Kernel came a callin’

Note to readers: Kernel duties came knocking at my door, or ringing at my phone if you want the truth. I doubt they would have driven 130 miles to ask me to write a column to fill space for today’s paper. Shannon Mason, the summer editor-in-chief, said I could write about whatever. I didn’t know what else to write about besides this trip. I took the ending from a blog post I had already written, but only because it had a good point that fit the lead I had used. So here is what you could find on the Kernel Web site. Or if you want to find it for yourself, click here.

            If home is where the heart is then I should be scanning through the classifieds for an old Airstream trailer to move into. 16′ of class to tow behind me, complete with a single bedroom, couch, television and microwave. 
            This summer I found out something about myself that I have always claimed but can finally attest. I love to travel. Even more specifically, I just love driving. I can’t think of too many experiences better than having a few good friends, a case of CD’s, two or three bags of animal crackers, a full tank of gas, an atlas and all summer to do what you want. I’ve lived and relived this scenario all summer.
            Three friends and I set out for California to spend the summer there shooting photographs for a stock photo company one of our professors is starting. The idea was to shoot photos that books or magazines would purchase, which translates to really generic photos. After two or three weeks we were released and told to have a good time. We spent the next three or four weeks exploring California in all of its beauty, which totals out to only be about 30 percent of the state. The other 70 percent turned out to be barren, dreadful and scorching desert.
            My friends and I had made a home out of my car, minus the Airstream. For 10,000+ miles this summer I relied on my Volvo to house my clothes, toiletries, cameras, sleeping bag and other things you bring along for road trips only to later find out you don’t need, like fireworks, two-way radios and fancy light stands.
            It took us two weeks of camping and 5,000 miles to reach our destination, Ventura, Ca. With minimal showering and a week of below or near freezing nights, it was nice to get a break. But it wasn’t long before we were off to see a few of California’s own attractions. The biggest tree in the world is just that. Yosemite is every bit as beautiful as Ansel Adams’ photos depicted. L.A. traffic inspires road rage just badly as every movie I have ever seen portrayed it as. Death Valley is so blistering and desolate that by the time you drive through it you’re delighted it’s 2,000 miles away from where you reside the other 10 months of the year.

Elliott and I left Martha’s more excited to do what we love: drive. I was nearly in tears a few steps prior to this high one.
Photo by K-Smiles

            On the way back “home” it was only one of my friends and me. The other two traveled back separately. So Elliott and I had planned on driving the 2,300 miles in the normal three days but things changed a bit once we got to our scheduled exit. I asked my buddy if he wanted to stop in Flagstaff, he said no. Once we got to Albuquerque I asked again and he said, “Let’s just go onto Lexington.” So we did.
            In a day and a half we drove across the entire country. In 31 hours, we saw the Pacific for the last time this summer and crossed from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and into Kentucky.
            We didn’t’ stop for more than 15 minutes, and most stops averaged about 5 minutes. We only had two meals on the road. Most of our diet consisted of beef jerky and Doritos. The second morning’s McDonalds catered to my hunger but came along with a bit of a side effect. Symptoms included nausea and constant word vomiting which mostly pieced together as complaining. Elliott diagnosed it as the whines and I treated it with biting my tongue for as long as possible, at least until someone new called. Then a new symptom came about when I began regurgitating the situation to my new listener.
            Aside from the severe stomach ache that lasted a week after I got home, I’m glad we pushed through. On the way back that we had one of the most humbling experiences I have ever had. One that makes it easy to take residence in a car for an entire summer.  
            The sun went down somewhere near the end of Arizona. The same sun that set behind us would be rising in a few hours in front. Elliott traded off with me and drove through the night. I took back over somewhere in Texas only to watch another beautiful sun peaking over the horizon. For two hours it was a spectacular view.
            If you ever get the chance to drive across the country I beg of you to plan your trip so that you can drive through the night just once. It’s an influential feeling you wont soon forget to see the sun go down and know you’ve been pushing on the whole time it was lighting the rest of the world when it gets back around to you. I can’t think of a bigger way to realize the world doesn’t revolve around you. But when I was driving and seeing it peek back up over Texas at 5 AM, I still felt like it was rising for me.

Help, I’ve driven to Utah and can’t get out

(Whiny) post by Keith 

My plan all along was to take it slow on the way back from California, to make some detours to national parks in Utah and heading to Salt Lake City to visit a friend before swinging through Denver. But the pace has been a little slower than I’d planned: Since Monday afternoon, I’ve driven less than 70 miles.

For the last two nights, I’ve been stranded in Panguitch, Utah (pop. 1623), waiting for car repairs. The Color Country Motel has been home:

See the painting on the wall? It’s a jigsaw puzzle. Seriously.

Saturday night was my last at Martha’s; I packed the car Sunday morning and drove through California and Nevada and into southwest Utah. The air conditioner in my car was barely cooling in the 110-degree desert, so I mostly just used the vent.

I stopped for the night in Zion National Park, paid for my camp site and grabbed my tent from the car. And that’s when I realized the poles and stakes were still strapped to the side of Ed’s backpack — in Lexington. I took my tent out of his pack when we returned from Yosemite, but never thought to get the poles from the outside. It had just finished raining and was threatening to start again, so frustrated, I turned around and drove the short distance back to town to find a motel.

It’s not a good picture, but it shows you that a Utah sunset beats a California sunset, no contest.

The next morning, I picked up a cheap tent at Target so I could spend Monday night in Bryce Canyon National Park. I went through Zion, stopping once to shoot a few touristy pictures in bad light, and headed toward Bryce, but never made it.

The check engine light came on a couple minutes before I stopped at a scenic pullout to shoot more touristy pictures, this time of Red Canyon (which I can attest is quite red). When I started the car again, I was without power steering, along with a few other niceties like an alternator. And my cell phone had no signal.

My car sits half dead at a scenic pullout. I obviously wasn’t thinking straight, as I didn’t shoot any pictures when I bright yellow and blue tow truck pulled up in Red Canyon to haul the car away.

Two cars that were caravaning pulled off as I started looking for someone with cell phone reception. I’m pretty sure they only stopped so the driver of the first car could talk to the driver of the second for a few moments, but I managed to interrupt them and find out that one of them had a phone with one bar of reception.

So for 30 minutes, the occupants of the car stood around and alternated between chatting among themselves and staring at me while I tried to get AAA to send a tow truck. The people in the first car made the short hike up to the top of Red Canyon and returned. “It’s nice, you should go see it,” they told the people in the second car, including the lady who’s phone I was using. So they hiked up the hill and back down, while I stood in the driver’s door of their truck, scared to move because I might lose the signal. The phone was running out of battery, but if I leaned into the truck to use the charger, the reception would drop. I got lucky; the last words I heard from the phone before it died were, “Alright Mr. Smiley, I’ll go ahead and send that tow…”

The clouds really were amazing Tuesday night, though they started to rain on me right after I took this picture. I suppose I should have seen that coming.

It turns out my air conditioner wasn’t working right, and when it finally died, it dragged the rest of the car down with it. The clutch on it seized up and snapped the serpentine belt, so the car was drivable but not very far.

Panguitch, about 10 miles from where I broke down, was the nearest repair shop, and by nearest I mean my other option was to tow it two hours to Cedar City. The shop was closing down as I got to it on Monday, Tuesday was spent waiting for parts, and on Wednesday they spent five hours putting the compressor, which is conveniently buried under the rest of the engine. And in the end, the air conditioner still doesn’t work; no one in Panguitch has the equipment to charge an AC.

So now I’m spending the night less than 70 miles away in Richfield, hoping to get to an AC shop as soon as it opens in the morning so I can get on the road toward home.

It’s unfortunate that I had to see Panguitch under these circumstances, because it really is a nice small town. Tourism seems to be all it has going for it anymore — it has something like 14 motels that do decent business, considering the town’s proximity to so many national and state parks — but it has a great view in every direction, and the people at the auto shop and the motel were extremely helpful.

But the delays and expense of the car repairs have left me frustrated with the whole trip back and have made it difficult to enjoy the scenery. I’m not going to bother with any of my stops now; I would rather just go home. Seeing Bryce canyon and Arches National Park will just have to wait; those rock formations have been hanging around for a few thousand years, so surely they can wait one more.

California Catchup

By Keith Smiley
The guy that Brad tricked into writing

As far as road trips go, driving a few thousand miles across the country is just an appetizer. We could have spent our entire trip in Ventura County, splitting time between the beach and the hills of Ojai, and been happy with the experience. But we kept logging miles instead, taking side trips to places like Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Yosemite and Death Valley.

A park ranger at Glacier Point in Yosemite talks about the sunset at Half Dome as the sun sets on Half Dome in the background. Funny how that works.

But anyone who’s reading the blog already knows about our excursions because Brad works so hard on keeping the blog up to date. Before the trip to California started, Brad said he would try and update the blog “3-4 times a week.” But for at least the last month, there’s been a minimum of one post each day, and they rarely come from me.

All the blog’s regular readers and everyone who’s been following the progress of this trip online should thank Brad for his dedication to keeping the blog current. I’m sure he enjoys writing and sharing his photos; otherwise he wouldn’t have started this in the first place. But I’m sure there have been plenty of days when he’d rather be out doing things instead of writing about the things we’ve done.

So I hope everyone appreciates the effort Brad puts into his work, both on the blog and elsewhere. I certainly do; it’s a lot easier to point everyone that asks — all three of them — to the blog instead of trying to recount everything that’s happened on the trip.

Everyone likes feedback, so I’d encourage more people to post comments on Brad’s  posts; something like, “Hey, thanks for all the thought and effort you put into the blog. I use it to kill time at work but enjoy it so much that I read it at home, too.”

For reference, here’s who I’m talking about:

That’d Brad in the middle; he’s the one not made of wood.

The problem with Brad writing so often is that it I don’t usually have a reason to post; he’s already covered the best parts of each day with quality writing and awesome pictures, so there’s not much room for me to put anything up. But I’ve still taken a few pictures here and there, so I’m playing catchup and posting some photos from our road trips to Simi Valley, Santa Barbara, and Yosemite.

Not many words in this one, so if you’ve had to force yourself to read this far, it’s paid off: there are only a few words left in this post and I’ll totally understand if you don’t read them.

What’s unusual about this scene? It’s not the hairpin turn, the randomly placed traffic cones or the hundred-foot drop right off the side of the road. No, it’s the guardrail that’s a luxury California doesn’t usually bother with.

This railing protects the casual hiker from a three-thousand or so foot drop. If you choose to look over the edge anywhere else, well, you’re on your own.

The scene from around where the above railing is. It’s hard to tell at this size, but there’s a spot on that trail on the right. That’s a person.

Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley

Camera, Nalgene bottle, reporter’s notepad poking out of camera bag… what else do you need?

Santa Barbara

Sequoia National Forest

That’s a pretty good sized tree sitting in that pool of light, but the sequoias on either side probably just laugh at it and call it a pipsqueak.

Yosemite National Park

Travel recap:

We can’t see the Star’s photo editor because she’s out of town on vacation for a week. Since we can’t hang around for a week, we’re heading out. I’ll be sleeping in a bed (any bed would be fine at this point, since I’ve only slept in one four times since we left in May), which happens to be my own, on Sunday night.

New plans are to leave here on Friday after breakfast with Dave. We’ll get to Flagstaff that night where Elliott and I see there is a KOA. I told my dad I would stay in a hotel but I’d rather stay at a KOA anyday. KOA’s are fantastic. Is this free advertising? Yes. But I’m OK with that.

We’ll probably make it to Tulsa, Oklahoma. That’s a little under 14 hours and under 1,000 miles. The next day will only be about 11 hours to Lex where I can then drive the two home.

My emotions are running wild. I can’t decide when to be excited and when to be bitter. Low-spirits are coming in with the highs. And the good seems to be causing the bad.  I miss Mary Margaret. That emotion weighs a little heavier than the rest. But leaving a day early isn’t going to get me any closer to seeing her. I still have to wait until the 20th.

Taking one from the team

Tonight is the last peaceful night the five of us will enjoy together. At least for the summer of 2007.

We’ll be together tomorrow night, but we’re most likely to come in late and go straight to bed after our trip to Malibu and LA. Tuesday night will probably be like tonight. All of us will be on our laptops. Elliott’s phone will ring and vibrate constantly. Keith will sit at the dining table surfing the vast unknown on the interWeb while Martha knits and I sit next to her on the couch playing on my computer trying to tone a summer’s worth of pictures. The missing link that will make Tuesday night different will be the empty chair by Martha’s computer. Ed’s claimed seat because it’s the only chair close enough for his borrowed Kernel computer to reach the interWeb plug-in.

Tomorrow is basically the beginning of the end, to be completely cliche. Ed has a flight out of Oxnard early Tuesday morning.

After Ed leaves we’ll probably be disoriented for a few days in trying to figure out what we want to do for the rest of our time. We had to pick between going to LA or meeting the Ventura County Star’s photo editor tomorrow. We picked LA. While I know I should be seeking opportunities and making connections, I just feel like right now, this is more important. I have my whole life ahead of me to work in journalism. It’s not often I’ll be able to take off for a summer and do what I want. That kind of freedom just doesn’t come with a photojournalism job.

Ed is a hardworker, but he’s not all work and no play. During one of Dave’s classes he takes a break on top of a mountain of bean bags that Tucker had constructed.

We had a nice meal tonight. We threw our actual cookout for leaving last night where we invited Dave and his family, Greg and Penny (Greg’s mother). I cooked my pineapple chicken, which kind of bombed since I’m not used to charcoal. Tonight we cooked out again and through a group effort we had a great meal. I cooked BBQ chicken and steamed a few vegetables, Ed made hamburgers, Elliott fried potatoes, Penny brought desert and I grilled peaches for ice cream. Keith spent basically the whole time setting up our family portrait, which I’m sure you’ll see eventually. It was beautifully lit and well composed. The whole time we took them, we couldn’t stop laughing at each other to take a serious one. Then we kind of decided that it’s who we are. We’re a goofy group who has fun together. Why pose it as anything else?

But it will be something else after Ed leaves. Ed brings a lot to this group; his highest achievement being the title of the Patchy Beard Contest. He has yet to even trim it and it’s pretty impressive.

Ed’s whiskers actually stick out farther than any hair on his head. Maybe he just looks up to Dave so much he wants to look like him.

Despite his hate for my driving, I’ll miss Ed, especially on the way back. Camping with him is a blast because he’s the kind of guy you want to have around. He has chopped every log we’ve burned because he likes to do it. He was the architect behind every tent we put up. Every time we hiked he set the pace. Elliott says after Ed leaves he’s going to start wrestling me, which I don’t really look forward to. Ed’s ninja skills are advanced enough for him to entertain Elliott but keep him tame. I’m not sure I can step up.

Here is one of my favorite things about Ed Matthews. He hasn’t found a ground too dirty or place to crowded to throw himself in an awkward position to make what he thinks is the best picture possible. Seen here throwing himself in front of a jumbo jet to take a picture of Air Force One. 

I’m sure one day when we’re older, more professional and established, someone will need to introduce Ed for an award he has won. I hope I’m around to be able to talk about how I’ve known the guy since his introduction to photojournalism and I can tell about him crouching in front of a herd of buffalo or how if you pull over for longer than 30 seconds he’ll be out of hearing distance from that car. He springs on opportunities to shoot pictures and isn’t afraid to get his feet wet. Or dirty. Since it doesn’t really rain out here. I could talk about how he can throw a hatchet better than anyone I’ve ever seen, or how he threw a wooden skewer into the bark of a tree.

I’m sure I could find other things to talk about. Things that would make his mother proud. But after having the entire summer’s worth of adventure together, I wouldn’t make it too far before I spilled a few good stories on him.

If I ever do get to talk about Ed in front of a group of people, I hope I get to put a slide show together and embarrass him a bit.