I am flying into Boston to meet Michele and we will fly out of Boston on Thursday the 31st, but we will probably not spend much time there. We are hoping to get as far away as Acadia National Park and then work our way back south. Maybe have a Chinese dinner in Boston on the 30th to celebrate out 20th Anniversary. What could be more American than that?
Michele’s paternal family is having a reunion at Squaw Valley. It is especially exciting for me because I get to take some of them on a day trip into the Smoke Creek Desert. After the reunion, we will take a couple of the reunionites down the back way to Mono Lake and then through Yosemite (fire permitting).
(For some strange reason, when I tried to put this on facebook a couple of days ago, it didn’t take.)
Google maps tells me that the trip from Michele’s family cabin in Olympic Valley, California – where Aston and Eileen picked us up at about 7:15 AM – to Ophelia and Peter’s home in Garden City, Idaho is 465 miles and should take 7 hours and 34 minutes driving time. Most people will tell you that it is a boring drive. Google is about right and most people are more or less wrong.
We get coffee in Truckee and head east to The West. After clearing the spectacularness of the Sierra Navadas, we follow the Truckee River – past the Mustang Ranch, surrounded in cyclone fencing with concertina, looking unhospitable as we thought when Michele and I pruriently drove by years ago – until it turns north to its sink at Pyramid Lake.
Then we drive out into a flat nothingness of the Humboldt Sink surrounded by distant, hazy hills. Driving up to Tahoe the night before, we could smell smoke and the moon glowed faded red. Now the whole Humboldt Basin seems full of smoke.
We are in an air-conditioned BMW sitting on leather cushions and breathing filtered air as we watch the Humboldt Basin slide by as if we were watching it on TV. The California Trail passed through here and people actually walked across this wasteland. Between 1848 and 1855, almost 150,000 people walked it – at a pace of around 15 miles a day – carrying their belonging on ox carts as part of the biggest migration in human history. (In 1850, when California became a state, the official census said 92,597 souls lived here; by 1860, the population had jumped to 379,994.)
The most severe part of their journey was from Salt Lake City to Reno and the scarcity of water was probably their biggest worry. Our biggest worry is where to stop for gas and we decide on a truck stop west of Winnemucca.
From the truck stop on, we are driving in increasingly clearer air, giving us a clear view of 7200 foot Auburn Peak in the East Range. Maybe twenty or twenty five years ago, Mike Moore bought an old US Air Force Radar Station on Auburn Peak and named it Radar Ranch, he sold it sometime later and it is now for sale again for only $200,000. It has a concrete block main building, an artist studio, lots of water storage, electricity, and a 360° view of the world all the way to the edge. Check it out.
When we turn left at Winnemucca, it begins to feel like we are almost there even though, intellectually, I know we have another four to five hours of driving.
First we have to climb out of the Great Basin which we do at Blue Mountain Pass – 5293 feet – after we crossed the border into Oregon, then we run along the top of a high plain. The fire off in the distance reminded all of us that this is a early and busy fire season. We drove by fires in California and the weather forecast for Boise predicted heavy smoke. When we got to Boise, one of the main topics of conversation was the evacuation of Sun Valley and Ketchum because of fires. The red state west is in a drought and it will be interesting to see what that does to their perception of Global Warming, or Global Change if you prefer (I read today that Florida Republican Congressman Jeff Miller says that God is changing the climate, not our pollution, so maybe that is the answer and I guess it is OK to keep up these long road trips).
We are now in the Owyhee River Basin and start talking about what we are going to order when we get to the Rock House Espresso and Ice Cream Parlor in Jordan Valley, Oregon. Jordan Valley is a neat and tidy oasis with a nifty coffee house.
This was our last stop in Eastern Oregon, and the old part of the town seems so orderly, that I was pretty sure this was a Mormon town, but it turned out that it was settled by Basque(s?).
To be continued.
Our first trip out of Tokyo was to the old Imperial Capital of Kyoto. It was an eight-hour trip by train (Japan didn’t yet have bullet trains, but they did already had very fast, air-conditioned trains, however they were expensive). We had the brilliant idea of taking the midnight train which we would sleep on, thereby getting to Kyoto at 8 AM rested and ready to go. I don’t remember when we got to the train station, but what ever time it was, it was too late. The train was standing room only.
Japan was in a heat wave and the temperature was over 35°C outside, at the Tokyo station, it was hotter inside the train. Most, or at least many, of the people on the train had stripped down to their underwear, hanging their clothes up on hangers so they would look nice and neat when we all got to Kyoto. This was before I read about the Japanese ability to compartmentalize behavior, still being in a stifling hot railroad car with a group of people in their underwear was not as weird as it sounds here. Part of it was that underwear in those days, in conservative Japan, was modest in the extreme and part of it was that we were naive in the same way that gullible people are naive, anything seemed possible and, even, normal.
Terry and I slept sitting on the floor, leaning against the closest seat. Being young and in the Army, I was more or less able to sleep anywhere, or so I thought. In this case, we didn’t get much sleep and arrived in Kyoto ready for bed. The fact that Kyoto was even hotter and muggier than Tokyo didn’t help either. Of course, checking into a place to stay at 8:00AM was out of the question (we found out when we tried). So we spent the morning of our first day wandering through some magnificent buildings, zombie-like. Kyoto was the largest city in Japan and the Imperial capital for many years and it is full of treasures like the Imperial Palace, Nijo Castle, Daitokuji Temple, Heian Shrine, and the list goes on and on, we zombied many of them.
On five dollars a day – our approximate budget was actually six bucks a day – we had to sleep in cheap hotels and cheap hotels in Japan are ryokan, a kind of Japanese inn almost like an old boardinghouse. That meant we slept on mats on the floor in rooms with sliding soji screen doors. The bathroom was a squat toilet down the hall or down some stairs and the shower was a communal hot tub in the basement that we couldn’t use until we washed off – usually – with a garden hose. They did come with breakfast which was a money saver except that breakfast was fishhead soup with some very rubbery, chewy, things we called Dunlaps (after the tire). Looking back on it, they were more charming than this sounds and, at the time, some were less charming. Never the less, they were cheap.
After our afternoon rest, we hit the town. One of the highlights that night was a strip club where the strippers were dressed in about the same fashion as the women in their underwear the night before on the train. At the strip club, the Japanese patrons went crazy. Really crazy, running at the stage crazy. It was a shock and we kept asking ourselves Why don’t they just take a night train ride.
The next day, we started sightseeing in earnest.
One of the Kyoto sights that was high on my list was a famous – even then – Zen rock garden of Ryoanji-Sekitei. My mother thought of herself as somewhat of a Japanophile, and – in addition to exposing me to Japanese food – she taught me an appreciation of Japanese art starting with the art of the Zen garden. Our hotel was near the train station and the rock garden was at a Zen temple across town, strangely near the strip joint, and it was a long walk (in the muggy, smoggy, air). But, when got there, it was worth it.
Close by is the Zen Golden Temple of Kinkaku-ji and it was even more worth it.
Kinkaku-ji was not the only temple with water a water garden, we ran into several others in other cities, but this was our first.
Just up the road from Kyoto was an even older capital of Japan, Nara. About the only thing I remember about Nara was that it had a very urban park full of tame, miniature deer.
And just down the road was Osaka and Osaka Castle. As I remember it, Osaka was a pretty dismal, industrial city, but the castle was terrific. Years later, while reading Shōgun by James Clavell, I came across a section in which a feudal lord and a samurai are standing on the parapets of Osaka Castle, pledging allegiance while thinking about how they are going to double cross each other. I said to myself, I’ve been there.
To be continued (and finished).