drinking water for San Francisco, 150 miles to the west. So for the last sixty years one of the half-dozen or so most breathtaking stretches of landscape on the planet has lain under water for commercial reasons. God help us if they ever find oil there.
The great problem at Yosemite today is simply finding your way around. I've never seen a place so badly signposted. It's as if they are trying to hide the park from you. At most parks the first thing you want to do is go to the visitors' center and have a look at the big map to get your bearings and decide what you want to see. But at Yosemite the visitors' center is almost impossible to find. I drove around Yosemite village for twenty-five minutes before I discovered a parking lot and then it took me a further twenty minutes, and a long walk in the wrong direction, to find the visitors' center.
By the time I found it I knew my way around and didn't need it anymore.
And everything is just hopelessly, depressingly crowdedthe cafeterias, the post office, the stores.
This was in April; what it must be like in August doesn't bear guessing at. I have never been anywhere that was simultaneously so beautiful and so awful. In the end, I had a nice long walk and a look at the waterfalls and the scenery and it was outstanding. But I cannot believe that it can't be better run.
In the evening I drove on to Sonora, through a tranquil sunset, along sinuous mountain roads. I reached the town after dark and had difficulty finding a room. It was only the middle of the week, but most places were full. The motel I finally found was grossly overpriced and the TV reception was terrible. It was like watching people moving around in front of funhouse mirrors. Their bodies would proceed across the screen and their heads would follow a moment later, as if connected by elastic. I was paying forty-two dollars for this. The bed was like a pool table with sheets. And the toilet seat didn't have a SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION wrapper on it, denying me my daily ritual of cutting it with my scissors and saying, 'I now declare this toilet open.' These things become important to you when you have been alone on the road for a while. In a sour mood I drove into town and went to a cheap restaurant for dinner. The waitress made me wait a long time before she came and took my order. She looked tarty and had an irritating habit of repeating everything I said to her. 'I'd like the chicken-fried steak,' I said.
'You'd like the chicken-fried steak?'
'Yes. And I would like french fries with it.' 'You want french fries with it?'
'Yes. And I would like a salad with Thousand Island dressing.'
'You want a salad with Thousand Island dressing 'Yes, and a Coke to drink.'
'You want a Coke to drink?'
'Excuse me, miss, but I've had a bad day and if you don't stop repeating everything I say, I'm going to take this ketchup bottle and squirt it all down the front of your blouse.'
'You're going to take that ketchup bottle and squirt it all down the front of my blouse?'
I didn't really threaten her with ketchup-she might have had a large boyfriend who would come and pummel me; also, I once knew a waitress who told me that whenever a customer was rude to her she went out to the kitchen and spat in his food, and since then I have never spoken sharply to a waitress or sent undercooked food back to the kitchen (because then the cook spits in it, you see)-but I was in such a disagreeable mood that I put my chewing gum straight into the ashtray without wrapping it in a piece of tissue first, as my mother always taught me to do, and pressed it down with my thumb so that it wouldn't fall out when the ashtray was turned over, but would have to be prised out with a fork. And what's more-God help me-it gave me a tingle of satisfaction.
In the morning I drove north from Sonora along Highway 49, wondering what the day would bring.
I wanted to head east over the Sierra Nevadas, but many of the passes were still closed. Highway 4q, as it turned out, took me on an agreeably winding journey through hilly country. Groves of trees and horse pastures overlooked the road, and occasionally I passed an old farmhouse, but there was little sign that the land was used for anything productive. The towns I passed through-Tuttletown, Melones, Angels Camp-were the places where the California Gold Rush took place. In 1848, a man named James Marshall found a lump of gold at Sutter Creek, just up the road, and people went crazy. Almost overnight, 40,000 prospectors poured into the state and in a little over a decade, between 1847 and 1860, California's population went from 15,000 to nearly 400,000. Some of the towns have been preserved as they were at the time-Sonora is not too bad in this regard-but mostly there's not much to show that this was once the scene of the greatest gold rush in history. I suppose this is largely because most of the people lived in tents and when the gold ran out so did they. Now most of the little towns offered the customary stretch of gas stations, motels and hamburger emporia. It was Anywhere, USA.
At Jackson, I found that Highway 88 was open through the mountains-the first open passage through the Sierras in almost 300 miles-and I took it. I had expected that I would have to take the next but one pass along, the infamous Donner Pass, where in 1846 a party of settlers became trapped by a blizzard for several weeks and survived by eating each other, an incident that caused a great sensation at the time. The leader of the group was named Donner. I don't know what became of him, but I bet he took some ribbing whenever he went into a restaurant after that. At any rate, it got his name on the map. The Donner Pass was also the route taken by the first transcontinental railroad, the Southern Pacific, and first transcontinental highway, old Route 40, the Lincoln Highway, on their 3,000-mile journey from New York to San Francisco. As with Route 66 further south, Route 40 had been callously dug up and converted into a dull, straight interstate highway, so I was pleased to find a back road open through the mountains.
And it was very pleasant. I drove through pine-forested scenery, with occasional long views across unpeopled valleys, heading in the general direction of Lake Tahoe and Carson City. The road was steep and slow and it took me much of the afternoon to drive the hundred or so miles to the Nevada border. Near Woodfords I entered the Toiyabe National Forest, or at least what once had been the Toiyabe National Forest. For miles and miles there was nothing but charred land, mountainsides of dead earth and stumps of trees. Occasionally I passed an undamaged house around which a firebreak had been dug. It was an odd sight, a house with swings and a wading pool in the middle of an ocean of blackened stumps. A year or so before, the owners must have thought they were the luckiest people on the planet, to live in the woods and mountains, amid the cool and fragrant pines. And now they lived on the surface of the moon. Soon the forest would be replanted and for the rest of their lives they could watch it grow again, inch by annual inch.
I had never seen such devastation-miles and miles of it and yet I had no recollection of having read about it. That's the thing about America. It's so big that it just absorbs disasters, muffles them with its vastness. Time and again on this trip I had seen news stories that would elsewhere have been treated as colossal tragedies-a dozen people killed by floods in the South, ten crushed when a store roof collapsed in Texas, twenty-two dead in a snowstorm in the East-and each of them treated as a brief and not terribly consequential diversion between ads for hemorrhoid unguents and cottage cheese. Partly it is a consequence of that inane breeziness common to local TV newscasters in America, but mostly it is just the scale of the country. A disaster in Florida is regarded in California in the same way that a disaster in Italy is regarded in Britain-as something briefly and morbidly diverting, but too far away to be tragic in any personal sense.
