The South Fork of the American River swung up parallel to the winding highway and for five miles the banks of the river were monopolised by the camp sites of whitewater rafting companies. Before I realised it, I had ridden through what I presumed was Coloma. I doubled back to check this drab hamlet was indeed the place which had inspired the world to rush in. On one side of the road was the Coloma Club Café and Saloon. On the other, a small L-shaped plaza contained a sports store, deli and the local farm agent for Nutran Feeds. There was a gas station, camp site and a few holiday cabins further down the road, but if this was what had become of the gold town where it all began, it was criminal.
I ordered a couple of compensatory Sierra Nevadas at the Coloma Saloon and took them to a secluded spot round the side of the bar where I pitched on a bit of waste land used for target practice. Clearing the ground of shells, I settled down for a night under a full moon not a hundred metres from where I figured the gold was first discovered. Across the road, in the official camping ground, an amplified crooner howled through American Pie. I waited for the ghost of James Marshall to appear with hands clapped over his ears.
In August 1847, James Wilson Marshall was sent to a bend in the South Fork of the American River to build a saw mill. His employer, Johann August Sutter, ran a fortified trading post in the Sacramento Valley and needed planking for further expansion. In the course of deepening the mill race, Marshall’s ‘eye was caught by something shining in the bottom of the ditch… I reached my hand down and picked it up; it made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold. The piece was about half the size of a pea. Then I saw another…’
Marshall rode down the mountain and showed the samples to his employer, who confirmed it was gold. Immediately Sutter swore Marshall to secrecy, at least until his mill was completed and the title to the land secured. Amongst Marshall’s workforce were a Mormon family, the Wemmers, whose son let slip about the find. Initially the news didn’t spread far. There had been previous discoveries in places like present day Colorado, but nothing came of them. Finally the news filtered through to another Mormon, Sam Brannan, an acquisitive entrepreneur who owned a flour mill and California’s first newspaper. Brannan opened a store next door to Sutter’s sawmill and stocked it with everything a budding prospector might need. He then caught a boat to San Francisco and walked through the streets waving a quinine bottle full of gold dust shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” It was May 1848 and the secret was well and truly out.
I rode down the hill from Coloma looking for the State Historical Park and swept into, er… Coloma. It seemed I had spent the night in Lotus, on a bend of the American River but not the bend. My disappointment evaporated at the sight of Sutter’s mill standing tall and solid a short distance from the river. The original structure was torn down in 1856 to make use of the wood, but its foundations were uncovered seventy years later and the replica I photographed from every angle was reconstructed from Marshall’s original drawings, albeit in a different location. It was the most impressive exhibit in an otherwise unabsorbing open-air collection of rock crushers and mining tackle. Considering I was visiting the heritage site in the sesquicentennial year of the big event, I expected more of a splash.
By comparison to the Mormon’s blockbuster screened at the Hub and Spoke Ranch, the docudrama of life in the gold fields was a hammy, scratchy B-feature liberally sprinkled with inaccuracies and stereotypes. The only exhibit in the visitor’s centre I learned anything from was a daguerreotype of Coloma before it was inundated. It appeared the barren rounded knaps I had seen at the junction of the North and Middle Forks were not much different from the barren rounded knaps of before the Gold Rush. The only other item I could get excited about was a plastic tub on the ticket counter containing ‘prairie rings’ — copies of the bent horseshoe nails used by the overlanders for wedding rings. I bought one to slip on Sandy’s finger at our reunion.
Opposite the Visitor Center, a row of shacks pretended to be the Coloma of old. At the one selling drinks and home baked cakes, I slipped into conversation with a local chap who looked miserable and spoke American with a heavy accent. On Friday, Finn Schmidt’s wife had passed away. He had just been to church, which only reminded him of the 101 things he needed to organise for his wife’s funeral. She was a popular lady in the neighbourhood and Finn had received special dispensation for his wife to be buried in the Pioneer Cemetery. One of the last people to be buried in the historic graveyard was Matt Sugarman, the former superintendent of the State Historical Park. Finn told me about Matt and explained why the sesquicentennial celebrations failed to make a mark.
“Matt was passionate about the park. He believed it was the most important historical site in America. When Pete Wilson became State Governor, he set up a fund of $2.5 million for the special anniversary and for improvements to the museum, but Wilson froze Matt out. He set up a commission and blew the money on junkets to Europe and contracts for his buddies. They came out with lousy, half-baked ideas. In the end, all there was to show for the money was a load of glossy publicity.”
Hoping they would dig into the scandal and lay it open for public scrutiny, Matt Sugarman called in the press. The commission proceeded to intimidate him, threatening to withdraw all state funding from the park.
“At the time, Matt was dying of cancer,” Finn went on. “The commission were totally unaware of his illness. As far as they were concerned, he was a meddling employee playing a game of political brinkmanship. Forcing him to attend the opening celebrations, Matt took the opportunity to publicly embarrass the governor. The opening went off like a jammed gun, but Matt cornered Wilson into announcing a further 300,000 bucks to go direct to the park. You want to go up and take a look at the graveyard. The epitaph on Matt’s headstone just says ‘Truth Speaker.’”
I didn’t cycle up to check out the Pioneer Cemetery, principally because I wasn’t cycling anywhere I didn’t have to, least of all up hill. All I wanted to do was finalise details with Sandy and beat a hasty retreat down to Sacramento. Several times I tried phoning home but she was engaged.
If you are stood at around forty metres and your destination is roughly fifteen above sea level, you would imagine your road would be downhill all the way. Had it followed the American River valley and the route taken out of the mountains in the nineteenth century it might have been, but the tarmac road to Sacramento first had to haul itself through the Himalayan foothills of El Dorado County. For anybody who had a nano erg of energy in them, the ascents were less than grievous. I had been riding on empty longer than I thought humanly possible. At the foot of the first climb disappearing into the clouds, I burst into tears.
Ten agonising, detestable miles later, I was saved from myself by a friendly little store-cum-café in the tiny wooded hamlet of Rescue.
“It’s named after a guy who struck gold,” the woman behind the breakfast bar told me. “He was rescued from heavy debts of the life threatening kind. Hey, you’re from Ingerland, right? D’yar know Def Leppard — the band? I’m a friend of the drummer’s. D’yar know him — Rick Allen? Been to Sheffield, ’n all. Full Monty, wahey!” She lifted her apron and jigged to the till.
On a phone in the café which was a hand-me-down from Alexander Graham Bell, I finally got through to Nottingham. There was an unexpected bubble of excitement in Sandy’s voice.
“I can’t believe this is really happening. In twenty-four hours I’ll be in San Francisco,” she frothed.
“You’re excited, yeh?”
“Too right. I’m out of here. I can’t wait to see you.” More cautiously she asked, “How do you look?”
I had spent a long time worrying about what Sandy and I would do when she arrived in California. She was bringing her bicycle and we vaguely planned to explore more of the gold towns together. I could think of nothing I would least like to do, but the next three weeks had to be Sandy’s time. I owed her that much and probably a lot more, but how to make it a reunion to remember when all I wanted to do was sleep for a hundred years?
Hills of frizzled grass gradually gave way to subdivisions of skeletal timber. Both were yellowing. Detailed down to porticoes and cornices, near complete condominiums of plywood awaited plastic sheeting to transform them into homes less desirable. The population of the Sacramento Valley was spreading up over the toes of the sierras like athlete’s foot. Dwarfed by the dirt dam of Folsom Lake, I rolled into Folsom town on a six lane blacktop looking for a sign post to Sacramento which didn’t want to steer me onto I-50. At a gas station I asked directions. Nobody knew how to get to the big city without taking the freeway.
More by accident than directions, I crossed the American River again. On the far side, a buckled cycleway sign pointed down to a tarmac trail hugging the north bank. Disorientated as a tracker dog sniffing in a creek, I had nothing to lose but the traffic. I wove my way through the thickets of Negro Bar and out onto shingle banks bristling with wild rye. The trail took a dive down to river level and meandered beside Lake Natoma — a bulge in the river like dinner in a snake caused by a dam five miles downstream. Beneath bright orange cliffs supporting the sprawls of Folson and Orangevale, I rode through evening shadows cast over a lazy current, impatiently scanning the skyline for signs of the high steel of Sacramento.
The riverside trail added eight miles to the straight into the city. For the pleasure of a traffic free route, the added distance usually wouldn’t have bothered me, but I was petulant to finish and would have jumped onto the interstate had it presented itself. The cycleway wandered through parks and picnic areas where kids whacked baseballs and Muslims bowed towards Mecca. It picked its way through endless boulder bars and cottonwoods pungent with fennel. Except that the finishing line appeared to be receding, my odyssey was over. There were no more surprises, except the wrong turns I took in my haste. Frustrated and angry, I resigned myself to cycling into Sacramento in the dark.
Amongst commuters and evening exercisers pedalling the thin grey line, I came upon a family of eight hogging the strip. As I dallied behind, poised to overtake, it struck me this was a sight to behold, even in Europe. The oldest child was about fourteen and the youngest about four. There were three boys and three girls — a balanced family balanced on bicycles.
“Is there anybody left at home?” I quipped, pulling alongside mum.
“Nar. The whole family’s here, present and correct, if Junior would just hold his line.” The woman spoke perfect American with a guttural accent which sounded Central European. “We’re on our way home. They’re a little tired.”
They had every right to be. According to Nelly, the children had cycled a round trip of over forty miles. The youngest solo rider pedalled a single speed, small wheeled machine never designed to go further than the end of the block. The baby of the bunch sat behind dad, trying to stay upright in a kiddie seat. Each time he slumped, Jim swung an arm round his back to shake the lad awake. He said the family took a ride most Sundays. They were six miles from home, straight down the bike trail.
Nelly was an English interpreter from Timisoara, Romania. She was there in December 1989 when the revolution kicked out Ceausescu’s local lackeys. Jim was a relief worker trucking aid into Timisoara when they met seventeen years ago. Nelly was now an American citizen, but I didn’t get their full story and couldn’t work out if the children were all Jim’s. He was softly spoken, polite and courteous, and the kids were certainly the same.
Number one daughter had been listening intently to my conversation with Nelly. “Excuse me, Mr. John. Nottingham? That’s where the Sheriff lived, yes?” She too spoke with an accent.
Like a detective checking her facts, number one daughter told me that Robin Hood was probably a compilation of several real people, that the first story was written down a century or more after their death, and that Robin of Sherwood was a hero of the dispossessed. I was dumb-founded. “I’ve read a few books,” she explained.
There was something odd about these children. Aside from anything else, they weren’t whinging. Forty miles is a long way for the best behaved little legs, but what banter occurred between them revolved around identifying wayside plants. When Jim invited me to pitch in their garden for the night, curiosity got the better of my desire to have done with the argonaut’s trail.
We were in the city, Jim said, but still I saw no skyscrapers looming over the cottonwoods. I followed them up a steep embankment onto an off-shoot of the American River Trail, and rode into a working class estate of scabby bungalows and dog-eared streets north of El Camino Avenue. Ours were the only white faces. In their driveway were a car and a pick-up which wasn’t long for the wrecker’s yard. “Going to have a problem transporting the wildlife,” Jim said cryptically, tapping the pick-up as we squeezed past. “I’m extending the sides to take a higher load.”
Jim, Nelly and the tribe were on the verge of moving to Michigan. They had sold their house and were boxing things up. “We need more space and more land, maybe a little farm,” Nelly said. “We haven’t bought anywhere yet. In fact, we’ve never visited the state. We plan to stay with Jim’s cousin while we search for a house. There will be thirteen people living under one roof when we move in.”
It was a recipe for tearing your hair out — or maybe not. I watched the children stash their bicycles, take a wash, change and settle down for the evening without any argibargy or instruction. Their behaviour was as exceptional as the family’s back yard.
Where neighbouring gardens were grubby lawns blitzed with kid’s toys, half of their’s was cultivated and orderly. At the bottom stood a small orchard of apple trees and secret hiding places where the children played. Then came the chicken pen and bee hives, the province of number two son, who was an apiarist and expert on White Leghorns. The remaining area was a kitchen garden bordered with flowers and a little white picket fence. A path down the middle slipped under a Chinese pagola onto the lawn before the house. A miniature Dutch barn built by Jim and the kids out of scavenged wood housed the bikes and gardening tools, and a small pond allowed their free range ducks, geese and Newfy, the German-Newfound’ cross, to take water. While explaining to Jim why it was a joy to see such a garden, I pitched next to the dovecote. “Of course, the fowl are illegal in the city, and we’ve had complaints,” Jim said, nibbling one of their Granny Smiths. “Another good reason for moving.”
In the kitchen, Nelly had been preparing dinner when she was struck down with a blinding migraine. All she could do was lie on the sofa in a darkened sitting room and grit it out. Jim lovingly caressed her brow and occasionally massage her neck. She was in tears of pain.
“I never ever suffered from migraines until I came to America,” Nelly moaned. “I watch our diet like a hawk — everything we eat and drink. I have no idea what brings it on.”
Without any prompting, number one daughter and son had taken over the cooking. I sat at the kitchen table drawing for number two daughter, and held a quiet conversation with the replacement chefs. They dismissed TV as boring but quite liked the Discovery Channel. They had both read the Harry Potter books and thought they were okay, for light entertainment. She was currently researching the State of Michigan and he was reading up on milk cows. What the hell was it with these kids?
It emerged they were ‘home schoolers’, taught principally by Nelly and supported by a movement which was gaining ground in America. Over a million kids were registered as being taught at home and fifty states had accepted the practice, albeit reluctantly. In 1997, home schooling received a major fillip when one of their number won the National Spelling Bee contest. Since then, home schoolers had consistently achieved significantly better results than private and public school kids, generally performing a grade higher than their contemporaries in the two systems.
Jim told me that school psychologists were talking up the fear that home schooling failed to develop the “socialisation skills” of pupils. They argued that children taught at home were introverted misfits who couldn’t relate to other kids, “In the same way that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold related to other kids, maybe?” The chefs told me they regularly joined other home schoolers from Sacramento for field trips, visits to museums and sporting activities, and they all had friends who went to mainstream schools. “Anyways,” Jim said, “would you trust the opinion of a profession which prescribes Ritalin to children to keep them subdued in class?”
In the morning, breakfast was served by daughters one and two, and son number three. Nelly was sleeping in after a rotten night and Jim was off to earn a few bucks working for a pal. He made to leave, returned, dug in his pocket and thrust $20 in my hand. It was twenty bucks better spent on his family, but Jim was an irrepressible aid worker. I thanked him and handed back the money saying, “I’m only cycling a couple of miles down the road, Jim. I’m all done.”
A shiver of relief rattled through me at hearing those three words. “Yes you are,” Jim said, patting me on the shoulder.
When I left for the final ride, Nelly was still in bed and all six children were gainfully absorbed in reading, writing, drawing or building “Robin Hood’s castle” out of Lego. The second stage of my journey had started with the slaughter of innocents at a high school. The massacre cast a shadow over the second year of the trip, particularly over those I stayed with who had teenagers. At trail’s end, it was heartening to spend time with children who were bright, helpful, inquisitive, creative and genuine. Jim and Nelly’s kids weren’t going to need a machine pistol to get themselves noticed.
From Independence to Sacramento had taken the fastest wagon trains ninety-three days to complete what one diarist described as ‘so tedious a journey’. It had taken me exactly eight weeks and a total of thirteen weeks from Washington. Hundreds of miles of my ride had been numbingly tedious, but their ordeals had given me a unique insight into what the overlanders put themselves through. The weather was mostly unforgiving, remarkably little of the landscape was seductive, and few built up areas were much more than bland. Where town or country was a bit special it was strikingly beautiful, sometimes sublime and generally surpassed my expectations, but it was the people who most astonished me. Travelling alone, I missed the comradeship of argonauts, pioneers and pilgrims following the same trail, but the readiness with which so many opened their door surpassed anything I had experienced elsewhere in the world. Of my ninety-one nights on the road, sixty-four were spent with families. Americans might not travel far beyond their shores, but their eagerness to learn about distant lands and how the world perceived them had resulted in many a morning suffering from late nights.
Of course the line I travelled was a single thread in a huge woven carpet, and as I rode towards my final destination, I mused on how frequently my attempts to generalise about America and Americans had been confounded. All I knew for sure was that the enterprise exhibited in crossing and colonising the continent in the second half of the nineteenth century made the United States what it is today, for good and bad. I now understood better than any history book could convey just how much the pioneer spirit of the nineteenth century forged the God given role the USA believes it has in the world today. Manifest Destiny is a mighty powerful driving force.
Where the American River flowed into the Sacramento, the curtains of greenery finally parted to reveal the skyline of Sacramento city, pleasantly under-endowed with steel and glass monoliths. What reached for the clouds were the turn-of-the-century towers, steeples and domes of a classically influenced architecture befitting a state capital looking to establish a sober identity after the raucous years of the Gold Rush. I crossed the American River and rode towards the shunting yard which once was the eastern terminus of the Central Pacific Railroad and now was the California State Railroad Museum. The cycleway across the tracks was closed for Railfair, a ten day beano for train spotters and one of the largest in the world. Following another cyclist, I dragged my rig through a tear in the chain link onto a fly-over into town. He cycled towards the traffic on the wrong side of the road, a malpractice I had witnessed in every major urban area since leaving the Appalachians. Now was as good a time as any to do as they do in Rome.
The second driver to approach hurled abuse at the guy in front and took aim at me. I squeezed into the high sidewalk, grazed my front pannier, corrected, was clipped by the car’s front fender and fell against its side window.
Thrown back onto the sidewalk, I landed in an embarrassed heap with the bike sprawled across the on-coming lane. Smarting with grazes, I made a rapid escape along the footpath.
Sat outside the train station beyond the fly-over, I was consoled by an elderly business man who fished Kleenex from his briefcase to wipe away the blood. “Welcome to Sacramento,” he said. “For what it’s worth, in my experience, it’s actually very safe cycling in this city… on the right side of the road.”