Sunday August 21, 2005
5:51 PM
Pinnacles National Monument, CA

Most people ignore Central California. Usually the state’s two megalopolises, LA and the bay area, get all the attention. But it’s about a seven-hour drive between LA and San Francisco, and there are lots of things in between, things with which I have more familiarity than most Californians, for I was born and raised in the empty middle part of the state. Sadly this also means that I am close to home and my journey’s end.

Where I am now is a very peaceful, quiet place. The sun is sinking behind the trees, filtering the yellow light of late afternoon to accentuate the golden color of the shaggy, rough grass dried out in the August sun. The brown and red grass blankets the hills between scattered trees and seasonal streams whose last trickles dried up months ago. Readers of John Steinbeck will be familiar with this area. Most of his stories took place in Central California, mostly within fifty miles of here. This is the setting of The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men. His most famous novel is probably The Grapes of Wrath, which took place in Bakersfield, where my parents are expecting me tonight.

An airplane flying straight across California at this latitude will pass over an incredible variety of scenery. More variety than any other place I’ve been to in all my traveling. The first thing to see would be great white waves crashing over the rocky Big Sur coastline. Hundreds of feet above the water, cars drive along Highway 1 on the edge of cliffs. Like arboreal skyscrapers the coastal redwoods tower hundreds of feet higher, the tallest trees in the world. Short but steep mountains come next, then drop down to the farms in the Salinas Valley. Hilly vineyards stretch out over the hills leading up to the rocky pinnacles around me that are part of the coastal range. These mountains go up a few thousand feet before dropping down to the rich, productive farms of the Central Valley mixed with Fresno’s enormous suburban sprawl. The valley slowly turns into hills that get bigger and taller as the foothills become the Sierras. Colossal trees and granite cliffs rise up in Sequoia National Park. The huge mountains climax to form lofty Mt. Whitney and its neighboring peaks, over 14,000 feet above sea level along the serrated spine of California. And then without warning the elevation drops 10,000 feet. There are no foothills on the eastern slope of the sierras. There’s hardly even a change in the ecosystem as the barren alpine landscape above tree line descends suddenly to the desert scrub of Owens Valley. Here the repeating pattern of valley then mountain range begins and continues across Nevada. After another great rise and fall of another snowy mountain range is the sparsely-populated Panamint Valley. After the next range is the white-hot floor of even sparser Death Valley, its shimmering salt flats like scorching anti-ice floes in a valley surrounded by implausible snowy peaks reaching to the Nevada border. All that variety lies on the cross-section of the state through this latitude. One of my favorite things about California is that there are so many types of environment that can be easily accessed. A total change in scenery is just a short drive away.

From here, the nearest town is Soledad, in the middle of the long, fertile, funnel-shaped Salinas valley that goes from about Paso Robles, 80 miles south of here, to Monterey Bay, about 50 miles north. You could argue that the valley continues on below the surface of the bay as a unique undersea canyon that brings the depths of the Pacific Ocean, in the abyss beyond the continental shelf, to within a few miles of land. Farmland fills the valley’s green floor, while scattered towns give travelers on the four lanes of US-101 places to stop and refuel. If they bother to look around they’d see the farms’ edge in the distance where hills start to take over the landscape. To the east the hills are the boundary of the long Central Valley. The hills to the west will drop off into the Pacific Ocean in the dramatic cliffs of the Big Sur coast.

I spent the last few days in Santa Cruz hanging out with my sister and her housemates. I also met up with Anna, who I first met in Boston a few months ago when she was visiting her friend Lucy who was friends with my friend Kyle. I rode my bike on some fun trails that start behind the dorm where my sister used to live. UC Santa Cruz is a very unique campus. It’s a really big university, but it’s mostly invisible from town despite its position atop a hill overlooking the whole city of Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay. It’s hidden within a thick redwood forest. Often the best way to get between school buildings is on hiking trails through lush fern-filled woods populated by either deer or stoned, shaggy 20-year-olds hitting drums. I’ve heard there’s a rule that no building can be taller than any tree within a certain distance of the building’s walls (though this shouldn’t be much of a problem as redwoods can be over 350 feet tall). The dense woods make it so you can rarely see the building you’re going to until you’re right in front of it. The area feels like its main purpose is to be a forest, with a secondary role as a major university. There’s not even any cell phone reception on campus.

I left Santa Cruz today and decided to check out Pinnacles National Monument. I’d never been here before even though I’d driven by it many times. It has one of the coolest hikes I’ve ever been on. It’s the only trail I’ve hiked that requires a flashlight during the day. The trail goes up a streambed through a gradually narrowing valley between tall orange and grey rock walls. Raptors watch climbers and hikers from their stony balconies and the trail tapers until it can’t get any narrower. Then you have to crawl through a cave. No normal cavern with dripping stalactites and stalagmites, this cave was created by boulders tumbling down over a narrow slot canyon, let loose by earthquakes. I am right next to the San Andreas fault, which separates the North American tectonic plate from the Pacific plate, making this a very seismically active area. The trail emerges and has you crawling through a few more caves before looping back on a high route above everything you just walked through.

I can definitely tell that I’m back in California now. Nearly all of the people here speak to each other in Spanish. That’s something you never find hiking anywhere else. All the nearby farms mean that most of the area’s population is Mexican. Agriculture is the main industry in this part of the state, so Mexicans make up more of the population here than probably anywhere else north of the border.

That’s it. Tonight I’m going home. Vacations over.

By the way, I just realized that “vaca” means “cow” in Spanish, so I guess “vacation” would mean “to be like a cow”. Interesting.

This trip has lasted 143 days. It’s required me to make a whole change in my lifestyle, as I’ve basically become a nomad. It’s been nice, but I am starting to miss the simple things most people don’t think about that come with having a home. Things like sitting around watching TV, or going on the internet whenever I feel like it, or keeping my stuff at a place instead of having it all with me at all times. So that’ll be another lifestyle change. Back to normal. Damn. Normal is just not my style.