We made a side trip to Minneapolis this evening. I went to a Sacred Harp singing at the University Baptist Church next to the University of Minnesota campus, while Carol explored that neighborhood, which is called “Dinkytown.”

Each local Sacred Harp singing is a little different, with different customs and singing styles; a sociologist or anthropologist could probably do an interesting study, if there were one who cared. This local singing was louder than the one at Berkeley, there are more of them, and they don’t take turns leading songs as we do but anyone jumps up when the spirit moves them.

During the break, I talked with a man who apparently had been one of the founding members of the group. He told me they had a strong connection with traditional Sacred Harp singers from the South. “The South is the real tradition,” said another man, and the first man nodded. It’s the old argument in folk music circles: are traditional musicians the only true interpreters of a tradition, or can urban revivalists sing genuine folk music? –should folk traditions remain fairly static, or should they evolve? –can new regional styles be considered legitimate, or are they merely poor imitations of the older regional styles? The two Minnesota signers I talked with clearly felt that traditional signers are the true interpreters of a tradition, that urban revivalists should imitate traditional singers closely, and that folk traditions should remain fairly static. I listened and didn’t say anything; but I’m never comfortable with arguments about “correct” forms of folk music; it sounds too much like doctrines and creeds, and I’m a determined non-creedalist.

While I was singing away, Carol rented a bicycle from Nice Ride, Minneapolis’s public bike sharing program, and rode around the neighborhood. Then the two of us checked out a bookstore, and headed back to our bed and breakfast.

From central Nebraska east towards Iowa, the landscape gradually changes from the vast open spaces of the Great Plains to the rolling farmlands of the Midwest. We left behind the graze lands with beef cattle spotted here and there, we left behind the occasional stock yard. A big sign on the highway at the eastern boundary of Kearney County proclaimed the end of the cattle brand inspection zone, and I figured that was as good a boundary as any between cattle country, and the land of corn and soybeans.

From Ogallala to the Missouri River at the Iowa state line, the interstate highway generally follows the route of the North Platte River, and then the Platte River after the confluence with the South Platte. Here’s how Francis Parkman described his first look at the Platte River in this book The Oregon Trail:

A low undulating line of sand-hills bounded the horizon before us. That day we rode ten consecutive hours, and it was dusk before we entered the hollows and gorges of these gloomy little hills. At length we gained the summit, and the long expected valley of the Platte lay before us. We all drew rein, and, gathering in a knot on the crest of the hill, sat joyfully looking down upon the prospect. It was right welcome; strange too, and striking to the imagination, and yet it had not one picturesque or beautiful feature; nor had it any of the features of grandeur, other than its vast extent, its solitude, and its wilderness. For league after league a plain as level as a frozen lake was outspread beneath us; here and there the Platte, divided into a dozen threadlike sluices, was traversing it, and an occasional clump of wood, rising in the midst like a shadowy island, relieved the monotony of the waste….

Today, a state highway goes along the other side of the Platte from the interstate, and a main line of the Union Pacific railroad follows the same general route. All these roads pass through or by a string of cities and towns: Gothenburg, Kearney, Cozad, Lincoln. Compared to the East Coast or the West Coast, the highway corridor is lightly populated; but compared to the days when the Oregon Trail ran along the same general route, it has become a settled, civilized landscape.

We went across the Missouri into Iowa. Carol and I both noticed that the town of Avoca, Iowa, had been circled in my 2004 edition of the United States Road Atlas. But neither of us could remember why Avoca had been circled. Carol thought maybe someone we had met on our drive from California to Illinois in 2004 had suggested we visit Avoca. We took the Avoca exit, and drove a short distance to a small, friendly-looking Midwestern town. We saw nothing remarkable. I took a photograph of the grain elevator, just to show we had been there.

We arrived here in Ames, Iowa, at about six this evening. We’re staying at Onion Creek Farm Guest House. Joe, one of the owners, took us on a tour of the farm. He said they sell mostly to restaurants. We saw tomatoes, potatoes, squash, onions, leeks, garlic, basil, beans, kale, radishes, lettuce, carrots, amaranth, and other vegetables I can’t remember. He sold us some beans and eggs from their chickens, which we ate for supper.

One of the fields at Onion Creek Farm

We left Winnemuca late, just after ten this morning. East of Winnemuca, the scenery is spectacular: wide, flat basins divided from one another by mountain ranges. We stopped briefly in Valmy, Nevada. One building houses the gas station, the restaurant, the convenience store, a few slot machines, the bar, and the U.S. post office. There was a small motel next door, with what looked to be only four units. The whole complex appeared to be for sale. We bought a few postcards — one of the ones I chose showed a dessicated skeleton lying in the dessert, the other showed a jackalope — and mailed them.

Elko is a small relaxed city with broad streets and a mix of older buildings and new buildings. We stopped in at the Western Folklife Center’s gift store. I looked at their books; they had lots of books of cowboy poetry, and quite a few books on Basque culture. I bought a book about a potter who decided to live in the backcountry of Nevada with his wife and school-aged boys. We ate lunch at the Blind Onion, which was mostly empty even though it was one in the afternoon.

We ground up the grade to Pequop summit, 6,967 feet above sea level. New Englander that I am, I couldn’t help thinking that if you rotated the final letter of “Pequop” 180 degrees, you’d get the name of Captain Ahab’s whale ship.

We had to stop at the Great Salt Flats rest stop, just over the border in Utah. While we were wandering over the salt flats, we watched as a west-bound Union Pacific train pulled into a siding while another UP train sped east on the main line.

Carol looking at the mixed freight in the siding.

Climbing out of Salt Lake City, the highway wound up a canyon. After the deserts of northern Nevada, and after the Great Salt Flats, I was amazed at how green everything was in the Wasatch Mountains. We stopped in Park City, Utah, for a break. The beautiful green mountainsides were dotted with pretentious over-done houses, tasteful McMansions winding up the mountainsides below the ski slopes. Upscale malls were everywhere. We stopped to get coffee in a chain store — my decaf tasted burnt and bitter, and I wound up throwing it out — and I read the local paper: a reckless skiing case resulted in a non-context plea; more businesses close on Main Street (we couldn’t find Main Street amongst all the malls, so it’s no wonder); a ribbon-cutting at a housing complex for people who work in support jobs; a woman drove a car (specified as a “BMW 5 series”) into a local reservoir. I found Park City oppressive, and was glad when we drove on.

The spectacular beauty of the Wasatch Mountains blended into the spacious beauty of western Wyoming, with its wide-open skies, purple mountains in the distance, strange rock formations, and farms of huge white spinning wind turbines. The sun set about nine o’clock, and the sky was still a little bit light when we pulled into Rock Springs, Wyoming, at ten. A big full moon lit up the sky.

Loading up the car in San Mateo, it was cool and cloudy. We drove through the usual insane Bay area morning traffic, up through Berkeley and Richmond, and began climbing up through the Coastal Range. The clouds grew thinner and thinner, until by the time we reached Concord, we were driving under a cloudless sky. The hills were a crisp golden brown.

We descended out of the Coastal Range onto the flat plain of the Central Valley. Carol saw a sign: Local Cherries, Take Dixon Exit. We took the exit and bought cherries, apricots, plums, and some tree nuts at Dixon Fruit Stand. I was trying to figure out the ethnicity of the woman who waited on us when I saw a newspaper clipping on the wall, telling how a family escaped from Iran and bought out the venerable Dixon Fruit Stand.

We ran into cloud cover again he Sierra Nevadas, and a few sprinkles of rain. We stopped at a MacDonalds fast food joint, mostly to use the bathroom. The french fries had been cooked in stale oil that tasted of hash browns, onion rings, and other things we couldn’t put a name to. There was still some snow on the high peaks in the Sierras, and the driving was, as usual, unpleasant, as cars tried to dodge around big trucks that ground slowly up the steep grades.

We stopped in downtown Reno at 4 p.m. for a cheap meal. We took a walk and came across a tiny residential neighborhood in the shadow of one of the big casinos. One house was particularly attractive. We stopped to admire it, and a good-looking pug dog came out to challenge us. “Don’t worry about him, he’s harmless,” said the man sitting on the porch. Carol asked if she could pet him, and the man said it would be fine. We asked him about his house.

House on Ralston St., Reno, between 3rd and 4th Ave.

The man said his house was one of the older houses in Reno. “This walking tour came around, and they said the house was completed in September of 1876,” he said. “It’s one of the seven oldest houses left in Reno.” A young man walked up carrying a fishing rod, and the pug dog started barking frantically at him. “Stop it, Chuckles,” said the man. We stopped and talked for a while longer, and I asked for permission to photograph the house. “Sure,” he said, “and I’ll get out of the picture so it looks good.”

The cloud cover continued as we drove through the high desert of the Great Basin, and a few spatters of rain hit the windshield. The sage brush was as green as I have ever seen it, and the whole landscape looked fresh and alive — by desert standards, anyway. We were driving through the Forty Mile Desert, and we saw pools of standing water in among the stands of rushes, and the patches of white alkali dust.

Mark Twain crossed the Forty Mile Desert by stage coach in 1861, and he described his crossing: ” On the nineteenth day we crossed the Great American Desert–forty memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from six inches to a foot. We worked our passage most of the way across. That is to say, we got out and walked. It was a dreary pull and a long and thirsty one, for we had no water. From one extremity of this desert to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step! The desert was one prodigious graveyard. And the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones. I think we saw log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any State in the Union. Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California endured?”

A half an hour before we got to Winnemucca, our stopping place for the night, we stopped at Thunder Mountain Monument — see the photographs in the subsequent blog post.