stretch of chain-link fence. The Space Shuttle lands at Edwards, and Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier there, so it's really quite a hotshot place, but from the highway I couldn't see anything at all-no planes, no hangars, just mile after mile of tall chain-link fence.
Beyond the little town of Mojave, the desert ended and the landscape erupted in smooth hills and citrus groves. I crossed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carries water from northern Cali fornia to Los Angeles, fifty miles to the south. Even out here the city's smog was threaded through the hills.
Visibility was no more than a mile. Beyond that there was just a wall of brownishgray haze. On the other side of it the sun was a bleary disk of light. Everything seemed to be bled of color. Even the hills looked jaundiced. They were round and covered with boulders and lowgrowing trees. There was something strangely familiar about them- and then I realized what it was. These were the hills that the Lone Ranger and Zorro and Roy Rogers and the Cisco Kid used to ride around on in the TV
shows of the 1950s. I had never noticed until now that the West of the movies and the West of television were two quite different places. Movie crews had obviously gone out into the real West-the West of buttes and bluffs and red river valleys-while television companies, being cheap, had only just driven a few miles into the hills north of Hollywood and filmed on the edges of orange groves.
Here clearly were the very boulders that Tonto, the Lone Rangers faithful sidekick, used to creep around on. Every week the Lone Ranger would send Tonto off to creep around on some boulders in order to spy on an encampment of bad guys and every week Tonto would get captured. He was hopeless. Every week the Lone Ranger would have to ride in and save Tonto, but he didn't mind doing that because he and Tonto were very close. You could see it in the way they looked at each other.
Those were the days all right. Now children sit and watch people having their vitals sprayed around the room with a chain saw and think nothing of it. I know that makes me sound very old and crotchety to all you youngsters out there, but I think it's a pity that we can't have some good wholesome entertainment like we had when I was a boy, when the heroes wore masks and capes, and carried whips, and liked other men a whole bunch. Seriously, have you ever stopped to think what strange role models we were given when we were children? Like Superman. Here's a guy who changes his clothes in public. Or Davy Crockett, a man who conquered the frontier, fought valiantly at the Alamo and yet never noticed that he had a dead squirrel on his head. It's no wonder people my age grew up confused and got heavily involved with drugs. My favorite hero of all was Zorro, who whenever he was peeved with someone would whip out his sword and with three deft strokes carve a Z in the offending party's shirt. Wouldn't you just love to be able to do that?
'Waiter, I specifically asked for this steak rare.' Slash, slash, slash!
'Excuse me, but I believe I was here before you.' Slash, slash, slash!
'What do you mean you don't have it in my size?' Slash, slash, slash!
For weeks, my friend Robert Swanson and I tried to master this useful trick by practicing with his mother's kitchen knives, but all we had to show for it were some torn shirts and ragged wounds across our chests, and after a time we gave it up as both painful and impossible, a decision that even now I rue from time to time.
As I was so close to Los Angeles, I toyed with the idea of driving on in, but I was put off by the smog and the traffic and above all by the thought that in Los Angeles someone might come up to me and carve a Z in my chest for real. I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there. Besides, Los Angeles is passe. It has no surprises. My plan was to drive up through the hidden heart of California, through the fertile San Joaquin Valley. Nobody ever goes there. There is a simple reason for this, as I was about to discover. It is really boring.
CHAPTER 25
I WOKE up quietly excited. It was a bright clear morning and in an hour or two I was going to go to Sequoia National Park and drive through a tree. This excited me, in a calm, unshowy sort of way.
When I was five, my Uncle Frank and Aunt Fern from Winfield went to California on vacation-this was, of course, before it turned out that Frank was a homosexual, the old devil, and ran off to Key West, Florida, with his barber, which rather shocked and upset a lot of people in Winfield, especially when they realized that from now on they would have to drive all the way to Mount Pleasant to get their hair cut-and they sent us a postcard showing a redwood tree of such enormous girth that a road had been cut right through the base of it. The postcard pictured a handsome young couple in a green Studebaker convertible driving through the tree and looking as if they were having something approximating a wholesome orgasm. It made an immediate impression on me. I went to my dad and asked him if we could go to California on our next vacation and drive through a tree and he looked at the card and said, 'Well ... maybe one day,' and I knew then that I had about as much chance of seeing the road through the tree as I had of sprouting pubic hair.
Every year my father would call a family powwow (can you believe this?) to discuss where we were going on vacation and every year I would push for going to California and the tree with a road through it, and my brother and sister would sneer cruelly and say that that was a really mega-dumb idea. My brother always wanted to go to the Rocky Mountains, my sister to Florida and my mother said she didn't care where we went as long as we were all together. And then my dad would pull out some brochures with titles like 'Arkansas-Land of Several Lakes' and 'Arkansas-the Sho' Nuff State' and 'Important Vacation Facts About Arkansas' (with a foreword by Governor Luther T.
Smiley), and suddenly it would seem altogether possible that we might be going to Arkansas that year, whatever our collective views on the matter might be.
When I was eleven, we went to California, the very state that housed my dream tree, but we only went to places like Disneyland and Hollywood Boulevard and Beverly Hills. (Dad was too cheap to buy a map showing the homes of the movie stars, so we just drove around and speculated.) A couple of times at breakfast I asked if we could drive up and see the tree with a road through it, but everybody was so dismissive-it was too far away, it would be too stupendously boring for words, it would probably cost a lot of money-that I lost heart and stopped asking. And in fact I never asked again. But it stayed at the back of my mind, one of my five great unfulfilled dreams from childhood.
(The others, it goes without saying, were to have the ability to stop time, to possess the gift of X-ray vision, to be able to hypnotize my brother and make him be my slave, and to see Sally Ann Summerfield without a stitch of clothing on.)
Not surprisingly, none of these dreams came true. (Which is perhaps just as well. Sally Ann Summerfield is a blimp now. She turned up at my high-school reunion two years ago and looked like a shipping hazard.) But now here at last I was about to fulfill one of them. Hence the tingle of excitement as I slung my suitcase in the trunk and headed up Highway 63 for Sequoia National Park.
I had spent the night in the little city of Tulare, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. This is the richest and most fertile farming country in the world. They grow over Zoo kinds of crops in the San Joaquin Valley. That very
