DRIVING DOWN CALIFORNIA—PART I

The last time I drove the length of the State of California was in a Volkswagen Microbus, which I’d painted with a brush and some available paint—white on the bottom with an orange roof. I remember someone telling me that the colors made the van look like a Howard Johnson’s motor inn. I should note that I wrote the words "You are me," on the back panel just above the engine. The year, you might have guessed, was 1969.

I was fresh out of the Army, back from Vietnam where I had (many of us had) read about the hippies and the "Free Love" movement that had sprouted up in California while we were doing our time in the service. I remember a fellow soldier out in the boonies passed around a copy of LIFE magazine with a story filled with pictures of girls wearing long skirts made from Indian fabric and tie-dyed shirts and boys with long hair and beards. These scenes taken on communes seemed, a half-a-world away, to be nothing short of paradise. We all wanted to be there.

It had taken me two months to grow my beard out and my hair was still not as long as I wished it was when I left LA for parts north. I had met a girl who made her own clothes and a dog we picked up a dog who we named "Thoreau" after Henry David. I built a bed in the back of the van and we carried our food with us together with a five-gallon olive drab Jerry Can of water and a Coleman camp stove, which we used wherever we stopped at State and National Parks. Travelling at the speed of a Microbus, and contending with numerous breakdowns along the way, the trip took us about two months to traverse the state.

Last week I headed south in our pick-up with my younger son, Andrew, with the truck’s bed packed with a coffee table, a set of stereo speakers and assorted stuff to furnish his (and his brother’s) college apartment in San Diego.

More than thirty years after the trip in my VW bus, my head was in a far different place. But I have to say that this trip filled me with much the same kind of excitement. I guess no matter how old we are we never get over the thrill of a road trip. This time, my underlying mission was to document, just for my own satisfaction, the "State of California."

We left much later in the morning than I would’ve liked but luckily missed the Santa Rosa traffic build-up by being too late instead of too early—which was just fine, just so long as we missed it. Our first stop was Mel’s Drive-in on Lombard Street in San Francisco, which gave us the needed "sugar rush" to get through the city to parts south.

I was most interested in getting at least as far as the open fields of Salinas, probably because I’m continually re-reading John Steinbeck and it gives me a good feeling just to see the places he wrote about and to realize that nothing much has changed with them in more than half-a-century. Sure, there are housing developments encroaching on the fields of beans and spinach and everything else grown in that part of the state, but it was heartening to see the fields that were there then are still being plowed now. When you see the workers with bright colored cloths tied around their foreheads or wearing straw hats on their heads, bent over in the fields it seems like time had stopped just after Steinbeck wrote his books.

After Salinas, where Highway 101 lies down flat as a pancake and stretches out for a bit, the driving becomes pure fun with lots of breathing space and plenty of time to take in the scenery. Since I was doing the driving, my son was reading the map. Our truck, thankfully, doesn’t have any sort of built in Satellite mapping system so we plotted our estimated destination loosely to be at Pismo Beach, a place that seemed comfortably far south enough to make us feel we were making progress towards San Diego without rushing the trip. We had plenty of time before my son’s classes started for the Spring so we were in no hurry whatsoever—something I think should be a prerequisite for any road trip.

What I noticed beginning with the flat farmland and moving farther south, was the gentle eventual rolling up of the land—as if the earth had been pushed towards the south with a giant rolling pin. Somewhere closer to San Luis Obispo than Salinas, the road begins to contain curves as well as hills. About half-way between the two places, we’d decided to stop at a place recommended to us—the not very well-known but ideally situated Seacrest Motel in Pismo Beach,

The name Seacrest, says it all. It’s a long narrow motel-shaped motel perched like a seagull with its wings spread on the edge of a cliff above the ocean. We’d called ahead to make a reservation via cell phone. Calling ahead to check for vacancies is a luxury I didn’t have in the VW van in 1970. By the time of our arrival it was dark and I was ready to sleep.

Waking up with the waves breaking on the ocean below our balcony was a wonderful feeling. It made me realize that if there’s anything at all possible to miss living in Ukiah, it’s the smell of salt air and the sound of the sea. After breakfast we drove down into town and walked out to the end of the fishing pier and watched the power of the Pacific waves roll in. The waves were unusually large and from the vantage point of the pier we naturally tried to imagine what the experience of a 40-foot Tsunami must be like.

The most beautiful stretch of Highway 101, and of almost any road I’ve been on in California, runs between Pismo Beach and Santa Barbara. The mountains are soft and round like the tops of clouds, covered mostly in grass dotted with oaks. Closer to Santa Barbara the highway parallels the ocean. The big waves rolling in had brought out schools of surfers all along the coast.

Somewhere between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles the idea came up to visit the Getty Center museum. The buildings, for anyone who hasn’t been there, in my estimation are the best part. As far as the art goes, the museum seems to own one of every famous artist in history as well as all the old furniture money can buy. Both my son and I found the Japanese garden interesting. As we stared down at the garden maze from above, my son asked, "Did you do it?" "Do what?" I asked. "The maze. It’s much easier to do it from here than walk through it." I was reminded that it’s possible to learn something every day—especially from a teenager.

Afterwards we walked out onto one of the huge cantilevers, which extend out over the Hollywood Hills. The view that day was crystal clear; we could see all the way to Long Beach and beyond. We spent a long time there, just staring in awe out over the endless miles of houses, office buildings and the roads that connect the various parts of Los Angeles.

When we were ready for the final leg of our journey, we took the tram back to the underground parking lot, fired up the truck and pulled into a traffic jam that extended all the way from Hollywood to San Diego.

Posted by Tony at April 6, 2005 09:23 AM