More cultural artifacts

In the rain, up through a very narrow, winding valley along Highway 6 from Spanish Fork, just south of Salt Lake City, over the Wasatch Range, ultimately towards the blazing red buttes of Arches, Canyonlands, and Moab. The highway is designated, according to a sign posted at the rest stop at Tucker, as a “Blue Star” highway, dedicated to US military personnel of the past, present, and future.

We’re there on the Memorial Day weekend, when even some of the thousands of churches in Utah are flying flags, and it seems altogether appropriate that we should be climbing towards the high point of the road, a pass called “Soldier Summit”.

Which, as it turns out, is a major real-estate development, and marked solely by a real-estate sign.

And this “Blue Star” highway is part of a patriotic movement, rather than a mere local curiosity:

The Blue Star Memorial Marker Program of the National Garden Clubs, Inc. began in 1945 to honor the men and women serving in the Armed Forces during World War II. The name was chosen for the star on flags displayed in homes and businesses denoting a family member serving. Garden clubs pictured a ribbon of living memorial plantings traversing every state. The designation of Blue Star Highways was achieved through petitions to the state legislatures and cooperation with the Departments of Transportation. A uniform marker was designed to identify the Highways. 
The Blue Star Memorial Program grew to extend thousands of miles across continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii. All men and women who have served, are serving, or will serve in the Armed Forces of the United States are included. 

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The next day, which is the last day of the Memorial Day weekend, we arrive at the KOA in Romeroville, New Mexico. They have a special on: veterans get a reduction. The lady knows we’re from Canada, but doesn’t hold that against us: am I by any chance a veteran?  
I joke, “I don’t suppose being a retired reserve naval officer in Her Majesty’s Canadian Forces counts?”

But it does, and she thanks me for my service, before showing us to our site, driving her quad with the McCain/Palin poster on the back.

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Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is an unprepossessing small town, which features a couple of gas stations and, thanks to the Pecos River, the only trees or greenery for miles.

 

The rest stop overlooking the Pecos sports several signs, one to tell us that Billy the Kid’s grave site is located here, and one to tell us that this is the home town of “the Atomic Admiral”, William S. “Deak” Parsons.

Take that, Port McNeill, home town of Willie Mitchell!

American Corrections

Maybe American prisons just advertise better, or maybe our travels took us past a concentration of them; whatever the reason, on our trip from Vancouver to Austin we saw, or saw direction signs to, no fewer than a dozen prisons, and probably more. None of these were in Canada, although I know there's at least one major prison somewhere in the Fraser Valley.

One couldn’t avoid the impression that, for many of the communities we passed through, incarceration is an important - in some cases the most important - industry.

Imagine my delight then, to have this confirmed on line, as I was checking the name of one prison I thought I remembered passing, high in the mountains of Colorado:  

More than half the jobs in Fremont County stem from the corrections industry. Yet, despite living in close proximity to these 13 different prisons, area residents and visitors soon discover the diversity of the Royal Gorge Country is what makes it such a great place to visit, live and work.

Flags

July 1 was Canada Day. As is increasingly the custom, even here on our island off the left coast, it was marked by a good deal of flag flying.

One notices this because flying a Canadian flag is, for most of us, ceremonial, and occasional, and distinctly not everyday normal. In Canada, flags traditionally fly on government buildings, schools, and motels catering to US tourists. Most individual Canadians don’t apparently feel a need to advertise: we know we’re in Canada; we expect visitors to know that as well. And for most of us flying a flag to demonstrate patriotism would be vaguely embarrassing: we’re not, after all, like those chauvinistic Americans!

Americans, on the other hand, I discover from two recent extended van trips through the heartland, fly American flags. All the time. Especially, it appears, those living in ranching America, the Land of the Long Driveways.

These flags are clearly not flying for our benefit, so it may be impossible for a thoroughly-indoctrinated Canadian such as myself to parse them. When we visited Isaac’s parents in Minnesota a couple of years ago I asked Isaac’s dad, Irv, if he could explain flag culture as exhibited in rural Montana, but he was unable to be very helpful beyond what I had already sort of inferred: Republican voters are more likely to fly the Stars and Stripes than are Democrat voters. If that’s true, there are a lot of Republican voters in rural Montana. But we already knew that, so maybe it’s a solidarity thing. (If solidarity is not too socialistic a concept.)

In Utah, in a suburb of Salt Lake City, we saw one of those traditional Mormon churches (I wonder if the designer of the original gets a royalty for every one built, and, if he does, how wealthy he is) flying an American flag. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen that before, not even on Canadian military bases.

Dealers of American cars in Texas fly bedsheet-sized flags. That must be an appeal to patriotism: buy American. But what does the size say? I’ve never seen larger except in Turkey, and in their case the issue is clearly a need to overcome feelings of inadequacy, like those ads for penis-enhancements. (we’re significant, we have a huge army, see our enormous flags!) Do dealers of Fords, Chevrolets and Dodges feel somewhat inadequate? Texas Toyota dealers don’t fly oversized flags (in fact, I don’t recall any flags at all) but there are lots of Toyotas in Texas.

In ranchland Texas the driveways frequently sport a Texas flag on one side and a Stars and Stripes on the other. This appears to be something of a theme in Texas generally, and I gather has something to do with the inalienable right of Texans to either secede or divide into four states, if they want to. Sort of like Quebec, except that the language in Texas is Spanish, and most Spanish-speakers in Texas just want to be Americans who speak Spanish.

After we returned to Canada just south of Regina, I was on the lookout. Canadian prairie farms don’t, as a rule, fly flags, but we did spot a driveway not far from the Battlefords with a Canadian flag on one side and a Saskatchewan flag on the other.

Must be transplanted Americans.