So on Thursday, September 13, I eat Chinese food for dinner and the msg keeps me up all night.
Plus, by prearrangement, we all having been forewarned, from 1am to 5am the power was turned off in the whole of West Yellowstone.
Four hours in the pitch and unable to sleep.
Ugh.

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Today is Saturday, September 15, 2018
This is my 158th consecutive daily posting.

Time is 5.01am and the weather in st George will be 98*.
But thinking a much higher elevation in Zion should be worth 10 degrees.
Down by Grand Canyon way it’s only 85*.

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After the sleepless night I head out to Salt Lake City early in the morning aware that the effect of sleep deprivation was  a real and present danger to my driving.
Fortunately, Route 20 west had many pull offs of which I availed myself nine times. Six of those times I closed my eyes for 5 minutes. Twice for ten and once for 15 minutes. And those cat naps were plenty to forestall any heavy-lidded driving.
In the event, the drive was fine.
No time for sightseeing.
Will walk around Temple Square in the morning.

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Don't forget to communicate with me @
​​​​​​​domcapossela@hotmail.com.

I also take messages, this one from Victor Passacantilli:

For Howard..coincidentally, "Le Pain Quotidien" at the massive Aventura Mall in North Miami Beach is one of my winter quotidian respites for sipping on a delectable cup of coffee as I attempt to complete a crossword puzzle.

This is a note from Kay Kane:

Anne,
I will find the old email and send out a reminder.

Dom,
I will cc: you but PLEASE focus on your odyssey & blog!!!
Do NOT worry/email/think about the dinner... we BBQ moms have got this.

Peggy,
Is Sat the 13th still OK for you & Ed?

XOX, Kay

Web Meister responds: Cute.

And from Tommie Toner:

dom, 

Just think what an awesome adventure you are undertaking! How many people would dare to undertake such a project as driving alone across country unless it was a necessity. I think it is wonderful that you are doing this. . . seeing our beautiful nation and on your own time clock. How many people get to do that? ???? 

I just wish I were with you. I want to see the sights you are seeing.  

Just remember that it is the journey and not the destination. Enjoy every minute. Don't sweat the small stuff. We are at the point in our lives where we had better enjoy every moment of life - especially, while we are still healthy, able to walk and think and talk. Each minute is a gift. 

love,

tommie

Web Meister responds: I feel very fortunate.
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Sorry I haven’t posted more pictures.
Hope to rectify that.

Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and the most populous municipality of the U.S. state of Utah.
With an estimated population of 190,884 in 2014, the city is the core of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, which has a population of 1,153,340 (2014 estimate).
This region is a corridor of contiguous urban and suburban development stretched along an approximately 120-mile (190 km) segment of the Wasatch Front, comprising a population of 2,423,912 as of 2014.[8] It is one of only two major urban areas in the Great Basin (the other is Reno, Nevada).

The world headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) is located in Salt Lake City and the city's street grid system is based on the temple constructed by the Church at its center.
The city was originally founded in 1847 by Brigham Young, and other followers of the Church, who were seeking to escape religious persecution in the mid-western United States.
These Mormon pioneers, as they would come to be known, at first encountered an arid, inhospitable valley that they then extensively irrigated and cultivated, thereby establishing the foundation to sustain the area's large population of today.

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Sorry I haven’t posted more pictures.
Hope to rectify that.

________________________________________________
Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and the most populous municipality of the U.S. state of Utah.
With an estimated population of 190,884 in 2014, the city is the core of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, which has a population of 1,153,340 (2014 estimate).
This region is a corridor of contiguous urban and suburban development stretched along an approximately 120-mile (190 km) segment of the Wasatch Front, comprising a population of 2,423,912 as of 2014.[8] It is one of only two major urban areas in the Great Basin (the other is Reno, Nevada).

The world headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) is located in Salt Lake City and the city's street grid system is based on the temple constructed by the Church at its center.
The city was originally founded in 1847 by Brigham Young, and other followers of the Church, who were seeking to escape religious persecution in the mid-western United States.
These Mormon pioneers, as they would come to be known, at first encountered an arid, inhospitable valley that they then extensively irrigated and cultivated, thereby establishing the foundation to sustain the area's large population of today.

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Temple Square is the great walking route for the pedestrian-tourist.
from Wiki:

Temple Square is a 10-acre (4.0 ha) complex, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), in the center of Salt Lake City, Utah.
In recent years, the usage of the name has gradually changed to include several other church facilities that are immediately adjacent to Temple Square.
Contained within Temple Square are the Salt Lake Temple, Salt Lake Tabernacle, Salt Lake Assembly Hall, the Seagull Monument, and two visitors' centers.
The square was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1964, recognizing the Mormon achievement in the settlement of Utah.

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The poor ye shall always have with you.
In Salt Lake City, in spades.
Homeless everywhere.

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Despite the sleepless night the structure of this day was terrific.
I stayed in my hotel room until 10.00am working on the blog and on several pieces of personal business, all of which turned out well.
For example, running out of data, Verizon gave me 8gigs of additional data per month free for a year.
Wow!

After the walk around Temple Square I had a passable lunch with a delicious glass of Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand.

The five hour drive to St George was gorgeous, the Wasatch accompanying me all the way.
Knowing I was driving while St George was sweltering added a touvh of smugness to the trip.
But I must say that the highlight of the drive, the Wow! was seeing a Starbuck’s logo on a sign for a rest area.
Four hours into the drive, dragging, and then the shot, the double shot of caffeine? What a morale booster.

Got into my room about 7pm and went out for dinner at a nice Japanese restaurant.

See you tomorrow.

Love

Meanwhile, back in New England…

The Green Hills of Cow Country

There is no mistaking a dairy farm, usually. There are the cows, of course, or other lactating four-legged mammals, usually goats as an alternative I imagine. But there is that buffalo mozzarella, and they have to be kept somewhere, and they are bigger than goats. But I’m talking about what is likely now a centuries old American agrarian culture.

It was long enough ago, but not too long. I’m old after all, but not, as things seem to go, that old. Mid-century upstate New York. I can’t imagine it very much different than a similar part of the country that I am far more familiar with currently, which is mid-state New Hampshire. We have a summer house, a year-round house really, but we visit mainly in the summers, and it is smack in the middle of dairy farm country in Grafton County.

Drive on the secondary roads around there and what you see is pasture land. Vast swaths of grass that go on endlessly coat rolling hills that slope to the Connecticut River (the same one, much further south, that Thoreau mused upon). Lately, where there has been so much rain, sometimes for days at a stretch it rains some part of the day or night, the green is brilliant, other-worldly, beyond Technicolor, well into Instagram, but real enough. And on, say, every other property, there are cows, mainly small herds.

The cows are grown for their milk for sure. We are immediately contiguous to Vermont after all, whose border with New Hampshire, shimmies along the meandering river. Go for an outing, or merely to shop, or merely to have a meager farm country repast, and you will cross a border one direction or the other. Sometimes it’s in the middle of the parade of bridges that traverse the alluvial yada yada. Sometimes the border appears on this side of the river, in Vermont, so you are suddenly in New Hampshire, but not yet across the water. Sometimes it’s the opposite, and you cross, still in Vermont, and just as suddenly you see a sign welcoming you to New Hampshire, in two languages, given the relative proximity to Quebec, in the middle of a field of silage corn.

The cows on these farms are of various breeds. I prefer the Jerseys, which seem a particularly placid breed, and, with a deep appeal to my esthetic preferences, usually monochrome in that rich brown, creamy somehow, with undertones of ivory and yellow. However you will also see all black herds, and brindle (or so it seems). There are Guernseys—the iconic cow of the children’s books of my youth. I have no idea what the ur-cow of today’s digerati young might be.

And there are, though not as many as one would expect in our productivity crazed economy, the equally iconic Holstein—those hefty white beasts with black patches shaped like island continents on a cartoon globe—or what are to me their cousins, the Ayrshire breed, which have brown island continents on their backs and heads. Both are, I read, prodigious producers of milk and are prized for their output. However, there is a glut of milk, as there is a glut of so much else in the United States, stuck in a world that has vast belts of starvation.

By whatever design, most of the herds I seem to notice, and I’ve already admitted to my aesthetic bias, are Jerseys or Guernseys, plus one very small herd, consisting of at latest best count four animals of gargantuan proportion, that ruminate, as cows do as a dominant mode, in a small field on the turn-off from the state highway to our local road of packed earth. These noble kine are a color I’ve seen from time to time elsewhere, but never so close. They are a warm, indeed a kind of receding tonality, shade of taupe, which is my default preference in all matters of taste and style in color. What color would you like to use in this room, if we were painting? Oh, uh, taupe?

Style aside, Jerseys and Guernseys are kept for the quality of their milk. Both produce rich, fat-laden milk, the Guernsey product being particularly rich in butterfat. You can taste it in the local market leading Hatchland Dairy ice cream. It’s sold from the time they open their retail store along Route 10, that runs inexorably north to south in a very straight, if hilly stretch, through town in North Haverhill. Starting at about five in the afternoon, as well as sporadically throughout the day in summer, lines form at the order window for hand-dipped cones and cups and sundaes and splits. The ice cream is rich, packed densely by hand, and cheap. The lines don’t abate until the place closes. —Howard Dinin. © 2018.