On the Road

Our Fall roadtrip begins again in Orlando where we pick up our trailer and immediately head for the Blue Ridge Parkway enroute to Boston.  The fall colors are supposed to be fantastic and we aren’t disappointed…..

Before leaving  Orlando, we got clobbered with a big rainstorm which dumped 15″ of rain on our tails as we fled north.

Only in Photoshop can you make a big storm cloud look like a nuclear explosion.  It’s time to drive north!

Before we  enter the Parkway, we visit one of our poster sites:  Fort Marion as it was called in the 30s when the WPA poster was created–using the British name.  Today it is  PC correct as Castillo de San Marcos:

Here’s the 30s poster–a beautiful poster design.  There is a shortage of eastern park WPA poster designs so this is indeed a rare poster, yet this park won’t sell it–but Ranger Doug does right here.

Martina with canon–not the camera…..  Incredible history here!

We lumber our way northward stopping at campgrounds on our way up Appalachia.  Here “Ranger Doug” can’t resist playing ranger again–he’s interviewing the modern camper replete with fifth wheel, piggy-backed “Smart Car” towed by a big-rig.

Above is the location of our 75th anniversary Blue Ridge Parkway poster….

….and below is our poster design:

Appalachia….truly a relaxed way of life.

Hiking trail with autumn colors….

Martina models in a neighboring Airstream–art-westeaux.  Never seen such an interior complete with a mounted bull’s head…..

every campground has it’s unique visitors….

This is Mabry Mill–quite a scenic stop and quite functional with a river driven waterwheel.  Essentially, this was the source of power for 200 years, before electricity.  This mill still grinds flour which is for sale.

We drive out the north end of Blue Ridge Parkway shortly after and skirt a storm in Shenandoah arriving in Washington DC for a 1/2 hour meeting with the Director of the National Park Service, Jon Jarvis.  My mission is to host an exhibition of all original WPA national park posters for the 2016 NPS Centennial at the Smithsonian–we have now found 13 of 16 known originals.  And Jon is certainly enthusiastic about my mission.

Since finding one castaway poster in 1973, I’ve republished the historical set of 16 parks plus contemporary designs for those parks that didn’t subscribe to the WPA’s federal poster project.  We now publish over 35 park designs and have  sold over 100,000 reproductions of this fabulous poster collection.  Our goal is to hang a WPA poster in every home in America.

Here Martina and I have finally arrived in Paterson N.J. the location of America’s newest National Park, just signed into law by President Obama–Paterson Falls National Park.   PFNP is located just 17 miles west of New York City at the site of a 77′ high/300′ wide falls that powered America’s first industrial town.

Founded by Alexander Hamilton, Geo. Washington’s Secretary of Treasury, he realized the industrial opportunity here as opposed to relying on the British.  General Washington camped on the fall’s edge during the Revolutionary War….  Quite interesting.

This hydro power allowed the Colt Firearms factory to be located here–also most of the American railroad rolling stock including the engines for the construction of the Panama Canal.

This park will take several years to mature with restoration and interpretation of many buildings and manufacturing plants.

Keep your eye on this place.

We keep driving north to Mystic Seaport, Connecticut.

With about 500-600 restored wooden boats!  Seattle has how many?  Maybe a dozen.  The Wawona was just chainsawed up before risking sinking in South Lake Union….  Shame on the NW Seaport for 40 years of supervised neglect!   Here’s how Mystic restores vessels:

This is a 6 year $8.2M restoration of the last whaling vessel left.  As a former board member of the Virginia Five,  I was proud!

OK–time to store our trailer (near Boston) and jump on an Amtrak train for a relaxed trip to Seattle–just barely beating a huge snowstorm in the NE.  Here we pose beside the modern “Bambi” airstreams and the larger goliaths.  I’ll stick with our 13′ footer….

Enroute across the Northern US, this photo was taken at sunset near Au Claire, Wisconsin where my great grandparents immigrated from Norway–no wonder they later moved to Bellingham!

And this was probably the very same train they rode on….   Minot ND.

Incredibly, we have no photos of our ferry trip from Bellingham to Petersburg–perhaps it’s too mundane for us after dozens of transits.  We arrive late at night to find our home (here, our garden fence) smothered in snow and 41F inside!  Time to fire up our masonry heater and move back in!  Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s that time of year when we attend the APPL park trade show–this year in Dallas.  We’ve now motored across from last year’s venue–San Diego and are headed to Key West Florida.  Instead of paying the labor unions hundreds of dollars to roll my Bambi Airstream into the convention center, Brian makes me a miniature…..check this out–complete in every detail including all the stickers/posters.   For two days we field questions about our unique WPA silkscreened historic and contemporary posters.  We’ve now about six others copying our style, and quite frankly the more they publish, the better we look.   Check out my genuine Route 66 necktie….and it comes with a ‘tacky’ trailer tie-tack!

We then drive east into the Bible Belt and are not surprised by the intensity of religiosity (expletive deleted); the radios were even worse….  so we keep driving to Pensacola where we meet with Martina’s brother who is perhaps the best barbeque expert I’ve ever known:

Check out his setup.  Three professional smokers and he cuts up hickory and tosses in a chip or two for flavor.  His steaks are three inches thick….

This is a heart stopper!  After this meal and a 17 lb./24 hour smoked beef brisket the following night, I take on a southern accent and have a great desire to collect guns and knives!

After three days in Pensacola, we turn eastward again but first visit Fort Pickens which was built with slave labor prior to the civil war and guards the harbor entrance here.  There are millions of bricks here–this is a massive fortress and others are even bigger.  The gun you see here was the largest guns of the war–and never fired–kind of like our cold war.  The designer was one of Napolean’s architects who directed construction of many of these around the southern ramparts of our country.

This is what the southerners mean by “walking the dog.”

So we drive all the way out to the end of the road–Key West, Florida.  This place is so tacky!….strewn with single-shot  bars and the typical tourist traps–the perfect cruise ship destination.    Both into Key West and back again, we stop for a night at Key Largo and visit many of the artisan shops in between–the essence of the Keys–quite nice actually.

Driving north, here is our campsite at Everglades National Park–our goal on this trip.

Opps!  wrong upload….here is the actual site–a very spacious campground, and this late in the season was nearly empty due to the increase of summer bugs and….rattlesnakes.   Note the Caribbean Pines that tower above our campsite.  Most of the Everglades and the gulf coast swamplands were populated with this species and have since been drained to raise paper-pulp species of pines (pinus radiata) as you will also find in most of New Zealand.   Lately there has been a big movement to reflood the Everglades back to the “River of Grass” restoring the natural ecosystem including the alligators pictured above.  Hope it works.  Meanwhile….

….we meet with the archivist and settle on a design for another poster in our series–this probably our 40th image.  We’re well on the way to completing our goal of publishing a poster of each park before the 2016 NPS Centennial.  This poster will feature many endemic birds and the alligators.   Are you ready?

This is our last night at Lake Gitch-e-goomie (or some such name) KOA–one of the nicest we found, but guess what……it’s a Christian owned and operated campground.  It took me two days of badgering them before they would let us heathens store our trailer there….   Maybe I didn’t give them the secret sign or perhaps it was our “Rubber Tomahawks” bumper stickers–don’t get me started….

Well, we two Alaskans finally made it to the opposite end of our country; as far from Kupreanof as you can get without getting our feet wet–and how opposite we found it.  We will continue this trip in the fall working up the Appalachian mountains through more parks.  Stay tuned.

After 40 years, almost to the day, I returned to Washington DC to lobby for the Arctic Refuge. This ceremony took place at “the triangle” which is directly outside the US Capitol Building. Attending are Wilderness Society president Bill Meadows, Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), Senators Tom Udall (D-NM) and Mark Udall (D-CO) and, of course……..Ranger Doug.

The Udalls have walked the talk–by hiking the entire Brooks Range and rafting each of the eleven river systems. Mark stated that Udalls are so thick in the SW that you can’t spit without hitting one. Tom’s definition of wilderness is when something is out there that you can’t see but is willing to eat you. Of course, I tell my bear story….

But first, let me explain the 40th anniversary of my first visit here….

I met with Richard Nixon on May 14, 1970 after the Kent State shootings–we were the only student group to access the White House and the President: (“Don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain!”)

You can read more in the Newsweek May 25, 1970 edition in “Youth Wants to Know” where I’m quoted as the “clean-cut leader of….American youth” This quote appears prominently on my resume, of course.

But, Richard didn’t listen to my sage advice so I had him impeached….but I waited for him to first sign the Wilderness Act–my reason for coming back 40 years later….

About a year ago, the Sierra Club approached me about a poster design to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Arctic Refuge. And here is our design featuring Mardy and Olaus Murie who spent their lives preserving this wonderful place–a considerable effort given that Mardy lived to 101! For more information about the refuge, read Mardy’s book “Two in the Far North.”

Also see our previous post on this area here.

After our “triangle meeting,” our next stop was Joseph Lieberman’s office. Joe called me the “An Alaskan Real McCoy”….another quote I’ll have to include on my resume along with Newsweek’s:

One more stop: The Library of Congress. For years, I’ve been collaborating with the LOC and National Parks to try to rebuild an original set. Imagine my surprise to find five of the nine “Laurent Collection” safely held by the LOC; we had been bidding against each other–they bought five, I, two. Only four posters remain elusive: Yosemite which was sold by the Swann Gallery, NYC to a private buyer and three which have never been found: Wind Cave, Yellowstone Falls and Great Smoky Mountain. Here, Ranger Doug donates his contemporary collection to Brett Carnell of the Prints and Photographs Division:

After all this political stuff, Martina and I train up to NY to the Big Apple. This place is expensive!…but we have a good time visiting Greenwich Village–hear Ranger Doug’s interview here. We also do the museums, visit the WTC site, the Steinway Piano Factory and also King Tut–checking out his personal jewelry. I visited the top of the Twin Towers 25 years ago and here’s what it looks like today:

….and the Steinway Piano Factory–fascinating for anyone nuts about pianos. No cameras allowed here:

OK….one more mention: Gettysburg. We’re doing a poster on this incredible place. In less than three days, there were almost 53,000 casualties–and a large percentage died.

Gettysburg is about 90 miles north of Washington DC–the Union was clearly threatened. I once sat at the very desk upon which Lincoln wrote his Gettysburg Address–Richard Nixon had it installed directly behind the (green) curtain behind his presidential desk. I also sat at Nixon’s oval office desk–but was politely asked not to sit there–only the President could. Just trying it out for size…..OK, OK–here’s a Gettysburg canon:

ELDA is next….but we first stop by Beacon NY on the beautiful Hudson River–beautiful because of one man’s efforts to clean it up. That man is Pete Seeger. Here he’s still strumming the banjo on his 91st birthday party. We were lucky to be able to meet him and have a piece of birthday cake!

and Pete still making music:

Then we proceed to ELDA–which stands for Elizabeth, Lucy, David and Abbott–the four children of David T. Abercrombie, founder of Abercrombie & Fitch and my great uncle. In 1926-8, he built a castle just north of NYC near Ossining–home of Sing Sing Prison. Today ELDA lies open to the elements, vandalized and for sale. I hastily organize a family reunion of the remaining Abercrombies and we tour the castle.

About 5 years ago, I stumbled across original photographs of the castle taken just after it was built….in Wyoming of all places where his son ranched. Here is the “Great Room:”

….and what it looks like today.

In 1944, a paint company was experimenting with camouflage paint and blew out one wing. I don’t believe this story preferring the more exotic tale of the Manhattan Project igniting a nuclear bomb here. This place was built like a proverbial stone outhouse with steel reinforcement, only stronger. David T’s wife was from the Abbott steel family who built the steel cladding for the Monitor (that sunk the Merrimack in the Civil War) and also the steel trusses for the US Capitol Building (see first photo in this post). This wasn’t paint…. But today’s kids still are experimenting with paint; thanks Jeff, class of 2009. It’s good to see that our high schools are still turning out well educated and mature adults.

The ceiling collapsed and the front stone wall was blown out–later turned into a courtyard.

Here’s that north wing intact in another original photo. It would be nice to restore this place and turn it into a music center, library or museum. There are 53 acres with two ponds and a separate guest house (originally a stable for horses). The stone tower is four stories high and from the top you can see the Hudson River.

Hmmm…..another project…..stayed tuned.

Recent add-on alert!….for all you East-Coasters. Our first bears show up right after we return to Alaska–here’ I’m gracefully tip-toeing after our fourth sighting (a big one!) to get a better pic–OK,….not too close…..