Postcards from the Rogue Valley

Three weeks ago, Tony and I drove from Southern Oregon to Los Angeles to meet, at last, our newest grandson, born three months ago. Air travel, in these days of pandemic, was not in the cards. Even if we accepted the health risks, nonstop flights from our regional airport to LA have been suspended and $350 will buy a one-way, one-stop, seven-hour flight.

Damian, as we expected, was everything we hoped for: a healthy baby smiling and cooing, discovering his hands, taking in the world, frantic when hungry. Other than a night nurse, we were the first humans to enter Einor and Dan’s small apartment since COVID struck in mid-March. As new parents balancing the challenges of caring for a somewhat-colicky infant in a time of social isolation, their anxieties were palpable. We did what we could to help, besides falling love with our newest grandson.

Dan and Einor live in downtown LA, near the epicenter of last month’s Black Lives Matter protests and looting. Each day during our visit, we walked with Damian in his Snugli past boarded up storefronts on mostly empty streets, a dystopian city I barely recognized. When we walked the nearby residential streets, ultra-houses with manicured gardens and jacaranda trees testified to the inequalities that grip our nation. On one of our strolls, we counted 19 parked Range Rovers and 20 Teslas. 

Love, we know, is a powerful tonic, and Damian’s small universe has plenty of it. But like all parents and grandparents, we fear desperately for his future, growing up in a world rocked by crisis and injustice. 

I write here, though, to tell a simpler story, about our road trip down and back from Los Angeles.

We followed Interstate-5 down to LA, the fastest and straightest shot from Southern Oregon to Southern California—the west coast version of I-95 in the east. Both interstates stretch from the Canadian border to their respective southernmost tips: San Ysidro on the Mexican border in the west and Miami in the east. As anyone who drives routes knows, tractor trailer trucks spill across the lanes.

Our drive took eleven hours with two pit stops. We crossed the Siskiyou Summit (elev. 4,311 feet), just south of Ashland and the highest point on I-5’s 1,381-mile trek, then descended into California’s Central Valley, which stretches 450 miles from Redding near the Oregon border to Bakersfield north of LA. More than half of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in the US come from the Central Valley. 

There are few distractions on this long stretch of road. Tony and I shortened the time listening to an audiobook, the contentious American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, a novel about a Mexican bookseller who has to escape cartel-related violence with her son, fleeing to the US.

The large growing fields we passed for what seemed like miles on end revealed none of the secrets their migrant pickers, many with their own stories of running for their lives, kept hidden. Much more visible was the extensive irrigation that turned this naturally arid land into an agricultural superpower.

Our trip back to Oregon followed a far different route: the two-lane 395 along the east side of the Sierras. It may be my favorite stretch of road in the country.

When I was a child living in Princeton, New Jersey, my family would pack into our Plymouth station wagon every July and drive across the country to Los Angeles, where my mathematician father earned a summer salary at the RAND corporation. On long weekends, we’d drive US 101 up the Pacific coast or I-5 up to Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks. 

I didn’t discover US 395 and the cornucopia of geological riches it contains until I was a teenager and moved to California when my mother divorced my father and married another mathematician who taught at UCLA. (My two older brothers stayed in Princeton with my father.)

After saying goodbye to Damian and his parents, Tony and I made our way through the spiderweb of freeways that circle Los Angeles, then out and up Cajon Pass, notorious for its winds, which during the Santa Ana season can gust up to 60 miles per hour and topple semi-trucks. The San Andreas Fault cuts through Cajon Pass, along with the Pacific Coast Trail.

Descending from the pass, we began our trip up 395, turning north into the Mojave, the smallest and hottest desert in North America. Its boundaries, I’ve learned, are noted by the presence of Joshua trees, which are native only to the Mojave Desert and are considered an indicator species, supporting an additional 1,750 to 2,000 species of plants.

Here in this corner of the desert, though, there are few Joshua trees in sight—only sand, rock, and dry shrub. Mojave means “people of the water,” but it is easy to imagine dying of thirst in this forbidding landscape. 

Ninety-seven miles later, Tony and I reached Inyokern (pop. 1,009) where the United States Navy’s largest single landholding, China Lake, stretches in every direction, covering 2,800 square miles, an area larger than Rhode Island. For ninety years, NAWS China Lake has supported the research, testing and evaluation programs of the U.S. Navy. 

I knew China Lake and its Edwards Air Force Base, however, as the place the Space Shuttles landed, with its dry lake bed and reliable weather providing near-perfect conditions. The double boom impact of the landings could be felt as far away as downtown LA. In 1982, 500,000 spectators crowded China Lake to watch the Columbia land. The Space Shuttle Endeavor landed here in 2008.

Another 45 miles and Tony and I reached the turnoff to Death Valley, the lowest point in the US (the grist of grade school geography quizzes). It was too hot to visit (119° F.), but Tony and I have been there twice in the past three years, hiking the canyons and stargazing in the cool of December. On our first visit, I told Tony this is “my land before time.” In 2001, when I was forced to resign from directing Walter Annenberg’s $500M “Challenge to Our Nation’s Schools”—refusing to measure the program’s impact by test scores alone—I booked a winter vacation for our family to Death Valley. I hoped to restore my soul.

Soon, the Sierra Nevada, an almost continuous chain of mountain ranges that forms the western “backbone” of the Americas, began to fill the driver’s side window of our dust-covered Subaru.

On our right, Owens Lake shimmered in the distance. Unlike most dry lakes in this Great Basin that have been dry for thousands of years, Owens held significant water until 1913, when much of the Owens River was diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, causing Owens Lake to desiccate by 1926. (Remember Roman Polanski’s film noir, Chinatown?) Today, some of the river’s flow has been restored, but as of 2013, it was the largest single source of dust pollution in the United States. The Owens Valley, in which Owens Lake is nestled, is the deepest valley in North America.

Soon, Mt. Whitney (elev. 14,505 ft), the highest peak in the contiguous US, rose dramatically to our left, flanked by two other 14,000 plus-feet mountains. I remembered the summer after my freshman year in college when my brother Tom and I, along with two friends (I’d attended Santa Monica High School with one, where he was the captain of the football team), decided to hike Whitney. My only asset was my youth—rhe trail, rated strenuous for seasoned hikers, is 22 miles round trip with an elevation gain of over 6,100 feet.

We had planned to hike and camp the first day at Trail Camp (12,000 ft) and acclimatize for the climb to the summit. Pouring rain forced us to pitch a tent just three miles from where we’d started. The next morning dawned blue and bright, though I don’t think I’d slept a wink. Setting off at five a.m., we crossed alpine meadows filled with wildflowers, scrambled up rocks, and climbed the 97 switchbacks that led to the summit—and started back down. We reached our car near sunset, having climbed 19 miles in twelve hours to what seemed like the top of the world. 

“I’m hungry, are you?” Tony wondered as we entered the town of Bishop (pop. 3,746), just north of Whitney. We found a small pubic park and sat in the shade to eat the sandwiches we had packed. “You want to know something interesting about this town,” I asked Tony. “Over 150 Westerns have been shot around here: True Grit, How the West Was Won…” I struggled to remember more titles. Tony reminded me that he wasn’t a fan of Westerns.

An hour later we reached the turnoff for Mammoth Mountain, a 7,881-foot volcano whose vertical drop, huge snows, open terrain, and sheer size make it one of the biggest and best ski resorts in California, if not the US. When I moved to Santa Monica at age 13, I discovered I was good at skiing, a rejoinder to my seeming nerdiness. Mount Baldy (elev. 4,193 ft), an hour’s drive from LA, offered novice runs. Mammoth Mountain promised wide open bowls and heart-pumping chutes.

Several times a year my, mother and stepfather (who barely skied) and I would drive five hours up 395 to Mammoth for a few days of alpine adventure, then head back to LA after we’d finished our last runs, stopping for dinner on our way home. One night, as we passed Mt. Whitney and her Sierra sisters, a full moon showered their peaks and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony streamed from the car radio of our 1964 Buick LeSabre. When “Ode to Joy” burst, I started to cry. I remember thinking this might be the best moment in my life.

A little farther up 395 from Mammoth, Tioga Pass, the eastern entry point to Yosemite National Park appeared on the left. The highest mountain pass in California at 9,943 feet, it is typically closed by snow eight months of the year. I crossed it twice in the 1960s, once a day after it opened for the season.

At mile 340 of our trip, Tony and I gazed down at Mono Lake, the oldest lake in North America and a habitat for millions of migratory and nesting birds. When the City of Los Angeles diverted water from the freshwater streams flowing into the lake, it lowered the lake level, which imperiled the migratory birds. The Mono Lake Committee formed in response and won a legal battle that forced Los Angeles to partially replenish the lake level. The “Water Wars” in California have lasted more than a century.  

From Mono Lake, we followed 395 another 70 miles into Nevada, then back into Northern California, past Lassen National Park and Mt. Shasta, one of the naturalist John Muir’s favorite mountains, where he also almost lost his life in a freak winter storm.

Indeed, John Muir’s footprints and name permeate the wilderness on US 395’s path through California.

He had the right idea.

“Keep close to Nature’s heart,” Muir wrote in 1915, “and break away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”

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