Day Three: The Larrabee Boys and The Wizard of Oz
After eating steak for both lunch and dinner yesterday, I opted for the fruit plate this morning despite the waitress’s warning that most of it came from a can. I was somewhat surprised that I did not regret this decision. Once we finished breakfast, we drove around town a little before Jim called Joe Larrabee to arrange a place to meet. Joe said he’d be over in a few minutes with his brother Bill. We all had coffee at the motel restaurant and looked over some photos and documents Jim brought with us. They didn’t have much new information to share, but they offered to take us around to see some sites.
Jim didn’t look too sure about things when I eagerly accepted Joe Larrabee’s invitation to go see his snakes before we did anything else. As a surveyor, Jim spends a lot of time trying NOT to see (or, more accurately, feel) rattlers when he’s working in the field. He’s a good sport, though, and we took off with the Brothers Larrabee to peer inside Joe’s giant box of snakes. Joe used to put on shows featuring the snakes, but stopped doing them recently because it was too expensive. He also told me that he took up hunting snakes as an alternative to golf.
After the rattlers, we headed out to Arkalon, which is where Henry Larrabee first settled before the family moved into Liberal. There isn’t much in Arkalon now but an abandoned school house and a cemetery. I did get to see a praire dog, though (Joe is always on the lookout for them because rattlesnakes also live in their prairie dog towns). After that, we drove down to the Cimarron River, which wasn’t much wider than a big creek. There we saw a beaver dam and the bridge known as “Mighty Sampson.” Bill said the bridge was built in “quickie sand” and that in order to support the bridge, the engineers had to bury pylons 90 feet deep (that was his rough estimate).
While driving around with Bill, Jim also learned that what he saw yesterday was probably a female grouse and not a roadrunner. And to my dismay, Bill confirmed that Jim probably did see a boar’s head in the road. Hog farming is apparently big here.
We ended our tour with the Larrabees at the cemetery in Liberal where their great-grandfather, Henry, is buried. It might be difficult to see in this tiny photo, but the headstone was very unusual, and Jim and I wondered if the pattern etched into the front might possibly contain another clue.
I don’t have time to write about our trip to the museum, but I will leave you with this tantalizing photo of the Wizard of Oz exhibit. My favorite part of this tour was our guide’s retelling of Frank Baum’s story. It was folksy, succinct, and featured lines like “well, I guess that old witch was pretty sore about those shoes....” It was, in a word, OZSOME!
Day Two: New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas
After driving through four states, we finally arrived in Liberal, Kansas, around nine tonight. We are staying at what can only be described as the most spectacular motel ever built. We saw the Liberal Inn listed in Jim’s AAA guidebook and although there was nothing exceptional about the write-up, we probably passed a dozen motels (including Supers 6 through 9) before we found our latest temporary home on East Pancake Avenue. I think we were drawn here by some inexplicable force (this was confirmed for me when we sat down for dinner and Wichita Lineman started playing on the bar jukebox). I haven’t asked yet, but I think the doors to our rooms used to open to the outside before the owners built a roof over everything. Now the floor-to-ceiling window by the door looks out on a dimly lit hallway. The effect is something like supermax prison meets Japanese capsule hotel. I love it here.
Other great things happened today, too, besides the Liberal Inn. We took a side trip to Santa Fe after we left Albuquerque this morning. We became temporarily lost when Jim’s pickup couldn’t make up its mind whether we had a half tank of gas or just enough to carry us a few miles. Once we finally located a fuel station, we made our way into town over the Santa Fe Trail and the Old Pecos Trail. We had breakfast (tacos!) in one of the oldest buildings in town and then visited a couple of churches. In Texas we saw some pronged horn antelope, and Jim saw what he thought was a roadrunner and a boar’s head in the middle of the road (I’m just telling you what he said). We passed through a town called Hooker with a sign that read “Welcome to Hooker, Home of the Horny Toads.” Oh, and we crossed the Pecos River at least twice.
We are planning to meet with one of Henry Larrabee’s descendants tomorrow as well as visit the cemetery. There is also a museum in town that is located in what used to be the home of one of Larrabee’s sons. And if there’s time, I’m hoping to check out Dorothy’s House and maybe we’ll make it to Dodge City. I have a hunch Jim can get his photo taken with Miss Kitty there.
Day One: California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico
Pat took this remarkably terrible photo with my cellphone this morning after we met up with Jim in Victorville (it was really bright outside). Once the pickup was loaded, Jim and I headed off in search of Henry Larrabee. Despite an unplanned detour through Nevada (we were attempting to film in the truck and missed our turnoff), we managed to make it all the way to Albuquerque tonight. The day was mostly uneventful, although it was a perfect day for southwest scenery, and Jim kept me entertained with plenty of stories (one of the most interesting was about the Zebra Killings, which took place in San Francisco in the early 1970s). I also tried unsuccessfully to convince my traveling companion to have his photo taken with the “girl in the flatbed Ford” in Winslow, Arizona, after we heard an ad on the radio, but he wouldn’t even slow down to take a look at her. It’s late. I’m tired. More tomorrow....
Hanging with Al Gore
On Thursday I was lucky enough to attend a private screening of An Inconvenient Truth in Menlo Park at the invitation of my friend June, who is part of the team that puts on the TED conference every year in Monterey. If you haven’t heard about the film yet, it is based on a slideshow about global warming, which Al Gore presents all over the world. I realize that it might be difficult to think of something that might sound more boring, but you’ll have to take my word. An Inconvenient Truth is captivating, entertaining, and terrifying, and since it relies more on facts than heavy-handed activism, I hope it has the potential to appeal to folks across the entire political spectrum (complete aside: the president and his flock of helicopters flew so low over our place on Friday that I raced for the front door because I honestly thought a jet was about to crash right into us). After the movie concluded, Al himself made a surprise visit to the theater to take questions. For a former vice president, he comes across as approachable and very genuine, not to mention funny.
Updated May 5: Pictures on flickr
The Tastiest Salsa in the Sixth Grade
My eleven-year-old niece’s recipe for shrimp salsa won “Best Mild” and tied for “Most Tastiest” in Mr. Sotomayor’s sixth-grade salsa contest. I thought salsa made out of shrimp sounded a little dubious, but it’s actually pretty good. Here’s the recipe:
SHRIMP SALSA
2 lemons
2 limes
2 oranges
½ bunch cilantro
1 small red onion
1 cucumber
1 tablespoon garlic
2 serrano chiles
Rice wine vinegar
Olive oil
1 cup rock shrimp
Juice the lemons, limes and oranges and place juice in a measuring cup. Add equal parts of rice wine vinegar and olive oil. Place liquids in a large non-reactive bowl. Peel the cucumber, remove the seeds, then dice. Remove the seeds from the serrano chile, then mince. Dice the red onion. Mince or crush the garlic. Wash cilantro and chop coarsely. Add all ingredients to the bowl except for shrimp and mix well. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the rock shrimp to the bowl just before serving.
Meat Party at My House!
If there isn’t a math formula that will tell you the volume of fifty pounds of butchered and processed beef, there ought to be. When I left for Humboldt on Monday, I chose an insufficient ice chest that was only about half the size I needed to cart home all the meat the Murphy family gave my mom and me in appreciation for our efforts on the Blocksburg book. Consequently I had to leave most of the roasts and a couple steaks at my grandma’s when I headed home yesterday. On my way out of town, I also stopped by my sister’s place to give her some. We watched from the porch as her two-year-old son repeatedly tossed a frozen London broil in the air with the kind of glee that should only be reserved for sustenance on the higher end of the glycemic index.
It wasn’t until I was about half way home that I realized that the meat I did manage to get in the ice chest wasn’t going to fit in our tiny little freezer. About that same time I remembered a fable I read as a kid--maybe in one of the Thornton Burgess books--about a squirrel who found himself in the exact same predicament after a frenzied effort to gather all the acorns in the forest. I can’t remember what happened to him, but it was bad, and yet I am certain it didn’t involve him worrying about his husband’s reaction when he discovered a pile of thawing meat in the back of his luxury sedan. I decided to call ahead, and by the time I got home Pat had arranged for us to store the meat in our elderly neighbor’s deep freezer. Crisis averted. I think in the fable, that squirrel was supposed to learn something about not taking more than you can use. I bet when I return from my trip in couple weeks, the weather will be perfect for a barbecue. Maybe y’all can come over and help us chew through it?
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My Projects
- Web: TED's Translation Project
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- Book: My grandmother's life story
- Always: The House!
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The Blocksburg Book
