You must be from Wisconsin if:
• You owe more money on your snowblower than on your car.
• The first day of deer season is a school holiday.

• More than half of your relatives work on a dairy farm.
• You think the world has two major religions: Lutheran and Catholic.
• You or your sister was the “Dairy Princess” at a county fair.
• Driving is safer in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow.
• You have a fishing cottage “upnort.”
• You take out-of-town visitors to La Crosse to see the World’s Largest Six-Pack of beer cans.
• Your hometown needs a bus but instead buys a Zamboni rink-surfacing machine for the hockey team.
• You decide to have a cookout this summer because it falls on a weekend.
• And you know what a “bubbler” is.

For the rest of us, “bubbler” is a Wisconsin drinking fountain.

Jokes aside, Wisconsin, with its emerald hillsides, rushing rivers, rugged bluffs, deep woods, and educated, industrious and well-mannered people, has been called “the perfect state.” And the tens of thousands of visitors who each year raft Wisconsin’s rapids or tour its Dells — canyons carved by the Wisconsin River — hunt Wisconsin deer or bear, camp in its rugged parks, make tracks in a snowmobile, or poke holes in a frozen lake, perchance to snare a passing muskie or pike, eagerly agree.

Controls on industrial emissions are vigorously maintained, and visitors to Wisconsin are hard-pressed to find an unkempt wayside — as highway rest stops are called in these parts — or discarded cheeseburger wrappers along a highway. Wisconsin’s state parks are more than a touch wild, full of hiking trails, waterfalls, and glorious vistas of valleys, rocky deposits called moraines, and teardrop-shaped hills known as “drumlins,” all formed by glaciers ages ago. The state established a wildlife refuge in the desolate Horicon Marsh — the “Everglades of the North” — whose 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres) of cattails and duckweed are a popular stop for a quarter of a million migrating Canada geese.

I’m not sure if Wisconsin has official colors, but you’d think so, looking at scarves and stocking caps and store-window displays clear across the state. They’re hunter green and gold, the colors of the Green Bay Packers professional football team — though, to my eye, the latter looks more shocking-yellow than gold. Since the Packers play on Sundays, you see a lot of hunter green and garish-yellow shirts, dresses, and ties — even whole suits — in church, too.

The Packers are locally owned, not by some mogul of industry or a corporate conglomerate, but by 112,000 shareholders, which is more people than actually live in Green Bay. In a league of teams based in big cities with an average population of 3 million, that’s a matter of justifiable statewide pride. Everyone in Wisconsin refers to the Packers as “we.” It takes a visitor awhile to realize what in the world someone in La Crosse, 266 kilometers (165 miles) from Green Bay — “coast to coast,” as they like to say in Wisconsin — is talking about when he says, “We looked great this week,” and his friend replies, “You betcha. We killed dem Bears.” There are bears, lots of black ones, in Wisconsin, but these Bears, from Chicago, are the Packers’ oldest and most despised rivals. Nine decades old.

In their flat, faintly nasal accents, punching those middle syllables —WisSCONsin, ChiCAWguh — Wisconsin citizens love to tweak mighty Chicago, just below their border, and to beat its teams in sports. Wisconsonites will tell you it’s Chicagoans (not Illinoisans; just those creeps from Chicago) who are buying up all the lake cabins in Wisconsin and driving up prices, and it’s Chicagoans who are clogging Wisconsin’s free highways with their cars and campers each weekend.

But when Wisconsinites want to catch a concert “down sout,” they have to pay tolls on Chicago’s maze of freeways to get there. Surely, Wisconsinites will insist, it must have been punks from Chicago enrolled at the “U” — the University of Wisconsin in Madison — not our clean-cut kids from Oshkosh and Eau Claire, who caused all the trouble in the Sixties. Back then, anti-war students staged sit-ins in university buildings, disrupted recruiting efforts of defense contractors, and, in 1970, bombed a U.S. Army mathematics think tank in Sterling Hall, killing a physicist, injuring four others, and causing $2.1 million in damage. The mastermind, Karleton Armstrong, served seven years in Waupun State Prison, then returned to Madison, where he drove a cab and ran a popular delicatessen called the “Radical Rye.”

Wisconsin has, however, also produced remarkable daughters and sons, and a number of firsts. Escape artist Harry Houdini, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, novelist Edna Ferber, actor Spencer Tracy, director Orson Welles, and innovative architect Frank Lloyd Wright were all born or spent significant years in Wisconsin. Some scoundrels did, too, including “robber barons” who ran logging companies that nearly denuded the state of trees. But that era spawned a virtuous antidote: Wisconsin’s fabled Progressive Movement, led by Madison lawyer Robert A. Lafollette Sr. and his sons, “Young Bob,” who held his father’s U.S. Senate seat for 21 years after “Old Bob’s” death; and Phil, who three times won the state’s governorship. Un-baronlike John Muir, too, hailed from Wisconsin. He founded the Sierra Club, crusaded for America’s national park system, and wrote in luxuriant detail of the birds whose songs “sweeten Wisconsin.”

“Good Wisconsin stock,” as the people sometimes refer to themselves, revere the hearth-and-home values of the yeoman farmer. After all, it was in a “Little House in the Big Woods” — Wisconsin woods — that “Pa” first taught Laura Ingalls Wilder, and she, in turn, generations of the nation’s children through her novels, the virtues of hard work and fair dealing.

As one of the Wisconsin wisecracks points out, Wisconsin is among America’s most Catholic states, yet also one of its most Lutheran ones. Although its stock is largely German and Scandinavian, many cultures have blossomed here. Each year Milwaukee alone holds Polish, Irish, Italian, and German fests, “Asian Moon” and “African World” festivals, a Mexican fiesta, “Serbian Days,” and a Native American celebration. Overall, the count of identifiable ethnic groups in town stopped at 110 about 15 years ago.

Racine, with the nation’s highest concentration of Danish descendants, throws an annual “Kringle Fest,” named for its sinfully delicious, filled Danish pastries. Not far from Madison are “Little Norway” and “America’s Little Switzerland.” There’s a “Little Finland” cultural center in Wisconsin, too, and colorful powwows on the Menominee and Chippewa Indian reservations in the western and northern parts of the state.

Wisconsin was the first state to number its highways, the first to require seat belts in new cars, and the first to outlaw the death penalty and to revoke the racist, secret Ku Klux Klan’s charter. First, too, to pass workers’ compensation and unemployment laws.

Wisconsin’s winter sports, in particular, draw enthusiasts from far and wide: cross-country skiing on frozen rivers, canals, and more than 300 designated trails; ice-fishing jamborees on frozen lakes; a snowmobile derby; speed-racing on ice skates; and ski jumping on the Mississippi bluffs. Wisconsin marks an astounding 32,000 kilometers (20,000 miles) of interconnected snowmobile trails — annually ranked the best — and no doubt noisiest — in North America. And I dare not forget windsailing, ice boating, even “skijoring,” which involves climbing onto a pair of skis and hitching to a sled dog team.

Carol dislikes one thing about Wisconsin that I adore: It’s a pig-out paradise and cholesterol-fighter’s nightmare. Wisconsinites swear there’s more to their diets than cheese, brats, and beer. But veal bratwursts, pork bratwursts, summer sausage that locals call “beef logs,” a half-dozen kinds of wieners, and a dozen more obscure varieties of wursts still hang from hooks in old-fashioned meat markets across the state. The Milwaukee Brewers baseball team even interrupts its home games for a faux contest among five costumed “racing sausages”: Brett Wurst the bratwurst, Stosh the kielbasa, Guido the Italian sausage, Frankie Furter the hot dog, and Cinco the sombreroed Spanish pork sausage.

And cheese is serious business in a state with 1,257,000 dairy cows. Who, exactly, counted them, I’m not sure. For years, Wisconsin law forbade the sale of the butter substitute oleomargarine within its borders. Its dairy farmers produce more than 200 varieties of cheese, including some, such as Havarti, once thought to be foreign and exotic.

Wisconsin farmers had little choice but to turn to dairying. Wheat was the Badger State’s early cash crop, and Wisconsin was the Union Army’s breadbasket in the Civil War of the 1860s. But giant wheat combines could not negotiate the hills and woods, and yields could not match those of flatter Minnesota and the Dakotas. So most Wisconsin farmers turned their spreads over to cows and corn. Most of their farms are small, about 81 hectares (200 acres) on average, and stubbornly owner-occupied, in defiance of the nationwide trend toward massive corporate operations. Many Wisconsin barns are designed to store hay bales on a second floor, from which the fodder would be tossed to the cattle below. But as machinery allowed famers to bundle hay in huge rolls, simple sheds — many metal and prefabricated — have replaced drafty old barns in several places.

Though state license plates proclaim Wisconsin’s continuing status as “America’s Dairyland,” its economy revolves far more around industry, including thousands of specialty fabricating shops. All along state and county roads, you see little factories that make many parts that we sort of see but don’t much notice: clock hands, springs for toasters, plastic lids, keychains, dentists’ pliers. All sorts of things.

Bigger than beer in Wisconsin are bathtubs in Kohler, floor wax in Racine, facial tissues in Appleton, motorcycles in Milwaukee, and cheese in Monroe. In recent years, agriculture, including fishing as well as farming, has accounted for less than 5 percent of the gross state product, industry around 30 percent, and services like graphics, computer work, and financial planning for all the rest.

The first European known to set foot in what is now Wisconsin came not from the south or east like so many who would follow, but from the north. French explorer Jean Nicolet paddled into Green Bay from Quebec in Canada in 1634, looking for a Northwest Passage trade route to China. He — and many others on similar quests — went home disappointed, and it was a while before French trappers and traders followed. They coveted otter and beaver pelts, not land, and while French place names abound in Wisconsin — La Crosse, Lac La Belle, Prairie du Chien — it is a rare place that can trace its land ownership back to the French. The same lack of interest did not apply to the British, who were victorious in the French and Indian Wars of the middle 1700s and nominally controlled this western edge of European settlement for a time. To them, and to American settlers who moved into Wisconsin in search of land after the British were expelled during the War of 1812, land meant power. Native peoples, who repeatedly lost battles to better-armed whites, ceded most of present-day Wisconsin in 1833. The area became, in rather quick order, part of America’s vast Northwest Territory; then of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan territories; then a territory unto itself before achieving statehood in 1848. The new state took its name from the Indian “Misionsing” and French “Ouisconsin,” meaning “gathering of the waters.”

After its initial Yankee settlement, Wisconsin became heavily German. Just as feisty German “Forty-eighters” were fleeing the strife of Central Europe in the mid-1800s, the United States was offering homesteaders 160 free acres (65 hectares) to settle the mostly untamed state it had just created to the north of Illinois. Save for its lack of Alps, the Germans found Wisconsin’s climate and topography to their liking, and they quickly put the state’s abundant raw materials to good use in machine shops, paper mills, and factories. Breweries, too, with names like Leinenkugel, Huber, Schwalbach, Rhinelander, and Zimmerman.

For half a century, German would be widely spoken on Wisconsin’s streets and even in schools. German was the language of hundreds of churches, and German newspapers abounded. But World Wars I and II, in which Germany was the hated enemy, severely damaged the prosperous Wisconsin enclave. Suspected and sometimes vilified despite abundant evidence of their loyalty to their new country, German-Americans saw their influence wane in the communities they had largely created. “A tragic tide of hatred and anti-German bigotry swept the country, leaving once-proud German settlements, like Milwaukee, quivering in its wake,” wrote Ellen Langill and Dave Jensen in the commemorative Milwaukee 150 history. “The German language became odious. . . . From a high point of 30,000 students enrolled in German in Milwaukee schools in 1916, the number fell to only 400 two years later.” To survive, German merchants found it necessary to post signs reading, “English spoken here,” and most German newspapers were gone by 1930.

African Americans from the South and Poles from Eastern Europe, searching for factory work, streamed to Wisconsin’s industrial cities after World War II. But jobs proved to be more elusive than elsewhere in the North. Blacks, in particular, faced not only racism, but also entrenched hiring and apprenticeship systems that favored the employment of relatives and friends. Blacks today make up 25 percent of Milwaukee County’s population but comprise only 6 percent statewide. Polish neighborhoods can still be found in Milwaukee, but even 25 years ago, in their Book of America, Neal Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom were quoting a priest in Milwaukee’s “Polish flats” as observing, “My funerals are all in Polish. My weddings and baptisms are all Latino.”

Wisconsin’s top tourist attraction is a modest one. It’s Wisconsin Dells, an 11-kilometer (7-mile) stretch of the Wisconsin River that is flanked by steep, sculpted cliffs. Families come for the water slides, small theme parks, and miniature-golf courses, as well as bracing splashes in the river. Second is Door County, a picturesque finger of land that juts north from Green Bay. Its Lake Michigan bluffs and beaches, multiple lighthouses, and array of apple and cherry orchards are endearing enough; add specialty shops, flaming fish boils, and cozy guest houses, and Door County looks for all the world like Nantucket Island had been lifted out of Massachusetts back east and deposited inland.

Visitors also come to see Wisconsin’s rugged Northwoods, cheese being made in several little factories, great summer “cottages” — read, mansions — built by dem filthy rich ChiCAWguns, and various retreats, including Taliesin, which was acclaimed architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate in the Wisconsin River Valley. There’s also a bizarre place near Spring Green called the “House on the Rock,” which includes not only a room with 3,264 windows — yes, 3,264 windows! — that seems to teeter 100 meters out and over a valley, but also the world’s largest carousel inside the house.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin, “heritage” tourists check out preserved lumber camps, great Victorian homes, cranberry bogs, railway museums, Mississippi River steamboats, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthplace in Pepin, and Al Capone’s cottage along a lake. That’s where the Chicago mobster relaxed with his pals and gals and flew in high-quality Canadian booze by seaplane throughout Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, when the manufacture and sale of alcohol were officially forbidden in the United States.

Pretty little Appleton is noteworthy, too, if only because two of Wisconsin’s most disparate characters — the magician Houdini, a rabbi’s son; and rabble-rousing, Communist-hunting U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy, the son of an immigrant Irish Catholic farmer — grew up there.

Wisconsinites are rarely flashy or outspoken, though. Tradition matters, and steady marks its course. Save for Pennsylvania, Carol and I couldn’t think of another place in America that is so industrial yet agricultural, so homespun yet sophisticated, so beautifully manicured yet naturally wild, so ruggedly individualistic yet socially involved, so reverent towards antiquity but open to new people and ideas, all at once.

One feels good — upbeat, optimistic — after a prolonged visit to WisSCONsin, where the direct and simple state motto fits the mood. It reads:

“Forward.”

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Combine [noun]. A big and complex farm machine that first cuts, then threshes, or bundles, grain.

Feisty. Spirited, spunky, aggressive. You can expect a lively argument if you tangle with someone who is feisty.

Languid. Listless, dreamy, momentarily lazy.

Mogul. A powerful businessperson or industry titan, traditionally male. How the word also came to be associated with bumps on a ski slope, I have no idea!

Oleomargarine. Sometimes shortened to “oleo” and now universally called “margarine,” it is a spread that looks like butter but is made from cheaper vegetable oils. Because of the influence of the powerful dairy lobby, for many years oleo came in lard-like white. Homemakers would stir in powdered food coloring to make it look halfway appetizing.

Think tank. A research organization or institute that studies and reports on issues of the day. Today, many think tanks display an obvious political bias.

Formidable Footpath

I want to tell you all about the Appalachian Trail from experience, for I have hiked it.

Layers of fog greet A.T. hikers in the Appalachian Mountains.

Well, not all 3,400 kilometers, or 2,100 miles, of it. More like 10 miles, some of it in my street shoes, thereby learning the first lesson of traversing the world’s longest footpath: Do not wear street shoes.

I wasn’t one of those hiking fanatics who set out to conquer the whole trail in a summer, or the gluttons for punishment who try to make it both ways before the snow flies. Carol and I just wanted to get some neat photographs along the mountaintops, ridge lines, valley floors, wildflower meadows, isolated cow pastures, and a few paved roads — my specialty — all remote but within shouting distance (“hello, hellooo, hellooooo”) of 100 million people along the East Coast.

Before I go any farther, I want to explain something about the pronunciation of this challenging path. Those living in southern and south-central portions of the route have always called their mountains the “Apple-ATCH-ins,” and the region, “Apple-ATCHIA.” For some reason, northerners and bureaucrats who assign names to things have preferred “Apple-AY-chins” and “Apple-AY-chia.” The latter stuck with the folks who oversee the trail, so that’s how you’ll hear me pronounce it in the podcast that accompanies this posting. Apple-AY-chia it is, over the protests of at least one of my friends, a former VOA colleague who makes it clear every time I see her that she grew up a stone’s throw from the “Apple-ATCHIAN Trail.”

This is where the trek ends for most thru hikers: lofty Mount Katahdin in Maine. A small percentage start here and work south instead.

What just about everyone who walks it calls it, however, is simply the “A.T.” whose precise route and length keep changing. That’s because officials keep tinkering with the route to get it as far away from civilization as possible. In fact, a different mountain, Oglethorpe, was the southern terminus until 1959 until it was moved to Springer Mountain because there was too much chicken farming, of all things, going on on Oglethorpe's hillsides.

Besides, how does one precisely measure a path that scrambles over rocks, tree roots, big and little bridges, a few fences, and such natural features as “the Lemon Squeezer” — not sure what that is, but it can’t be, uh, a walk in the park — “the Priest,” “Pollywog Stream,” “Eph’s Lookout,” “the Pinnacle,” “Crawfish Valley,” “Hogwallow Spring,” “Dragon’s Tooth,” “Beauty Spot,” “Charlies Bunion” (sounds painful), and, gulp, “the Guillotine”?

The north-and-south trail connects 14 states, but it runs east-westerly in spots, especially in New England in the Northeast, where the A.T. was hacked through forestland to connect existing north-south trails in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Several sections there follow trails like the Long Trail and “Fishin’ Jimmy Trail” that existed well before the footpath from Maine to Georgia was conceived. The Appalachian Mountain Club, the first known U.S. hiking club, was founded in 1876 to “explore the mountains of New England and adjacent regions for both scientific and artistic purposes.”

You or I would thrill to see such views. And most A.T. hikers do, too — for awhile, until vistas become commonplace. For most, more attention is focused on keeping moving and reaching the next shelter.

The A.T. hugs the crestline of the ancient, wrinkled Appalachian Mountains, named by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto after the Appalachee Indians who lived in northwest Florida. Trails of the southern Appalachians were cut by bison that roamed the land before European settlement. Early adventurers and botanists were thrilled to discover the bounty of flowering plants and shrubs, notably mountain laurel, flame azalea, and rhododendron. They saw literally billions of chestnut trees that are since gone — victims of a terrible blight. Today another plague, acid rain, appears to be killing or damaging many southern Fraser firs.

The Appalachians are old, worn-out mountains by American standards and were formed by staggering geological compressions and uplifts. A.T. thru hikers must conquer almost all of their most daunting peaks, including Clingmans Dome in North Carolina (2,025 meters/ 6,643 feet) and Mount Washington in New Hampshire (1,917 meters/ 6,288 feet). Middle-of-the summer snowstorms on the latter summit are common.

But much of the trail’s course worms under a dense canopy of trees — a “tunnel through time,” as National Geographic magazine once called the trail. Rivers have sliced several gaps through the mountains, and A.T. hikers tromp through those as well.

The idea of an Appalachian Trail was proposed in an article published in the obscure Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1921 by Benton MacKaye, a Yankee forester, hiker, dreamer, and believer in the “creative value of wilderness.” It was written at a time when “tramping,” as hiking was known, was becoming a passion among many New England intellectuals. According to the member handbook of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (A.T.C.), the governing body of most trail activities, “the article proposed an extended wilderness along the Appalachian crests as a crucial line of defense against both demoralization of urban laborers (by providing a refuge for contemplation in a natural setting) and ‘the lure of militarism’ (by channeling primal heroic instincts into the care of the countryside).”

The A.T. idea was peddled to supportive newspaper columnists and outdoor enthusiasts, including the national commissioner of the Boy Scouts of America. Hiking clubs joined in the fun of proposing the trail’s exact route, and the first section was cut and christened at the Palisades Interstate Park in New York in 1922. A bridge there had made possible a connection between New England and the New York-New Jersey area — and thence southward.

The Appalachian Trail cuts right next to this old place, possibly a hunting cabin, in central Pennsylvania.

At the trail’s organizing conference in Washington, D.C., in 1925, attendees agreed upon an Appalachian Trail monogram, in which the crossbar of the “A” serves as the top of the “T.” The logo is used to this day. At the conference, MacKaye was careful to distinguish between his “trailway” and a railway. He said a railway opens the countryside to civilization, but “the trailway should ‘open up’ a country as an escape from civilization.” Later, he would write that “the Appalachian Range should be placed in public hands and become the site for a Barbarian Utopia.”

Others like Myron Avery, an early Appalachian Trail Conservancy chairman and a legend in hiking circles, turned MacKaye’s lofty vision into a reality. What would be designated America’s first “National Scenic Trail” was completed from up-north Maine to Georgia, way down South, in 1937. A year later, an unnamed, devastating hurricane that killed hundreds of people and destroyed whole coastal villages in New England nearly obliterated the trail in that region. At the time there were no more than 100 active volunteers on the entire length of the trail, compared with more than 5,000 today, ready to effect repairs.

A simple plaque on a rock on Springer Mountain in Georgia’s Chattahoochee Forest marks what is the beginning point of the long journey for most. Many start. Few reach Maine.

Perhaps 2,000 people depart Springer Mountain in Georgia or Mount Katahdin in Maine — the lion’s share from the former in the Spring, when the weather is nice in Georgia but still snowy in Maine — determined to hike the trail’s entire distance at one time. Most years, rangers won’t even allow thru hikers to depart Mount Katahdin until June 1 or thereafter because of the nasty weather in the Maine highlands. The highest officially estimated number of “starters” intending to hike the entire Appalachian Trail in any one year was 2,900 in 2000. That was four years after humorist Bill Bryson published the wildly successful book A Walk in the Woods, an account of his hike of 1,400 kilometers (800 miles) of the A.T. The year 2000 was also incorrectly observed as the millennial year, in which a lot of hikers reported a desire to complete a life-changing accomplishment.

Starting and completing are two different matters, of course. The most people to attest that they completed the route was 411 northbound last year, and 70 southbound in 2000. The number of long-distance A.T. hikers has been growing, in part because of an increasing number of hostels that give foot-weary travelers both rest and encouragement along the way.

This Appalachian Trail patch shows the distinctive A-atop-the-T logo and recognizes the wearer as both a hiker and “maintainer” — one who volunteers time to keep the trail open and marked.

Awarding of a patch for completing the trail — the only reward beyond one’s immense satisfaction — is strictly on the honor system. No longer does a panel of experienced hikers grill a purported successful thru hiker, as was the case for the first 25 years or so, to be sure he or she did indeed hike the entire way. Earl Shaffer of York, Pennsylvania, faced such an “oral comprehensive” exam, and had to show his series of slides taken all along the route when he became the first documented person to hike the entire trail in 1948. Only well-wishers and photographers greeted him in Maine when he repeated the hike in 1998 at age 79, lugging the same tiny back-pack, to mark the 50th anniversary of the feat.

The Earl Shaffer of 1998 was older than most, but not all, hikers. Don Cogswell, owner of both a diner and a lodge catering to hikers in Millinocket, Maine, told me he once ran into an 82-year-old man who asked for a lift to the start of the trail at Baxter State Park. “I took him out to the mountain,” Don said. “He looked through the windshield and said, ‘Don, I can’t wait to tackle it.’ I said, ‘Papa, I don’t want to be disrespectful, but you’re a freak of nature!’”

“Trail names” like “Trailhead Ted” are a relatively recent phenomenon. A.T.C. officials trace them to the 1970s when clever citizens’-band radio “handles” were in vogue. Many hikers on the Appalachian Trail introduce, and forever know, each other by their trail names alone. Some have even had their names legally changed to their trail personas.

Another badge of individuality among hikers is the walking stick, often carved with care by a loving relative. There is, you see, an element of romance, even fantasy, in the thru-hiking experience.

Hikers Scott Davis — trail name “Flow Easy” — and Deborah “Twilight” Smith are joined by their trusty companion, Linville. All three completed the thru hike, but Linville had to be boarded in two stretches where dogs are not allowed.

I should point out that, from what people tell me, one does not really walk the Appalachian Trail. Nor is it a hike in the image of a happy wanderer, whistling “I love to go a wandering, my knapsack on my back” along a gently sloping path. Neither, however, is conquering the A.T. an extreme sport akin to rappelling. Rather, one could be said to trudge the trail in five million or more strides, purposefully and carefully under a considerable burden. Even frugally stuffed backpacks weigh 30 kilos (44 pounds). Among the packed items considered essential: a bandanna, lip salve, water filters or iodine tablets, a candle, a waterproof pack cover, and “mountain money”: toilet paper. And, of course, some real paper money, a credit card, and at least a dollar’s worth of change in case an emergency call at a pay telephone becomes necessary. I didn’t mention a cellphone because there aren’t a lot of cell towers in or near the deep woods.

Jagged and slippery rocks, exposed roots, and muddy ruts await the hiker’s step. I can attest from my laughably short experience on the trail that all one has to do to turn an ankle is to take one’s eyes off the next rock in the path. Except in meadows, there’s no eyes-ahead, jaunty stride possible, even if you wanted to affect one. And there are a few treacherous (short) jumps across boulders, and grades that can be steep. To many hikers’ surprise, the slog down a mountainside can be far more grueling than the trip up because of the pounding to one’s feet and knees. Surprisingly, too, hikers soon loathe the stretches along hard, smooth roads and bridges, preferring the softer footfall of the earthen trail.

In rain, shine, sleet, or snow, A.T. thru hikers walk farther every 20 minutes than most Americans walk in a week.

Let me repeat that for effect: To make it the entire length of the trail in time, thru hikers on the Appalachian Trail go farther on their feet every 20 minutes than most Americans walk in a week. Thanks to sturdier boots and lots of practice, they find a comfortable gait that enables them to hike 15, 20, even 30 kilometers in a day. One superbly conditioned fellow, Andrew Thompson, set what is thought to be the unofficial speed record for through-hiking in 2005, at 47 days, 13 hours and 31 minutes. Needless to say, he hiked fast, slept little, and traveled light!

And in 1991, Bill “Orient Express” Irwin, previously a bitter alcoholic whose rehabilitation included a commitment to outdoor activity, became the first, and perhaps only, blind hiker to cover the whole trail in eight months, accompanied by his guide dog, “Orient,” and a variety of sighted companions who came and went along the way.

Others have walked the entire trail as surrogates for disabled friends or loved ones. One such man whom we met carried a mini-tape recorder on which to detail the events of each day. When he’d come to a town, he’d mail his progress report to his son, who had contracted multiple sclerosis.

The trail runs right across massive Fontana Dam in North Carolina. Built by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the early 1940s, it tamed the wild Tennessee River and provide hydroelectric power to seven states.

Thru hikers soon discover the trail’s delights, obstacles, and eccentricities, including 112 straight kilometers of crest line in the Great Smoky Mountains; spectacular bridge crossings of great rivers, including the Shenandoah and Potomac; and a long stretch above the timberline in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range. Five or six Yellowstone National Parks could fit inside the uninhabited wilderness that greets northbound hikers at the end of their trek in Maine’s Baxter State Park. Parts of it have still never been surveyed! And at the very end is one last, taxing climb of Mount Katahdin, where late summer-afternoon thunderstorms, pierced by dangerous lightning, are legend.

Almost as daunting as the physical challenge of the Appalachian Trail is the boredom. Brilliant sunsets, grazing deer, arresting fog banks, and spectacular valley views quickly lose their allure as the grind of a 3,400-kilometer ordeal sets in. Homesickness intrudes. Some of the best-conditioned athletes are the first to drop off the trail when they lack the self-sufficiency and inner strength to keep going. As simple an impediment as a foot blister can send a perfect physical specimen packing. The A.T.C. reports that 20 percent of hikers who begin the trail intending to reach the distant terminus drop out within 10 days. Some heading north even give up on the 25-kilometer approach trail in Georgia’s Amicalola State Park up to the A.T.’s starting point atop Springer Mountain!

The A.T.C estimates that one-third of all thru hikers are college-age men and women, often just out of school and awaiting their first jobs. While some of their buddies are off touring Europe, they’re challenging the Appalachian Trail — and themselves. Others of all ages who make the attempt are changing jobs, on sabbatical from work or school, or have a hefty financial “nest egg” — necessary because the reasonably equipped thru hiker will spend $6,000 or more on gear, clothes, and food.

New Englanders call their passes through the mountains “notches.” This is Franconia Notch, through which the A.T. passes in New Hampshire.

Parents of some hikers — and, secretly, some hikers themselves — worry about bears, snakes, criminals, or frightening encounters with drooling backwoodsmen of the sort depicted in the dark movie “Deliverance.” Statistics are faulty because many confrontations go unreported, but authorities calculate that no more than 10 hikers — many who are day hikers and intoxicated — die on the Appalachian Trail each year, often from sunstroke, heart attacks, or falls. There have been close calls due to hypothermia following late-spring blizzards, too. Few if any snakebites are reported, since snakes with any sense about them avoid pathways, but some pet dogs accompanying hikers have been bitten while nosing around in the brush. Reported murders and rapes over time along the trail can be counted on two hands. The shooting of two lesbian hikers — one of whom survived — by a self-proclaimed “mountain man” who professed a hatred of homosexuals sent reporters and filmmakers scrambling to Pennsylvania’s Michaux State Forest in 1988, however. The biggest crime problems associated with the trail are the occasional thefts of backpacks and the vandalism of cars left while their owners are off day hiking.

To reduce confrontations with unsavory locals, A.T. officials keep moving the trail farther off roads and away from picnic areas and other “beer party” locations where hikers are likely to get hassled. Hunting is permitted over many sections of the trail, but no hiker has been reported shot by these men and women in camouflage. In Georgia, Army Rangers practice in the mountains, occasionally scaring the living daylights out of hikers.

Long-distance hikers report developing a keen “woods sense” that allows them to detect potential trouble from humans or animals. Most fellow hikers prove to be eminently honest and trustworthy, and criminals are usually too clumsy or lazy to venture far off the road. Some thru hikers take along dogs for protection, but this is strongly discouraged. Not only do they slow down the hike — some mutts are quite paunchy, and no dog does well on slippery rocks — but, as mentioned, they are far more likely to spook a snake or moose or bear.

One certainly does not want to break a leg or ankle on the trail, although help in the form of the next hiker is always on the way. Such rescuers will sometimes construct a makeshift litter to get the injured person to a road, where real assistance can be summoned. But in rugged back country, rescue parties of 50 or more must sometimes be mounted to evacuate victims by forming human chains. As I said earlier, if you ever attempt to stroll up the A.T., watch where you’re going!

Not only is Harpers Ferry the unofficial midpoint of the Appalachian Trail and its headquarters location, it also offers a lovely walk over a bridge across the Potomac River.

Officially the Appalachian Trail is overseen by the National Park Service, although only a single ranger, operating out of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia — approximately 160 kilometers to the south of the midpoint of the trail — assumes this responsibility. The park service delegates the day-to-day running of the trail, so to speak, to the A.T.C., a caretaker organization also headquartered in Harpers Ferry. Its budget, in the millions of dollars, is raised from membership dues, a federal payment, corporate and foundation support, and income from its maps, guidebooks, and other publications.

Trust me, you’ll want more than a tourist brochure before you go ambling off into the wilds.

The trail, which winds through national parks and forests, state-owned land, and even a few short stretches of towns or private property, would not exist without the direct involvement of 30-some hiking clubs, some of which include members as far away as Michigan in the U.S. Midwest who drive east once or twice a year to help maintain a part of the trail. Hikers don’t need big signs to remind them not to litter or deface trees or private property. Carol and I found it nigh unto pristine every place we went.

Here’s a beautiful fall view of Big Meadow in Virginia, which the A.T. crosses beneath the Shenandoah Mountains. If it’s late fall and you’re there, you’d best be heading south, as the northern terminus will soon be closed.

The Appalachian Trail Conservancy faces a continuing conundrum. Part of its mission is to promote the Appalachian Trail through newsletters and photographs, including the happy shots of hikers who reach Harpers Ferry and the two termini. This, however, only attracts more hikers, including what one might call short-time “joy hikers,” making it harder to protect the trail and keep it wild. At one time or another, even pricey “guide services” have appeared, offering to tag along on the edges of a client’s thru hike, meeting him or her at a road crossing every night, bringing good food and driving the hiker to a motel or comfortable campground. That’s “roughing it” in style!

But it is truly dedicated thru hikers whose stories are the stuff of legend on the Appalachian Trial. Those whom we met assured us that if there was any question about one’s fitness, “the trail gets you in shape” fast. Knees and hips ache. Feet can easily get caught in crevices. Achilles’ tendons get painfully stretched. Tents collapse. Mold grows inside rain jackets. Your only dry clothes are the ones you sleep in; you get up in the morning and have to put your wet clothes back on again. Biting bugs give you no break for the effort you’re putting in; indeed, sweat excites many of them. Hikers soon miss the taste of vegetables and fresh fruit. “You’re not going carry a big head of lettuce, three cucumbers, and six apples with you,” one young woman told us, “because they’re going to weigh so much with all the water in them.”

After awhile, she told us, the world outside the trail “doesn’t exist. You think, ‘This is what I do. I walk.’” Many hikers report a remarkable metamorphosis. Striding through the endless forest, they are no longer students or secretaries or executives. They are hikers. Many report an incredibly difficult transition back into the “real world” of responsibilities and relationships when their thru hikes are completed. Some, disoriented and missing not only the quietude but also the community of hikers, take odd jobs and continue hiking the A.T. or other trails again and again.

This is one of the nicer shelters along the trail, a big improvement over simple lean-tos in most locations, and cheaper (free) than even the cheapest paid hostel.

A hiker with the trail name “Interplanet Janet” told us she expected to see bears and did — in captivity at Bear Mountain Zoo in New York State, through which the trail actually winds. Her parents sent periodic provisions, to be picked up at some of the larger “drop sites” at shelters along the route. “I got sick of oatmeal,” she said. The provisions included clean underwear and T-shirts, a small cooking stove (which she sent back as too cumbersome), and moleskin, intended to cover blisters. “I ended up just popping the blisters with a safety pin,” she recalled. “Not very sanitary, but it worked.”

Another hiker found the trek to be “a meditative experience, living for the moment.” When her mind seemed to deaden, she’d read a book in the shelters.

And she was surprised when she finally reached trail’s end atop Mount Katahdin that “it wasn’t this big, elated moment. It was like, ‘OK, I’m at the end of the trail, and in a few moments I’ll be hiking down the mountain” and going home. “I was glad, but there was so much calmness in me that I didn’t need some big exciting moment.” Nor did she report a ravenous “hiker’s appetite,” a common experience among those who complete the trail.

Many hikers take away what they describe as “a lot of inner peace,” or at least a calmer perspective on life. Physically, some say it takes them months to lose the stoop in their strides from carrying a heavy backpack. As Bill Bryson wrote, "It’s one thing to walk 2,000 miles, quite another to walk 2,000 miles with a wardrobe on your back.” And still another to adjust to the noise of urban life. Some hikers find they have lost interest in television and nightlife and find themselves switching jobs to positions with less pressure. Many who live anywhere close keep hiking and helping local clubs maintain a part of the Appalachian Trail.

One man told me he and his friends became “almost insane about the weight” they were carrying while hiking. “Our whole group cut off toothbrush handles,” he said. “We’d get toilet tissue and knock the core out. You’d do anything to lessen the weight.” No portable cook stoves for these folks!

The hikers use more than maps and trail books to find their way. Volunteer “maintainers,” as they’re called, keep the footpath a couple of meters wide, with at least a three-meter clearance above to accommodate the ever-increasing height of hikers’ backpacks.

And they freshen the little blazes of paint on trees, fences, and bridges that mark the route of the Appalachian Trail. Two blazes atop each other signal an obscure turn and alert hikers to consult their maps before proceeding. Blue blazes mark side trails, viewpoints, campsites, and shelters — if you call the 250 nighttime stopping places shelters. Most are little more than three-sided lean-tos, invariably open to whichever side from which rain, snow, or cold winds are advancing. Because the floor is sure to be wet, hikers sleep on boards in a crude loft and hang their food high in “bear poles.”

Fortunately, there are often inexpensive boarding houses, old hotels, and hostels not far off the trail at several points along the way.

Back to the blazes for a moment: They replaced a system of axe marks, which sometimes killed trees, and metal diamond shapes tacked to trees and posts. The diamonds are now collectors’ items. There is no set distance between blazes. Where the trail is well worn and relatively flat, there may be as much as a ten-minute walk before you see the next one. The blazes are as unobtrusive as possible. After all, this is the backcountry, and man’s handiwork is to be kept to a minimum.

To address a chronic erosion problem along the trail, crews dig pits into which they roll small boulders.

Over the years, almost the entire length of the trail has been relocated to get the path off roads, out of cities and subdivisions, and onto public land in the woods to realize Benton MacKaye’s vision of a “ridgecrest trail” with a view. In some cases, as in the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania, previous landowners are allowed to continue to farm or graze cattle — no bulls, though — on a ridge, so hikers can experience walking through pastures and cornfields.

The trail passes beside a fisherman, enjoying the day on Connecticut’s Housatonic River.

To alleviate overcrowding caused by the bunching-up of thru hikers starting from Georgia each spring, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy encourages “section hiking,” in which hikers complete the trail in stages, sometimes over several years. Or “flip-flopping.” Flip-floppers typically hike north to a point at which they realize they will not make Mount Katahdin before it’s closed for the winter. So they catch a ride to Maine and work their way south to the point where they had left the trail. As mentioned earlier, some superhumans “yo-yo” the full trail, hiking one direction (usually north), then immediately heading the entire way back. In the 1980s, a fellow named Phil Good completed three thru hikes, from Georgia to Maine to Georgia to Maine in one calendar year. You go, guy!

Hikers in silhouette do what comes naturally — keep moving, up a short hill.

The A.T. has distinctive social protocols: those inventive trail names, courteous sharing of limited shelter and hostel space, and communication via journals at points along the trail. This “A.T. Internet,” as it’s called, is little more than a series of crude spiral notebooks filled with handwritten, often simplistic, Twitter-like entries such as “Passed Cooter en route to Beagle Gap” and “Another glorious day to be alive!”

The journals are a lifeline. They are the first place authorities check to determine the last movements of missing hikers.

Are trail enthusiasts, in the words of the theme of an A.T.C. gathering in 1997, “loving the trail to death” from overuse? Not just a few hundred thru hikers but also thousands and thousands of day hikers are tramping about the mountain path right about now. Most trail authorities have concluded that there’s no right answer. One person’s view of overuse is another’s delight at the popularity of the trail as an escape from mundane daily life.

Little Wolf Creek footbridge near Bastian, Virginia, was carefully built by hand.

In his book, Bill Bryson pointed out that the Appalachian Trail had already outlasted the historic Oregon and Santa Fe trails, the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, and old U.S. Route 66, about which I’ll be writing in detail one of these days.

In the 1990s, the Appalachian Trail was informally extended from the official northern terminus in Maine into New Brunswick and Quebec provinces in Canada, creating a long dreamed-about “International Appalachian Trail.” Not very many hikers are thought to have made it all the way from Springer Mountain,

The end, beautiful Mount Katahdin, is in sight. But there’s a whole lot of wilderness hiking left before one can raise a fist in triumph at the top.

Georgia, to Cape Gaspé in Quebec.

Still under construction is even more of the International A.T. in Newfoundland. But there’s a little problem. Newfoundland is an island, and there’s no bridge from Quebec. That would necessitate either forgiving a gap in the trail or the far more unlikely feat of walking on water.

Because nature bedevils the Appalachian Trail in the wintertime, and administrators keep tweaking the route, it is the attitude of most officials, volunteers and hikers alike that the Appalachian National Scenic Trail will never be finished.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Bandanna. A large and brightly colored handkerchief, often used as a scarf or headband.

Conundrum. A difficult problem or riddle.

Rappelling. The controlled descent of a cliff, using a rope.