My Drive West

If you hang around long enough in Guatemala, a nation the size of Tennessee, your sense of distance gets a little warped. You start to think it’s normal for coast-to-coast trips to take only a couple of hours, and for trips to the capital to take no more than four. You just get used to it.

So as Nicole bid me farewell from her home in Des Moines, I didn’t blink an eye when she offhandedly asked, “So, you’ll probably be in Oregon tomorrow morning, right?”

I said, “Yeah, probably.” And I kind of meant it.

People, I have made this trip before. Eight times by airplane, twice by car, and one time on a bus that was stopped by the fuzz so they could arrest a passenger on a manslaughter charge. So how in the world did I forget how huge this country is?

And monotonous. In Guatemala, you’ll go from rainforest to mountain pass to desert and back to rainforest in the course of a few hours. Here, a few hours brings you from Iowa to Iowa to Iowa, and then just when you think there can’t possibly be any more Iowa you cross over into Nebraska, which - let’s be honest here - is really just another Iowa. Nine days later you cross over into eastern Wyoming, which, again! It’s just Iowa! Jiminy Christmas!

Finally something changes mid Wyoming. One by one, all the friendly cars you’ve been caravanning with slip discreetly onto exits. Soon, it’s just you and a few semis, and they’re starting to get scarce too. And all the distant towns that you could see from the highway in the Iowas have vanished, and now there’s just nothing. It’s an incredibly lonely, please-don’t-fail-me-now-little-car sort of feeling.

As befits a journey through the Midwest, I was listening to The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. It’s a delightful tale about how everyone else in the world is going to take the cool jobs and so those of us in the U.S. are going to be stuck selling coffee to each other, except none of us will be able to afford coffee. So, I spent most of my trip freaking out about my current unemployment and also my lack of a science degree.

I also spent a lot of time eating Fig Newtons. I tell you what, outside of the car I really never eat those things, but if I’m on a road trip I can’t keep my hands off them. It’s the strangest thing.

So that was the Midwest. Let’s skip forward a few hundred miles.

I entered the Reno at about 7 on Saturday evening and spent the next 3 hours trying to find a cheap hotel that didn’t look like a likely setting for my physical or financial ruin. I pulled into a lot of parking lots and then promptly wheeled right out of them again, my Spidey-senses tingling. I could just tell that some of these places have seen their share of chalk outlines. Gave me the willies.

Eventually I found a delightful chateau with a view of the highway. It shared a parking lot with a Denny’s. Hard to do better than that, I say.

The next day, I did nothing except eat microwave burritos and watch football. Somewhere therein lays proof of my manhood.

Of course I did secure sustenance at Denny’s as well. And while mowing down a Grand Slam I had a lovely conversation regarding American foreign policy with a mining expert. And I mean expert. Get a load of this title: Newmont Professor of Extractive Mineral Process Engineering at the Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering Department of Mining Engineering.

Good lolly. I don’t even have a business card. (Self-esteem dropping, dropping….)

Somehow I escaped Reno without losing a nickel, and by mid-morning on Monday the 22nd of January I descended into the mighty Sacramento Valley. What a warm, beautiful, open place. Every time I encounter it, I feel like Littlefoot when he first peers into the Great Valley. For those of you not catching that Land Before Time reference, just know that the Great Valley is “…a land of lush vegetation where the dinosaurs can thrive and live in peace.”

Yeah, it’s that good.

My home, of course, is in another beautiful valley to the north, and to get there you have to drive past Mt. Shasta and then up the south side of the Siskiyou range. So that’s what I did.