Roads From the Ashes Page 6

  We were closing in on Kettleman City, another tiny town whose economy had been boosted by the arrival of a major highway. “Well,” I said, we missed Highway 46, which is the usual way to cut over to Paso Robles and Highway 101, but there’s this other road, Route 41. It’s marked as a scenic road, and it passes Orchard Peak, which is 3,125 feet tall. Think that’ll give you enough of a thrill?”

  “I’ve never been on that road,” said Mark, who had traveled many such byways during his tenure as a firefighter for the Forest Service. “Let’s do it.”

  We made the turn onto a two-lane road that rose into low hills. After three miles or so I caught sight of a sign. “RVs and Trailers Not Recommended,” it read.

  “We’re an RV,” I said.

  “We have four-wheel-drive,” said Mark.

  “But what if it’s too twisty, or too narrow, or. . .”

  “That sign was for Winnebagos and those huge house trailers. The Forest Service drives trucks up there, so we’ll be fine.”

  I sighed. We were well past the sign now, anyway, and Mark was in the grip of four-wheel fever. So far the road looked perfectly ordinary. Maybe the sign was for the overly cautious, or people who couldn’t steer well.

  We continued to climb, and, was it my imagination? The lanes seemed a little narrower. Mark took the Phoenix around a curve or two, and I looked over the drop-off on my side. This wasn’t four-wheeling territory, but it was a road where you had to pay attention to turns. “Slow down,” I said to myself, knowing that if I said it out loud, I’d be treated to a burst of acceleration.

  The road got narrower. The turns got sharper. Mark had no choice but to slow down. “Maybe the sign was right,” I thought, but it was too late to turn back, and it was pointless to verbalize the obvious.

  We rounded a bend near what seemed to be the summit of the ridge we were climbing. Headed straight at us and half in our lane was a fire truck bearing the logo of the California Division of Forestry. Behind the wheel was a fireman with an open mouth. He screeched to a halt, and we inched around each other. He kept the baffled look the whole time.

  It was the first time we’d surprised someone in isolated country, but it wouldn’t be the last. We didn’t know it then, but that baffled look would become a familiar sight. It meant, “Who are those guys? What is that truck? What are they doing out here?” If you drive a vehicle with NASA looks, you come to expect it.

  Our back end hung out over a few more cliffs as we wound our way down to join Highway 46. The road had been a beginning lesson in the Phoenix One’s strengths and limitations. Yes, it could climb hills and navigate corners, but no, it couldn’t handle curves like a jeep. The wheel base was just too long, and no amount of four-wheeling can provide traction on a wheel that’s spinning in mid-air.

  Even though he never got to shift into four-wheel-drive, Mark was happy with our little detour. I think he liked the look on the fireman’s face. I was happy to be back on a flat road, with asphalt under all six wheels. We headed north on Highway 101, and cut over to the coast at Salinas.

  Pizza at the Edge of the Continent

  Is there a more idyllic city than Santa Cruz? Tucked between the mountains to the east and crashing waves to the west, its cool, moist air is the favorite atmosphere of coast redwood trees. There are always flowers blooming outdoors in Santa Cruz. It’s a natural greenhouse for begonias, fuchsias, peonies — all those soft, hard-to-grow flowers the romantics immortalized in lavish still-life paintings.

  Santa Cruz was hit by a serious earthquake in 1989, and the downtown section, which was full of old, unreinforced masonry buildings, was badly damaged. Now, nearly five years later, the cracks and sadness were gone, and the main street buzzed with the latest in espresso bars and New Age cuisine.

  Four disgruntled cats met us at Mark’s brother’s house. We located the front door key, went inside, and served them dinner. We sat down on the living room couch.

  “I’m tired,” said Mark. He had good reason. After we’d descended to the coast by way of the twisty mountain road, something had gone wrong with the Phoenix One’s electrical system. The alternator had failed, and Mark had kept the engine running by using an emergency switch that allowed him to draw power from the coach batteries. It was a serious problem, but one whose solution would have to wait until daylight.

  “I’m exhausted, too,” I answered. We sat there a while, silent in our weariness. How could we have guessed it would be such a chore to start a new life?

  In the last five months, we’d excised ourselves from a routine we’d practiced for twenty years, a way of life we’d known since childhood. It was done in a second, when we pulled out of a driveway in Pasadena, but it had taken a hundred and fifty days to get to that moment.

  I was beginning to understand how different our journey was from a trip with a planned itinerary. Those trips have a beginning and an end, a day when you leave, and a day you know you’ll go back. We’d had our departure, but we had no back. We had no plan beyond feeding the cats and finding out what was wrong with our alternator. The only other ghost of a scheme was the list we’d made of all the places and people we’d marked on the map we’d hung in the living room of our rented cottage. It was somewhere in the Phoenix, but I couldn’t say where.

  I’d never taken an open-ended trip before. I’d always planned them out, tied them up neatly before I left with a return ticket or a drop-dead date for being back at work. And now, here I was, a character from a fairy tale. I was going out to seek my fortune, wherever that might take me.

  “You know, it’s kind of like the difference between Denny’s and a greasy spoon,” I said out loud. “At Denny’s, you look at a slick color menu, and photographs show you exactly what your hamburger will look like. If it doesn’t, you can complain. This trip’s more like a greasy spoon in a small town. You have no idea what you’ll get or who’ll be sitting next to you. It may be awful, it may be great. You take your chances. ”

  “Speaking of greasy spoons,” said Mark, “I’m hungry. But I’m too tired to go anywhere.” He got up and went into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open.

  g“You won’t believe this,” he called. “Lynette left us a homemade pizza. It’s all ready to stick into the oven.” I smiled. Lynette was a fabulous cook, and somehow, she’d found the time to make us a pizza when she was getting herself and three kids ready to leave for Hawaii.

  And so we ate well that first night on the road, and we slept well, too. We needed to. Mark had to find out what was wrong with the Phoenix One’s electrical system, and I had a newspaper column to file. I had six days to learn to drive in cyberspace.

  RTFM

  It’s a good thing fax machines came along when they did. They became ubiquitous faster than any technology in the last couple of decades, and they made great training wheels for prospective cyber-surfers. My deal with my editor was that I’d use e-mail to file my columns, but until I could figure out how to do it, he’d accept them by fax.

  I was eager to be cutting edge, but because I had no background in Internet technology, culture, or jargon, the easiest way for me to begin to grasp what “online” meant was to pull out one of the free disks America Online had provided me with. I knew about CompuServe, but their “starter kit” cost $20. AOL was already in my hands, and the label said I’d get ten free hours just for trying it. Like thousands and thousands of other would-be cybernauts that year, I took the path of least resistance. I turned on my laptop and slid the disk into its floppy drive.

  It didn’t work. I installed the software, followed the directions for obtaining a local access number, and logged on. My modem dialed, emitted a stream of static, and beeped. America Online’s main menu appeared on my screen, and my cursor metamorphosed into an hourglass. I waited half an hour, but nothing happened. Finally my whole system froze, and I had to shut everything down and start over. I did this seven times.

/>   America Online had a toll-free number to call if you needed help, but even back then, when the membership had yet to break the million mark, you had to wait nearly an hour “on hold.” If you were patient enough, you’d finally hear a human voice.

  “Hello, this is Robert. How may I help you?”

  “When I log onto America Online, I get an interminable hourglass, and then my system crashes.”

  “What kind of modem do you have?”

  “It’s an Intel PCMCIA card.”

  “Well, it should work.”

  “Well, it doesn’t.”

  “Well, you may need to reinstall Windows.”

  “Reinstall Windows?”

  “Yes. That’s all I can suggest.”

  “Well, OK, I’ll try that.”

  And I did try that, which was tantamount to erasing my whole hard drive. I turned my fancy little laptop into a paperweight in five minutes and a dozen key strokes.

  With the help of the consultant from whom we’d purchased the computer, Saint Wes Ferrari, my laptop was restored to functionality. We had to ship the thing to Pasadena, and he sent it back, good as new. My equanimity was also restored, but not before I learned the second of computerland’s two golden rules.

  The first rule is Back Up, and I had already had enough experience to know its importance. If you’re diligent about making extra copies of everything on your hard drive, you really can “back up” if you find you’ve gone forward a little too recklessly. When I erased my hard drive, I didn’t lose anything permanently, not even my high scores in electronic backgammon.

  The second rule was new to me: RTFM. RTFM means “Read the F—ing Manual.” The reason the rule is necessary is that nobody wants to do this, and few people ever do. They’d rather call some poor overworked AOL operator who’s sick to death of dealing with frustrated non-nerds who don’t know a byte from a baud rate. The reason they’d rather wait an hour on hold than read the manual has nothing to do with their ability to obtain information from a written source. It’s that prose crafted by a computer wizard is nasty stuff, and slogging through it is worse than a trek though a crocodile-infested mangrove swamp. Really, software manuals are harder to decipher than Beowulf, and they put the reader into a worse mood than Grendel’s mother’s.

  Nonetheless, it was RTFM that finally got me online. I’d slip into something comfortable, pour myself a glass of Chardonnay, and read, whether I could understand or not. It was slow, arduous going, but by hook and crook, by bit and piece, by tooth and toenail, I finally clawed out a serviceable metaphor and a working vocabulary for what was going on behind all my pointing and clicking. I’d created my own version of a Frankenstein monster, but it served me well enough to construct gibberish sentences in modem language that allowed it to recognize static, log on to America Online, send and retrieve e-mail, and play trivia in a “chat room.” I’d finally entered the nineties, only four years after they started.

  I couldn’t rest on my laurels. In spite of my progress, I had not achieved the goal I’d had in mind when I started out. A mute black box was still attached by Velcro to the wall above the Phoenix One’s desk. I still had no idea how to instruct it to cooperate with my modem and send e-mail via cellular telephone. I tried a dozen times with not even the tiniest shred of success. The machines would hiss at each other, I’d be charged for a call, and no information was exchanged. It would frustrate me so violently that Mark and Marvin would flee any time I suggested I might try again.

  I was still using a fax machine to file my stories, and even though I’d come a long way in a short time, I was morose. “I don’t think it’ll ever work,” I lamented to Mark, and no one I asked had any ideas. Even RTFM didn’t help. The black box didn’t have a manual. And so it sat, mysterious and silent, tantalizing and useless. I needed help before I went bald. Where was a deus ex machina when I needed one?

  A Cup of Tea and Nothing

  From Santa Cruz, we headed north through San Francisco and then west out to the Point Reyes Peninsula. Easterners think California has no seasons, but an unmistakable spring was emerging around us, complete with baby birds and tender green grass.

  We stopped at a private campground near the coast. It enjoyed a delightful location along a stream, and was obviously a destination of choice for families on summer vacation. This time of year, however, the grounds were populated by permanent residents and overnight visitors like us.

  A man and a woman were inside the office. The man said, “What is that thing?” and pointed through the window at the Phoenix. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I thought I’d seen them all.” Mark explained, and after we’d signed up for a camping space, he asked if they’d like to see inside. “Sure,” they answered in unison, and we trooped out to the parking lot.

  “What kind of engine does she have?” the man asked Mark, and the two disappeared under the hood. I invited the woman inside.

  “Wow,” she said. “Wow. This is my dream. I live here in a trailer, but it doesn’t move. I dream of the day I can travel.” Her eyes took in everything. “Wow,” she said again. “You’re really doing it.” I showed her the back room, the office. She ran her hand over the desk. “Wow. What a perfect place to write. I’m a writer. I always notice desks.”

  She fell silent as her eyes traveled from floor to ceiling. She seemed to be memorizing every detail. “Wow,” she whispered. “Wow.”

  Suddenly she gave herself a little shake and said, “Gosh, I’m sorry. I really got lost in my thoughts. Thank you for inviting me in. When you’re all set up, why don’t you come over to my trailer? We can have a cup of tea.” Before I could reply, she added, “I’ll come knock on your door in an hour or so.” She stretched out her hand. “My name’s Cherie, by the way.”

  True to her word, Cherie arrived at the Phoenix an hour later. We walked across the grass toward a row of trailers. Some were huge and new, some were tiny and old. Cherie’s was a little one surrounded by red geraniums and two large propane tanks. It looked as though it hadn’t rolled in at least a decade.

  Inside was a cozy nest just big enough for one. A cat was curled in an armchair, and every nook was filled with a book or a potted plant. A tiny desk stood near the door, and the tea kettle was beginning to whistle on the two-burner stove. “Do you like almond tea?” she asked. “My favorite,” I said.

  “I’ve written a book,” said Cherie as she moved the cat and invited me to sit down. “Would you like to see it?”

  “Sure,” I said, and she opened a box under the desk. She handed me a small volume with a pen-and-ink drawing on the cover. The title was “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” I said out loud.

  “Nothing,” said Cherie, and she laughed. “Yep, it’s a book about nothing.”

  And it was indeed a book about nothing. As we drank our tea, Cherie explained how she’d gotten to a point in her life where she’d lost Everything, which meant, of course, that she had Nothing. “I suddenly realized that Nothing was Something in its own right,” she said, “And I started working on the book.” I turned the pages, and the drawings were as important as the words. I sat there, let my tea get cold, and read the whole thing.

  “Wow,” I said at last. “Wow.” It was wonderful.

  Cherie and I sat in her little trailer until the sun went down. Two days later, when we left, she said, “Happy Trails!” I never got her last name. I’ve never seen Nothing in a book store.

  I like to think that Cherie is on the road somewhere, living her dream. Wherever she is, I’m glad our paths crossed that April afternoon. I’m especially grateful for what she gave me, a cup of tea and Nothing.

  Chapter 5

  A State of Amazing Grace

  Camping With the Forty-Niners

  If you’re looking for a real gold mining town of forty-niner vintage, Columbia, California, is the closest you can get. It’s tucked into the
foothills near Yosemite, and since it never burned completely down or became completely deserted, it never had the chance to become a ghost town.

  The cosmetic surgery Columbia has received since it became a state park in 1945 has successfully pickled the main street. It’s like a piece of beef jerky, a carefully preserved strip that has lost the juice of its former glory without giving up any flavor. The streets aren’t dusty any more, and mad Chinese cooks no longer chase little boys with butcher knives. You have to read about things like that in the visitors’ center. Then you can sit on a bench on the sidewalk and chew on the images. Sure enough, the essence emerges, and it’s not hard to imagine what it must have been like in the days when the miners lived in tents while they worked feverishly to remove 87 million dollars’ worth of gold from the hills nearby. You have to look past the yellow school buses and the sign in the candy store window that says, “Only four students may enter at a time.” Columbia is the field trip destination of choice for California history teachers, a fact that arouses mixed feelings among the town merchants.

  We went to Columbia because Mark had a friend who lived there. “He probably won’t be there, because he spends most of his time rafting on rivers in Idaho,” Mark explained. He was right. The friend was gone, and we looked in our thick new campground guide to find a place to stay.

  “The Mother Lode Trailer Resort sounds pretty good,” I said as we headed north away from the town center. I was still getting used to reading the abbreviations and deciphering the icons in the guide. “It seems to have everything we might want.” This was well before we learned that the most important things about campgrounds are the ones the guidebooks never tell you.