Category: Places

When you drive across the country, what you remember are the eye-catching parts of the landscape through which you have traveled. You focus your vision on what turns out to be a tiny portion of what you can actually see. When you look at that bright red tractor on the tractor-trailer rig going the other way on the highway, it looms large in your vision; you ignore the junk piled down by your feet, the driver sitting next to you, the landscape rushing by the window to your right, the road rushing towards you in front of you.

When you are in the car, you hear very little of the landscape through which you are passing. Instead, you hear the rush of sound made by your own car, and perhaps sound from the cars that pass you; you hear the recorded music that plays through your car’s speakers, Louis Armstrong singing about missing New Orleans, or eighteen musicians playing music by Steve Reich. You do not hear the cicadas whirring, the birds singing in the marshes along the river, the wind whispering through the trees.

And when you are driving, you don’t exert your muscles, although your muscles start to ache, because you have to hold them in the same position for long periods of time. If you think about it, driving on interstate highways is slightly surreal: you drive along in a dream bubble, not really seeing what is around you, not hearing, not smelling, not feeling the temperature of the air. In this surreality lies part of the power of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: Humbert Humbert becomes unmoored from moral reality, drifting in a dream world of highways and sex.

We saw signs advertising gasoline for less than two dollars a gallon; adjusting for inflation, this is about what gasoline cost in 1966, and since our car gets nearly forty miles to the gallon, it is cheaper for us to cross the country now than it would have been in 1966. This is surreal, particularly when you recollect that in this presidential election season so many of the politicians tell us that life is so much worse now than it was back in some Golden Age of the past; and what the politicians say is both true and not true, which only increases the surreality.

But as the sun got higher, these dark thoughts occupied me less and less.

We stopped at Rowe Audubon Sanctuary near Gibbon, Nebraska, and walked through the fields near the Platte River. A large cloud was blocking the sun when we arrived, and with a gentle easterly breeze it was a perfect summer day: warm, but not too hot.

I told Carol to go on ahead because she wanted to walk, and I wanted to look at birds. Soon she was out of my sight. I listened to dozens of Dickcissels singing their funny buzzing song in the tall grass around me. Red-winged Blackbirds flew back and forth across the path, growing noisy and worried when I walked too close to their nests. Northern Bobwhites called in the distance, and once one flew out of the brush near me and across the meadow, short little wings carrying its tubby body to safety. One rabbit scurried down the path in one direction, and two more flushed out of the brush where they had been relaxing and scurried off in the other direction.

The cloud drifted away and the hot sun beat down on my head. The breeze died away. The blue sky opened up above me. Even though it had grown hot, even though I kept sneezing from something that was in bloom, it was a perfect summer day.

We left the Audubon sanctuary, and I took a nap while Carol drove through the afternoon and into the evening. We got off the interstate and drove down a two-lane highway into Avoca, Iowa, driving between fields of soybeans and fields of corn. On the way into town, we passed Titan Machinery of Avoca, and admired their Case agricultural equipment, glowing deep red in the fading sunlight. I especially admired the dozen or so combines with cornheads mounted on them, all lined up along the edge of the street.

I ordered a ribeye steak at the Old Main Street Grill, while Carol ordered a salad. I felt guilty for eating beef because all my liberal friends tell me how bad it is for the environment, but the ribeye steak was inexpensive, perhaps raised in neighboring Nebraska; Carol’s salad was mostly shredded iceberg lettuce, doubtless shipped a thousand miles from where it was grown in California and perhaps harvested by undocumented immigrants. And which is better, monoculture fields of corn and soybeans, much of which will be heavily processed before it is eaten, or even not eaten at all; or range lands devoted to beef cattle? Moral equations are never as simple as I would like them to be. One thing I know for sure: farm work may be deeply rooted in reality, but is is brutally hard — hot, exhausting, hard on the body and the mind — and I’d just as soon not so it myself, not even on a picturesque organic farm.

We had a hard time getting going this morning. Both of us slept a long time. I feel as though I have no reserves upon which to draw. And no wonder: long hours at work throughout June; and prior to that, the death of my father two months ago, followed a few weeks later by the death of my mother’s twin sister.

A couple of hours east of Evanston, we stopped at Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge. We ate lunch on the deck of the visitor center, looking out across the broad valley of the Green River, a line of cottonwood trees marking the course of the river, the bluffs on the far side of the valley, then the sagebrush of the rolling Wyoming plains drawing your eye to snow-covered mountains in the distance.

After lunch, we walked down the bluff into the valley. There was very little wind, and the deer flies buzzed in anxious circles around our heads, trying to find a way past our broad-brimmed hats. Carol walked on at a brisk pace; I dawdled, looking at and listening to the birds in the marshlands on either side of the gravel road. As Carol walked past a clump of three big old cottonwood trees, she startled an owl. It flew out, a big brown ghostly shape. Smaller birds swarmed around it — swallows and blackbirds — and one brave little bird, maybe a kingbird, swooped down and with its feet clawed at the back of the owl. The owl turned and twisted, trying to get rid of its anxious tormentors; it flew low over the marsh grass to some distant trees.

The flies wouldn’t leave us alone, so soon we made our way back to the visitor center. The warm sun almost directly overhead, the dry clean air, the teeming life around us: I felt something in me replenished, just a bit.

A long afternoon and evening of driving followed. At one rest area in Wyoming, a sign on the side of a small box truck proclaimed “MONSANTO=MUERTE,” and above the amateurish lettering was a painting of ears of corn. Each kernel of corn was a skull.

We drove on into Nebraska. The radio told us that there was a tornado watch in effect for southeastern Wyoming and northwestern Nebraska. Tall clouds began to rise on the horizon. In front of us, directly in the path of the highway, rose a huge cloud, broad at the top with undercut sides, like a huge unsteady island floating above us. We got closer and closer, then the highway turned, taking us north of the huge cloud. The light waned, night fell, and off to the north of us we could see lightning flashing continually.

I love the green valleys in northeastern Nevada, nestled along the Humboldt River and minor creeks and seeps. At the lowest points, where there is water, everything is bright green at this time of year. As the land gets higher, the green turns to the silver-green of sagebrush, and then brown, and then the high rugged mountains tower over everything else. Every once in a while, you’ll see a ranch house at the boundary between the well-watered low lands and the sage brush.

Above: Near Beowawe, Nev.

We drove over the pass to Wells, Nev. Once we got above about 4000 feet, most of the land was green, or somewhat green, and there were enough small trees that you might almost call it a forest. At these high elevations, the green well-watered land near watercourses backed right into mountain slopes that were also green, though less vividly so. The peaks of some of these mountains still had bright white patches of snow near their peaks.

Above: About 10 miles west of Wells, Nev.

Northeastern Nevada would be a beautiful place to live. Not that I’d actually want to live there myself. Making a living from agriculture wouldn’t be easy, and the other major industry, resource extraction, would be just as hard and less beautiful. Plus this part of Nevada is heavily Mormon, and I am not a Mormon. So I wouldn’t want to live there, but when you drive past those pretty green valleys at 75 miles an hour, it’s fun to fantasize about how beautiful it must be.

We drove out of Nevada and into Utah, across the salt flats. It was hot, and we kept seeing what looked like large bodies of water, but they were just mirages. Carol looked to the north, across the other half of the interstate highway, and there was a mountain standing in water that was higher than the level of the roadway. Or was it a strange undercut mountain-island floating in midair? Of course it was a mirage, but it was beautiful, and I wanted it to be real even though it was not.

Above: Near mile marker 16 on Interstate 80 in Utah.

We finally got on the road at half past one. It took more than an hour to get free of Bay Area traffic, and then more than another hour to get past Sacramento. Carol decided to pull off the highway at Auburn, Calif. We walked the steep streets around the historic district, passing restaurants and stores selling tchotchkes, up the hill to the Place County Superior Courthouse, a monumental pile of yellow brick.

Along Interstate 80 on the way up the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we passed a roadside billboard that advocated splitting off a new state, to be called Jefferson State, from the rest of California. Republicans and libertarians who want “less government” and low or no taxes are behind this movement for a new state. Not surprisingly, there was a large Donald Trump sign attached to this billboard, for he is the new standard-bearer for those who want low taxes and less government. They would not have funded the construction of the monumental Placer County Superior Courthouse.

An hour or so later, we stopped in Verdi, Nev., to stretch our legs. Out in front of ESP Art, a trout sculpture leaped in front of a reflection of the eastern Sierras.

We drove through Reno and Sparks, and at last, as the sun was setting, we were in the wide open spaces of the Great Basin. We passed the Carson Sink, which had some patches of open water in among the salt pans; passed tall brown mountains that turned gold in the setting sun; passed mysterious large industrial plants along the Humboldt River; passed sage brush and tumbleweeds; and arrived in Winnemucca at half past ten.