Old Bones

Notes from Margo:

After three days of being feted, fed and generally treated like royalty by the Salt Lake Ludlows (Joy and Conrad Unit), we knew we’d have to readjust to roughing it. But there are compensations.

Let’s start with the sandhill cranes. And then we’ll talk about the huge uptilted rock formations that have changed colors steadily for the past few hours as the sun dipped down – from a daytime sandy off-white to a strange yellowish-orange at sunset on one side of our campsite, and from a dusky red to a brilliant terra cotta in the other direction.

We’re in Dinosaur National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border. As we approached, looking to see some dinosaur bones at the visitor center, we drove by a freshly mown field of corn – and saw what appeared to be herons, dozens of them, on the field. I asked at the visitors center, because I’ve never seen herons standing anywhere other than in water. Sandhill cranes!

So, before checking out the bones that have been there for eons, and will certainly still be there tomorrow, we headed back to the cornfield. Cranes, almost 100 of them. Through binoculars, we could see their bright red heads and regal high-stepping moves. Then a group took flight. (The group is called a construction of cranes, or a dance of cranes, or a sedge or a swoop of cranes. I love my birdbook.)

Watching them fly with their long slender necks stretched way out in front, and the gorgeous slow flapping of their wings (wingspans can reach 90 inches), well, I was beside myself. Lynn was laughing. He said he thought I was going to pee in my pants. But really! I don’t think I ever thought I’d see sandhill cranes. They migrate from the Arctic through the middle of the continent, so they just don’t show up on the California coast. And that was just the first bonus of the day.

We drove on to our campsite, which must be one of the more beautiful places to sleep in the western United States. We’re at the Green River, next to Split Mountain, which is just what it sounds like – a mountain with a river splitting right through it. Lynn and I were trying to describe the rock formations to each other: Take a Rothko painting, enlarge it 1,000 times, tilt it about 25 degrees and then drive your car through it. Or take an enormous wedding cake with dozens of layers, and knock it off the table, so the layers slip off one another, leaving jagged frosting on top. And then the sun started going down, and the colors started shifting in those jagged layers.

Yesterday, and the two days before, we were in Salt Lake City visiting Conrad and Joy, Lynn’s brother and sister-in-law. Conrad, for 20 years a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, is still teaching ballet as a professor of dance at the University of Utah. He is 74. He’ll retire next June, and let’s say he’s earned a bit of a rest. (That's him, shucking oysters, at right.)

And Joy! Where to begin? She’s a former dancer with the NYCB, where she met Conrad. Her dinner menus made us feel like we had suddenly been mistaken for the Duke and Duchess of the Traveling Minivan. Trout almondine, garlicky spinach soup, heirloom tomato and fresh watercress salad. Babyback ribs with spicy Chinese barbecue sauce, onion rings, roasted baby purple potatoes, fresh corn on the cob. Chicken baked in grits, roasted carrots in dill, broccoli and onion soup. Every time we opened the front door, a delicious aroma welcomed us into the house. I kept telling Conrad what a lucky man he is. And I kept thinking, “If I lived here, I would be waddling around, weighing about 300 pounds.” I couldn’t restrain myself around all that incredible food. (That's Joy, at left.)

Guests for dinner one night were neighbors, a young couple from Romania, an engineer and his wife, a doctor, both working at the university. Really interesting conversation about Romanian politics vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

Lynn's granddaughters and his great-granddaughter also visited us. (More on this from Lynn, below.)

Notable: The birdbook says that a fossil about 10 million years old that is structurally identical to the sandhill crane, making it the oldest know bird species. So how cool is that, that we saw the cranes near the Dinosaur National Monument?

Notes from Lynn:

Mary Ellen Miner is a former math teacher in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her specialty was helping kids with learning disabilities. After she and her attorney husband retired, they put on the khaki uniform of volunteers with the National Park Service. That’s why this knowledgeable, outgoing and very patient guide was helping me with my learning disability regarding dinosaur bones.

With Margo and two other tourists, I stumbled up a canyon in the Dinosaur National Monument and marveled at the riot of color in crooked layers of shale gray, purple, yellowish red and dark brown. The guidebook has a name for this banded pattern of the Morrison Formation: Neopolitan ice cream. Mrs. Miner took us past fossilized plants, fish parts (hard to see without a graduate course in paleontology) and the gleaming edge of a dinosaur’s femur that protrudes through the gray wall of the cliff. (At left, Margo takes a look at the femur.) The poor beast was buried about 150 million years ago, we were told by the math teacher, give or take a few million.

I tried to make a joke about my own life in a dinosaur park, the newspaper business. Not a laughing matter. Will someone in the future establish a National Newspaper Monument to display the corporate fossils who were buried in the mud of the Internet epoch along with the daily papers?

During our too-brief visit in Salt Lake, we greeted my beautiful granddaughters and my ultra-beautiful great-granddaughter, Elliot. She’s almost 2 and, according to her mom, intelligent and a bit feisty. Jenna Lynn Ludlow (at right) is working for a high-end clothing store. Her smile is just as lovely as her sister's, but we caught her in a pensive moment. Lauren (at left), is working for Overstock.com. Both young women want to emigrate to the Bay Area some day.

Here are snapshots of Elliot (and her pensive mom).


Mileage from Salt Lake City to Dinosaur National Monument: 188

Total mileage: 2,935