Educate Yourself About Autism Before You Make Snap Judgements

People really need to educate themselves on the characteristics of autism, especially if they are a vice principal of a school. 

Yes, my son has dyed his hair red. Yes, my son "talks to himself". Yes, my son isolates himself from others. Yes, my son does not look you in the eye, especially if he does not know you. 

No, this does not mean that my son dyed his hair red because he heard about the Aurora, CO shooter who dyed his hair the same exact color red as the Joker's and went to a movie theater to shoot up the attendees of "Batman: The Dark Night". No, this does not mean that my son has turned schizophrenic and hears "voices" in his head and is answering to them. No, this does not mean that my son is contemplating any deviant behavior by withdrawing from the general population of high school students. 

My son is "stimming", a very common characteristic of autistic children. His form of stimming involves an internal movie in his head that he has memorized and he verbalizes each scene, word by word, often acting out what he has seen. And about the hair color? He started with blue, being his favorite color, but then moved on to green, orange, and now red. Colors based on his mood or even just the season (green at St. Patrick's, orange at Halloween). Who knows why he chose red, but it sure wasn't because of the Joker in the Batman movie (by the way, he's never even seen that movie nor has heard of the Aurora movie theater shooting).

So when we got called by the school psychologist to come in for a meeting regarding the above (and regarding yesterday's post as well), we were quite concerned. Luckily, the psychologist has known my son and has been his case worker since he was 2 1/2 and in the special preschool for developmentally delayed kids here. She told us of the vice principal's concerns, clearly embarrassed over having to share them with us and very apologetic. She stood up for my son and totally explained  to the VP how he is a gentle, innocent, and naive soul who has no malicious intent with regards to planning a form of school violence. We thanked her for standing up for our son and for reassuring us that she is on our side (and gently encouraged us to gently encourage our son to choose his next hair color with discretion).

But a day later. You know what? I'm pissed. How dare that VP jump to snap judgements over a 15 year old boy just because of his hair color and behaviors. My son! My sweet, loving, funny, and brilliant son who happens to be on the autistic spectrum. Please, people, especially if you are school personnel, please educate yourself about autism before you make such snap judgements.

Thank you.

Lowering That Bar Again

I've mentioned this before a while ago in a previous post......you know when you have a baby and you can see his/her future a certain way for them....you set your bar high and have all these expectations for them....college graduate, marriage, family, great job....then you find out he has a disability. You have to lower that bar a little bit and revamp your expectations. Maybe he won't be a doctor or scientist, and may not get that PhD. But he'll still do fine, right? Then a few more years go by and test scores indicate he doesn't have as high of an IQ as a typical child and you get a diagnosis: autism.  So you lower the bar again; lower your expectations. How many times can you lower that bar? Lower your expectations? So you hope for high school graduation, maybe some vocational school or general degree in college, and a good job--hope for marriage and grandkids someday. Year after year you come to the conclusions that none of your hopes and dreams for your child can ever come true. It breaks your heart each time you have to lower that bar. Now it is to the point where the child will graduate, but will no longer be in the academic classes that lead toward a college path. Now the best thing you can hope for is the career path. Forget Algebra, forget Trigonometry. Forget three years of the typical sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology. Put in their place "functional" math and "general" science. And the words that are hard to hear, "Basic Living Skills." The bar gets lowered. Now all to hope for is your child being as independent as possible. To live on his own and take care of himself with help, if needed. Maybe he'll never be the kindergarten teacher that he always wanted to be, but now will only be a classroom assistant. And forget about him being a veterinarian, but maybe he can clean cages at the local shelter. And if all else fails, maybe he can bag groceries at the local supermarket. And forget about those grandkids. But on the bright side, maybe he will be less anxious and stressed out, most definitely happier with regard to school work. But once he finds out that he's in the "remedial" classes, he'll get really upset and I don't know what I'll do if that happens. I don't want to disappoint my child and shatter his dreams. How do I help him to reach his full potential and be incredibly happy in life?

Four Corners Monument

Four Corners Monument

To complete our southwestern spring break we took the back way home so that we could visit the Four Corners Monument. Of course, Four Corners is the only place where the four states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet. The monument is on the Navajo Nation and is in the middle of absolute nowhere.

The original marker was erected in 1912 and was a simple cement pad, but now it is a whole circle of granite rock and brass. State flags surround the monument as well as four descriptions on when state lines were surveyed. It really is a nice monument and was a lot of fun to photograph ourselves on it.

Now you may have heard in recent years that the Monument is incorrectly placed by about 2.5 miles. That turned out not to be the case and was just an issue of interpreting survey lines of latitude and longitude from back in the days of drawing them (1860s). It turns out that the Monument is placed where it is supposed to be so no worries. 

Since the monument is on the Navajo Nation, vendors occupy all four “sides” of the monument in small cubbies with their beautiful jewelry and souvenirs. Be polite and browse--maybe even buy something.

On the way home we passed Shiprock, NM. Shiprock is a volcanic plug that has been exposed by the erosion of sedimentary layers to expose the hard volcanic rock. The highway was about 20 miles north of the formation that stood out in the middle of nowhere. The sacred formation figures prominently in Navajo Nation mythology as a giant bird that carried the Navajo from the cold northlands to the warm Four Corners region. 

Canyonlands National Park: The Needles

View Across the Way with Wooden Shoe Arch on the Right

Wooden Shoe Arch

A second district within the Canyonlands National Park is the Needles that forms the southeast corner. It is named for the colorful spires of Cedar Mesa Sandstone that dominate the area. 

View of the Needles from Afar

We only had time to walk the Pothole Point Trail, unable to hike the longer trails to view the Needles close up (a disappointment). Those trails are at least 5 miles round trip and since we stopped on the way home from Moab, just didn’t have the time (or inkling) to hike to the Needles. But the Pothole Point Trail was a nice short hike among some really great sandstone layers that formed 250 million years ago.

Pothole

Me Among the Sandstone Layers

Along the trail (and also at Island in the Sky and Arches) We saw a lot of biological soil crust. Cairns mark the walking trails so that you stay off of this delicate life form. This crust consists of cyanobacteria (the most basic of life forms) but also lichens, mosses, green algae, fungi, and bacteria. It forms the foundation of high desert plant life.

Biological Soil Crust

Maybe next time we visit we will stay at the quiet campground and go on some of the long hikes to see the Needles up close.

Canyonlands National Park: Island in the Sky

Shafer Canyon Overlook

Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT is divided into different districts. The first district that we visited was Island in the Sky. The whole park is an example of the effects of millions of years of erosion on rock layers deposited nearly 300 million years ago. This area of southeast Utah was flooded by tropical oceans, criscrossed by rivers, covered by mudflats, and buried by desert sand. Layer upon layer of sedimentary rock were deposited.

About 15 million years ago the sea level sedimentary layers were flat. Movements in the earth’s crust caused the whole area to rise; today the average elevation is over 5,000 feet above sea level. This uplifted area is part of the Colorado Plateau and has been eroded from the Colorado and Green Rivers that cut into the plateau and formed the 2,000 feet deep canyons seen today.

Mesa Arch

The Island in the Sky mesa rests on sheer sandstone cliffs over 1,000 feet above the surrounding land. There are pullouts with spectacular views along the scenic drive through the district including overlooks at Shafer Canyon Overlook, Grand View Point, and Buck Canyon Overlook. There are several trails that criss cross the park but we only walked on the shorter ones: Mesa Arch Trail and the Upheaval Dome Overlook Trails, and only hiking 2.5 miles today.

Upheaval Dome Second Overlook

Grand View Point

Moab and the Arches

I’ve lived in the southwest for 14 years and finally got the opportunity to visit the area around Moab, Utah. We spent a few days camping in Moab and first visited Arches National Park. Arches has the world’s largest concentration of natural sandstone arches, over 2,000. The park also contains other geologic formations such as sandstone fins, balanced rocks, pinnacles, and spires. Millions of years of deposition, erosion, and other geologic events shaped the layers of rock. 

How Arches Form from Erosion

Arches lies near the heart of a high desert called the Colorado Plateau at an elevation an average of 3,000 feet above sea level with peaks over 12,000 feet above sea level. Roughly 65 million years ago the area was a dry seabed. The red rock formations seen currently in the park were buried beneath the seabed at that time. Geologic forces wrinkled and folded the buried sandstone to form anticlines (kind of like a carpet that has been pushed inward to form lumps across the middle). As the sandstone warped, fractures tore through it.

Skyline Arch

Next, the entire region began to rise, climbing from sea level to thousands of feet in elevation. The forces of erosion carved layer after layer of rock away and exposed deeply buried sandstone layers that expanded and fractured enough to allow water to seep into the rock and further break it down. Water continues to shape the environment through freezing and thawing cycles that break off chunks of sandstone and rain eroding the rock and carrying sediment down washes and canyons. Little by little fractured rock layers turn into fins and then the fins turn into arches.

Broken Arch

Most of the exposed arches are of the Navajo Sandstone, Carmel Formation, and the Entrada Sandstone Slick Rock Member that was laid down during the Triassic period, roughly 150 million years ago. The Carmel layer is a mix of sand and clay and form a rock more dense and less porous than the Entrada Sandstone, which was once a massive desert of fine-grained sand that turned into a very porous sandstone. Underneath these sandstones lie a thick layer of salts that flowed and bulged upward into long domes that forced the sandstones above to crack. As water soaked into the porous Entrada sandstone, it puddled above the more dense Carmel Formation where it eroded the sandstone into a cavity, and in time, an arch.

Tunnel Arch

Turret Arch

There are many types of arches: cliff wall arches such as Park Avenue Arch, Biceps Arch, and Visitor Center Arch; free standing arches such as North Window Arch, Delicate Arch, Landscape Arch, and Double Arch; natural bridges (which required a hike too far to see this time); and pothole arches such as Pothole Arches and Bean Pot Arch.

As we drove the scenic drive through the park, we stopped to hike easy trails to various arches and rock formations. We hiked a total of 7 miles today, enjoying Double Arch, the Windows Arches and Turret Arch, Balanced Rock, Sand Dune Arch, Broken Arch, Skyline Arch, Tunnel Arch, Pine Tree Arch, and lastly, Landscape Arch. There were great overlooks as well including the Firey Furnance, Delicate Arch, Courthouse Towers, and Park Avenue. We stood on the hill overlooking the Moab Fault valley and saw a 40 million year difference between the Entrada Sandstone we were standing on and the Wingate Sandtone exposed across the valley. All in all, a fantastic day--no higher than 70 degrees and sunny with a slight breeze.

Landscape Arch

Ground Zero: Trinity Site

Ground Zero Monument

Trinity Site is where the first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945. According to the pamphlet given to visitors on the one day a year that they open the site to visitors (first Saturday in April), “The 19-kiloton explosion not only led to a quick end to the war in the Pacific but also ushered the world into the atomic age.”

The story of the Trinity Site begins with the formation of the Manhattan Project in 1942. “The project was given overall responsibility for designing and building an atomic bomb. At the time it was a race to beat the Germans who, according to intelligence reports, were building their own atomic bomb.” Along with sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington, Los Alamos, New Mexico was established as the place that the bomb was designed and built. Many of the greatest scientific minds of the day studied nuclear theory and labored over the actual construction of the bomb.

Two bombs were designed at Los Alamos: one using uranium 235 and another using plutonium. The uranium bomb was simple enough that scientists did not think it needed testing but the plutonium bomb was more complex and worked by compressing the plutonium to a critical point that would set off a chain reaction that split atoms in the explosion. The test of the plutonium bomb occurred the early morning of July 16th just before dawn at the Trinity Site. The shock wave broke windows 120 miles away and was felt by many at least 160 miles away. There was not much of a crater left, but the desert sand was scooped up into the fireball and melted into a new rock called “Trinitite” that covered the ground.

Trinitite

After visiting Trinity Site, I have come to the conclusion that every New Mexican (and even every American) should visit this historic monument. It is a sobering experience when thinking about the power that was unleashed there 69 years ago--the power that led to such destruction and loss of life that ended World War II.

Mushroom Cloud After 15 Seconds at 10 Miles Away

“The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun.”--Brig. Gen. Thomas Farrell

Sending My Oldest to College

So it has been almost 2 months since I dropped my oldest son off at college. I think it has taken this long to discover the "new norm" that is my life with 1/3 of my precious cargo missing from my day-to-day life. Leaving him at college, even though only 3 hours away, was incredibly difficult. I barely made it to the parking lot without being overcome with tears. But the good thing was that two weeks later, Labor Day, he came with us camping and it was just like he never left.

The other 2/3 now each have their own rooms, not having to share anymore, and both are now in double beds instead of their twins. These two are incredibly happy with their new, private spaces. My only concern is that now my oldest does not have a bedroom nor his own private space for when he comes back home for visits and breaks. He will now have to sleep on the sleeper sofa upstairs in the family room. He says he doesn't mind, but in my heart I think he does. I just don't want him to feel that he does not have a home base anymore.

Next home visit will be during a 3-day weekend after midterms in 9 days (but who's counting).

My sister posted an article on her Facebook page, thinking ahead to when her oldest goes to college next year. I'd like to share the link with you and feel so much of what the author feels as he sends his oldest off to college as well: Saying Goodbye to My Child, The Youngster.

The emotions of a parent, I can attest, are an odd mix: part pride, part resignation, part self-pity, even a bit of something that feels like grief.... 

Eighteen years is not enough. A crib is bought. Christmas trees get picked out. There is the park and lullabies and a little help with homework. The days pass uncounted, until they end. The adjustment is traumatic. My son is on the quiet side — observant, thoughtful, a practitioner of companionable silence. I’m learning how empty the quiet can be....

Well, 18 years is a window that closed too quickly. But, my son, those days have been the greatest wonder and privilege of my life. And there will always be a room for you.

Vacationing in Durango and Silverton

We spent a few days vacationing in the Durango, Colorado area this week with family. We stayed up at the Durango Mountain Resort in a vacation rental that fit our family of 12. 

View of a little creek outside our rental balcony

The area is absolutely beautiful, located in the San Juan Mountains with the Animas River running through the valley that was formed by a long mountain glacier. The Durango valley is surrounded by tilting layers of sedimentary rock formed during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods (570-65 million years ago), representing episodes of deposition and retreat of ancient seas. Sandstone and shales have a reddish tint to them in places. All this is rested on the granite bedrock (1700 million years ago).

Sedimentary Rocks

We explored Downtown Durango on a couple of different days. Downtown has a lot of cute shops and good restaurants, including Steamworks Brew Pub (try the Lizard Head Red!), Cold Stone Creamery, Durango Coffee Company, Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, and notably Ken & Sue’s, where we were spoiled with great food and service when celebrating our parents’ 50th anniversary. We tasted wine at the Four Leaves Winery and enjoyed the Pinot Noir and apple-infused Riesling the most. Lastly, we hopped on the Animas River Walk and enjoyed strolling along the river. We walked about a mile of the seven mile walkway.

Steamworks' Lizard Head Red was delicious!

Strater Hotel, Downtown Durango

Me at the Animas River

We took a day trip to Silverton, an historic mining town full of nice little shops, located at the edge of a volcanic caldera that erupted 27 million years ago. We took a tour of the “Old Hundred Gold Mine” just outside of town in Galena mountain, 1/3 mile in and 3,000 feet underground at an elevation of 12,750 feet and a temperature of about 46 degrees inside. Gold was claimed there at the turn of the century in about 1898 and was mined by various companies until the early 1970’s. Our tour guide explained the hard rock mining process and equipment used throughout the years.

 

Ready to enter the Old Hundred Mine

I'm a hard rock miner! Where's a quartz vein?

We drove the winding road from Silverton to Ouray and enjoyed the beautiful scenery along the drive, especially the Red Mountains, before driving back to the resort. The Red Mountains are a complex system of volcanic flows that have been altered due to Late Tertiary (approximately 1 million years ago) hydrothermal activity. The iron oxides are shades of red, orange, and yellow against the white and gray clays, and are absolutely beautiful.

Red Mountain #3 

On the way out of town on the drive back home we stopped at Chimney Rock National Monument, a sacred place for the Ancestral Puebloans over 1,000 years ago at the southern edge of the San Juan Mountains. On the 1/3 mile Great Kiva trail we saw an evacuated pit house and great kiva. The ruins are one of the highest elevation Ancestral Puebloan sites and is the northeastern-most Chacoan outlier. (Note: price of admission not worth it unless you do both the self-guided and tour-guided trails).

Chimney Rock

Also on the way home, we stopped at Echo Amphitheater (back in New Mexico), a favorite place to take a break on the drive and see the beautiful, colorful rocks of the box canyon. (See blog post Ghost Ranch for a description of the rocks in this formation.)

Echo Amphiteater

It was a fabulous vacation and we had so much to celebrate. The house is too quiet today now that we're back and everyone has left. I look forward to next year’s vacation with my parents and my nephew's graduation, when we'll be together again.

Returning from Spring Break

So I'm thinking that the average person gains 5 pounds after a week's vacation. What do you think? My scale verified that for me this morning so now it is time to un-do what I did this last week. But was it worth it? Oh, yes!

We spent a week in Orlando, Florida, which meant a beach trip and a visit to the four Disney parks. Each one has something wonderful to offer and we had an amazing time. One thing I do suggest, if at all possible, take a 2 hour break in the afternoon back at the condo to rest and recharge before going back for evening activities. It made a major difference for us.

Coming back to northern New Mexico, I realize how much that I miss warmth. It is springtime here, which means cool days with high breezes. In Florida, it was in the 80's all week, and although overcast many days, was so heavenly. Now I'm back in jeans and jackets instead of the shorts and tank tops. But the good news is that there is no humidity here in my region of the world, so my hair isn't poofy like it was in Florida. But again, bad news is that the humidity kept my contacts moist and now I'm suffering from the dryness by 8 pm where in Florida, my eyes weren't irritated at all. And there's no beach in New Mexico. But the skies are blue with pure white puffy clouds and it is beautiful in its own way.

But it is good to be home from vacation. I did sleep in until noon today, really feeling the effects of the go-go-go week, something that we always seem to do when we're away. Seems when we vacation, we see and do so many things that we need a vacation from our vacation when we return. But it was worth the time and energy and we had a wonderful week.

Now for the 7 week crunch until the end of the school year, and yet another vacation. This time to celebrate my oldest graduating from high school and my parents' 50th anniversary a few months ago. We'll see if it all pulls together.

Already April

So a couple of things.....

1) My New Year's Resolutions have taken a back burner to life and I haven't been succeeding. Life has intervened..middle kid ended up with an appendectomy, older kid ended up stressed over final semester of senior year, hubby traveling so much. Anyway, at this moment it doesn't matter too much since spring break has begun and I'll be on the way to Disney World tomorrow. I'll get back on track after I get back from vacation.

2) Something humbling occurs to a person when they are making out a will and a trust for the kids for after you die. The whole power of attorney thing, both financial and medical, turns over your own self to the person you choose, in faith that they will do the right thing by you. Who needs to renew their marriage vows! The same commitment to a marriage can be made by signing over your power of attorney to each other. It's an act of total faith in your spouse that recommits you to your marriage. Faith and trust made stronger after 20 years.

Fall Colors Hike Near Santa Fe

Spent this holiday driving up out of Santa Fe to hike among the beautiful aspen trees in full fall color and to share a picnic with my family. It was a wonderful day.

Food For Thought

Got this from Sparkpeople.com on my birthday. Gave me perspective.

Let Children Learn Evolution

I have always enjoyed Bill Nye the Science Guy. I've shown his videos in my classroom and the kids have always liked watching and learning from them. My own kids love to watch his videos. He's been around for a long time now and I hope he continues his mission of teaching science to the youth in our world.

Here, in this video, Dr. Nye makes a statement against teaching Creationism to kids instead of letting them learn true science....Evolution. It is much easier to make sense of the universe they live in when they do.

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. According to Bill Nye, aka "The Science Guy," if grownups want to "deny evolution and live in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them."

Denial of evolution is unique to the United States. I mean, we're the world's most advanced technological—I mean, you could say Japan—but generally, the United States is where most of the innovations still happens. People still move to the United States. And that's largely because of the intellectual capital we have, the general understanding of science. When you have a portion of the population that doesn't believe in that, it holds everybody back, really. 

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You're just not going to get the right answer. Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place. 

As my old professor, Carl Sagan, said, "When you're in love you want to tell the world." So, once in a while I get people that really—or that claim—they don't believe in evolution. And my response generally is "Well, why not? Really, why not?" Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent. 

And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems. 

It's just really hard a thing, it's really a hard thing. You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I'm sure, will be, it just won't exist. There's no evidence for it.

Pansies

Thought
Thought, I love thought.
But not the juggling and twisting of already existent ideas
I despise that self-important game.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness,
Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of consciousness,
Thought is gazing onto the face of life, and reading what can be read,
Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to conclusion.
Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,
Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.
-- DH Lawrence

"The name pansy comes from the word 'pensee,' which means 'thought', and was so named because the flower resembles a human face-- in August it nods forward as if deep in thought. It was believed that pansies could make your lover think of you."

I just got a new tattoo, here in August, of pansies. I'm turning 45 this month and have a lot of thoughts to muddle through. I loved that pansies, one of my all-time favorite flowers meant "thought" and "reflection." With the creative artistic skills of my new tattoo artist, Max, we created a beautiful bouquet to mark this milestone in my life.

Being from the iPhone, this is a reverse photo. It is actually on my left shoulder.

Meet Me in St. Louis

''Meet me in St. Louis, Louis,
Meet me at the Fair
Don't tell me the lights are shining
Anyplace but there
We will dance the 'Hoochie-Koochie'
I will be your 'Tootsie-Wootsie'
If you will meet me in St. Louis, Louis,
Meet me at the Fair.''

- First chorus of the 1904 popular song ''Meet Me in St. Louis,'' celebrating the St. Louis World's Fair of the same year.

Ok. So I don't know what the "hoochie-koochie" was, but I definitely don't want to dance it and become someone's "tootsie-wootsie" but I did want to visit St. Louis, especially the Gateway Arch. We planned an evening flight back home so that we'd have time to get downtown, go up in the Arch, and make it to the airport in time for our flight.


Now for some reason, I thought the Arch was built in time for the World's Fair, which I discovered to be in 1904 and was officially called the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Who knew, right? Well thanks to Google, yet again, I found out all kinds of information, the most important is that it wasn't built until 1965. It had originally been planned after the design won an open art competition in 1947 but because of financial backing issues was not built right away. The winners of the design of the Arch were architect Eero Saaurinen and structural engineer Hannskarl Bandel.

View from the north end

I found out that the Arch was all part of an idea to renew an economic downturn by bringing people to the downtown riverfront area of St. Louis. Those old 1947 designs were still in play and somehow the funding was found (with the National Park Service involved this time), and it became part of a whole concept of the "Jefferson National Expansion Memorial" that also holds the Museum of Westward Expansion and the old Jefferson County Court House on the park grounds. According to the National Park Service website linked here:

"The Arch reflects St. Louis' role in the Westward Expansion of the United States during the 19th century. The park is a memorial to Thomas Jefferson's role in opening the west, to the pioneers who helped shape its history, and to Dred Scott who sued for his freedom in the old courthouse."

Which leads me to another question....Who was Dred Scott? (Wikipedia to the rescue!) Two trials of his case, in 1847 and 1850 were held in the old courthouse in which Scott sued in court for the right to be a free man in the state of Missouri. It went to the Supreme Court because nobody could figure out if Scott even had the right to sue, having no rights as a white man does. In the Supreme Court ruling in his case, they determined that people of African descent brought into the U.S. and held as slaves (or their descendants) were not protected by the Constitution and were not U.S. citizens. Scott was considered a free man in other states but when he moved to Missouri he wasn't. His case retains historical significance as one of the worst decisions ever made by the Supreme Court. In fact, some argue that it was this case that began a pathway toward the Civil War. In any case, it was credited with launching Abraham Lincoln's political career and ultimate election.

Looking straight up

The Arch is 630 feet high and 630 feet wide from leg to leg. It is the tallest memorial in the United States and the tallest stainless steel monument in the world. The base of each leg is an equilateral triangle with each side 54 feet long at the bottom and narrowing to 17 feet at the top. (The legs are wider at the bottom).The Arch is hollow to accommodate a tram that takes riders up to an observation deck at the top. It consists of a train of 8 egg-shaped cars that seat 5 people and takes about 4 minutes to get up (3 minutes to get down). They open up to the top observation deck where we were able to look down on St. Louis and the Mississippi River. Absolutely amazing! 

View from the top down to the Old Courthouse

According to poet Calvin Trillin from Kansas City, Missouri, when being compared to poet T.S. Eliot, a St. Louis native:

"Some have questioned whether St. Louis really was the Gateway to the West....I'm from Kansas City where people think of St. Louis not as the Gateway to the West but as the Exit from the East."

That's another way of looking at it I guess. In any case, I can check the Gateway Arch off of my Bucket List now!

Me with the arch in the background