Travels With David, pt. VIII

June 22, 2001: San Francisco, CA - Barstow

At dinner last night, David told me that when a friend of his applied for a temporary job at a video store in Chicago, he was asked whether he could count to 50.

"In multiple languages?" I asked. "Alternating forward and backward, with his eyes closed? In twos and threes? As a Fibonacci sequence?"

David shrugged: the implication was that merely counting in a forward direction, from one to 50, was a sufficient sign of mental agility to gain employment. Well, maybe I shouldn't be surprised: after all, long division was once a college subject.

I was reminded of David's story when I ordered room-service breakfast at the Fairmont Hotel this morning, prior to our departure. It's a simple request, the same every time: orange juice, oatmeal with any form of milk or cream, and black coffee with Sweet-and-Low. But it's always an ordeal: "Would you like whole milk, 2% milk, skim milk, or cream with your oatmeal, Mr. ... (pause, while the waiter tries desperately to read my name on the high-tech digital phone readout) ... Juurdan?"

"Whatever. I don't care."

"Well, you have to pick one. Would you like whole milk, 2% milk, ..."

"Yeah, I got it. Okay, 2% milk."

"Okay, thank you, Mr. ... ahhh ... Yardoon. And would you like milk or cream with your coffee?"

"Neither. Just Sweet-and-Low. Or if you don't have that, then 'Equal' will be fine."

"Yes, but would you like milk or cream with your coffee?"

Now, a reasonable person might ask why I don't give up at this point, and just let them deliver whatever they damn well please. Well, part of the reason is that I was brought up by Depression-era parents who believed that wasting food was a really bad thing. "Just think of all those starving children in India," they said to me solemnly, over and over again -- which created the impression, in my fertile little brain, that if I left some food untouched and uneaten, someone would immediately pick it up and sprint all the way to India, in order to feed two or three starving children who had been waiting patiently for such a delivery. Oddly enough, I still hold that belief, though I tell myself that it takes several indirect "pass-alongs" to get the uneaten and unspoiled food from my table to a hungry employee in the Fairmont Hotel, who will then be able to free up some food for someone else, who will ultimately set in motion a chain of events that will benefit a starving child somewhere, somehow. Don't tell me it's not true; I still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too.

The other reason I've learned to be finicky about placing room-service breakfast orders is that I've suffered the consequences of being too casual and good-natured: instead of getting orange juice, I end up with grapefruit juice, or tomato juice, or prune juice -- or no juice at all. Sometimes toast arrives with the meal, even though I haven't ordered it; sometimes the toast is buttered, sometimes it's not -- which isn't always obvious, because sometimes the toast is served with the buttered side up, and sometimes down. And the selection of jams, jellies, marmalade, and honey could fill an entire road-warrior journal entry of its own, which I'll save for another day. As for the oatmeal: it's one thing to end up with two different containers of whole milk, skim milk, 2% milk, and/or cream (neither of which is marked or otherwise distinguishable) ... but it's a real nuisance ending up with no milk for my oatmeal, presumably because the waitress decided that anyone stupid enough to want black coffee was probably eccentric enough to want "naked" oatmeal, too. There have been times when my oatmeal has arrived with no milk, but my coffee has been accompanied by half a dozen of those thimble-sized containers of ersatz "creamer," which I've been forced to pry open, one by one, in order to lubricate my oatmeal to the point where it doesn't stick like cement to the roof of my mouth. Ah, the travails of being a road-warrior; one can never let up one's vigil, not even for a moment. If you want to see how bad things can get, take a look at my September 18, 1995 road-warrior essay, "Road Warrior vs. The Hotel."

David has no such problems: he merely gets up when I call his room, wanders about in a zombie-like fashion until he's dressed and reasonably presentable, and then appears unfed at the front of the hotel. I figured that it might be a while before we were able to stop for a snack today, so I ordered a "box breakfast" from the hotel (which required another series of incoherent conversations with the room-service waiter) at an exorbitant price; David munched happily on two Danishes, an apple, a banana, and a bottle of Evian water as we negotiated our way down California Street to Van Ness, and along Van Ness to the entrance to highway 101. Traffic was extremely thick and slow-moving, and it gave me time to watch the pedestrians and tourists moving along the sidewalks and crosswalks. Interestingly, there were several unemployed people holding up signs, asking for donations; one of them must have been a dot-com techie, for his sign said, "Where did all the Java go?" I started to explain the double entendre to David, and then decided he probably wouldn't understand, and definitely wouldn't care.

Once on highway 101, we moved through San Francisco, past Daly City and the airport, and then down through the Silicon Valley corridor. I've driven this route dozens of times, on various business trips to the Bay area; I don't find any of it particularly distinguishable (though there are a couple of beautiful vistas on Interstate 280, taking a parallel path down toward San Jose). David doesn't seem particularly interested either, and I can't blame him. Meanwhile, he has turned on the CD player, and we're entertained by a group called Califone, with an album called Room Sounds.

Enjoying the music, I ask David: "Is this a new band, or an old band, or in between?"

"In between," he says. I decide to leave the details for some future conversation; whoever they are, the Caliphones produce enjoyable music, and I recommend them to other musically illiterate fathers.

Near Gilroy, we pull off the highway to fill up the gas tank and get a snack. The clock has just struck noon -- two hours to drive some 50 miles down 101! Sheesh! -- so I decide that it's okay to get a bottle of Diet Coke. Unless you're from Atlanta or Texas or some other part of Faulkner territory, you don't drink Coca-Cola, or any of its derivatives, before the clock strikes noon. It just isn't done. On the other hand, if you live in Atlanta, you probably sleep with a bottle of Coke under your pillow, so you'll enjoy the sensation of hot, fizzy soda when it slams against the back of your throat at breakfast. But I digress ... the point of this story is that the Gilroy Chevron gas-station snack-shop committed the unpardonable sin of running out of Diet Coke. Regular Coke and Cherry Coke were available, but for those of us who drink diet soft drinks, there was no choice but some weird new liquid from the Evil Empire (aka Pepsi-Cola) called "Pepsi One." Sighing with the resignation of a true martyr, I picked up a bottle, and trudged back to the car with David.

Off we went, to the accompaniment of Moon Pix, by Cat Power. I have to admit that Ms. Power (or Ms. Cat, if she prefers to be known that way) didn't do much for me, but she faded into the background as David and I discussed the intriguing details of a highway sign that we had seen on the highway: Gilroy, as it turns out, is the garlic capital of the world.

"Says who?" I asked David. "How does a rinky-dink little town like Gilroy manage to achieve world-class status in the area of garlic? Do you think they have an annual garlic contest, with towns from all over the world competing for top honors?"

"I suppose so," David replied, thinking for a moment that my question was serious. "You don't imagine that they would just make it up, do you?"

"Well, why not?" I said. "Maybe there's a list of cities that are the capital of this or that, and the Mayor of Gilroy happened to notice that nobody had claimed the rights to garlic capital-hood." I went on to inform him that Castroville, a little bit down the road on the little road connecting us from highway 101 to the coastal road near Monterey, was also famous: as I had first discovered as far back as 1969, Castroville is the artichoke capital of the world. I could just imagine the city fathers in Gilroy seething with envy; in desperation, they seized upon the garlic.

I'm not sure that David was convinced by the logic, but it didn't matter: we had passed both towns behind, and were now driving through Monterey, to the accompaniment of Elvis Costello, and a 21-track album called Armed Forces. Since we had a long drive ahead of us, I decided not to take him on the 17-mile drive around the Monterey Peninsula, which includes a tour through the Pebble Beach golf course. And when we got further down the road, I also decided not to take him down to the beach in Carmel; instead, we just kept on driving.

As we pulled out of Carmel, David switched the music to a group called Dirty Three, playing an instrumental album of soft, gentle music called Ocean Songs. It was perfect music for our entry into the fabulous Big Sur coastline, and it accompanied us for most of the 75-mile drive. The road was crowded, with long lines of cars, trucks, campers, and SUV's moving along in both directions. The winding roads tend to slow everyone down, and our progress was further slowed by numerous bicyclists bravely peddling up and down the steep hills and winding curves -- on roads that rarely had a shoulder area more than a couple feet wide.

We stopped briefly at the general store in the little village of Big Sur, picked up a sandwich, and then kept on driving. As I explained to David, on my first visit to Big Sur, it took me an entire day to drive from Carmel down to the far end, at Pismo Beach. I was only a few years older than David at the time, and I was stunned by the rugged beauty of the area; as a result, I stopped at every single turnout and vista point, and busily snapped dozens of photos. I spared David the annoyance of doing it again, and I'll spare you the tedium of looking at all those pictures; if you're interested, there's a section of of Big Sur photos in the photo section of my website.

At Pismo Beach, the terrain levels out, and traffic moves along much faster, down past San Simeon, Cambria, and Morro Bay. We were heading for San Luis Obispo, which took a long time to reach; in the meantime, David played two albums that we had heard a full week ago: Lambchop's What Another Man Spills, and The Lilys' Selected Hits. I raised my eyebrows at the prospect of listening to the same music a second time during our trip; I had been warned that we might spend the final day listening to the "best of the best" of his 48 selections, but I didn't think I would have to endure it today.

"We didn't hear the whole album last time," was David's explanation. Okay, good enough. Whatever ... a man who can endure oatmeal with no milk, and a Gilroy Chevron station with no Diet Coke, can surely endure listening to the same album twice within a week.

Meanwhile, the drive went on ... and on ... and on. When the Lilys finally finished singing whatever it was they were singing, David turned the CD player off, and drifted off for a short nap, while I navigated our way into the town of San Luis Obispo. From there, we had to reverse course briefly, traveling north on highway 101 to Santa Margarita (no, not Margaritaville; just plain old Margarita), where we picked up highway 58 heading east toward McKittrick, Buttonwillow, and Bakersfield. We hadn't decided, at this point, whether to stop at Bakersfield, or continue on to Barstow in order to shorten tomorrow's final drive back to Albuquerque.

In many ways, the 90-mile drive from Santa Margarita to McKittrick was the strangest and most bizarre of any part of this trip; I'm still struggling to find adequate words to describe it. If you look at a map, you'll see that we were only about 150 miles north of Los Angeles at this point; and remember, this is a state with 34 million residents, so you would expect to see McDonald's and Taco Bells, gas stations and car dealerships, everywhere you go in the state. But this stretch of road was empty, desolate, lonely beyond words. We were warned by a small sign a couple miles out of Santa Margarita, as the road turned north into the hills of the Los Padres National Forest: "no services for 86 miles," it said. And the sign wasn't kidding: there wasn't a gas station, deli, grocery store, post office, movie theater, or any other commercial establishment for 86 blankety-blank long miles. Occasionally, huge power lines snaked over a set of hills, and disappeared off behind some other hills; but for the most part, there was nothing but empty land, with deserted farm houses, rusted out sheds, and old cars sitting among weeds. There was occasional evidence of life and activity -- we passed a big spread called the Panza Ranch somewhere along the way, and an occasional field where the golden-colored grass had been cut, baled, and stacked into huge piles. But for the most part, it reminded me of the scenes from Grapes of Wrath: it was almost as if a thriving region in the 1930s had run out of energy and prosperity, and had simply withered away.

Part of it may also have had to do with the oil industry: as we came to the end of the long drive, we began to see small oil drilling rigs in the fields. Dozens of them, but all sitting silently, defunct. And the tiny village of McKittrick was equally defunct: maybe it, too, had thrived in an earlier era, but it now consisted of a general store on one side of the street, and a tavern on the other side. No gas station, no restaurant, no movie theater; a few trailer homes off in the surrounding brush may have accounted for the official population of about 150 people, but there was almost no sign of life, aside from the Chinese family that operated the general store.

Among the snacks offered by the general store were fried burritos and egg rolls; but the egg rolls were all gone, and so were the Diet Cokes. Sheesh! Another Pepsi One! Well, it wasn't worth making a fuss about it; neither David nor I have any immediate plans to return to McAllister, and we still had enough gas to get to Bakersfield. So off we went again, for the final 40-odd miles to Bakersfield. And as we drove, we watched the thermometer slowly climb: it had been in the high 60s along the Big Sur coast line, then up to the mid 90s as we traversed the hills between Santa Margarita and McKittrick. But by the time we reached Bakersfield, it was 104 degrees.

Bakersfield struck both of us as an ugly, sprawling city; and while we had to stop for gas and a quick bite to eat, we had no interest in spending the night there, and quickly decided that it was worth driving another 136 miles to reach Barstow. David saw a road sign claiming that Bakersfield has a population of 254,000 people; I assume that most of them actually want to live there, though David pointed out that many of them simply don't know any better. In any case, the city serves both the oil industry and the agricultural industry: oil drilling and refining apparatus was apparent on the edges of town, and vast fields of pecan trees and other crops lined both sides of the road before and after the city.

Picking up a quick burrito in the drive-through window of Taco Bell, we switch driving assignments, and David navigates us out the eastern end of Bakersfield, and onto the continuation of highway 58. The landscape is pleasant: gentle rolling hills, golden fields with contented cattle; a ranch entrance proclaims that it is the Tejon Ranch, and that it has been operated continuously since 1843.

And then, as we round a bend in the road, a most unexpected sight appears near Tehachapi Pass, at an altitude of 4,035 feet: rows and rows of white, glistening wind turbines, spinning slowly in the gentle wind. It's very hard to see them clearly in a tiny picture; but if you click on the thumb-nail to the left, you'll see a larger photo that should give you a good idea of what they look like. (Actually, it's amazing that the photo is visible at all, since I took it from an open window of the car, as David sped along at 70 mph.)

As David said to me, the turbine blades were almost hypnotic, spinning slowly in the final glow of the setting sun. As such, they were much more peaceful than another hillside of spinning turbine blades situated along Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Los Angeles, at the San Gorgonio Pass -- where there are thousands of windmill turbines, at the bottom of the pass and snaking up the hills and ridges, lined up to catch every breath of the wind that blows off the ocean, through the pass, and on into the desert. The wind turbines there are like a vast armada of seagulls all flapping their wings and taking flight simultaneously -- not just ten or twenty, but rows upon rows, hundreds upon hundreds, of white three-bladed propellers spinning, whirling and twirling like pinwheels in the sunshine. When I first saw the San Gorgonio wind turbines, nearly 10 years ago, I thought it was absolutely the most breath-taking sight I had ever seen; and maybe one would have the same impression here at Tehachapi Pass if the wind was blowing more strongly.

But in any case, we're up over the pass, down the other side, and on our way through the little town of Mojave. An enormously long train snakes its way past us -- so long that it has three locomotives in the middle of the string of cars, and two more locomotives at the end. Edwards Air Force Base appears on our left, along with a small mobile-home village presumably occupied by scientists and military personnel working at the base. As the dusk slowly deepened, David turned on the headlights -- something we haven't yet had to do on this trip -- and navigated us along the last 20 miles of Highway 58 to the town of Barstow. There were no hotels on the highway itself, so we took the Main Street exit, headed north into town, and stopped at a Holiday Inn Express for the night.

And thus ends our next-to-last day of the trip. It's always a treat to see the Big Sur coastline, and I don't think I'll ever forget the empty, forlorn countryside between Santa Margarita and McKittrick. All in all, it was a very good day. Thank you, David.

Continue with pt. IX of this series ...