Bible Belt - New York

Our mission in the Land of Enchantment has been accomplished! The Flag of Greenland flies high and proud right in the middle of the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR). It’s time to move forward. Now we will be looking for New Greenland in the land of mirages and tobacco, of confederate flags and fat Texas Tea, oil that is! To the Bible Belt are we going! Damma!

As soon as we crossed the Texan border we felt we’d fallen down the rabbit hole. 

Apparently it is the same world – the same Indians and cowboys, the same rattlesnakes, scorpions, and black widow spiders sheltered in hidden spots – yet it is nothing like before. Oil!!! Big Fat Oil is everywhere, both visible and invisible, with a kaleidoscope of oil-related structures looking like monstrous spaceships in a lunar landscape.

As we are driving through Texas I am thinking of Hivshu who carries his home on his back. Hivshu – a son of a Fly and of Admiral Robert Peary – is a wanderer who travels the world lite. All his belongings fit in a little seal-skin bag which he carries on his back. Whether in Greenland, or in Africa, or on the Pole of Cold in Siberia, he needs no more. He can build an Illuaraq (little house) out of ice and snow using his working knife alone: it will fit 10 people and the construction will take no longer than an hour. 

Texas it is a different story. Owning a home is the most important of all American religions. People bury their entire lives in the ground to raise a home made out of wood, concrete, plastic and precious stones.

And when they travel, they pull their additional homes behind their back. 

And these portable homes are not just any homes: each of them is no lesser than Hoover Dum! As I am watching them passing us by, I am thinking to myself: “Texans are tough! That must be a difficult life! And a difficult job!”

Texas homes, both permanent and portable, are the galaxies of their own. They keep more items inside than there are stones in Uummannaq Mountain. All the pleasures of the world are available handy!

All worldly pleasures are accessible  in the temperature controlled environments. Regardless of the season, it’s not cold and not hot; it’s just pleasant and comfortable inside. Damma!

After visiting some of the best homes of Texas  we noticed: so much is happenning inside while there is literally no one –  not a single person - outside. Texans reminded us of astronauts – they live in the capsules. If you step outside, you will end up in a  pool whose sapphire chlorinated waters are populated by high fidelity  gadgets relentlessly searching for all kind of undesirable elements. And where is Sila? There is no place for Sila here. Too much chlorine! 

 For a while, it seemed to us that our search for New Greenland in Texas was leading us nowhere. And then everything changed in a blink of an eye. We discovered that here, in the middle of the Lonely Star State, lives a boy who knows everything about Greenland and who can spell the word Uu-mm-a-nn-aq and quote its exact geographical coordinates. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Ricky!

 You need to know something about Ricky. His ancestor, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was a Spanish hidalgo and the explorer of the New World, a proto-anthropologist who gave one of the first detailed accounts of Native American tribes living in American Southwest. He was an explorer, but also a healer, a shaman, a bridge-builder and a peace-maker. No wonder, little Ricky lives on Explorer’s Street,  just outside of Austin. No wonder, he wants to become an Explorer when he grows up. And I can assure you that he is absolutely fit to take this path in life: American, Spanish, Ecuadorian, Irish, Tadjik, Russian, Jewish and even Cossack bloods run in his veins, and his room is full of polar bears.

Our  journey through Texas  gave us a lot to think about, a lot to compare and to contrast. At times it was  hard to survive in Texas, but we did! By the way, Austin - a town where we discovered Ricky Cabeza de Vaca - was a perfect place to stop. Austin is by far  the greatest Texas' anomality. It has all one can wish for: live music, night life and Three Little Pigs at Rosewood Avenue where we ate while waiting for our car to be repaired.  Now we are on the road again, and this time we will be searching for New Greenland in the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi! Time to look for some Spicy French Food!

This is the place where the revolutionary war against the British was fought! This is the land of Huckleberry Finn and of Guy Davis, the Bluesman, a Big Friend of Uummannaq and Greenland: his blues come from here - a place where his grand and great-grandparents, track linemen, used to live, work and interact with KKK.

Mark Twain said about Mississippi: "It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper."

On a steep shore of  Mississippi River, Little Jaaku is practicing Southern American English:   "Wha cha doin today y’all? I’m gonna have some chittlins and gravy!" Here they eat grits, and they eat Cajun food. They eat cat fish ... Cajun style.

Should we take a raft down the Mississippi River? Should we dedicate the next month to stealing watermelons and chickens and borrowing boats and cigars? Will we find Freedom on our way? Will we find New Greenland? Or only more sufferings?

Instead, we are moving east to the humid subtropics of the Yellowhammer State. Now we are deep in the heart of Alabama! Here we will be collecting medicinal plants and practicing double modals: “It feels as we I been livin’ here  darn near our whole life! Darn! Darn! Darn! I might could climbed to the top. I used to could do it! And  I knowed you for a fool soon as I seen you!”

Alabama is  a land of hurricanes, tornadoes and tropical thunderstorms. It reports more tornado fatalities than any other state in the US and ranks seventh in the number of deaths from lightning per capita!

No surprise we get right into the middle of one as soon as we cross the state's border. It comes with furious hail and as many lightnings as we have seen in our entire life!

This is how it looked and felt:

And the Aftermath: flat tire in the absence of a spare one! Whom to blame? and What to do? Little Jaaku in his own defense: " I only done what you done told me!”

Aside from the pouring rain, hail, lightnings, flat tire and  ZERO visibility, we greatly enjoyed the Cotton State of Alabama. Now the nightmare is over, and the Sun is up again! We are ready to drive North - this time to the Appalachian Mountains, to the great state of Tennessee! To the land of Al Gore, of rock-and-roll and of Manhattan Project's uranium enrichment facilities which helped to build the world's first atomic bomb. Damma!

It takes only hours till we are driving fast through the heart of the Hillbilly Country, through the lands of big mountain feuds, all the way to Virginia and both Carolinas.
 

Fileds of Glory! So many famous Civil War battlefields were fought here. Moonshine (White Lightning, Mountain Dew, Hooch) and NASCAR racing started here too. In the years of Prohibition, the moonshiners were trying to make their cars (carrying bootlegged whiskey and other illicit products) faster and faster so that they could evade the police. Moonshiners would modify (soup up) their cars for speed and cargo capacity and after the repeal of Prohibition they started to race each other. Today the speed limit on this particular road is 55. And high-way patrol officers are everywhere. We hear that they fine everyone driving even 5 miles above the speed limit!

It's +43C this afternoon and we are in the “Old Dominion”! Eight US presidents were born here! Virginia! Here they have great rocking chairs in their balconies. Sitting in these chairs, local residents  watch life slowly going by with a distinct sense of total coolness.

In Virginia, we follow Little Jaaku's instincts and at first end underwater  and then underground. In Saltville we plant the Flag of Greenland at Virginia Cobia Farms and enjoy the finest flavor of cobia, which in our humble view overpasses the one of mahi-mahi, of Chilean sea bass, and even of our beloved Greenlandic halibut. Bill Harris, a genius biologist, recently taught the salt water cobia to survive and even propagate in fresh waters of self-sustaining  "spaceship looking aquarium" hidden deep in the Blue Ridge mountains. 

From Saltville, we head to the yellow Luray Caverns where the new stalactites are growing from the old ones and seem to be stalagmites since we see their reflections in the waters of the underground ponds that are shallow but seem to be bottomless. In this  world of illusions, you never know where is up and where is down anymore!

We are here mainly to listen to the Great Stalacpipe Organ, a lithophone that in some tricky way makes stalactites to produce the most enigmatic music in the world similar to the one that we daily make in Uummannaq Music.

We return on the surface safely, but after that, we stand for five and a half hours in the traffic jam leading to Washington DC. It's Friday afternoon and every single off-road we are trying to take leads us even to a bigger jam.

What can you do when stuck in the traffic? Maybe watch President Obama flying above our heads. Marine One  flies in groups of identical helicopters constantly shifting in formation; we don't know in which one the President is, but we know that had he been driving instead of flying, our terrible auto jam would have been many times worse! Dear God, please save the President!

Five and a half hours later we hit I-95 North and now we know that finally we are on a short approach to our destination. Six more hours and we will enter the Heathens of New York where a man may lie with a man and woman may lay with a woman according to the recently approved same sex marriage as the Six State to do so. 

New York! The greatest of America's cities, and it  puts dear in God into us with its everyday signs!

Here we will meet real New Yorkers! They are awesome and humble! They are collectively responsible for only 1% of the America's greenhouse gas emissions!

Now you can see why the gasoline consumption in this great city is the same rate as the national average in the 1920s....

... and why an average NewYorker consumes only one-quarter the electricity consumed by a resident of Dallas! Toilets and Fluid Station Ahead! Here  despite all gruesome circumstances people believe in the bright future.

Matthew 7:7 "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."  True in NYC!

And all who have sinned...

... MUST come to Matsu Japanese Restaurant on Upper East Side in NYC which is an incredible oasis of dignity and freshness. Sea food here it is much better than in Nobu or in EN Japanese Brasserie on Hudson Street, and better than anything else except for the fresh catch we eat on the sea ice of Uummannaq Bay. Please, before anything else, try Sex-on-the-Beach signature hand roll! Amma!

Sex on the beach  MUST be followed by a coal- brick-oven Grimaldi's pizza in Brooklyn! To obtain this treasure you need to get into  yellow cab, drive to Brooklyn and .....

... then spend (at least) an hour in the line on the street, but to plant the Greenland's Flag in melted home made mozzarella cheese and fresh basil takes only seconds!

From here, the road takes us to Nathan's on Coney Island, a home to the world's best hot-dog! Al Capone ate here, Jimmy Durante, Cary Grant, and in 1939 FDR served Nathan’s hot dogs to the King and Queen of England and later to Joseph Stalin ( in Yalta). The line for famous hot-dogs is endless this morning, and it is +39C in the shade, and there is no shade in sight.
 

Nathan's Famous is only steps away from the ocean. Atlantic Ocean! Now we can finally say: "We made it!" Our trip started on the Pacific, in LA, and now, 3 weeks and 10 000 km of ZIGZAG travelling later we are about to touch the waters of the Atlantic. If we jump high enough, would we see Greenland from here?

Native Americans used to call Coney Island "Narrioch" - "land without shadows". And indeed, nothing - even the Wonder Wheel - casts a shade. Sun is overwhelming. So, let's sit down and think about everything that happened to us in the last three weeks, let's revisit our great adventure and let's think about the future - about all the important things in life we normally do not think about. It's not the end of our journey, it is just a final stop for today. Takuss!

In the Land of Enchantment

On Route 66! Finally, in the Land of Enchantment! Our search for New Greenland leads us to New Mexico – the land of scenic beauty, rich history and many unsolved mysteries.

Though New Mexico’s most famous residents are rattle-snakes and Tarantula Hawk Wasps, its first residents were courageous Asian hunters and gatherers who have arrived here at the end of the Ice Age, 20,000 years ago, after successful crossing of the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia to Alaska. Little Jaaku is looking forward to meet his distant family here.

Our first stop in New Mexico will be Alamogordo - a place famous for book burning (2001: Harry Porter and Complete works of William Shakespeare were publicly burned by Christ Community Church as masterpieces of Satanic deception), hot air balloons launching and Space Shuttle emergency landing.

As the sun sets, we recall that 66 years ago to this day only steps away from here, in the Jornada del Muerto ("single day's journey of the dead man") desert, Manhattan Project was proven successful. I wonder if anyone was driving on the road like us, at this particular place, at the moment when “Trinity” was detonated, and if yes, what exactly did he see or feel?

Alamogordo is a home to many celebrities due to the presence of Holloman Air Force Base. Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, was trained here. And here at an altitude of 102,800 feet Joseph Kittinger stepped out from the balloon gondola in 1960.  The scientific work at Aeromedical Field Laboratory (AMFL) at Holloman AFB focused on the effects of cosmic radiation, fractional gravity, and mechanical forces on living tissues. That’s exactly what we are planning to do today with Little Jaaku on the White Sands Missile Range which is only 25km away. It is +41C this morning and we are ready for the another difficult and exciting day in the Land of Great Heat.

White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) is a rocket range of almost 3,200 square miles. It started as a playground for testing V-2 rockets captured from Germany (along with the German scientists and engineers associated with the V-2 development program, including Dr. Werner Von Braun). Captured rockets and scientists were kept and tested here.

White Sands Missile Range surrounds the White Sands Dunes from both sides making it look like an oasis in the middle of the battleground. But it is only an illusion: several times a week Dunes are shut down due the missile range tests. We are trying to sneak in and get lost in the sands before V-2 missiles are sent over our heads.

For those who have not been here before, I need to admit that the White Sand Dunes are really white! They are much whiter than on this picture! White Sand Dunes are as white as snow in Uummannaq at the beginning of the season. This is how white they are!

You can walk on white sands bare feet even on the hottest day. White sand feels cool and pleasant. This is because the gypsum unlike quartz does not easily convert the sun's energy into heat. Being here feels really strange: as if your head and feet belong to two different climate zones.

Before our venture into the White Sands begins, we equip ourselves with a GPS, compass and a mirror (in case we are lost or captured like many others before us, we can send a signal by shining in the sun so that people in Uummannaq can spot our location and save us). By the way, thank you, Aalibarti! For those who have not noticed, it’s his famous seal hunting mirror!

Waves of white sand remind us of frozen waves of Uummannaq Bay.

Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq - a wise and caring man - knew exactly what he was talking about when he suggested that in our journey across America must start with White Sand Dunes. He said that we should see it before we see anything else – Statue of Liberty or swamps of Mississippi.

Welcome to the waterless world!

Dunes  - like sea ice -  are always shifting, always changing, always moving. And the fastest of them are moving at a rate of up to 30 feet per year. They always move forward – under the force of gravity. Most of the dunes here move to the northeast.

So, you too have to move fast to survive, otherwise you will be eaten alive by the voracious dunes.

Faster, faster! Damma!

I guess the trick here is to be tall. Or sprout a tall fancy stem our of your short body.

Some plants succeed to over-smart the dunes by adapting – they keep moving together with the dune – literally on its back.

Here, in the White Sands I again think of Hivshu: “Wonder, accept and adapt.”  Our mission today is to blend with the sand and to move on with the sand!

But the reality of life here is that even those super-smart creatures who have adapted to this environment thousands of years ago still have to struggle to survive.

Many lose the battle. This little bug died earlier this morning. Before sunset, the great white sand will absorb him fully.

Death is near, but life is too. Someone before us had a perfect breakfast here at the bush, and here is the proof.

But most of the life during the day, of course, proceeds underground. It’s invisible to us; we can only try to reconstruct it in our imagination by reading the great book of desert.

Dwarfs and Giants.... little orphans... and other creatures...

We are looking specifically for the traces of a bleached earless lizard and distinct X-shaped tracks of a roadrunner. Unlike most birds that have three front toes and one back toe, the roadrunner has two front and two back toes. That’s why it can run faster than anyone.

But sand storms and high winds erase the foot-prints quickly:  of animals and humans alike. Nothing stays... except for this Big Heart that we drew with our feet in the middle of the White Sands. 

We draw Ummat - the Heart - and then plant the Flag of Greenland on the highest Dune we can find...

... and then head to Carlsbad Caverns – a subterranean wonder-world that will hopefully offer us a temporary escape from the Heat.

And just miles away, we find ourselves in a little Switzerland  in the Rocky Mountains: pines , fat green grasses,  birches and a pleasant +26C! America is all about diversity! And that's exactly what we love most about this country!