morning, on the local news on TV, they reported that the farming income for Tulare County for the previous year was $1.6 billion and yet it was only the second highest figure for the state. Fresno County, just up the road, was richer still. Even so, the landscape didn't look all that brilliant. The valley was as flat as a tennis court. It stretched for miles in every direction, dull and brown and dusty, and a permanent haze hung on the horizon, like a dirty window.
Perhaps it was the time of year, or perhaps it was the drought that was just beginning to choke central California, but it didn't look rich or fruitful. And the towns that speckled the plain were equally dull. They looked like towns from anywhere. They didn't look rich or modern or interesting.
Except that there were oranges the size of grapefruits growing on trees in the front yards, I could have been in Indiana or Illinois or anywhere. That surprised me. On our family trip to California it had been like driving into the next decade. It had all looked sleek and modern. Things that were still novelties in Iowa-shopping centers, drive-in banks, McDonald's restaurants, miniature golf courses, kids on skateboardswere old and long established in California. Now they just looked older. The rest of the country had caught up. The California of 1988 had nothing that Iowa didn't have. Except smog. And beaches. And oranges growing in front yards. And trees you could drive through.
I joined Highway 198 at Visalia and followed it as it shot through fragrant lemon groves, ran along the handsome shoreline of Lake Kaweah and climbed up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Just beyond Three Rivers I entered the park, where a ranger in a wooden booth charged me a five-dollar entrance fee and gave me a brochure detailing the sights beyond. I looked quickly through it for a photograph of a road through a tree, but there weren't any pictures, just words and a map bearing colorful and alluring names: Avalanche Pass, Mist Falls, Farewell Gap, Onion Valley, Giant Forest. I made for Giant Forest.
Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park are contiguous. Effectively they are one national park and, like all national parks in the West, it is a good-sized one-seventy miles rrom top to bottom, thIrty miles across. Because of the twisting roads as I climbed up into the mountains, progress was slow, though splendidly scenic.
I drove for two hours on lofty roads through boulder-strewn mountains. Snow was still lying about in broad patches. At last I entered the dark and mysterious groves of the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum, according to my brochure). The trees were tall, no doubt about it, and fat around the base, though not fat enough to take a highway. Presumably they would get fatter as I moved deeper into the forest. Sequoias are ugly trees. They soar up and up and up, but their branches are sparse and stubby, so they look silly, like the sort of trees three-year-olds draw. In the middle of the Giant Forest stands the General Sherman Tree-the biggest living thing on earth. Surely the General Sherman was the one I was looking for.
'Oh boy, Chevette, have I got a treat for you!' I called out and patted the steering wheel fondly.
When at last I neared the General Sherman, I found a small parking lot and a path leading to the tree through the woods. Evidently it was no longer possible to drive through the tree. This was a disappointment-name me something in life that isn't-but never mind, I thought. I'll walk through it; the pleasure will last longer. Indeed, I'll walk through it severally. I will stroll and saunter and glide, and if there aren't too many people about, I might well dance around it in the light-footed manner of Gene Kelly splashing through puddles in Singin' in the Rain.
So I banged the car door shut and walked up the trail to the tree and there it was, with a little fence around it to keep people from getting too close. It was big all right-tall and fat-but not that tall, not that fat. And there was no hole through its base. You might just about have managed to cut a modest road through it, but-and here's the important thing-no one ever had. Beside the tree was a large wooden board with an educational message on it. It said, 'The giant General Sherman is not only the biggest tree in the world, but also the biggest living thing. It is at least 2,500 years old, and thus also one of the oldest living things. Even so, it is surprisingly boring, isn't it? That is because it isn't all that tall or all that fat. What sets it apart from other redwoods is that it doesn't taper very much. It stays pretty fat all the way up. Hence it has a greater bulk than any other tree. If you want to see really impressive redwoods-ones with roads driven through their bases-you have to go to Redwood National Park, way up near the Oregon border. Incidentally, we've erected a fence around the base of the tree to keep you well back from it and intensify your disappointment. As if that were not enough, there is a party of noisy young Germans coming up the path behind you. Isn't life shitty?'
As you will appreciate, this is somewhat paraphrased, but that was the gist of it. The Germans came and were obnoxious and unthoughtful, as adolescents tend to be, and stole the tree from me. They perched on the fence and started taking pictures. I derived some small pleasure from wandering in front of the cameraman whenever he was about to click the shutter, but this is an activity from which it is difficult to extract sustained amusement, even with Germans, and after a minute or two I left them there jabbering away about die Pop Musik and das Drugs Scene and their other adolescent preoccupations.
In the car I looked at the map and was disheartened to discover that Redwood National Park was almost 500 miles away. I could hardly believe it. Here I was 300 miles north of Los Angeles and yet I could drive another 500 miles and still be in California. It is 850 miles from top to bottom-about the distance between London and Milan. It would take me a day and a half to get to Redwood National Park, plus a day and a half to get back to where I was now. I didn't have that kind of time.
Gloomily, I started the car and drove on to Yosemite National Park, seventy miles up the highway.
And what a disappointment that proved to be. I'm sorry to moan, I truly am, but Yosemite was a letdown of monumental proportions. It is incredibly, mouth-gawpingly beautiful. Your first view of the El Capitan valley, with its towering mountains and white waterfalls spilling hundreds of feet down to the meadows of the valley floor, makes you think that surely you have expired and gone to heaven. But then you drive on down into
Yosemite village and realize that if this is heaven you are going to spend the rest of eternity with an awful lot of fat people in Bermuda shorts.
Yosemite is a mess. The National Park Service in Americalet's be candid here-does a pretty half-assed job of running many of the national parks. This is surprising because in America most leisure-time activities are about a million times better than anywhere else. But not national parks. The visitors' centers are usually dull, the catering is always crappy and expensive, and you generally come away having learned almost nothing about the wildlife, geology and history of the places you've driven hundreds of miles to see. The national parks are supposed to be there to preserve a chunk of America's wilderness, but in many of them the number of animals has actually fallen.
Yellowstone has lost all its wolves, mountain lions and white-tailed deer, and the numbers of beaver and bighorn sheep are greatly depleted. These animals are thriving outside Yellowstone, but as far as the park service itself is concerned they are extinct.
I don't know why it should be, but the National Park Service has a long history of incompetence. In the 1960s, if you can believe it, the park service invited the Walt Disney Corporation to build a development in Sequoia National Park. Mercifully, that plan was quashed. But others have succeeded, most notably in 1923 when, after a long fight between conservationists and businessmen, the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the northern part of Yosemite-which was said to be even more spectacularly beautiful than Yosemite Valley itself-was flooded to create a reservoir to provide
