Transcontinental Gas Guzzle, part 5, Blighted Industry edition

The final installment of the transcontinental marathon took us down through Michigan, around Ohio's shores and across northern Pennsylvania, areas firmly situated in the rust belt, the faded industrial heartland that was the United States' steel and auto production epicenter and blue-collar paradise. Definitively outsourced, downsized and globalized into obsolescence over the last thirty and more years, this region now offers an abundance of unique fixer-upper opportunities for those willing and able handymen still able to get a home-improvement loan during this time of difficult credit.

Saginaw pawnshop awaits your TLC and weed-killer.


Bring a sheet of plate glass and some merchandise to this breezy former pharmacy in Saginaw and you will be back in business in no time!


Civic pride in Flint

Detroit has the only abandoned skyscrapers I'm aware of, classic gems standing tall and empty. See Forgotten Detroit for photographs and histories of these ghostly buildings. The photographer Camilo José Vergara has also been making images of many of these buildings for years.


This mural fantasy, of a sylvan glade butted up against the cerulean waters of Lake Erie or Lake Michigan, was probably originally painted here to bring some cheer to this dismal block of abandonment. Unfortunately the dilapidated police barricades, meant to prevent the use of the sidewalk, and the fallen and falling shattered slate cladding peeling off the building, rather diminish the effect.

Transcontinental Gas Guzzle, part two

Glacier National Park rorschach.

Camp 3 at Glacier NP. One night under the stars was enough, and the missing tent has been replaced. Just in time,too, as it poured all night. Late May and the park still wasn't really properly open for the season. Remnant piles of snow (not pictured) and an endless carpet of lichen, branches and leaf litter gave a sense of how long and violent the northern Montana winter must be. There is now a fifty dollar fine levied for leaving any items of food or even items which may have "food odors" out unattended, since this place is wall to wall with grizzly bears. We didn't see any.

Calypso bulbosa, a diminutive but spectacular solitary orchid of the evergreen forest floor.

An intensely beautiful forest, rather like the Maine woods on steroids.

Camp 4. A second successive night huddled under the blue polytarp, cooking ramen over a bunsen burner was deemed rather too much adventure, so we retired in comfort to the Hi-Line motel, named, like almost everything else along Route 2, for the legendary trans-Rockies train line it follows. Here, as opposed to the rest of the country, where paved roads soon made the train tracks all but obsolete, the rail line is still a focus of town life and commerce. Enormous lengths of freight, mostly extra long containers, piled double, in snakes of hundreds of cars, chugged by at all hours. This was in Havre, Montana, where the waitress at the casino-restaurant (a designation which means that one can play Keno while eating, or stop at one of a dozen or so video one-armed bandits on the way to the toilet) told us "Havre is the biggest town on the Hi-Line, which is kind of sad, really."

Transcontinental Gas Guzzle, part one

Flew out to Oregon to help Laura drive her trusty pickup back east; I've never driven all the way across the country in one go before. The trip started auspiciously, as we headed out of Portland late in the afternoon on the day of Obama's record-breaking political rally. Yesterday's newspapers showed a sea of bodies crushed together, eagerly listening to what he has to say. He is looking more and more like a lock for the nomination; it seems like only a matter of days, or even perhaps hours, before Hil throws in the towel. Already she must be alienating more voters, former supporters and superdelegates than she could possibly be attracting, and so we hope that for her own sake she moves quickly, in the painful process of decisively losing, from denial to acceptance.

Camp One, At Beacon Rock, in the Cascades, in the spectacular Columbia River valley, a spot Lewis and Clark passed as they were nearing the end of their journey. Although they could not yet see the Pacific Ocean, the sight of the seagulls patrolling the upstream reaches of the mighty river must have warmed their hearts.

Wild Bleeding Heart, a typical understory wildflower of the Cascadian Douglas Fir forest.

Round Lake rorschach, Idaho Panhandle, dawn. The eerie calls of breeding Red-necked grebes gabbling in the marshy verges of the lake accompanied our dinner of couscous and grilled asparagus. The site of Camp Two.

Camp Two. But what's missing from this photo? You noticed? How lovely, you may be be thinking, it was such a wonderful, starlit night, and the temperature so mild, that they dispensed with the claustrophobia of the tent altogether, sacking out al fresco. How mistaken you are! While unpacking the truck beside mosquito-infested Round Lake I discovered that one of us had left the bundled-up tent on the picnic table at Camp One, four hundred miles back down the road. I'm far too gallant to tell you who was responsible for this calamity, but she later claimed to have been distracted from packing by some wildflowers that needed urgent collecting. Something similar happened to me once before, in Africa, but that time, there was no one else to blame.

Camp Two, detail. Harmonian mosquito avoidance strategy. Note the crisp, brand-new blue polytarp we purchased only fifty miles back down the road at the Coeur D'Alene Walmart, "to protect the bottom of the tent."

Skunk cabbage. One hoped that the upside of setting up camp next to a pungent, stinky patch of this gigantic swamp-tobacco would be diminished mosquito activity. Sadly not.

Thank goodness it didn't rain, although that might have kept the bugs down. Apparently Mrs. Clinton still hasn't capitulated.

Transcontinental Gas Guzzle, part 3: High Plains Drifter edition

East of the Marais Pass and the continental divide, Route 2 follows the railroad tracks of the Hi-Line right the way across northern Montana, from one small single-stoplight town to another. Only the grain elevators stabbing up into the sky beside the tracks mark the skyline above the expansive plains of this endless state. At Glasgow we turned south, tempted by a remote campsite mapped on the shores of Fort Peck Lake, the enormous reservoir created by the first of the dams exploiting the power of the Missouri River.

Delightful lakefront solitude. Not another camper was to be found. The new tent has now survived two nights of use without being blown away or forgotten.

Grasslands on the shores of Fort Peck Lake, at Camp 5 inside the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge

North Dakota is said to be the least visited state. This is perhaps unsurprising, as only the true plains addict would appreciate its charms. Apart from the legendary hospitality: In Fargo, butted hard up against Minnesota at the state's easternmost edge, we stopped for a night with Allan and Hazel Ashworth. Allan is the geology professor who was kind enough to share his antarctican field camp with our film crew a year and a half ago. Despite those two months in the frozen wilds submitting to the indignities of sharing an open-air toilet, not to mention being filmed daily, Allan invited us, after a last minute call, to stay the night. We had a lovely dose of plains hospitality, ate our first Thai meal since Queens, and saw our first black people since Portland, the latter two things suggesting just how far Fargo has come since Allan and Hazel first arrived here, from Surrey, England, in 1969. Culture shock is too mild a term to describe their reaction to landing in what was then a diminutive, provincial, ice-bound town, something like a transplanted outpost of northern Scandinavia, with all its racial diversity. But Fargo is slowly changing for the better. At the restaurant the adjacent table held a large extended family of Indians, as in people from India, and a sizable population of resettled refugees from the horn of Africa now call the city home.

The story of the drive across North Dakota is one of a grueling three-hundred-mile battle against a constant forty-mile-an-hour headwind. Despite stops at the Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge and a few other select patches of preserved prairie, almost none of the ornithological specialties of this endangered habitat, once the natural state of huge areas of the plains, showed themselves. No surprise, since the few birds which lifted up off of the grasslands at our approach immediately wheeled off downwind, flapping as hard as possible to avoid being slammed back down into the matted grass by the gusts. With the bird trip list suffering from a distinct lack of prairie birds, Allan suggested a sort of last-chance stop just over the Minnesota border at a postage-stamp sized patch of Nature Conservancy land, Bluestem Prairie. He served up breakfast, scribbled a map on a sheet of notebook paper, and we said au revoir to Fargo.

Shortgrass prairie may not be everyone's idea of a must-see sort of a habitat, resembling as it does an unkempt, unmowed field. It has no majestic Redwoods, no epic stands of conifers or rafts of ducks to be glimpsed dabbling on shimmering lakes. Few people have seen pristine shortgrass prairie, not only because it is perhaps perceived as unspectacular, but because only one-tenth of one percent of the former prairie still exists. One out of one thousand acres of the vast western midwest. The other 999 are now used to grow corn, or wheat, or run cattle, or have been paved over to make Wal-mart parking lots. These various concentrated monocrops have gravely diminished the biodiversity of the region, for healthy, unaltered shortgrass prairie like the Bluestem preserve, harbors up to three hundred species of wildflower and many special birds.

Bluestem Prairie, near Glyndon, Minnesota

Violet Wood Sorrel Oxalis violacea

The delights of the prairie, varied and unexpected, but modest in scale, are to be found nestled in amongst its diverse grasses. Spring has come late this year, but purple, yellow, red and white wildflowers were blooming in clumps everywhere between the windblown stems of sedge. Mauve Pasque flowers, like tiny tulips; Marsh Marigolds, more like buttercups than marigolds, growing right out of puddles and the watery ditches; and Swamp Lousewort, a bizarre conate spiral protrusion dotted with yellow petals. A long-sought bird, the Sedge Wren, was common in the brushier patches of prairie, and another, the Upland Sandpiper, nests in its tall grasses. We found five of the latter patrolling the stubbly chaff of an adjacent field.


Not yet blooming: Prairie Smoke, Geum triflorum, aka "Old Man's Whiskers." When the plant flowers, clumps of hairy white tendrils emerge to wave in the breeze.

Heading for Duluth, the prairie and the plains imperceptibly receded in the rearview mirror, until, without quite noticing how it had happened, we found ourselves surrounded once again, for the first time since crossing the Rockies, with forest.

Plant identification consultation provided by L. F. Harmon.

Transcontinental Gas Guzzle, part 4, North Woods edition, Updated

Duluth smelled of lumberyard. The entire town was pervaded with the not unpleasant but unexpectedly strong odor of a freshly opened bag of mulch. Near the waterfront we discovered, in a broad expanse of decaying industrial real estate, perhaps some sort of rail yard, an enormous mound of wood chips, sending puffs of steam up into the cold, moist air from heat generated deep in its woody bowels. There were chill winds blowing off of Lake Superior, but Duluth still seemed to have a gray, immovable ceiling, a dense, oppressive blanket of cloud and fog pressing down upon it. If this is late May in northern Minnesota, what must February be like? We thought of the music of Low, area rockers who make ponderous, dirgelike pop of the sort that suggests why Scandinavians suffer from unusually high rates of suicide.

Although we had earlier that day crossed a narrow northern tendril of river sharing the name of the mighty Mississippi, it was only after crossing the bridge into Wisconsin that we felt we had truly arrived in the east. The south shore of Lake Superior resembled nothing so much as the Maine woods, with clumps of birches running in narrow bands through the dominant conifers, and loons cackling on densely wooded ponds. Our remote, interior campground was surrounded by pristine forest, although it suffered from a certain lout factor; it was the last night of Memorial Day weekend, and more than one campsite was occupied by festive high-school youth.


After dark, they quieted down, perhaps to tell ghost stories around the campfire; we heard nothing but the steady rush of the Coleman lantern and the onomatopoetic cries of a team of Whippoorwills. Then started up a repetitive, high-pitched monosyllabic call, beaming out through the woods like a metronymic radio beacon. (Or, as we read later in the National Geographic Field Guide, "a monotonously repeated single-note whistle"). It had none of the eerie quality of an owl, hooting or screeching, but it was an undoubtedly avian sound, and we followed it, tiptoeing through the dark woods to a clump of pine trees clustered around the water-pump. Whee, whee, whee, whee, whee, the thing called, from somewhere just overhead. Weep, weep, woop, whoops, I whistled clumsily back, while peering about in the foliage, thanks to my Petzl, a tiny LED headlamp I was wearing strapped to my head, like an emasculated miner. "Be serious. You're not going to see anything with that feeble light," said Laura. But my imitation was enough to pique the bird's curiosity, and soon, like an apparition, a whitish ball of fluff flitted noiselessly through the soft beam. With it, the whistling moved closer, and lower. I persisted, whistling more softly, like, I thought, an unattended infant's version of the adult call coming down from overhead. Then it came, and sat on a branch not three feet over our heads, wide-eyed, seeking the intruder in my headlamp: a cute and cuddly (unless you are a small rodent or nestling, in which case substitute the adjectives terrifying and ominous) adult Saw-whet Owl, all of six inches tall.

"Watchu doing in my grove?"

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula felt as much like Maine as the tip of Wisconsin had; all through the long morning’s drive across it we expected at any moment to see a big bull moose striding through one of the countless moss-encircled bogs. The roadside stands selling “pasties,” venison jerky and wild rice, all apparently local specialties, had many postcards depicting moose, but we saw no real ones.


East Hampton? Cape Cod? No, it’s the raging surf of Lake Superior!

Once over the Mackinac Bridge into Michigan proper, we headed to the jack-pine flats of Oscoda County and a chance at one of the United States’ rarest birds. Certainly its rarest warbler: while the Bachman’s warbler, once a denizen of the expansive bamboo swamps of the south, still hopefully appears in most bird guides, it is “presumed extinct.” (What’s that you say? You didn’t know much of the south was once covered in bamboo forest? That’s because it has been many generations since this habitat was wiped out, the bird lingering on in a few last corners until inevitably capitulating to humankind’s excesses.) That leaves Kirtland’s warbler, some 3000 surviving individuals of which breed only in the scrubby pine forests of north-central Michigan.

After a tranquil night in the county park campgrounds of Mio, Michigan, we rose early for a 6:45 rendezvous at the Mio Ranger station. During the breeding season, when male Kirtland’s warblers are singing, the forest service escorts hordes of drooling birders to see them on their territories. These officially sponsored jaunts always involve some sort of briefing to go with the handholding, and this one was no exception. At 7AM sharp we packed into a conference room with a good dozen hardcore binocular toting obsessives to watch an orientation video on the warbler, its habitat, and the National Forest Service’s efforts to preserve both. The bulk of the crowd looked, I’m embarrassed to say, much the way I will inevitably look in ten to fifteen years: paunchy and gray-bearded, wearing ill-fitting acreages of gore-tex and frumpy hiking boots, with Germanic ground-glass binoculars running into the low four figures looped around their necks. Oops: I’m told that except for the gray in the beard I already fit this description.

Then, the chill morning air crackling with anticipation, we possed up, clambering into our out-of-state vehicles to convoy behind an avocado-green forest service SUV.

Caravan of the obsessed, following the forest service out of Mio. When I pulled into the police station the night before to ask directions to the forestry office, the cop said "just go back to the traffic light...." And I said: "that traffic light just down the block?" "Yeah, yeah," the officer replied, dismissively, "it's the only one in the county."

Kirtland’s warbler has not made life easy for itself. For reasons which remain unclear, it breeds only in young stands of jack-pine between five and twenty-five feet tall, which is to say trees about seven to twenty years old. It nests on the ground, and only chooses large stands of pine, eighty acres being the minimum requirement.

Whatever Darwinian enhancements led it to its extraordinarily finicky degree of specialization almost caused its demise in the modern age. Both the jack-pine and the bird historically require fire. In the past, new tracts of young trees resulted from lightning strikes and the resultant natural forest fires; jack-pine cones do not even pop open and release their seeds until the heat of a burn sweeps over them. But the success of the Smokey the Bear fire awareness campaign and our own species' general antipathy toward forest fires, even when they are a necessary safety valve, almost caused Kirtland's warbler's extinction; in the seventies there were as few as 175 pairs of warblers hanging on.

Young jack-pine habitat, looking much like a Christmas tree plantation

The warbler likely only exists today because of conservation dollars and intensive management. Fire is no longer used to create habitat, but the jack-pines, once they have grown too tall to please the bird, are now harvested and pulped, and the land reseeded. Prime habitat looks almost exactly like the more coniferous portions of South Jersey's scrubby Pine Barrens.

Our convoy pulled to a halt beside a large expanse of five to seven foot tall pines, along a sandy dirt road southwest of Mio.
"The warblers like sun, and it's obviously overcast, and they like to be warm, and as you can tell it is quite cold out here," said our guide, preparing us for the worst. "But I'm hearing one singing over here somewhere." She gestured behind her.
"That sounds nothing like the recording we've been listening to over and over in the car these past few days," commented one birdo.
"The song is quite variable, unlike many other warblers," said our guide. "And very loud. That one is quite far away still."

We walked down the road. Another Kirtland's called, off to our left (2868). The group turned as one, scanning the remnant, leafless oaks jutting above the level of the pines, on which the singing males often like to perch. Far, far away, I saw a tiny flash of movement in the snaggy branches. "I think I've got it," I said. "Not much of a view." It was a plump, even rotund, warbler, yellow below, the sides of the barrel chest streaked with black. Gray-blue above. Distant. It sang again, extraordinarily loudly, I thought, for a bird its size. And so far away. By now those in the party with sixty-power spotting scopes had planted their tripods and had the singing bird framed in their overpriced optics. We all had a turn looking. It was, I must admit, rather underwhelming, not much more than a small blob of partially backlit feathers, vibrating in the extremely narrow field of view of the zoom lens.

Observers, wondering if the small, blue and yellow bird, singing its heart out some eighty yards away, will ever come any closer

It was extraordinarily cold, and our convoy of birdos had charged off into the bush without so much as glancing down Mio's main street to see if there was an espresso shack. The birds, happy to sing somewhere off on the horizon, also seemed happy to stay there instead of popping in for a closer visit (we could not walk out to them for fear of trampling on a nest). These factors conspired, and while some of the group determined to stay on and stamp their feet, waiting for sun, warmth, and better looks, we said adieu. The Kirtland's warber was never, after all, going to come and perch over our heads like the Saw-whet owl had, and we were still basking in that experience.

UPDATE:
By fortuitous coincidence, within an hour of posting the above, one of our fellow party of intrepid Kirtland's spotters emailed, proving that those who stayed behind and braved the cold were finally treated to superior looks at the bird. As we were leaving I had given my card to Dan Brown in hopes that antarcticiana's readership might have a chance to actually see something resembling a warbler, since with the views I had, my 300mm lens would have captured nothing but a murky dot. Such gambits rarely work, since those one meets in the field and ask for photos seem invariably never to follow through, so I am particularly indebted to Mr. Brown.



Photos courtesy Daniel Lee Brown. Many Thanks!