The Lost Continent (34 page)

Finally there was a special report about a man awaiting release from prison who ten years before had raped a young woman and then, for reasons of obscure gratification, had sawn off her arms at the elbows. No kidding. This was so shocking even to the hardened sensibilities of Nevadans that a mob was expected to be waiting for the man when he was released at 6 a.m. the next day, according to the TV reporter, who then gave all the details necessary to enable viewers to go down and join in. The police, the reporter added with a discernible trace of pleasure, were refusing to guarantee the man’s safety. The report concluded with a shot of the reporter talking to camera in front of the prison gate. Behind her a group of children were jumping up and down and waving hi to their moms. This was all becoming too bizarre for me. I got
up heavily and switched the TV to
Mr Ed
. At least you know where you are with
Mr Ed
.

In the morning I took Interstate 15 south out of Las Vegas, a long, straight drive through the desert. It’s the main route between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, 272 miles away, and it’s like driving across an oven hob. After about an hour I passed over into California, into a shimmering landscape of bleached earth and patchy creosote bushes called the Devils Playground. The sunlight glared. The far-off Soda Mountains quivered and distant cars coming towards me looked like balls of fire, so brilliant was their reflection, and always ahead on the road there was a slick smear of mirage that disappeared as I drew near and reappeared further on. Along the shoulder of the road, sometimes out on the desert itself, were cars that had failed to complete the journey. Some of them looked to have been there for a long time. What an awful place to break down. In the summer, this was one of the hottest spots on earth. Off to the right, over the parched Avawatz Mountains, was Death Valley, where the highest temperature ever recorded in America, 134 degrees Fahrenheit, was logged in 1913 (the world record, in 1922 in Libya, is just two degrees higher). But that was the shade temperature. A thermometer lying on the ground in the sun has gone over 200 degrees. Even now in April the temperature was nudging ninety and it was very unpleasant. It was impossible to imagine it almost half as hot again. And yet people live out there, in awful little towns like Baker and Barstow, where the temperature often stays over ninety degrees for 100 days in a row and where they can go ten years without a drop of rain. I pressed on, longing for clear water and green hills.

One good thing about California is that it doesn’t take long to find a complete contrast. The state has the strangest geography. At Death Valley you have the lowest point in America – 282 feet below sea level – and yet practically overlooking it is the highest point in the country (not counting Alaska) – Mt Whitney, at 14,494 feet. You could, if you wished, fry an egg on the roof of your car in Death Valley, then drive thirty miles into the mountains and quick-freeze it in a snowbank. My original intention was to cross the Sierra Nevadas by way of Death Valley (breaking off from time to time to perform experiments with eggs), but a weather lady on the radio informed me that the mountain passes were all still closed on account of the recent nasty weather. So I had to make a long and unrewarding detour across the Mojave Desert, on old Highway 58. This took me past Edwards Air Force Base, which runs for almost forty miles along the highway behind a seemingly endless stretch of chain-link fence. It was at Edwards that the Space Shuttle used to land and that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, 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 California 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 brownish-grey haze. On the other side of it the sun was a bleary disc of light. Everything seemed to be bled of colour. Even the hills looked jaundiced. They were round and covered with
boulders and low-growing 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 Ranger’s 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 Super-man. 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 favourite 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 practising 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 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
passé
. 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.

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 homo, the old devil, and ran off to Key West 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 a 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 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 fulfil 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 200 kinds of crop in the San Joaquin Valley. That very morning, on the local news on TV, they reported that the farming income for Tulare Country for the previous year was $1.6 billion – that’s the sort of money Austin Rover turns over – 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 tenniscourt. 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 centres, drive-in banks, McDonald’s restaurants, miniature golf-courses, kids on skate-boards – were 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 $5 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 colourful 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 from 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
.