Beyond the Great Wall

It was a long time ago, while still in grade school, I learned about the Silk Road. In July, I will be on my way to China and Silk Road for the first time. I shall visit many places outside the Great Wall; those cities I have a hard time to pronounce their names; I shall let my emotion float like a small raft on the Yellow River; I shall let my eyes wonder over the mountains and across the hills; I shall let my heart pound when I step onto the old walls and roads; I shall let the sun and the sand fill me up and take me to the markets,  for the land I stand on was once an ancient kingdom . I shall sing and dance and drink lots of tea; Finally, I shall visit Dunhuang cave and pose in silence in front of their religious murals.

Without Fund For Teachers Grant, NCTA field study opportunities and Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute's organization, it  would be impossible for me to leap into a journey that I was destined to start forty years ago.  I am leaving Tulsa tomorrow to meet with the group and continue the journey  to China for three weeks.  I will bring silk and a pocket of dirt back.  Stay cool my family and friends!

I cannot  sleep

For the blaze of the full moon.

I thought I heard here and there

A voice calling.

I answer "Yes"

To the empty air.

***

Thanks to Karen Kane and Roberta Martin from the Columbia University, we have some fantastic reading materials:

http://virtuallabs.stanford.edu/silkroad/SilkRoad.html

Online Silk Road History
http://www.ess.uci.edu/~oliver/silk.html

Online Silk Road resources:
http://www.chlive.org/pbeck/eastlibrary/SILKROADRESOURCES.htm#PRIMARY%20SOURCES

The curriculum guide "From Silk to Oil"
http://www.chinainstitute.cieducationportal.org/education/for-educators/curriculum-resources/curriculum-guides-units/

The Silk Road: An Educational Resource
http://www.asian-studies.org/eaa/silkroad.htm

Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project
http://www.silkroadproject.org/

Asia for Educators program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu

Online Museum Resources on Asian Art (OMuRAA), particularly the Featured Topics: Art and Trade of the Silk Road and Asian Religions: Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Islam, Manichaeism, and Zoroastrianism.

http://afemuseums.easia.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/museums/search.cgi

Three "must-see" cities on the Silk Road

http://www.farwestchina.com/2013/05/why-you-should-visit-turpan-xinjiang.html

A quick list of cities along the complete Silk Road (beyond China)

http://annmah.net/articles/secrets-of-the-silk-road/

Good resource for current news on Uyghurs in China

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur

"The Year of Dunhuang" at the China Institute in NYC and online

http://www.chinainstitute.org/gallery/dunhuang/

A great resource on Xinjianq

http://www.farwestchina.com/

Photography exhibition by Lisa Ross at the Rubin Museum

http://www.rmanyc.org/events/load/1908

Reading "Gatsby" in Beijing Evan Osnos (New Yorker, Letter from Beijing)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/reading-gatsby-in-beijing.html

Xinjiang-China’s Central Asia by Jeremy Tredinnick

http://www.amazon.com/dp/9622177905

Along the Black Mesa

The young may die

The old must...

Three graces

Black Mesa Bed and Breakfast, Kenton, OK

Capulin Volcano

Sheep Pen  Sandstone, road to Folsom, NM

Black Mesa State Park

Cimarron County

No Man's Land

Santa Fe National Historic Trail

Daughters of Felt

Daughters of Revolution by Grant Wood, 1932, in the collection of Cincinnati Art Museum

Daughters of the Oklahoma Panhandle

If you head west on Hwy 412 from Tulsa, it 's three and half hour to Woodward, and  then another couple hours to reach Guymon; further west yet, Boise City, in almost a straight line fashion. 

 

The Oklahoma Panhandle region has an incredibly rich history which is shaped by farming and ranching culture and definitely by the water and wind as well. Three teachers from Felt Public School, on the edge of the OKlahoma panhandle joined the field trip. Linnett, a graduate of Felt High School and a farm gal remembers the area neighborhood; Crystal recalled the story she heard from relatives about the Black Sunday in Guymon; Janese as a tour guide pointed to the direction the dust came from  more than 70 years ago. They know people in Ken Burns's The Dust Bowl. "Remember the widow of ten kids during the Dust Bowl? She survived and managed a Cafe in  her later years," the ladies recall.

***

New Deal efforts at soil conservation brought back the land. When the rains came back in ’39, and dust storms started to settle down, farmers on the Plains turned to the Ogallala Aquifer, the 174,000-square-mile water table beneath them, to satisfy their crops’ needs. In a region with so little and such unreliable rainfall, it made sense: All the water that they could ask for was right there, under their feet. Wells started cropping up everywhere. Just how much water the aquifer holds is difficult to calculate, but its volume has been dramatically drawn down since 1950. At the present rate of depletion, the aquifer could, at some point, be pumped dry. And when that happens, the Plains, the people who live there, and their children could face the possibility of another Dust Bowl. (Children of the Dust by James Williford)

In fact, during our trip, the teachers from Guymon confirmed that the highway had to be closed due to bad visibility from dust storms.  It is very hard to visualize that I am standing in an area that has no surface water, all water supply comes from the mighty Ogallala Aquifer!

***. 

Crystal's granddaughters visited her while we stopped at Felt; Janese's parents are volunteers at Cimarron Heritage Center Museum; Linnett and husband live on leased farm land and we said hi to their cattle as we passed them. The most incredible impression I have from the people in the panhandle regions is their longevity. Their grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles all lived very long lives.  For everyone, every farm and ranch, and every cattle, please rain! 

"The guy in the picture is my grandpa"

American Gothic in grassland

Felt History

Fort Supply Cemetery

In June, I joined the Oklahoma Alliance for Geographic Education Summer Teacher Institute to study the Oklahoma Panhandle area from Woodward to Dalhart in Taxes. I can see the cemetery from the edge of US 412 as the highway passes through Fort Supply.  We got off the bus and walked into a look- as- empty field with plain name markers dated to 1908, the year Western State Hospital was established. The Fort Supply Cemetery became the burial place for many mentally ill patients when the property was acquired by the State of Oklahoma in 1908. In 1982, Dr.William Blythe, M.D., former hospital superintendent was the last person buried in the cemetery.

***

Historic Fort Supply was established in 1868, as "Camp of Supply" for the winter campaign against the southern Plains Indians in what is now western Oklahoma. From this post Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer led the Seventh U.S. Cavalry south to the Washita River and destroyed the village of Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle. The military presence in the region was felt for the next twenty-five years as troops from the post performed peace-keeping duties monitoring the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation and the Cherokee Outlet.  When Camp Supply became Fort Supply in1878, the post had become the hub of transportation and communication in a region that included southwest Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, and western Indian Territory. Troops built the roads and telegraph lines that linked the forts, reservations, and region's settlements. They protected the stage coaches, freight haulers, and travelers as they moved along the trails.

The Run of 1893 opened the lands of the Cherokee Outlet to non-Indian settlement. The troops at Fort Supply policed the operation that proved to be the last major task for the soldiers. The frontier was closing and the presence of the army was no longer required. In late 1894, the post was abandoned, and the property turned over to the Department of the Interior.

The old post became the State of Oklahoma's first state-operated mental institution with the arrival of the first patients in 1908. Northwest Center for Behavioral Health continues to serve the mental health needs of Oklahoma. Starting in 1969, the Oklahoma Historical Society assumed responsibility for the five remaining army period buildings. Since 1998, the William S. Key Correctional Center, a minimum security prison facility, has occupied most of the old post and hospital grounds. (http://www.okhistory.org/sites/fshistory)

 ***

I walk

Walking in Beauty 

A Navajo Indian prayer of the Second Day of the Night Chant

Today I will walk out, today everything negative will leave me

I will be as I was before, I will have a cool breeze over my body.

I will have a light body, I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me.

I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me.

I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me

I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful.

In beauty all day long may I walk.

Through the returning seasons, may I walk.

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.

With dew about my feet, may I walk.

With beauty before me may I walk.

With beauty behind me may I walk.

With beauty below me may I walk.

With beauty above me may I walk.

With beauty all around me may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.

It is finished in beauty

It is finished in beauty

***

I

walk

I walk
I walk

        I walk I walk I walk I walk I walk I walk          

I

 W 

  A  

  L  

   K  

A thistles field

Perryman cemetery

sketches by Yiren, 11" x 16", pen and watercolor

New York photographer Lisa Ross traveled to Xinjiang many times.  Her photographs of “The Living Shrines of Uyghur China”, showing wind-battered marks in Xinjiang, China, are astonishingly beautiful. (www.studiolisaross.com) The markmakers, using branches, flags, and pieces of cloth to make visual importance in a desert is very different than the Christian cemetery or Islamic burial site which are marked by tombstones, cubic–like structures and space alignment.  For both the East and West sacred grounds, the influence of nature and culture can be seen in the construction and age of the sites.  The spiritual ideology that lies within  a mound , a shine, or a grave becomes tangible.  Uyghur’s spiritual marks sometimes look like a bunch of scraps gathered up together to push back against the strong wind and sand of the open plains.  To put this into perspective, an ancient Native American burial ground is often surrounded  by  land developers.  Nature and cultural forces can shapes our perception of how we should die, how to be remembered, and for the most part, how to treat holiness in a very private and religious way.

I stopped by the Perryman Cemetery, a property of Tulsa Historical Society in my neighborhood, took some pictures and left there with a bit of a cultural understanding of an open land that became a town.  

Tulsa Perryman Cemetery

http://www.tulsahistory.org/visit/perryman-cemetery/

The Graveyard Hill

The Hill,  11"x 16",  oil on paper


On the Ramona Graveyard Hill
by
Virgil Van Dyck

On the Ramona Graveyard Hill
The wind blew and blew
As it did a thousand years ago.

The grass grew tall and there was not a wall
And the wind blew and blew
As it did a thousand years ago.

When I was a small boy on Ramona Graveyard Hill
I could see the longhorn cattle on the prairie
As far as the eye could see.

The buffalo and longhorn cattle are gone
And the wind blew and blew
As it did a thousand years ago

The old man died
And the little girl cried and cried
And the wind blew and blew
As it did a thousand years ago.

I was born in 1912
At the bottom of Graveyard Hill
It seemed a thousand years ago
So bury me on top.

Virgil Van Dyck
2006