Staff De La Flag

Hi!

So I live in Flagstaff, Arizona, as much as I live anywhere. Eight days out of fourteen I live in the wilderness somewhere, conserving the hell out of it. The rest, I spend in a little desert college town straddling what I have been informed is the historic Route 66. The town itself is home to about 66 thousand souls, so not tiny but pretty petite. There is a lovely walkable downtown replete with outdoors stores, bars and...probably other things. Look, I like what I like. It is actually quite pretty.

Picture ain't mine (lower left for credit) because I'm an asshole who doesn't photo the place I live, but it looks like this

Here's the thing.

So, my organization is largely composed of 18-22 year olds, because when you say "work in the woods for food and housing" it is mostly kids who think that's a good idea. The field staff itself tops out at (with one awesome midlife crises exception) about 27. So, add the couple hundred of us to the population of Northern Arizona University, and the downtown district ends up functioning basically like Pleasure Island out of Pinocchio, all drunk children smoking cigars and shooting pool. This feels...somewhat regressive to me.

Luckily, I get to live in the woods most of the time. Here's some pics!

Joshua Tree National Park in CA

Picture Canbyon, AZ

Cibola Wildlife Refuge, AZ

There's also some pretty cool stuff around Flag. At seven thousand feet elevation, it's in a high desert, so it's still dry as all fuck but cold, with more ponderosa pine than saguaro. It is also spitting distance from some real, honest to goodness mountains- more Colorado than Maine here. I went up Humphreys a little bit back, Arizona's tallest peak at a couple feet short of fourteen thousand.

I can see my house from here! Also, every one of yours.

 So those are the highlights. I'll start throwing up more pics of my adventures in nature preservation/conservancy soon- for now, enjoying a poor man's sabbatical in sunny Portland OR over the holidays.

Capping off the Nor' East

Having spent the majority of our financial and emotional resources in our whirlwind tour of New England, the second week was spent at a much more leisurely pace. We made a firepit in the back yard of the ridiculously charming New England farmhouse Ms. S rents the top floor of from beachstones and large rocks liberated from state built spillways and christened it with a wide variety of local microbrews.  Later, we went on a boat again.

They didn't let me drive this one.

It was a three or four hour cruise, detailing the eccentric history of all the insane mansions on the island and their insanier owners. Bar Harbor, as I have mentioned, was originally an offshore playground for the insanely rich of the turn of last century that had no access by car or foot until the 60's- if you didn't own a yacht, you weren't welcome. It's the place Gatsby would come to get *really* weird. Now, while it's still class-rage incitingly wealthy, the glory days of inexcusable wealth have faded, leaving a long row of dilapidated lunacy memorials. Some of these houses are built in English style, some in Egyptian, some in castle. One was protected by a fifty food sound barrier, so the owner could throw a party without hearing all the other parties. Rich people are weird.

Later, we re-christened the fire pit. You gotta do these things right if you want them to stick.

Hiking was also a major theme of the week. For a small place, Mount Desert Island (home of Bar Harbor and named, in the typically literalist fashion of the northeast, after a mountain that no one lived on) boasts a wide variety of impressive and challenging hikes.

Let's talk about New England hiking for a moment.

I want you to keep this image in your mind

Remember a few posts back, when I was (predictably) lost on a run and found the least helpful sign in the world? Turns out that was merely a warm up for the rugged individualism our gentile yankee countrymates expect from even the most casual of outdoors enthusiasts. Between the picture above and the one below, can you guess which is an officially sanctioned trail?

And which is a site scouting photo from Blair Witch filming?

Sucker! They both are! When the BLM of Maine thinks to itself "we should make an area accessible to humans to preserve the rest of the woods, and allow them the experience of nature" they come away with the same mental images most of us reserve for "scenes from Into the Wild".

Yes, trimming the tree is easier than installing a sign. But it's the principle

How could we possibly follow such a subtle, minimalist trail, you, my hypothetical readers demand in your thousands? There where signs!

Safety is here used with scathing irony

This is what was to the left of that sign. No, seriously- this is the sign-worthy path.

Eventually the trail, as best as we could tell that it was such, gave up all pretenses of helpfulness and ran to a shear cliff face. It wasn't the end of the trail, mind you- just the horizontal portion.

Once again, not a joke.

After wandering in the woods long enough to seriously consider if my foot speed was high enough to catch a squirrel (unlikely) and whether I could best it in single combat to create a meal (almost certainly not) we finally reached the culmination of what was so ambitiously labeled a "trail". I would say it was worth it. 

Like, I guess.

After a week of low key exploration (both physical and libational) of America's far east, it was time to board the final plane in this trip and head to the cardinal inversion of the northeast, America's vast, arid, and surreally racist southwest. Sarah is, as always, a stalwart of awesome, and Maine is quietly, insistently glorious, and I can almost understand why the 1% would try to carve out a private Narnia here. I'm just gonna leave you with this.

Interlude

3:00 pm, 11/28

T, I yell at him shortly after he wakes, You've ruined Thanksgiving.

Tom, who has a physique and hair style best described as Sideshow Bobesque, blinks the sleep from his eyes.

Whu, he asks.

Whu indeed.

3:45 am, 11/28

They burst into the room, cellphone lights blazing.

Where is he they demand. Where is T.

They go through each of the four bunks, demanding of each whether it holds T.

Now I, having celebrated the holiday in the tradition of my people, have been in bed for maybe twenty minutes, and still am not pleased by this interruption. The bunk next to me is empty, reserved for a jubilant Welshman who uses it exclusively during the mid afternoon, sleeping off the hangovers he crafts for himself each night with the clear-eyed determination of a boxer putting in hours at the gym after work. The remaining two contain the physical vessels of two well advised teetotalers who have likely been in bed upwards of four hours at that point. Under the weight of our combined verbal abuse, the interlopers reluctantly retreat, asserting the entire way that T "has something" for A, the most diminutive yet by far the loudest of my immediate peers, who had been out with us.

3:15 pm, 11/28

After coaxing him to full wakefulness, I manage to impress upon T the situation which occurred.

Well, I was trying to give her something, he says apologetically, But she was asleep already.

What'd you have of hers? It'd better've been important. Like a dialysis machine.

I didn't have anything of hers. I had something for her.

What, I inquire, tired of splitting hairs,

T doesn't speak, but simply looks down his torso, towards where the seams of his pants meet (digital jungle camo, pilfered from the free box my house maintains in the closet).

This is my life now.

Vermontiers

After soaking in the wonders of some of America's oldest cities, we decided to skew a little more rural and head in to Vermont, which is from the latinate for 'nothing but goddam trees'.

Also weird- that last one is what Sarah considers a mountain

Interspersed amongst the multihued foliage (I went to college!) are a fine smattering of uniformly lovely, welcoming, minuscule towns. Which all kind of look like they're different neighborhoods in the same town, a town which has somehow been dismembered and distributed evenly across the state.

Not taken in the same village

We even went to Burlington, the most populated city in Vermont, a bustling metropolis of 42,000 souls, which, distinctively enough, looks like this.

It's different because it's longer

And, of course, the state capitol of Montpelier, which I literally almost missed as we drove through.

SShhhhhiiiiiinnnnyyyyy

The Sarster and I camped out on the island of Grand Isle, in Lake Champlain, which if you ask any Vermonter is the home of Champ, the ancient seamonster with the surprisingly friendly moniker. If you ask anyone else, they'll just be confused. 

Grand Isle is home to Grand Isle State Park, which is where we resided during our time in Vermont. And goddam, is it worth residation.

Vermont, will you stop being remarkably gorgeous for like one fucking second

And that was it. Made the long drive back East to Bar Harbor, with a quick detour in Portland ME (more on that place later). Vermont is just incredible, and also incredibly quiet. There's just...just nothing going on in this state. It would be a great place to enter hermitage, but otherwise it's pretty much devoid of excitement.

Obviously there are exceptions.

Notification from the establishment: The me that is here in real time in Arizona is gonna be off in the woods for eight days, so you'll have to wait that long to hear about the me that was in Maine last week. Stay strong, I know you'll endure.

England, now New and Improved

Okay, okay, real post. Phooo. Lets do this.

Piled in the Sarahmobile and headed south on Monday. It's a six hour, three state drive between Bar Harbor and Boston, but it was on the interstate so it looked like the ass end of the car in front of us, by and large.

We did, however, make one quick stop

Once we got there we turned right around and went back up to Salem for mexican food (aside- it was much easier to find mexican up here than in New Orleans, which is on the goddam gulf of goddam Mexico) at a place called Howlin' Wolf, which, fun fact, is the same name as a bar in NOLA where I once watched Kirsten Schall get common law married during a charity womens' arm-wrestling competition.

Salem is...weird. And I don't mean the buy-a-pound-of-meth-get-an-hour-with-a-prostitute-free weird that Salem Oregon is, I mean bad weird. Anyone here see ParaNorman?  Wait, seriously? You guys, c'mon- it's the studio that did Coraline. It's just, so good. Go watch it. I'll wait.

You didn't watch it. did you. I don't even have to ask, I can see it in your duplicitous little eye holes. Fine, whatever. No, it's not important.

I'm fine.

Anyway, this is the Salem of the Salem witch trials, where a bunch of idiots murdered some people, and the reverberations are still felt to this day. Mainly through peoples' wallets.

Stay classy Salem

This shit is just all over. Witch tours, witch houses, museums of witch torture. In fairness, there is a lovely and affecting memorial to the actual humans who were actually killed.

And literally right around the corner,

Is it possible to file restraining orders on behalf of memorials?

I hope the reanimated corpses of the perpetrators come back to terrorize the populace. Seriously, go watch that movie guys.

Next day, on to Boston Proper. Took the subway into town and hoofed it from there. Boston's got a thing called the Freedom Trail, which is a really stupid name but pretty helpful for dumb lost tourists like yours truly as a way to wander around and see stuff. It's literally just a line in the sidewalk that goes past a buncha things.

Bill Keene consulted

So it turns out events happened in Boston a couple hundred years ago, and most of the places they happened are still around. The red brick road took us past a pretty significant amount of it.

My picture file from Boston seems to indicate I don't care about American history

There is actually a lot more, but whatever. I was saving my phone memory for the really worthwhile items.

Nailed it

The really cool part of Boston, at least of the part of Boston that I saw (which is therefore the important part) is the big swath of green space that runs the entire length of the downtown. Thanks to the Big Dig Boston was left with what used to be packed inner city highway, and turned it into a pretty sweet park.

All it took was decades of mind boggling corruption.

Also, Boston has a Chinatown. Well, it's called Chinatown, but it is in fact a neighbor hood representative of pretty much every Asian country.Which I think means all Bostonians are racists.

Basically all the same, right?

After traipsing the length and breadth of Beantown (as the locals call it), we hopped back on the underground across the river to Cambridge and got off at MIT. Didn't really do much on the campus except pee (take that nerds), but still worth the trip. There are many large buildings with enough things coming out of them to guarantee that Science is happening.

Then a quick stroll up to Harvard, just because. We didn't pee on anything here, but we did walk on the grass a bunch.

True fact- the whole place is fenced in wrought iron, to keep the plebes out

After that it was just back to the house for craft beers and new episodes of The Strain. And that was that for Massachusetts- super pretty, and definitely the most urbanized part of New England I've seen.