List 1 (Places visited, roughly in temporal order)

HUMBERT leaves 'Ramsdale,' New England (Massachusetts?) on Wednesday, August 13, 1947, drives 40 mi to 'Parkington' (in a state "adjacent to the state Beardsley was in," p.226) where he buys a trunk full of fashion articles for Lolita and spends the night in his dead wive's car, a Dream Blue Melmoth Sedan.  The following day he drives on to Camp Q wich is in "another state" than 'Ramsdale,' as is 'Parkington' (p.105), where his stepdaughter Lolita is spending her summer vacations, picks her up and continues to 'Briceland', Connecticut.  It is more 100 mi from ‘Parkington’ to Camp Q and "a four hour-drive" from Camp Q to 'Briceland,' that is c.160 miles at Humbert's speed (p.108).  'Briceland' – "pretty little Briceland, its phony colonial architecture, curiosity shops and imported shade trees" (p.116) – is a "secluded town" in the 'Hazy Hills' (p.110). Humbert spends the night with Lolita in the convention and resort hotel The Enchanted Hunters.

¶ That the state is Connecticut is evident from the way Humbert had hit upon 'Briceland.'  When his wife was still alive, one day he had been browsing a Girls' Encyclopedia. She walked up to him, interrupting his musings : "Presently (at Canoeing or Canvasback) she strolled up to my chair and sank down, tweedily, weightily, on its arm, inundating me with the perfume my first wife had used. 'Would his lordship like to spend the fall here?' she asked, pointing with her little finger at an autumn view in a conservative Eastern State. 'Why?' (very distinctly and slowly).  She shrugged. (Probably Harold used to take a vacation at that time …)" (p.92-93).  The only Eastern State beginning with C is Connecticut (Humbert will have continued browsing a few pages until he had to pay attention to her words).  In this case the 'Hazy Hills' must be the southern Berkshires or more precisely the Taconic or Litchfield Hills, and 'Briceland' must be a town somewhere between Torrington and Lakeville about which the 1947 AAA Northeastern Tour Guide says: "In the Taconic Hills, on Lake Wononskopomuc ('The Smile of the Great Spirit') and near its twin lake, Wononpakook.  It is a charming old village, now a residential and resort community, with many beautiful summer estates."  There even was and still is a fitting hotel in Lakeville, the Interlaken Inn Resort & Conference Center ("The Interlaken Inn of Lakeville, CT is a resort and country inn located in the beautiful Litchfield Hills of Connecticut. We are an elegant country retreat with 90 rooms and Townhouse Suites").

Camp Q is c. 160 mi from 'Briceland' and 100 mi from 'Parkington'.  If the polygon 'Ramsdale'-'Parkington'-Camp Q-'Briceland' is anchored in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut, if 'Ramsdale' is in New England, but not in Connecticut, if all these four places are in three or four different states, and if 'Beardsley' is 400 mi from 'Ramsdale' and in a state adjacent to the state 'Parkington' is in, 'Ramsdale, 'Parkington' and Camp Q must be to the north of the Litchfield Hills.  That almost automatically ‒ and plausibly ‒ places Camp Q in central Vermont.  It is said to be near 'Climax' and 'Climax Lake.'  There is no Climax in Vermont, and it is tempting to think of all kinds of climaxes.  But there also is climax vegetation, the stable stage in the development of an ecosystem attained only after many generations if nothing interferes, and there are climax forests in central and northern Vermont.  Nabokov, remember, was a naturalist.

01 – They leave 'Briceland,' Connecticut, on August 15, 1947 and drive to "the gay town of Lepingville."  "That destination was in itself a purely arbitrary one (as, alas, so many were to be" (p.139).

¶ 'Leping' is lepidopterists' slang for the collection of butterflies, and so to Nabokov 'Lepingville' would have seemed a gay town indeed.  ('Gay' did not yet have its present meaning.)  But all we hear about 'Lepingville' is that it seems to be within an easy driving distance from 'Briceland' and that "a great poet had resided [there] in the early nineteenth century" (p.112).  Which are the American poets of the nineteenth century Humbert would consider great?  We don't know.  It probably would have been either Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Poe and Whitman.  Whitman was from the vicinity of New York City, Poe's links were to Baltimore and Virginia.  Neither of them had much to do with New England.  That's different for the others.  Emerson and Thoreau are deeply tied to Concord, Longfellow to Cambridge, Massachusetts.  This cue would place 'Lepingville' in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts, and at about 130 mi from the supposed location of 'Briceland.'   Note that Cambridge was a sort of 'Lepingville' for Nabokov.  From 1942 to 1948 he worked as a de facto curator of butterflies at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge.  I f we follow the reasoning on the relative situations of 'Beardsley,' 'Ramsdale,' 'Parkington' and 'Briceland' in Trip Two and place 'Ramsdale' in western Massachusetts, it would have made sense for Humbert to tell Lolita that Charlotte was in a hospital near 'Lepingville,' i.e. in one of the famous big hospitals of the Boston area.  Humbert baited Lolita with the movies she would be able to see in 'Lepingville.'  There were plenty of movie theaters in and around Cambridge.

"It was then that began our extensive travels all over the states" (p.145).

"My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the itinerary we followed, and I suppose I have reached here a point where I cannot avoid that chore.  Roughly, during that mad year (August 1947 to August 1948), our route began with a series of wiggles and whorls in New England, then meandered south, up and down, east and west; dipped deep into ce qu'on appelle Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there, veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts (this is not too clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not keep any notes, and have at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour book in three volumes, almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past, in which to check these recollections); crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled through southern deserts where we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned north through the pale lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads; almost reached the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and bad lands, back to agriculture on a grand scale, avoiding, despite little Lo's strident remonstrations, little Lo's birthplace, in a corn, coal and hog producing area; and finally returned to the fold of the East, petering out in the college town of Beardsley" (p.153-4).

02 – "I dimly evoke that Magnolia Garden in a southern state which cost me four bucks and which, according to the ad in the book, you must visit for three reasons : because John Galsworthy (a stone-dead writer of sorts) acclaimed it as the world’s fairest garden; because in 1900 Baedeker’s Guide had marked it with a star; and finally, because . . . O, Reader, My Reader, guess! . . . because children (and by Jingo was not my Lolita a child!) will 'walk starry-eyed and reverently through this foretaste of Heaven, drinking in beauty that can influence a life.'  'Not mine,' said grim Lo, and settled down on a bench with the fillings of two Sunday papers in her lovely lap" (p.154).

¶ This is Magnolia Gardens in Magnolia, South Carolina, 12 mi NW Charleston, on the Ashley River.  Humbert's quaint quote is not in the AAA Southeastern Tour Book, but the admission fee is.  It sounds as if it could come out of the Baedeker mentioned in the ad, but matter-of-fact Baedeker said only this about Magnolia Gardens : "No one in the season (March-May) should omit to visit the **Gardens of Magnolia (reached by railway or steamer), on the Ashley, the chief glory of which is the gorgeous display of the azalea bushes, which are sometimes 15-20 ft. high and present huge masses of vivid and unbroken colouring" (Karl Baedeker, ed. : The United States, with an excursion into Mexico: Handbook for Travellers, Leipzig: Baedeker, ²1899, ³1904). John Galsworthy raved but did not supply the quote about the starry-eyed children either : "Every one who goes to Charleston in the spring, soon or late, visits Magnolia Gardens.  A painter of flowers and trees, I specialize in gardens, and freely assert that none in the world is so beautiful as this.  Even before the magnolias come out, it consigns the Boboli at Florence, the Cinnamon Gardens of Colombo, Concepcion at Malaga, Versailles, Hampton Court, the Generalife at Granada, and La Mortola to the category of 'also ran.'  Nothing so free and gracious, so lovely and wistful, nothing so richly coloured, yet so ghostlike, exists, planted by the sons of men.  It is a kind of paradise which has wandered down, a miraculously enchanted wilderness.  Brilliant with azaleas, or magnolias, it centres round a pool of dreamy water, overhung by tall trunks wanly festooned with the grey Florida moss.  Beyond anything I have ever seen, it is otherworldly" (in Pear's Annual and Century Magazine, 1921).  That Baedeker gives it rare two stars, ranking it with premier sights like the Capitol, Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon, instead of only one as claimed by Humbert, proves that he did not actually consult the old Baedeker but was relying completely on the ad.

"We passed and re-passed through the whole gamut of American roadside restaurants, from the lowly Eat with its deer head (dark trace of long tear at inner canthus), 'humorous' picture post cards of the posterior 'Kurort' type, impaled guest checks, life savers, sunglasses, adman visions of celestial sundaes, one half of a chocolate cake under glass, and several horribly experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the ignoble counter; and all the way to the expensive place with the subdued lights, preposterously poor table linen, inept waiters (ex-convicts or college boys), the roan back of a screen actress, the sable eyebrows of her male of the moment, and an orchestra of zoot-suiters with trumpets" (p.155).

03 – "We inspected the world's largest stalagmite in a cave where three southeastern states have a family reunion; admission by age; adults one dollar, pubescents sixty cents" (p.155).

¶ It is tempting to think this would be Mammoth Cave near Bowling Green, Kentucky, which with 360 mi of passageways is said to be the largest cave of the world.  But Mammoth Cave does not extend under three states and has no particularly big or colorful stalagmites.  Moreover, the admission fee does not fit.  So at this stage they must rather have visited Cudjo's Cave (present name Gap Cave) at Cumberland Gap between Tennessee, Kentucky and the SW tip of Virginia. The special price for "pubescents" gives it away : "Prices: $1 plus tax for complete trip, 50c plus tax for children 12 to 14 years of age. Children under 12 free" (AAA Southeastern Tour Book, 1947).  As Humbert later remembers that they have been at the longest cave of the world, they will have visited Mammoth, too.  He is confusing the caves from the outset.

04 – "A granite obelisk commemorating the Battle of Blue Licks, with old bones and Indian pottery in the museum nearby, Lo a dime, very reasonable" (p.155).

¶ Blue Licks Battlefield State Park, Blue Licks Springs, NE Kentucky. The 1947 AAA Tour Book : "A granite obelisk commemorates the Battle of  Blue Licks which occurred in 1782.  A museum contains bones of prehistoric animals found nearby, a collection of Indian relics and other historical articles.  Admission to museum 30c, children 9c."

05 – "The present log cabin boldly simulating the past log cabin where Lincoln was born"  (p.155).

¶ Lincoln Birthplace Memorial Building, near Hodgenville, C Kentucky.  The replica of Lincoln's tiny log cabin is inside the mausoleum-like building.

06 – "A boulder, with a plaque, in memory of the author of 'Trees' (by now we are in Poplar Cove, N.C., reached by what my kind, tolerant, usually so restrained tour book angrily calls 'a very narrow road, poorly maintained,' to which, though no Kilmerite, I subscribe)" (p.155).

¶ Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, 15 mi SW of Robbinsville, North Carolina, just S of Smoky Mountains National Park. The AAA Southeastern Tour Book prior to 1947 did not warn of the bad road but said this: "3,840 acres of virgin timber within the Nantahala National Forest. Some of the huge poplar trees are 80 inches in diameter and more than 125 feet high, and there are giant hemlocks and oaks … A half-mile trail leads into the heart of Poplar Cove, where a granite boulder bears a bronze plaque in memory of Joyce Kilmer, soldier and poet, author of 'Trees.'" Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), journalist and poet, was considered the leading Roman Catholic American poet of his time. He was a World War I volunteer and was killed in the second Marne Battle. He is remembered almost exclusively for his poem "Trees" :

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

07 – "From a hired motor-boat operated by an elderly, but still repulsively handsome White Russian, a baron they said (Lo's palms were damp, the little fool), who had known in California good old Maximovich and Valeria, we could distinguish the inaccessible 'millionaires' colony' on an island, somewhere off the Georgia coast" (p.155).

¶ Jekyll Island, just off the coast of Georgia, 90 mi S of Savannah.  The Jekyll homepage explains : "In 1886, it became an exclusive winter retreat for some of America's most elite families, known as the Jekyll Island Club.  An array of wealthy and well-known figures joined the resort, including J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, William Rockefeller, and William Vanderbilt.  Jekyll Island remained a private paradise for the wealthy until the State of Georgia purchased the land in 1947 and declared the island a 'playground' for the public."  If Humbert and Lolita had come some months later, they might have come ashore.

08 – "We inspected further : a collection of European hotel picture post cards in a museum devoted to hobbies at a Mississippi resort, where with a hot wave of pride I discovered a colored photo of my father's Mirana, its striped awnings, its flag flying above the retouched palm trees. 'So what?' said Lo, squinting at the bronzed owner of an expensive car who had followed us into the Hobby House" (p.155).

¶ This is a tough case which I long believed impossible to resolve.  But there it is, in the 1952 edition of the AAA Southeastern Tour Book, under Bay St. Louis, Mississippi : "Holly Bluff on-the-Jordan, off U.S. 90, is a woodland of rare, exotic trees and plants.  Among giant moss-festooned oaks, great holly trees, dogwoods and mountain laurels are hundreds of varieties of camelias and azaleas.  The Hobby House, on the grounds, contains a collection of curios and objects of art from all parts of the world."  The Holly Bluff Gardens belonged to horticulturists James and Octa Crump.  The area was devastated by hurrican Katrina in August 2005.

"Relics of the cotton era."

09 – "A forest in Arkansas and, on her brown shoulder, a raised purple-pink swelling (the work of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent poison between my long thumbnails and then sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood" (p.156).

¶ As Humbert and Lo visited the "Wonderland" cave-café in NW Arkansas, they must have come through Ozark National Forest.

10 – "Bourbon Street (in a town named New Orleans) whose sidewalks, said the tour book, 'may [I liked the 'may'] feature entertainment by pickaninnies who will [I liked the 'will' even better] tap-dance for pennies' (what fun), while 'its numerous small and intimate night clubs are thronged with visitors' (naughty)" (p.156).

¶ New Orleans, Louisiana. The quote is from the post-1947 AAA Southeastern Tour Book: "Bourbon Street is a lively street at night.  The sidewalks may feature entertainment by a one-man band, or pickaninnies who will tap-dance for pennies. Its numerous small and intimate night clubs are thronged with visitors."

"Collections of frontier lore" (p.156).

11 – "Ante-bellum homes with iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked stairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor, holding up the fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way, and the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing" (p.156).

¶ This could be Nottoway Plantation, a former well-to-do sugar-cane plantation at White Castle, Louisiana with one of the stateliest ante-bellum homes in the South.  It is (probably wrongly) said to have inspired the mansion of Tara in the film Gone with the Wind (1939) to which Humbert seems to be alluding here.  In this case the movie lady with the sun-kissed shoulders is Vivien Leigh.

12 – "The Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck of it" (p.156).

¶ The foundation that maintained the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, E Kansas.  It was established c.1925 by psychiatrist Dr. C.F. Menninger and his sons Will and Karl, both of them also psychiatrists.  Especially Will fought hard to reform state sanitariums, and in 1948 the Menninger Foundation took over the "dismal" Kansas mental hospital system.  (The 1947 AAA Tour Book for Topeka just mentions "the Kansas State Hospital for the mentally ill.")  Also in 1948, Time magazine featured Dr. Will Menninger on its cover, lauding him as 'psychiatry's U.S. sales manager.'"  In 2003, the Menninger Foundation moved to Houston, Texas.  Humbert is very reticent about his psychiatric past but mentions that for some mental disorder he does not specify he had been in sanitariums.  From what he tells the reader (if he is to believe him), they had not been dismal state institutions.  Obviously he was curious to see what in 1948-49 probably was the best-known private reform clinic in the US.  The Menninger cover of Time magazine may have brought him there.  Or was there another reason for driving to out-of-the-way Topeka which will hardly have interested Lolita?  Was he at a point where he feared he would have himself admitted?

"A patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping white flies" (p.156).

13 – "Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail" (p.156).

¶ The Oregon Trail was a migration route from Missouri to Oregon used by pioneer settlers with chuckwagons from 1841 to 1869 when railroads made this kind of travel obsolete.

14 – "Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo" (p.156).

¶ Abilene in C Kansas was the hometown of Dwight D. Eisenhower.  The AAA Tour Book called it "the first real cattle town of Kansas" but did not mention the Wild Bill Hickok Rodeo which is held annually at the beginning of August.  Too bad for Humbert and Lolita, for they will have missed it. About Abilene and Wild Bill Hickok, The American Guide of 1947 (ed. by Henry G. Alsberg) had this to say : “Here great droves of Texas longhorns were herded into stock pens awaiting shipment, while as many as 5,000 cowboys, paid off simultaneously, thronged brothels, saloons & gambling houses.  Abilene, said in 1871 to have more cutthroats & desperados than any other town, was tamed somewhat by James Butler ('Wild Bill') Hickok, who became marshal; credited with 43 killings before he came to Abilene, he increased his total here to 100."  About Wild Bill, the Custer Battlefield Museum in Wyoming explains : "Gun fighter, Indian scout, Union spy, U.S. Marshal, gambler and actor, James Butler Hickok (1837-1876) is one of the best known frontier personalities.  Critically wounded in battle by a Cheyenne lance, Hickok ended his scouting career and became the U.S. Marshal in the cattle town of Abilene, Kansas.  Later he settled in the mining town of Deadwood, where he befriended Calamity Jane.  Hickok's days came to an end on August 2, 1876 in Deadwood's #10 Saloon, shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall while holding Aces and Eights (the dead man's hand)."

"Distant mountains.  Near mountains.  More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, 'too prehistoric for words' (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot" (p.156).

¶ There are numerous lava buttes in the West, but only one black one that is actually called Lava Butte, 7 mi S of Bend, Oregon. It's likely Humbert was thinking of this one. It was on his road from the Crater Lake to Burns.

15 – "Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in Colorado, and the snow banks, and the cushionets of tiny alpine flowers, and more snow; down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried to slide, and squealed, and was snowballed by some youngsters, and retaliated in kind comme on dit” (p.156).

¶ The small Iceberg Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, N Colorado, on Trail Ridge Road.  Nabokov had spent the summer of 1947 at Columbine Lodge above Estes Park at the edge of the National Park, hiking along Trail Ridge Road in pursuit of butterflies.  Iceberg Lake is at 11,500 ft altitude, just below the highest point of the road.  There will not necessarily have been icebergs on the lake in summer and fall but there certainly will have been snowbanks.  The end of the butterfly chapter 6 in Speak, Memory recalls Rocky Mountain National Park : "At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh [the one in Russia where his passion for butterflies had begun].  The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons.  Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines.  In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.  I confess I do not believe in time …" (p.138-139).

"Skeletons of burned aspens, patches of spired blue flowers.  The various items of a scenic drive.  Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of Bear Creeks, Soda Springs, Painted Canyons" (p.157).

¶ Humbert is exaggerating.  There may have been hundreds of scenic drives but certainly not thousands of Bear Creeks etc., and there was only one Soda Springs, in Idaho.  This again shows that he was not interested in his tour as such and hence not able to think of any destination that might have been to Lolita's liking.

16 – "Texas, a drought-struck plain" (p.157).

17 – "Crystal Chamber in the longest cave in the world, children under 12 free, Lo a young captive" (p.157).

¶ Carlsbad Caverns, SE New Mexico.  It certainly is not the longest cave in the world. H.H. seems confuse it with Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, which they must have visited earlier.  But it has a Crystal Grotto in its Big Room.  The admission charge agrees with the one given in the AAA Tour Book of 1947 : "Adults $1.25 plus tax, children between 12 and 16 years, 25c plus tax. No charge is made for children under 12 years when accompanied by adults assuming responsibility for their safety and good conduct."

18 – "A collection of a local lady's homemade sculptures, closed on a miserable Monday morning, dust, wind, witherland" (p.157).

¶ The Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, Texas.  According to the AAA Tour Book of 1947, on Sundays and Mondays it was open only from 3 to 5 pm.  It is the converted residence and studio of Elisabet Ney (1833–1907), a once well-known Texan sculptress.  Humbert's derision comes from the European perspective he clings to throughout his book but in this case is particularly out of place.  Ney, German by birth, after a formal academic training in sculpture had been an esteemed sculptress in Europe before she came to America and was invited to Austin to set up a studio there and resume her work.

19 – "Conception Park, in a town on the Mexican border which I dared not cross.  There and elsewhere, hundreds of gray hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim flowers" (p.157).

¶ Concepcion Park is the grounds of the former Franciscan mission church of La Purisima Concepcion de Acuna in San Antonio, Texas (today part of a National Historical Park).  Ciudad Acuña is one of the closest Mexican border towns, 160 miles to the west.

20 – "Shakespeare, a ghost town in New Mexico, where bad man Russian Bill was colorfully hanged seventy years ago" (p.157).

¶ Shakespeare, 2,5 mi S of Lordsburg, in the SW corner of New Mexico, is a very small "semi-ghost town" (it has an owner who maintains the remaining buildings) in rolling rattlesnake country, today consisting of seven rickety houses, sheds and barns.  It was founded in the late 1850s as Mexican Springs and served as a station for the Butterfield Overland Stage.  When service was discontinued and silver found in the early 1870s, the place turned into a mining camp with as many as 3000 inhabitants and was renamed Grant and Ralston City.  Due to a diamond scam the town got a bad name.  So after a mining company called Shakespeare took over the remaining citizens in 1879 renamed it Shakespeare.  Possibly the name was meant to attract London investors.  However, Shakespeare Mining Company never flourished, and when in the 1880s the railroad chose to lay its tracks through nearby Lordsburg, the town slowly died.  In 1935, what remained of it was sold to the Hill family as a working ranch.  "Russian Bill" was one Vilgelm Tattenbaum (1855-1881), a wealthy Russian nobleman and ex-lieutenant of the White Hussars who deserted in 1880 and somehow ended up in Tombstone, Arizona, where he attempted to join one or the other band of rustlers.  On a side-trip to New Mexico on a stolen horse he and outlaw Sandy King were put to jail in Shakespeare and within two days hanged from a beam in the dining room of Grant House, "due to the lack of trees.  A member of the lynch mob explained to startled stage passengers that Russian Bill was hanged for stealing a horse and Sandy King was hanged for 'being a damned nuisance'.  After Shakespeare's postmaster received a letter from Russian Bill's mother inquiring of his whereabouts, he sent her the diplomatic reply that her son had died 'of throat trouble'" (Hidalgo County historian Bill Cavaliere).

21 – "Fish hatcheries" (p.157).

¶ The AAA Tour Book of 1947 mentions only one hatchery in the state, at Santa Rosa, NE New Mexico, on Rt 66. Up to 1964, the hatchery was just E of the town at Blue Hole, a 81 ft. deep artesian well of clear blue water which was the only water supply of the adjoining hatchery ponds. Since the state hatchery moved to new facilities at Rock Lake 2 mi S of Santa Rosa, Blue Hole serves as a year-round training center for scuba divers.

"Cliff dwellings" (p.157).

¶ These would have been more numerous and well-preserved in Arizona; the best-known and most extensive ones would have been in Mesa Verde National Park, SW Colorado.  In New Mexico, the best bet would have been either Bandelier National Monument W of Santa Fe or Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in SW New Mexico.

22 – “The mummy of a child (Florentine Bea's Indian contemporary)” (p.157).

¶ There have been Native American mummies found in New Mexico, but it will not have been easy for Humbert to get to see one in 1947 or 1948.  An Indian child’s mummy found in Mummy Cave of Canyon de Chelly was deposited at the National Museum and thus could not be sighted by Humbert and Lolita.  He may refer to a child mummy exhibited at the Million Dollar Museum in Whites City, New Mexico, a place established in the late 1920s or early 1930s at the entrance of Carlsbad Caverns National Park.  As another remark of his makes it likely that they have been to the caves, they must have come through Whites City.  There is another cue.  Humberts speaks of a museum of guns and violins in Oklahoma, very probably referring to the Davis Gun Collection in Claremore.  Among various other collectables they have music boxes and a few musical instruments there but not particularly violins.  So Humbert's recollection of violins must be from somewhere else.  Now at the Million Dollar Museum they have a small collection precisely of guns and violins.  So probably Humbert is confusing the two museums just as he was confusing the caves.  The mummy was advertised as a "6000 year old mummified cliff dwelling baby."  (The age seems purely arbitrary.)  In 1997, a German TV crew gave it some publicity by claiming it is E.T.  Today its space is empty.  The mummy was removed in 2007 by the FBI for DNA testing.

"Our twentieth Hell's Canyon. Our fiftieth Gateway to something or other fide that tour book, the cover of which had been lost by that time. A tick in my groin. Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away the summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain" (p.157).

¶ H.H. exaggerating again. The Tour Books don't mention dozens of Hell's Canyons and Gateways.

23 – "A hazy blue view beyond railings on a mountain pass, and the backs of a family enjoying it (with Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper–'Look, the McCrystals, please, let's talk to them, please'–let's talk to them, reader!–please! I'll do anything you want, oh, please ...") (p.157).

¶ It is tempting to think this may have happened on Milner Pass in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado which later is listed by Humbert as one of the places where they had a major row, because the reason for their quarreling may exactly have been the McCrystal incident.  In any case it cannot be where they should be according to Humbert's sequence, somewhere between New Mexico and Arizona, where there are no hazy blue views on mountain passes.

"ART: American Refrigerator Transit Company" (p.157).

¶ Private refrigerator car railroad line, established in 1881, based in St. Louis.

24 – "Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings, aboriginal pictographs" (p.157).

¶ There are Native American pueblo ruins, cliff dwellings, pictographs and petroglyphs all over Arizona and New Mexico.  A site where Humbert and Lolita could have found all of them is the Canyon de Chelly National Monument near Chinle, Arizona, in the heart of the Navajo Indian Reservation.  The AAA Western Tourbook of 1947 awards it a star : "Canyon de Chelly is a box canyon 30 miles long, joined by a lateral canyon, Canyon del Muerto.  The walls of brown sandstone rise to the heights of 700 to 1,000 feet and are remarkably sheer and smooth.  In natural crevices of these cliffs there are many cliff-dweller ruins ... Cut into the sandstone walls of the canyons are pictographs, some perhaps dating from the time of the earliest occupation."  A webpage on American Indian archeology explains : "The area contains the ruins of several hundred prehistoric Native American villages, most of them built A.D. 350—1300. The spectacular cliff dwellings include Mummy Cave, with a three-story tower house.  Artifacts have been found, and there are numerous pictographs in rock shelters and on cliff faces.  The earliest people living in the region were the Basket Makers, predecessors of the Pueblo."  Pueblo, Spanish for 'village,' is the name the Mexicans gave the sedentary, agricultural and for the most part peaceful native inhabitants of the Southwest.  They lived, and are still living, in houses made of stone or adobe, whether built into cliffs or not.  If not living in cliffs, they tended to settle atop of mesas for protection from their not so peaceful neighbors.  If Humbert wants to pedantically make a difference between the "cliff dwellings" they went to see in New Mexico and the "pueblo dwellings" visited in Arizona, that is if their Arizona pueblo ruins were not located in cliffs, Canyon de Chelly would not have been the most likely place to find them but rather Wupatki National Monument 38 mi NE of Flagstaff.  They must have passed it on US 89 on their way from Flagstaff to Dinosaur Canyon.  "Within the monument there are more than 800 ruins, some of them in good state of preservation.  Those built of red Moenkopi sandstone have weathered far better than the others ... One of the most impressive is Wupatki, Hopi word for 'Tall House,' containing more than 100 rooms which have been partially excavated and restored ... Most of the ruins were occupied from about 1100 to 1225 A.D." (AAA Western Tour Book, 1947).

25 – "a dinosaur track in a desert canyon, printed there thirty million years ago, when I was a child" (p.157).

¶ Dinosaur Canyon, c.68 mi N of Flagstaff, Arizona, in the Navajo and Hopi reservations.  It was featured in the AAA Western Tour Book<