The Lost Continent (35 page)

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 and 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 let-down 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 Parks Service in America – let’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’ centres 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 Parks Service itself is concerned they are extinct.

I don’t know why it should be, but the National Parks Service has a long history of incompetence. In the 1960s, if you can believe it, the Parks 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 Hetchey 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 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’ centre and have a look at the big map to get your bearings and decide what you want to see. But at Yosemite the visitors’ centre 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’ centre. By the time I found it I knew my way around and didn’t need it any more.

And everything is just hopelessly, depressingly crowded – the 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 fun-house mirrors. Their bodies would proceed across the screen and their heads would follow a moment later, as if connected by elastic. I was paying $42 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 boy-friend 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 under-cooked 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 49, as it turned out, took me on an agreeably winding journey through hilly country. Groves of trees and horse pastures over-looked 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, Angel’s 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 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, up and over Mokelumne Peak (9,332 feet), 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 paddling-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 haemorrhoid unguents and cottage cheese. Partly it is a consequence of that inane breeziness common to local TV newsreaders 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.

I entered Nevada about ten miles south of Lake Tahoe. Las Vegas had so put me off that I had no desire to go to another sink of iniquity, though I was later told that Tahoe
is a really nice place and not at all like Las Vegas. Now I shall never know. I can tell you, however, that Carson City was just about the most nothing little city you could ever hope to zip through. It’s the state capital, but mostly it was just Pizza Huts and gas stations and cheap-looking casinos.

I headed out of town on US 50, past Virginia City and towards Silver Springs. This was more or less the spot where the map used to burst into flames on
Bonanza
. Remember that? It has been many years since I’ve seen the programme, but I recall Pa and Hoss and Little Joe and the surly-looking one whose name I forget all living in a landscape that was fruitful and lush, in a Western, high chaparral sort of way. But out here there was nothing but cement-coloured plains and barren hills and almost no habitations at all. Everything was grey, from the sky to the ground. This was to remain the pattern for the next two days.

It would be difficult to conceive of a more remote and cheerless state than Nevada. It has a population of just 800,000 in an area about the size of Britain and Ireland combined. Almost half of that population is accounted for by Las Vegas and Reno, so most of the rest of the state is effectively just empty. There are only seventy towns in the entire state – the British Isles have 40,000, just to give you some comparison – and some of them are indescribably remote. For instance, Eureka, a town of 1,200 in the middle of the state, is 100 miles in any direction from the nearest town. Indeed, the whole of Eureka County has just three towns and a total population of under 2,500 – and this in an area of a couple of thousand square miles.