Editor’s note: Ocracoke Islanders Tom and Carol Pahl are on a trek around the United States (following 70-degree weather) and will report back from time to time their reflections. This is their seventh dispatch.

Text and photos by Tom Pahl

One of the questions we heard often from friends before we started this year-long adventure was whether we had really considered what life would be like with the three of us (Carol, me and our dog Napolean) living together in a 156-square foot space.  That is a pretty small area, but as we had hoped, we’re doing fine. 

Over the years, we’ve developed a healthy regard for each other’s independence, and seven months into this adventure, we have tested a theory that independence is a state of mind, not of proximity. So far, the theory is holding up to very close scrutiny. It helps that we have millions of acres of wilderness right outside our door with biking trails and hiking trails, incredible views, and time for reading. And regularly, we pour a little something to celebrate the end of another day, which also helps.

As we travel the country, we often find ourselves making gross generalizations about the apparent character of the folks living in America’s different regions.  Down South you can walk into a convenience store and walk out believing that the clerk is your new best friend. In New England that same transaction is likely to take place with the clerk barely looking up and quite possibly without exchanging a word. 

After all, the amount you owe shows on the register, so why complicate things with useless palaver? On the other hand, the New Englander’s reticence also comes without judgment, where you must wonder, when you leave that WaWa in Macon, if your new best friend wasn’t thinking, “Bless his little heart!” 

Now that we’ve spent several months in the Western states, we have concluded that the classic “well, howdy” friendliness out here is much like that of their counterparts in the South, minus the sideways blessing. Westerners are just plain friendly people. And I would add: They respect the letter “R,” which I appreciate very much, having lived in places such as eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island where the letter “R” is treated like a case of appendicitis. 

Even though I’m a Montana boy by birth, I have spent enough time in New England that I tend toward the laissez-faire side of the human interaction spectrum.  I have, therefore, not made any extraordinary efforts to try to cultivate a lot of new friendships as we’ve traveled around, though the opportunity is always there.

Back in February, we were camping along the Texas gulf coast in a county campground with campsites right on the water.  I had been fishing off and on for almost a week and had caught some fish, but mostly I had been putting shrimp back where they came from, albeit less lively than when they came out. As every piece of water has its own learning curve, fishermen have developed an unwritten code that says you should share the basics of the learning curve with other fishermen, but you’re not required to share the details.

With that in mind, I strolled over to where a neighboring camper had set up to start fishing.  He had just arrived, and I thought I might be helpful. 

“Catchin’ anything,” I asked.  The standard fisherman greeting.

“Nope,” he answered.

I asked what he was using for bait.  Again, pretty much standard fisherman-ese.

His reply: “You know, there’s a difference between you and I.” 

He threw out the bait and, being curious, I took it, “And what would that be,” I asked, not adding that one of us knows the difference between the objective and the subjective first-person singular.

He looked me square in the eye and said, “I would never enter another person’s campsite without being invited.”

I gave a kind of halfhearted two-finger salute and wished him luck as I backed away.  Whereupon I learned that the human interaction spectrum extends way past me in both directions. It happened we were leaving the next day, so we didn’t have to feel the discomfort of his neighborly chill for long, but on the way out, I silently put a fisherman’s curse upon his bait and his gear. “May your bait rot in your Yeti cooler so that the stink lingers forever and may your rigs twist up into tight knots and catch everything but fish!”

All together we ended up spending four months (February through May) in the southwest desert.  We spent a good amount of time in the border areas of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.  We came to love the remoteness and the desolate beauty of the dry lands. 

From the border, we went up to Tucson, where we stayed just outside of the Saguaro National Park for almost two weeks.  Our stay there coincided with a Bernie Sanders/AOC rally which we attended, and which has buoyed our spirits somewhat, as we doom-scroll through the news most mornings.

From Tucson, we made a quick stop in Phoenix to visit old friend Sari, then on to Winslow.  Yes, that Winslow: “Standin’ on a corner in Winslow Arizona….”  In Winslow, we caught up with the cold weather we’d been trying to avoid. 

When we woke up to snow one morning, we cut our visit there short and headed back southward, just enough to find beautiful weather and a wonderful campground on Roosevelt Lake, south of the Tonto National Forest. Ten days later we ventured north again, passing through the Coconino Plateau and the Painted Desert to the Grand Canyon.  On the way, we went through some of the most inhospitable land imaginable. 

What wasn’t dry arroyo or rocky gorge was red sand so infertile that nothing grows there except a rare tumbleweed, and a creosote bush too mean to die.

The only living critters we saw and apparently, the only fauna that can survive in that environment are lizards that have evolved to live with just the moisture they can suck from their diet of red ants and grasshoppers.  The entire southwest is four years into a severe drought and even the slightest gust of wind will raise a cloud of red dust that regularly spins up into a dust devil that will rise 40 or 50 feet into the dry air.

As we traveled through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and into Utah, we learned to watch for Reservation Land — tribal land that is the historic legacy of Westward Expansion, white supremacy, and genocide. 

Invariably, it is this dry land, the most inhospitable, the least arable, the least valuable, that was designated as Reservation Land. And, even then, as times and technology changed, some of the Navajo Tribal Lands, at first thought to be worthless, were discovered to contain great stores of highly valuable uranium ore. 

As a matter of course, newly found value quickly became a new way to screw over the Indians.  Between the 1940s and the 1980s more than 4 million tons of uranium ore was mined from Navajo land.  During that time, the attraction of paying work put Navajo men and their families, by proximity, at risk for uranium poisoning, resulting in increased incidences of various forms of cancer ranging from 250 to 1,500%, depending on the type of cancer. 

Though the hazard was known, little if anything was done to make the danger known to the Navajo workforce and it wasn’t until the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was signed by President George H.W. Bush that any significant effort was made to rectify the harm. 

In New Mexico, in 1979, a neglected uranium mine tailings pond in the Church Rock region of the Navajo Nation broke its dam, releasing more than 1,000 tons of radioactive mill waste and 93 million gallons of radioactive water.  Downstream notification was slow and was delivered in English-only format. Residents were sickened, sheep and cattle died en masse.  Multiple requests for a state of emergency were denied. Government and industry response took years to clean up the disaster, considered to be the largest radioactive accident in US history.

After just one day at Grand Canyon, we went to Zion National Park where we luckily snagged a two-week spot at the campground just inside the park.  Zion is breathtaking at every turn.  There is not a view or angle, not a sunset or sunrise that doesn’t just take your heart and wring it out like a wet rag.  We hiked up challenging trails rising a thousand feet and some easy trails alike, all with the same impossibly stunning views.  

And I biked the Pa’rus Trail along the Virgin River into Zion Canyon.  For anyone who loves to ride a bicycle, all I can say is, “Don’t miss this ride!” For some reason, perhaps it’s just the magic of the place, it seems like a mostly downhill ride for six miles out, but then it’s all downhill coming back.  I can’t explain it. 

We were told that if we were lucky, we might see Big Horn Sheep on the east side of the park. So, with hope as our guide, we took an excursion out there one day searching ridgelines and along canyons, up and down rocky ledges until the day waned and we turned back.  And then the magic happened and there they were, a small herd, bucks, ewes, and lambs all within a few hundred yards of us. They posed and stood still for our photos like they were on duty. 

There is majesty out in this wild world, and the concentration of it at Zion National Park will affect you for a lifetime.

From Zion, we followed the San Juan River into the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument.  This area is so barren and dry and desolate and magnificent, it has a kind of beauty you feel more than see.  There is one section known as Valley of the Gods.  The buttes, and canyons, and mesas, red as a rising sun, are most certainly grand enough and spread out far enough for the gods to inhabit.

The sandstone formations are 250 million years old, formed when calcium carbonate (from ancient seashells) mixed with layer upon layer of red sand in great dunes along the shores of an ancient sea.  When the sea was emptied by the collision of continents, the remaining dunes hardened into rock and were then sculpted by millions of years of wind and rain, creating this landscape that defies description. Monoliths thousands of feet high were revered by the ancients as god-sculpted tributes to their ancestors.  Who’s to argue.

In Bears Ears, there are over 100,000 known archeological sites, many unexplored.  Some are ancient, going back 10,000 years or more and some, not so ancient, are sites of Aboriginal inhabitants, mostly ancestors of today’s Dine’ (Navajo) community.  We stayed almost two weeks in a modest little town called Bluff, in southern Utah. 

There, we learned about the settlement of Morman pioneers into the area in the 1880s.  Latecomers by archeological standards, but their efforts were rewarded by a permanent, though sparce settlement that established a relatively peaceable relationship with the Native inhabitants, and which happens to have, today, a little treasure of a restaurant called Comb Ridge Eat and Drink.

As if all of that weren’t enough to overload our senses and to remind us every day how lucky we are, we departed Bluff in the beginning of May for the magnificence of the New Mexico highlands. 

I will leave off here, to pick up the narrative next time of our last weeks in the desert. 

But first, I’ll invite you to join a game we invented one day while we were driving in the super arid climate of the southwest.  Mind you, we’re talking humidity levels around 15%, week after week after week. 

The game is called, “It’s as dry as ___.”  Here are some of our favorites: It’s as dry as a fairground parking lot.  It’s as dry as a sinner’s throat on judgment day.  It’s as dry as a snakeskin in a dust devil.  It’s as dry as scorpion spit.  It’s as dry as dinosaur dandruff.  OK, go!

I’ll keep you posted.