If you’re looking for a real gold mining town of forty-niner vintage, Columbia, California, is the closest you can get. It’s tucked into the foothills near Yosemite, and since it never burned completely down or became completely deserted, it never had the chance to become a ghost town.
The cosmetic surgery Columbia has received since it became a state park in 1945 has successfully pickled the main street. It’s like a piece of beef jerky, a carefully preserved strip that has lost the juice of its former glory without giving up any flavor. The streets aren’t dusty any more, and mad Chinese cooks no longer chase little boys with butcher knives. You have to read about things like that in the visitors’ center. Then you can sit on a bench on the sidewalk and chew on the images. Sure enough, the essence emerges, and it’s not hard to imagine what it must have been like in the days when the miners lived in tents while they worked feverishly to remove 87 million dollars’ worth of gold from the hills nearby. You have to look past the yellow school buses and the sign in the candy store window that says, “Only four students may enter at a time.” Columbia is the field trip destination of choice for California history teachers, a fact that arouses mixed feelings among the town merchants.
We went to Columbia because Mark had a friend who lived there. “He probably won’t be there, because he spends most of his time rafting on rivers in Idaho,” Mark explained. He was right. The friend was gone, and we looked in our thick new campground guide to find a place to stay.
“The Mother Lode Trailer Resort sounds pretty good,” I said as we headed north away from the town center. I was still getting used to reading the abbreviations and deciphering the icons in the guide. “It seems to have everything we might want.” This was well before we learned that the most important things about campgrounds are the ones the guidebooks never tell you.
We soon found ourselves driving into a cluster of buildings that looked more genuinely mining-related than Columbia’s mummified main street. “I bet this was a real Gold Rush ranch,” said Mark. “Cool.”
Mark was ready to award the Mother Lode Trailer Resort an extra star by the time we managed to park. He not only had to use four-wheel drive, he had to do it in reverse up a steep hill. We were teetering off the edge of a fifteen-foot bluff when we were done, and we’d aroused the interest of every other resident in the park. We’d become fast friends with the manager, whose vigorous arm signals narrowly prevented the Phoenix from taking flight.
We settled in, which was still an awkward process for a couple of greenhorns. Leveling the truck required a serious yelling match, and Mark called me a harsh word that wounded my pride. I retaliated with a killing remark and quickly retired inside before I could be broadsided with another salvo of invective. I opened the refrigerator door, and a dozen eggs leapt out and smashed on the floor. I swore. My mood improved, however, when I looked out the window and caught sight of Mark waltzing with a recalcitrant sewer hose. Ah, this is the life, I thought. Free, easy, and above all, romantic.
It was getting dark when we finally sat down to a surly cup of tea. We sipped silently. Suddenly, swelling on the breeze, came a low wail. It got louder. “What is that?” asked Mark. “A sick cow?” Then a melody joined the blend, and, “Bagpipes!” I exclaimed. ‘“That’s ‘Scotland the Brave!’” The piper droned his way through three verses and then followed up with the “Skye Boat Song.” When he launched into “Amazing Grace,” Mark said, “Let’s go find out who’s behind this.”
It didn’t take long to find the lungs behind the tunes. They belonged to a retired Puget Sound ship pilot from Seattle who’d even donned a kilt for the occasion. He kept up his highland serenade for an hour or so, invited us to come back the next day for more, and retired to his trailer. The moon had risen by the time Mark and I headed back towards the Phoenix.
As we passed the office, the manager who had so assiduously prevented us from taking a header over the cliff came out to meet us. “I hope the bagpipes didn’t bother you,” he said.
“Oh, no, of course not,” I said. “They may well have saved our marriage.”
“Uh, good, I guess,” said the manager uncertainly. “The first day he did that, I didn’t know whether to applaud him or evict him. Fortunately, nobody has complained. I asked him to keep his concerts early and short.” He paused and shook his head. “You have no idea what it takes to manage a place like this,” he said. “You have no idea.”
Before we left, he invited us to come back later. “I build a campfire every night right out here,” he said gesturing toward a large metal ring. “Sometimes we sing, sometimes we tell jokes, and sometimes we just sit and watch the fire.”
We thanked him and walked back up to the Phoenix One’s perch. I don’t remember going to bed or falling asleep, but the next thing I knew, it was morning.
When I woke up, I was still feeling a little glum, in spite of the bagpipes. Real life on real wheels was turning out to be work, and it was straining the adhesive of my marriage. I went outside and sat at the rickety picnic table next to the Phoenix.
“It seems like the only things we ever say to each other are ‘excuse me’ and ‘get out of my way,”’ I thought out loud. “We spend all our time bumping into each other.”
It was true. The Phoenix is eight-and-a-half feet wide, which means that the available width for movement inside is no more than seven in the widest parts and less than three in the narrowest. There’s room to get around, but you have to cancel any feelings you might have about “personal space.” I was beginning to feel like I was on a perpetual commute in a Tokyo subway.
Outside, the air was cool and still, and a squirrel scolded me from the branch of an oak tree. “I hate you for bringing that dog!” he screamed. “Hate you, hate you, hate you!”
I sipped my coffee from a stainless steel mug my father had given me. “It’ll keep your coffee nice and hot,” he’d said. My coffee was stone cold.
I might have wallowed in self-pity for hours, but I was interrupted by the arrival of a tall woman with strong calves and a direct manner. She was walking up the hill with a newspaper, and she stopped in front of me.
“I watched you arrive last night,” she said. “That was quite a show.”
I smiled weakly. “Glad you enjoyed it,” I said. Now go away, I thought.
“Your truck is amazing,” she continued. “What is it?”
I told her, and she continued to ask questions. As we talked, my mood rose ever so slightly. “Would you like to come inside?” I asked at last.
“I thought you’d never ask,” said the woman. “By the way, my name’s Shane.” She gave my hand a firm shake.
Shane and I stepped into the Phoenix, where Mark was doing something violent with a pair of pliers and a hose connection. Marvin was thrilled to have a visitor. I showed Shane around.
“Would you like to see my rig?” she asked when I’d finished the tour. People who own RVs always call their vehicles “rigs,’” I was beginning to learn.
“Sure,” I said. “Lead the way.”
I walked with Shane up the hill, and as we passed other trailers and motorhomes, she started telling me about the permanent denizens of the Mother Lode Trailer Resort.
“That’s Cheryl’s rig,” she said, pointing to a vehicle that was only a little larger than a minivan. “She lives there with a Great Dane, if you can believe it. She used to be a television producer, but she came down with leukemia. She chucked her L.A. life and came here. She’s been in remission a year now.”
We continued walking up the road that ran around the perimeter of the grounds. “And that’s Don’s place,” Shane said as we walked by an old silver Airstream trailer. He’s lived here forever, or at least since way before I arrived. He’s a survivor, too. He lost a leg to bone cancer.”
At last we arrived at Shane’s “rig,” a new-looking motor home with a row of geraniums out front. A woman was watering one of them with a sprinkling can.
“This is Louanne,” said Shane. “My roommate.”
Louanne, it turned out, was another of the Mother Lode’s survivors. She’d been diagnosed with cancer on her thirty-fifth birthday, and had spent the last two years in and out of treatment programs, surgery, and chemotherapy.
“We came here from San Francisco,” said Shane. “We’d been here a month before we realized what a sanitarium it is. For whatever reason, this place seems to attract people who need to heal.”
I walked back down the hill to the Phoenix, where I could see Mark taking a whack at something on the picnic table with a big rubber mallet. Even from a distance, I could tell he was angry. “What are we doing here?” I asked out loud. “We’re not sick.” But then again, maybe we were. Maybe not in the way Cheryl and Don and Louanne were, but somehow in need of solace just the same. Our pipe dream had met reality with a thud. Our rainbow seemed to be ending in a quagmire. We’d dreamed of glorious horizons, but all we were finding were tacks in the road. We stayed at the Mother Lode Trailer Resort for almost two weeks, resting among the oak trees. We took Marvin for long walks in the hills. If we didn’t stop bickering, we at least became quieter. The bagpiper played every day at sunset, and Shane came by to chat.
The manager came by, too, nearly every day. He’d noticed our computers, and he had a lot of questions. “How does e-mail work?” he asked. “What’s the Internet? What’s America Online?” Finally, I said, “You know, Jim, I can answer your questions, or I can show you. Why don’t I show you?”
Jim led me to an old lean-to next to the office. Inside, a chain saw was leaning against one wall, and I nearly tripped over a stack of dusty two-by-fours and a wheelbarrow. Jim pulled the string on a naked lightbulb dangling from a rafter.
“It’s not fancy, but there’s a desk in here,” said Jim. Sure enough, a thick piece of plywood formed a counter across one end of the shed. A leather chair that had once been grand enough for a big city banker sat nearby. “And there’s a telephone line.”
“Those are the magic words, Jim,” I said. “I’ll go get my computer.”
Twenty minutes later, the light from my laptop’s screen bathed two faces in a dim glow. The modem dialed, hissed, and beeped. I’d been navigating in cyberspace for two whole weeks, and suddenly, I was an expert. For an hour, I showed Jim everything I knew about the virtual universe.
Jim was an avid pupil, and by the time we left Columbia, he’d picked my brain clean. He thanked me profusely, but I said, “Jim, I learned as much as I taught.”
It was true. There in that Gold Rush shack, I began to see the first glimmer of the tantalizing possibilities the Internet held.
“Can I send a message to someone in another country?” asked Jim. “Does my computer have to be on for them to get it?”
They were simple questions, the same ones being asked by people everywhere that year. The answers were simple, too, but as they steeped in my brain, I began to fathom their profundity. Sitting there in the dusky light, I was an assayer, no different from those who swarmed California in the wake of breathless announcements from Sutter’s Mill. My virtual diggings glinted with something more important than fool’s gold.
“I love how we’re joining the Gold Rush of the nineties in Columbia,” I said to Mark. “I’ve always liked a good metaphor.”
“Well, I like metaphors, too,” said Mark, “And yes, it’s awfully charming. As I see it, though, we’re still like the dreamers who never left Ohio. We still don’t know how to make that damn black box work with the cellular phone.”
The black box, my nemesis. Mark was right. I still hadn’t the slightest idea how to get the thing to work.
Nowhere in the world have glaciers done a better sculpting job than Yosemite. I heard a Swiss man say once that he didn’t want to bother visiting Yosemite Valley because it couldn’t be any more beautiful than the Alps. “But the tour I took went there anyway, and I am glad it did. I was awed.”
Yosemite is a huge U-shaped bowl carved out of granite by eons of sliding ice. To get inside it, you have to drive over Tioga Pass at the eastern end or across Crane Flat on the west. The weather outside the valley has little to do with what you’ll find inside. Yosemite is a separate universe, and its glory varies spectacularly by season.
When I was in college in Southern California, I signed up for a botany class to fulfill a science requirement. It was a great choice, because the professor believed in field trips. One day in October, I joined fifty classmates in a large bus. We headed north for Yosemite, laughing and talking all the way.
The bus crawled up Highway 140 from Mariposa. We were still telling jokes as we approached the summit, still chattering as the bus began its slow descent. Suddenly, the valley opened up in front of us. As a body, we were struck dumb. The valley floor was a rippling sea of brilliant yellow. We had caught Yosemite’s maple trees in their brief metamorphosis from green to bare. We spent the weekend in an autumnal wonderland.
“It takes a lot to shut a busload of college students up,” I said to Mark as we drove north. “I wonder what we’ll find there this time of year.” It was late April.
We had driven south from Columbia, and caught Highway 120 west through Chinese Camp. As we gained altitude, snow lurked in the shadows. As we continued to climb, the snow emerged into the sunlight in larger patches. Low ridges of dirty snow lined both sides of the road. “It doesn’t look like it’s snowed here for a while,” said Mark. “This is probably the worst of it.”
We crawled on. “Was that a snowflake?” I asked suddenly. “Yes!” I answered myself as a dozen more bounced off the windshield. “It’s not like it’s really snowing, though,” I added. “It’s just a tiny flurry. I think it’s blowing off the trees.”
A dozen more flakes swirled by, and a dozen more. “I hate to tell you this, Meg, but it’s really snowing,” said Mark. And it was. Snow whirled across our windshield, and now it was sticking to the trees. More and more flakes hit the black pavement in front of us, dancing and sliding and piling up in little drifts.
“It’s beautiful,” I said as the snow fell softly in the sunlight. And it was. Soon the road was white, and the branches of the fir trees bent down under sparkling coats.
“It’s not stopping,” said Mark. “And the pattern of the snowfall on the windshield is mesmerizing. I have to concentrate to keep my attention on the road.”
I looked ahead. It was dark, even though it wasn’t yet two o’clock, and Mark turned on the headlights. The snow was silent, but it was hitting our windshield relentlessly. Caught in our lights, each flake looked like a tiny star, and as we moved forward, it was like driving into a meteor shower.
“Should we stop?” I asked, but it was a stupid question. We were on a two-lane road with no shoulders. A mountain rose on our left, and on our right was an apparently bottomless drop-off. Mark shifted into four-wheel drive, and we pushed on.
The snow formed a thick carpet and crunched under our wheels. We made slow progress. I had long before stopped commenting on the pristine beauty of our surroundings. I was on the cliff side. I wasn’t enjoying it.
Suddenly headlights flashed around the curve ahead of us, reflecting on the falling snow. A pickup truck appeared, and, startled, Mark let up on the gas too fast. Because we were in four-wheel drive, this had roughly the same effect as hitting the brakes. The back end lost traction and slid sideways, and the Phoenix, all seven-and-a-half tons of her, slid inexorably toward the truck in front of us. Our headlights lit up the face of its driver. His eyes were all whites, and his mouth was open. He skidded to a stop, and watched in horror as the Phoenix continued on its unplanned trajectory. Six inches short of crushing in his front end, we struck the side of the mountain with a muffled thud.
The driver of the pickup truck quickly regained his composure and his traction and inched around us. I thought we might be permanently embedded in the mountainside, but we backed up easily and continued into the storm. “No harm done,” said Mark. “Except to my fingernails,” I replied.
We crawled on, and the cliff seemed closer and darker and more threatening at every turn. “What if we’d skidded the other way?” I kept asking myself. But I didn’t ask Mark. I knew he would have said, “We’re here, aren’t we? What’s your problem?”
My problem was simple. I was still in the habit of enjoying adventure only as long as it wasn’t adventurous. I sighed. “Can’t have it both ways,” I thought. “It’s this or spend the rest of my life at Disneyland pretending. I guess it’s time to start loving the cliff side.”
Then, and I can’t say I was disappointed, the cliff switched to the left, and we started descending. The snow still whirled around us, but the sky was lighter. We continued, and suddenly the sun broke through. The snow vanished, and the valley, clear, green, and lovely, lay before us. “But what’s that white down there?” asked Mark. “It almost looks like snow, but . . .”
It was the dogwoods. Bare of leaves, they were covered in delicate, translucent white blossoms. There were hundreds of them scattered across the fresh green meadows, their branches swaying gently in the breeze, their blossoms dancing and shimmering in the sunlight. We stopped. We got out. We stood and looked in silence. Once again, Yosemite had struck its visitors dumb.
The first thing we saw in Susanville was an elephant. He was standing in a pen by the side of the highway, deftly twirling hay into his trunk and stuffing it into his mouth. He was a small elephant, a teenager perhaps, but still about a thousand pounds of pachyderm more than we expected to encounter outside this Gold Rush crossroads on Highway 395 northeast of Sacramento.
We proceeded down Main Street, and the second thing we noticed was Radio Shack. A franchise electronics store is generally less noteworthy than an elephant, but if you have a mission to make your modem work with a cellular telephone, such places rise in importance.
I’d heard a rumor that Radio Shack had once sold an item called an acoustic coupler, which, as far as I could tell, was basically a hearing aid for a modem. It was a concept I could understand, a refreshing hardware solution to an irritating software problem. I was sick of the silent black box whose idiom defied me. “Let’s stop,” I said. “If they have an acoustic coupler, we can forget cellular and log on by pay phone anywhere in the world.” We turned left into the parking lot and parked at the back where we could fill up two spaces without causing a traffic jam. As we walked towards the store, Mark said, “I just realized something. My driver’s license is about to expire.” His fortieth birthday was looming large.
Driver’s license renewal strikes dread into the hearts of most Californians. This is because most Californians live in population-dense places, and most of that population seems to spend most of its time waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where most of the staff has forgotten how to smile.
“Well, at least you remembered while we’re still in California,” I said. We were hard on the Nevada border and heading for Oregon. “Otherwise you might have had to qualify from scratch in foreign territory.”
“That might be preferable to California DMV purgatory,” said Mark, “But now that I’ve remembered, I might as well do it here.”
“Okay,” I said, “But first, let’s see if we can achieve our grail at Radio Shack.”
Actually, the store was called Electronic Butterfly. It seemed to sell all kinds of computer paraphernalia beyond the ordinary Radio Shack lineup. Better and better, I thought. I walked up to the counter where a tall man with a long mustache was taking apart a calculator with a tiny screwdriver.
“Do you sell acoustic couplers?” I asked. The man looked up, startled.
“I think we’ve got an old one around here somewhere,” he said. “But why on earth would you want one?”
He didn’t have to ask twice. I poured my heart out. “I want it so I can log on at pay phones as we travel,” I said. “I used to want to log on with my cellular phone, but I’ve given up that dream. I’ve got this little black box, but . . .”
“A black box?” He interrupted. “What’s it supposed to do?” I explained as well as I could, using every fragment of techno-jargon I could muster. At the time, my fluency in modem-speak was at an all-time high. I’d immersed myself in manuals for weeks. A fair amount had stuck, if only momentarily.
The trouble is, my knowledge was fleeting. I’d detested learning it, and as soon as I could forget it, I did. This means that now, I am incapable of reporting my conversation with anything close to accuracy.
As well as I can remember, it went something like this.
Store clerk: Have you connected your fleeb strut to your crankduff bilgebanger?
Me: Yes, I used the glingbat dub that came with it.
Store Clerk: Good. Then the problem’s got to be in the kilber chain. Do you know about kilber chains?
Me: Well, I’ve been reading the manual. I know how to change them.
Store clerk: Good. Why don’t you try changing the jib hammer to a sneak hub and add an X-pod to your huppernog. That may do the trick.
Me: I’ll give it a try!
Store Clerk: If the X-pod doesn’t work, you can try a Y-frag.
Me: I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks!
Mark was so grateful he bought a new battery for his watch even though he didn’t need one. “If what you told her works,” he said to the clerk, “I’ll send you a consulting fee. You may have saved our marriage.”
“It’s my pleasure,” said the clerk. “And don’t forget to check your corkle bunt,” he added.
“On another topic,” said Mark, “Can you tell us where to find the Department of Motor Vehicles?”
The DMV, it turned out, was only a few blocks away, which, come to think of it, was true of everything in Susanville. We went there immediately, and I scribbled what I could remember of the store clerk’s advice in my notebook on the way.
“You’ll probably be stuck in the DMV for hours,” I said to Mark as we parked. “I’ll come in with you, but if it’s going to take forever, I’ll come back out and see whether I can make the black box do my bidding.”
The first thing that struck us about Susanville’s Department of Motor Vehicles was the size. It was housed behind a tiny storefront and had only one desk. A smiling woman stood behind
it, and behind her on the wall was a child’s crayon drawing.
“What can I do for you?” she asked cheerily. In five minutes, Mark had a new license.
Five pleasant minutes. Service with a smile. I swear, the next time I’m in Los Angeles and my license needs renewing, I’m driving to Susanville. Even with the twelve hundred mile detour, I’ll save time.
As soon as I had the chance, I set up my computer, made the changes the store clerk had suggested, hooked the modem up to the black box, and dialed an access number on the cellular telephone. It didn’t work the first time, and it didn’t work the second time. The third time — the last time, I told myself — it actually worked. Two pieces of e-mail transferred themselves to my machine. It was hardly earthshaking, but I felt like Archimedes, ready to run through the streets in the buff shouting “Eureka!” Luckily for Susanville, I restrained myself and settled for a celebratory glass of Chardonnay.
Susanville was founded by a man named Isaac Roop, who came to the area in 1854 after he lost his business in a fire and needed a fresh start. He staked his claim along the river, which he named after his daughter. Later the town got her name, too, and grew rapidly into a busy hub for Gold Rush-inspired trade.
That may be Susanville’s important history, but for me, this quiet hamlet will always remain a place of marvels: an unexpected elephant, a five-minute driver’s license, and, thanks to a friendly Radio Shack genius, a black box with a voice.
Technically speaking, it was spring when we arrived in Sequoia National Park, but winter had not wholly retreated. Azaleas were blooming in sunny spots, but the spreading branches of the Presidential Grove’s giants preserved a shadowy white carpet at their feet.
We walked quietly among the noble redwoods, each one bearing silent testimony of ancient fires, lightning, wind. In the presence of their extreme age, size and magnificence, I felt like a short-lived nuisance flitting by. How absurd that humans presume to name these beings, to act as though we own them. If Sequoias had arms, I wouldn’t blame them for swatting us.
The first loggers to happen upon a Sequoia grove drooled immediately and put their saws to work almost as quickly. Fortunately, the giants were found lacking in one astonishing regard. They had been blessed with size and beauty and age, but their wood is weak and brittle. Giant sequoias, unlike their smaller coastal cousins, are useless as lumber. A few trees died anyway to serve as side show freaks at Centennial celebrations and world fairs, but giant Sequoias were ultimately worth more alive and standing than sawn to bits.
We may kill them anyway, of course. Sequoias are champions at surviving forest fires, but nobody really knows whether they can survive having their root systems covered with asphalt and pummeled by two million feet a year. Size bears no relation to deadliness, and humans may well be the AIDS virus of the giant redwoods, a lethal invader with a long incubation period.
I hope we’re not killers. I hope we’re harmless groupies, not death-bearing tsetse flies. I want those redwoods to be here until the sun dies, and as long as I’m here, I want to be able to visit them. They remind me to seize the day.
We walked until the sun began to fade, and then headed for a campground we’d noticed earlier. Campgrounds in national parks have an unwritten rule that every car camper knows. You have to drive by every available site before you pick one. You can’t just take the first one, because you might be missing one that’s flatter, bigger, shadier, prettier, or just plain better. We began our obligatory circuit, and around the first bend, we surprised six people standing next to a camper laden with mountain bikes. They all wore that now-familiar “What is that thing?” look, and we smiled politely.
The campground was nearly deserted, which made our search more challenging. “That one’s got azaleas blooming next to it,” I would say. “But that one’s got its own water faucet,” Mark would counter. “That one’s got a view.” “That one’s nice and level.” Before long, we found ourselves back at the entrance gate. “Okay, now we have to pick,” said Mark, and we began our second orbit.
This time, the six cyclists were expecting us. They were standing in a row, and as we rounded the bend, they salaamed in unison, touching their foreheads to the ground in exaggerated adoration. We waved sheepishly, and suddenly a site on the opposite edge of the campground seemed ideal. We fled. The cyclists came by later to make sure we weren’t mad. “No, just embarrassed,” we said, and Mark spent the next hour happily discussing suspension systems and tag axles.
I retired to my office. From a romance point of view, it was the perfect setting to test the newly functioning black box. I set up my computer and turned on the cellular phone. At last, I thought as I looked at the moon rising above the cedars outside my window, we were truly mobile. At last, location was unimportant. I really could sit at my desk in the wilderness and function just as efficiently as if I were in a Manhattan skyscraper.
The telephone didn’t work. In 1994, cellular phones functioned fairly well in major cities and heavily traveled corridors, but relay stations were few in sparsely populated and mountainous regions. I should have known, but my success in Susanville was still fresh.
I wrote for a while anyway, and near midnight, Mark and I went outside to take Marvin for a walk in the starlight. We crunched across the snow and soon arrived at the campground gate. “Look,” I said. “There’s a pay phone.” It was housed in a tidy wooden shelter, and there was a neat cap of snow on its little peaked roof. I could reach out and touch a perfectly functioning telephone, and it was useless to me. And all I want to do is send e-mail, I thought. In 1994, I didn’t even know about the World Wide Web. All I wanted was to transmit a small text file once a week from wherever I happened to be. Was that too much to ask? I sighed. I was beginning to think it might be.