Roads From the Ashes Page 7

  We soon found ourselves driving into a cluster of buildings that looked more genuinely mining-related than Columbia’s mummified main street. “I bet this was a real Gold Rush ranch,” said Mark. “Cool.”

  Mark was ready to award the Mother Lode Trailer Resort an extra star by the time we managed to park. He not only had to use four-wheel drive, he had to do it in reverse up a steep hill. We were teetering off the edge of a fifteen-foot bluff when we were done, and we’d aroused the interest of every other resident in the park. We’d become fast friends with the manager, whose vigorous arm signals narrowly prevented the Phoenix from taking flight.

  We settled in, which was still an awkward process for a couple of greenhorns. Leveling the truck required a serious yelling match, and Mark called me a harsh word that wounded my pride. I retaliated with a killing remark and quickly retired inside before I could be broadsided with another salvo of invective. I opened the refrigerator door, and a dozen eggs leapt out and smashed on the floor. I swore. My mood improved, however, when I looked out the window and caught sight of Mark waltzing with a recalcitrant sewer hose. Ah, this is the life, I thought. Free, easy, and above all, romantic.

  It was getting dark when we finally sat down to a surly cup of tea. We sipped silently. Suddenly, swelling on the breeze, came a low wail. It got louder. “What is that?” asked Mark. “A sick cow?” Then a melody joined the blend, and, “Bagpipes!” I exclaimed. ‘“That’s ‘Scotland the Brave!’” The piper droned his way through three verses and then followed up with the “Skye Boat Song.” When he launched into “Amazing Grace,” Mark said, “Let’s go find out who’s behind this.”

  It didn’t take long to find the lungs behind the tunes. They belonged to a retired Puget Sound ship pilot from Seattle who’d even donned a kilt for the occasion. He kept up his highland serenade for an hour or so, invited us to come back the next day for more, and retired to his trailer. The moon had risen by the time Mark and I headed back towards the Phoenix.

  As we passed the office, the manager who had so assiduously prevented us from taking a header over the cliff came out to meet us. “I hope the bagpipes didn’t bother you,” he said.

  “Oh, no, of course not,” I said. “They may well have saved our marriage.”

  “Uh, good, I guess,” said the manager uncertainly. “The first day he did that, I didn’t know whether to applaud him or evict him. Fortunately, nobody has complained. I asked him to keep his concerts early and short.” He paused and shook his head. “You have no idea what it takes to manage a place like this,” he said. “You have no idea.”

  Before we left, he invited us to come back later. “I build a campfire every night right out here,” he said gesturing toward a large metal ring. “Sometimes we sing, sometimes we tell jokes, and sometimes we just sit and watch the fire.”

  We thanked him and walked back up to the Phoenix One’s perch. I don’t remember going to bed or falling asleep, but the next thing I knew, it was morning.

  Sanitarium in the Trees

  When I woke up, I was still feeling a little glum, in spite of the bagpipes. Real life on real wheels was turning out to be work, and it was straining the adhesive of my marriage. I went outside and sat at the rickety picnic table next to the Phoenix.

  “It seems like the only things we ever say to each other are ‘excuse me’ and ‘get out of my way,”’ I thought out loud. “We spend all our time bumping into each other.”

  It was true. The Phoenix is eight-and-a-half feet wide, which means that the available width for movement inside is no more than seven in the widest parts and less than three in the narrowest. There’s room to get around, but you have to cancel any feelings you might have about “personal space.” I was beginning to feel like I was on a perpetual commute in a Tokyo subway.

  Outside, the air was cool and still, and a squirrel scolded me from the branch of an oak tree. “I hate you for bringing that dog!” he screamed. “Hate you, hate you, hate you!”

  I sipped my coffee from a stainless steel mug my father had given me. “It’ll keep your coffee nice and hot,” he’d said. My coffee was stone cold.

  I might have wallowed in self-pity for hours, but I was interrupted by the arrival of a tall woman with strong calves and a direct manner. She was walking up the hill with a newspaper, and she stopped in front of me.

  “I watched you arrive last night,” she said. “That was quite a show.”

  I smiled weakly. “Glad you enjoyed it,” I said. Now go away, I thought.

  “Your truck is amazing,” she continued. “What is it?”

  I told her, and she continued to ask questions. As we talked, my mood rose ever so slightly. “Would you like to come inside?” I asked at last.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” said the woman. “By the way, my name’s Shane.” She gave my hand a firm shake.

  Shane and I stepped into the Phoenix, where Mark was doing something violent with a pair of pliers and a hose connection. Marvin was thrilled to have a visitor. I showed Shane around.

  “Would you like to see my rig?” she asked when I’d finished the tour. People who own RVs always call their vehicles “rigs,’” I was beginning to learn.

  “Sure,” I said. “Lead the way.”

  I walked with Shane up the hill, and as we passed other trailers and motorhomes, she started telling me about the permanent denizens of the Mother Lode Trailer Resort.

  “That’s Cheryl’s rig,” she said, pointing to a vehicle that was only a little larger than a minivan. “She lives there with a Great Dane, if you can believe it. She used to be a television producer, but she came down with leukemia. She chucked her L.A. life and came here. She’s been in remission a year now.”

  We continued walking up the road that ran around the perimeter of the grounds. “And that’s Don’s place,” Shane said as we walked by an old silver Airstream trailer. He’s lived here forever, or at least since way before I arrived. He’s a survivor, too. He lost a leg to bone cancer.”

  At last we arrived at Shane’s “rig,” a new-looking motor home with a row of geraniums out front. A woman was watering one of them with a sprinkling can.

  “This is Louanne,” said Shane. “My roommate.”

  Louanne, it turned out, was another of the Mother Lode’s survivors. She’d been diagnosed with cancer on her thirty-fifth birthday, and had spent the last two years in and out of treatment programs, surgery, and chemotherapy.

  “We came here from San Francisco,” said Shane. “We’d been here a month before we realized what a sanitarium it is. For whatever reason, this place seems to attract people who need to heal.”

  I walked back down the hill to the Phoenix, where I could see Mark taking a whack at something on the picnic table with a big rubber mallet. Even from a distance, I could tell he was angry. “What are we doing here?” I asked out loud. “We’re not sick.” But then again, maybe we were. Maybe not in the way Cheryl and Don and Louanne were, but somehow in need of solace just the same. Our pipe dream had met reality with a thud. Our rainbow seemed to be ending in a quagmire. We’d dreamed of glorious horizons, but all we were finding were tacks in the road. We stayed at the Mother Lode Trailer Resort for almost two weeks, resting among the oak trees. We took Marvin for long walks in the hills. If we didn’t stop bickering, we at least became quieter. The bagpiper played every day at sunset, and Shane came by to chat.

  The manager came by, too, nearly every day. He’d noticed our computers, and he had a lot of questions. “How does e-mail work?” he asked. “What’s the Internet? What’s America Online?” Finally, I said, “You know, Jim, I can answer your questions, or I can show you. Why don’t I show you?”

  Virtual Diggings

  Jim led me to an old lean-to next to the office. Inside, a chain saw was leaning against one wall, and I nearly tripped over a stack of dusty two-by-fours and a wheelbarrow. Jim pulled the string
on a naked lightbulb dangling from a rafter.

  “It’s not fancy, but there’s a desk in here,” said Jim. Sure enough, a thick piece of plywood formed a counter across one end of the shed. A leather chair that had once been grand enough for a big city banker sat nearby. “And there’s a telephone line.”

  “Those are the magic words, Jim,” I said. “I’ll go get my computer.”

  Twenty minutes later, the light from my laptop’s screen bathed two faces in a dim glow. The modem dialed, hissed, and beeped. I’d been navigating in cyberspace for two whole weeks, and suddenly, I was an expert. For an hour, I showed Jim everything I knew about the virtual universe.

  Jim was an avid pupil, and by the time we left Columbia, he’d picked my brain clean. He thanked me profusely, but I said, “Jim, I learned as much as I taught.”

  It was true. There in that Gold Rush shack, I began to see the first glimmer of the tantalizing possibilities the Internet held.

  “Can I send a message to someone in another country?” asked Jim. “Does my computer have to be on for them to get it?”

  They were simple questions, the same ones being asked by people everywhere that year. The answers were simple, too, but as they steeped in my brain, I began to fathom their profundity. Sitting there in the dusky light, I was an assayer, no different from those who swarmed California in the wake of breathless announcements from Sutter’s Mill. My virtual diggings glinted with something more important than fool’s gold.

  “I love how we’re joining the Gold Rush of the nineties in Columbia,” I said to Mark. “I’ve always liked a good metaphor.”

  “Well, I like metaphors, too,” said Mark, “And yes, it’s awfully charming. As I see it, though, we’re still like the dreamers who never left Ohio. We still don’t know how to make that damn black box work with the cellular phone.”

  The black box, my nemesis. Mark was right. I still hadn’t the slightest idea how to get the thing to work.

  Loving the Cliff Side

  Nowhere in the world have glaciers done a better sculpting job than Yosemite. I heard a Swiss man say once that he didn’t want to bother visiting Yosemite Valley because it couldn’t be any more beautiful than the Alps. “But the tour I took went there anyway, and I am glad it did. I was awed.”

  Yosemite is a huge U-shaped bowl carved out of granite by eons of sliding ice. To get inside it, you have to drive over Tioga Pass at the eastern end or across Crane Flat on the west. The weather outside the valley has little to do with what you’ll find inside. Yosemite is a separate universe, and its glory varies spectacularly by season.

  When I was in college in Southern California, I signed up for a botany class to fulfill a science requirement. It was a great choice, because the professor believed in field trips. One day in October, I joined fifty classmates in a large bus. We headed north for Yosemite, laughing and talking all the way.

  The bus crawled up Highway 140 from Mariposa. We were still telling jokes as we approached the summit, still chattering as the bus began its slow descent. Suddenly, the valley opened up in front of us. As a body, we were struck dumb. The valley floor was a rippling sea of brilliant yellow. We had caught Yosemite’s maple trees in their brief metamorphosis from green to bare. We spent the weekend in an autumnal wonderland.

  “It takes a lot to shut a busload of college students up,” I said to Mark as we drove north. “I wonder what we’ll find there this time of year.” It was late April.

  We had driven south from Columbia, and caught Highway 120 west through Chinese Camp. As we gained altitude, snow lurked in the shadows. As we continued to climb, the snow emerged into the sunlight in larger patches. Low ridges of dirty snow lined both sides of the road. “It doesn’t look like it’s snowed here for a while,” said Mark. “This is probably the worst of it.”

  We crawled on. “Was that a snowflake?” I asked suddenly. “Yes!” I answered myself as a dozen more bounced off the windshield. “It’s not like it’s really snowing, though,” I added. “It’s just a tiny flurry. I think it’s blowing off the trees.”

  A dozen more flakes swirled by, and a dozen more. “I hate to tell you this, Meg, but it’s really snowing,” said Mark. And it was. Snow whirled across our windshield, and now it was sticking to the trees. More and more flakes hit the black pavement in front of us, dancing and sliding and piling up in little drifts.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said as the snow fell softly in the sunlight. And it was. Soon the road was white, and the branches of the fir trees bent down under sparkling coats.

  “It’s not stopping,” said Mark. “And the pattern of the snowfall on the windshield is mesmerizing. I have to concentrate to keep my attention on the road.”

  I looked ahead. It was dark, even though it wasn’t yet two o’clock, and Mark turned on the headlights. The snow was silent, but it was hitting our windshield relentlessly. Caught in our lights, each flake looked like a tiny star, and as we moved forward, it was like driving into a meteor shower.

  “Should we stop?” I asked, but it was a stupid question. We were on a two-lane road with no shoulders. A mountain rose on our left, and on our right was an apparently bottomless drop-off. Mark shifted into four-wheel drive, and we pushed on.

  The snow formed a thick carpet and crunched under our wheels. We made slow progress. I had long before stopped commenting on the pristine beauty of our surroundings. I was on the cliff side. I wasn’t enjoying it.

  Suddenly headlights flashed around the curve ahead of us, reflecting on the falling snow. A pickup truck appeared, and, startled, Mark let up on the gas too fast. Because we were in four-wheel drive, this had roughly the same effect as hitting the brakes. The back end lost traction and slid sideways, and the Phoenix, all seven-and-a-half tons of her, slid inexorably toward the truck in front of us. Our headlights lit up the face of its driver. His eyes were all whites, and his mouth was open. He skidded to a stop, and watched in horror as the Phoenix continued on its unplanned trajectory. Six inches short of crushing in his front end, we struck the side of the mountain with a muffled thud.

  The driver of the pickup truck quickly regained his composure and his traction and inched around us. I thought we might be permanently embedded in the mountainside, but we backed up easily and continued into the storm. “No harm done,” said Mark. “Except to my fingernails,” I replied.

  We crawled on, and the cliff seemed closer and darker and more threatening at every turn. “What if we’d skidded the other way?” I kept asking myself. But I didn’t ask Mark. I knew he would have said, “We’re here, aren’t we? What’s your problem?”

  My problem was simple. I was still in the habit of enjoying adventure only as long as it wasn’t adventurous. I sighed. “Can’t have it both ways,” I thought. “It’s this or spend the rest of my life at Disneyland pretending. I guess it’s time to start loving the cliff side.”

  Then, and I can’t say I was disappointed, the cliff switched to the left, and we started descending. The snow still whirled around us, but the sky was lighter. We continued, and suddenly the sun broke through. The snow vanished, and the valley, clear, green, and lovely, lay before us. “But what’s that white down there?” asked Mark. “It almost looks like snow, but . . .”

  It was the dogwoods. Bare of leaves, they were covered in delicate, translucent white blossoms. There were hundreds of them scattered across the fresh green meadows, their branches swaying gently in the breeze, their blossoms dancing and shimmering in the sunlight. We stopped. We got out. We stood and looked in silence. Once again, Yosemite had struck its visitors dumb.

  The Black Box Speaks

  The first thing we saw in Susanville was an elephant. He was standing in a pen by the side of the highway, deftly twirling hay into his trunk and stuffing it into his mouth. He was a small elephant, a teenager perhaps, but still about a thousand pounds of pachyderm more than we expected to encounter outside this
Gold Rush crossroads on Highway 395 northeast of Sacramento.

  We proceeded down Main Street, and the second thing we noticed was Radio Shack. A franchise electronics store is generally less noteworthy than an elephant, but if you have a mission to make your modem work with a cellular telephone, such places rise in importance.

  I’d heard a rumor that Radio Shack had once sold an item called an acoustic coupler, which, as far as I could tell, was basically a hearing aid for a modem. It was a concept I could understand, a refreshing hardware solution to an irritating software problem. I was sick of the silent black box whose idiom defied me. “Let’s stop,” I said. “If they have an acoustic coupler, we can forget cellular and log on by pay phone anywhere in the world.” We turned left into the parking lot and parked at the back where we could fill up two spaces without causing a traffic jam. As we walked towards the store, Mark said, “I just realized something. My driver’s license is about to expire.” His fortieth birthday was looming large.

  Driver’s license renewal strikes dread into the hearts of most Californians. This is because most Californians live in population-dense places, and most of that population seems to spend most of its time waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where most of the staff has forgotten how to smile.

  “Well, at least you remembered while we’re still in California,” I said. We were hard on the Nevada border and heading for Oregon. “Otherwise you might have had to qualify from scratch in foreign territory.”

  “That might be preferable to California DMV purgatory,” said Mark, “But now that I’ve remembered, I might as well do it here.”

  “Okay,” I said, “But first, let’s see if we can achieve our grail at Radio Shack.”