Night visit to Wal-Mart

 

Inside the sliding glass doors at Wal-Mart we found ourselves at the wrong end of the store, and I followed Grandpa slowly slowly down along the long rank of checkout lanes towards the pharmaceutical aisles. I had suggested a hand basket but he had wanted a cart. “A hand basket?” he said, as if this was some unknown object. “No, I need a cart, to lean on.” But he had his walker. I didn’t bother to argue, as I knew it would be no use, but pushed the empty cart along behind him.

I had arrived back in Boise the night before to find Grandpa out of the rehabilitation hospital and in his own house again. My mother had come out from Maryland and she was staying with him. His other two kids, Rosemary and Mike, were over much of the day. So far he had proved a nearly full time job for the three of them. Not so much because of his physical limitations, though there was that, but they were trying to get the house in better order, to manage his complex meds regimen, and to deal with his demands and sometimes his frustration. He has always wanted things just so, and that’s harder to get now.

It probably doesn’t help that he’s not sleeping much. He wanders around the house much of the night—during the day too he can’t hold still for long. When he does sleep it’s in a chair in his room; he never gets in the bed.

The lawn remains a source of trouble. (In New Plymouth both Janie and Jeannette also fretted over their yards, the watering and the mowing, the tragedy of brown spots, whether to use irrigation water or pay for city water….; I have concluded that the elderly would have substantially less stressful lives if the Kentucky bluegrass lawn was eliminated. Or maybe if they simply didn’t have to rely on—and sometimes pay—others to do what they had always done for themselves. So maybe the lawn is just representative.) At Grandpa’s the difficulty has remained how to get the lawn cut. But a solution has, it seems maybe, been found close at hand: the two teenage brothers next door cut it today, working in tandem with push mowers. Grandpa had agreed to pay them twenty dollars, but then he had them do some extra work, raking and clearing fallen branches, and it was about a hundred degrees, and they worked for two and a half hours. Mom and Mike and I all agreed that we should pay them more; but we did not consult Grandpa, as we knew he would not agree. I said to Mom, “It’s either placate him and short those boys, or piss him off and give the boys what they deserve. I vote for the latter.”

He was having his physical therapy appointment when the two boys were done, so Mike gave them forty dollars. Later, when we were leaving for Rosemary’s, Grandpa told me to back out of his driveway and pull into the neighbor’s. A ridiculous move, it seemed to me, and I couldn’t resist asking, though I knew better, “why?”

Grandpa said, “Just go ahead and do it.” This is the sort of thing that most irritates me. How hard is it to offer a brief explanation?

When he started to get out of the car Mom figured it out. “Mike already paid them,” she said.

Grandpa stopped and put his hand on a white envelope he had put in his pocket, with the cash for the boys. He sat back hard in his seat, petulant, and said, “Why can’t people mind their own business and keep out of mine.” Mom tried to explain but he didn’t want to hear it.

Later at Rosemary’s he said something to Mike, and when Mike told how much he had paid, Grandpa got up and picked up the two chair pads he puts down wherever he sits and made his way out into the backyard. He can’t really storm out of a room, but he did his best version.

I have sympathy for him, but even at his age and in his condition I think a person can practice a little more consideration for others. The Wal-Mart visit, for example. We had been over to Rosemary’s house for dinner, and it was late, nearly ten, but he insisted on stopping at the store. I suggested we make the trip the next morning, but there’s never really any possibility of such flexibility. Rosemary’s better able to say no to him, but not Mom and not me. Mom asked if it was okay if she stayed in the car, and I said yes, and I got his walker out of the trunk and decided to be patient, especially since what other choice was there. With another person I could’ve asked, what are we here for, or what is it you want to get? But that’s pointless with Grandpa, as he’ll just say something annoying like, “you’ll see,” or, more commonly, simply ignore the question. So I didn’t know what I was up for, if he had a long list or what.

He worked slowly up and down the aisles, picking up bottles of various over-the-counter medications and peering at the labels. But he put each item back and kept looking…. Finally, he pointed at a bottom shelf and had me hand him a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol, then another. For a long time he contemplated the difference between 50% and 70% rubbing alcohol, and then he had me put them both in the cart. We started the long journey back to the other end of the store, where only the last two checkout lanes were open and the lines were each ten people long.

Grandpa waved towards the doors and started off in that direction, and I thought he was going back to the car. But after I had paid, I found him sitting on a bench between the two sets of automatic doors, in the bay where the carts are kept. He had his two hands on his walker and he was staring off in front of him, and he looked ancient and frail and tired. He can hardly walk, he can’t drive and get around in the world on his own, can’t even go to the store for a bottle of rubbing alcohol without a lot of help.

Janie in New Plymouth



At noon I pulled into the New Plymouth cemetery and parked in the shade underneath one of the big elm trees. The temperature was already in the upper nineties. I noted the gravestones for my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my uncle Kelly, and the new one for my great uncle Chuck, who died last December, less than a month short of ninety. His wife Janie’s name was on the stone too, but she was still in their house in town about a half mile away.

At the house, Chuck’s pick-up truck, a 70s Ford, is still in the carport. Janie’s 94’ Cutless Cierra is in the garage, but she doesn’t drive any more. She told me later, “I have my license, but it’s not a good idea.”

I came into the kitchen, and her very small little dog, Zoe, barked at me ferociously until Janie said to her, “oh, shut-up.” Janie wanted to feed me right off. She made me a fried tuna sandwich and microwaved a piece of corn on the cob, then put out a bag of potato chips. “You want ketchup?” she asked.

“For what?”

“For the sandwich of course.  I couldn’t eat that without ketchup. Here,” she said, putting the plastic ketchup bottle down on the table beside me, “you try it.” So I did and it wasn’t bad.

She asked about my trip, and we talked about Chuck’s funeral. At one point she referred to his death as “when he left.” She asked after grandpa, then talked about her own ailments. “I was fine till Chuck went, but I‘ve been falling apart ever since.” Janie’s eighty-five, short and skinny (I‘d guess she weighs ninety pounds, at the most), and the biggest problem is her back. “The doctor says my vertebrae are all disintegrating. He gave me some sort of pain pill but I didn’t like how it made me feel….” She grimaced.   “Sort of floaty…. So I told him I was just going to take Tylenol, and he said alright, go ahead.” Her back had been pretty good the last couple weeks, but she was having a bad day. She stood in the kitchen while I ate, and later when we moved to the living room she sat in a rocking chair but soon got up. “I just can’t get comfortable.”

She had also had a cancerous bit removed from her right cheek, and she moved her glasses up to show me where. “Just call me ol’ scarface,” she said. She lit up a long cigarette and said, “Don’t say anything to me about smoking.” It hadn’t occurred to me to counsel her. “I told the doctor, I’m not going to stop, it’s been fifty years, and it doesn’t matter now.”

She told me how she’d had a chest x-ray and the doctor had asked, did you grow up on the Plains? She did, in Kansas. It turns out that people of her generation, who lived in the Dust Bowl region, have what she called “dust bunnies” in (on?) their lungs, ancient dust that has calcified in small clusters. “Those dust storms were just awful,” she said. “You just couldn’t keep the dust out, it got in everywhere. People had their ceilings collapse, after even the attics filled up. My two sisters and I slept in one big bed, and every night my mother would tie a wet sheet to the four bed posts, over us like a tent. In the morning there was a layer of mud on that sheet, not just dust but mud.”

Her parents had divorced when she was young, and after a few years her mother got a proposal from a rancher who lived in Idaho. They got on a train in 1936, when Janie was nine, and went west. “He was twenty years older than mom, but I think she was sort of desperate, with three kids and all that. He was supposed to take care of us, but then he got hurt and lost his cattle and we ended up taking care of him.”

After high school she took a nursing course down in Boise, with her best friend, Verleen. They would sometimes hitchhike the fifty miles back and forth, or out to Verleen’s family in Emmett. Janie didn’t meet Chuck until after the war. He had enlisted shortly before Pearl Harbor, and his ship had left Hawaii just before the attack. Later he was on a ship that was sunk off Australia. When he finally got back to Idaho, none of his family had seen him for five years. He said he was never going anywhere again and he never did. “I was looking for a handsome man,” Janie said, “and I ended up with stubby Chuck Fitzsimons.”

After a pause she waved a hand as if pushing something away, then said, “Old people and their boring stories.”

She said to the dog, “I bet you have to pee.” We went out to the backyard, where the temperature had risen to one hundred degree, and she lit another cigarette and showed me her tomato and cucumber plants. She told me someone else mows for her now, and she’d had a sprinkler system put in at the end of last summer. For fifty years she had been dragging hoses around the yard to water the grass. “But I don’t think I could do that anymore.”

I spent most of the afternoon with Janie, then drove a half mile to the other side of town to see my aunt Jeanette and her husband, Nig, who live in a small, newish subdivision, in a small, non-descript house littered with gewgaws and aphoristic signs about the joys of home. They also have a noisy lap dog that heralded my arrival. Janie had offered to come over with me, but I could tell she didn’t want to leave her house, because of her back, and I assured her I could find the way on my own. The three old people have known each other for seventy years—Janie and Jeanette were in high school together—but they don’t see each other much these days. Nig can just barely get around with a walker, and he rarely leaves his house. There are three steps to get up into Janie’s kitchen, and those are not possible for him. During an operation on his left knee a key nerve had been severed, and there was no going back. “But I can still drive,”he said, patting his good right leg.

I sat down in the second living room of the day, and Jeanette explained that she couldn’t hardly leave the house because she had to watch her husband all the time. She made it sound like a cross to bear, but he didn’t seem to mind. I went over some of the same conversational ground, about grandpa’s health, about my trip, about family and how old each person had become, and how did all this time go by. I sat next to Jeannette and Nig sat across from us on another couch, with his walker, its basket loaded with mail, between us. “He’s been looking for a check,” Jeanette explained. “It got lost somehow.”

Nig seemed to be able to hear well enough, but periodically he would throw out a question that had nothing to do with the conversational topic at hand. Jeanette didn’t seem to mind these non-sequiturs, and I’d answer his question—about my work (he was in education too) or some past event—then take back up where we had left off. Jeanette was better able to stay on point, but she had moments of drift when she would seem to forget who I was, or to forget that she had just said something and say it again. They were not quite as sharp as Janie.

Jeanette had recently broken her right wrist and still wore a brace. They were each being slowly whittled down. And not so slowly in recent years. But they all seem to be looked after fairly well. Both households get regular visits from their children, who are nearly old people now too…. Janie talked of how her daughter Sue wants her to move to assisted living, down in Boise where Sue lives. Janie’s thinking about it but seems in no hurry to leave her house. But it won’t be long. When I left Jeanette and Nig I said I hoped to be back next summer to see them, and Jeanette laughed and said, “If we’re still here.” But they’ve always been there, as long as I can remember.

I like Lakeview

In south central Oregon, Lake Abert is big and lonely, and you drive miles along the eastern side and see no people or boats but thousands of shore birds clustered on the beach and in the shallows. Up from the road looms a long, dark escarpment, 2500 feet above and parallel to the lake. In between is sagebrush and millions of small volcanic boulders.

The late sun was near the western horizon across the lake, heading for the tan, round hills…. At the northern end of the lake the escarpment petered out, and the shallow water gave way to a couple miles of gray flats, sprinkled with patches of green where a few tiny streams straggled towards the smooth, unruffled lake. I couldn’t figure where they came from, those slow, winding seeps. The land all about was dry and dusty, rolling hills, the occasional outcropping of rock on a ridge, and everywhere the pale sagebrush. Occasionally a jackrabbit ran across the road and darted into the bushes and disappeared….

The evening before I had left Susanville and driven north an hour or so to Willow Creek campground, in Modoc National Forest. None of the eight sites was taken, though it was a Saturday, and none looked like they been occupied for a long time. I’d stayed at the same place last year after visiting Stan, and there was no one about then either…. In the morning, over the first hour of driving north I saw only three cars.

In the town of Alturas (pop. 2827) everything was closed. Sunday…. I did the short Auto Tour route at nearby Modoc National Wildlife Refuge, and took a walk around a couple of the ponds. I’d left my binoculars in Boise before coming away, which was a mistake. Lots of shorebirds along the muddy verges of the ponds and in the shallows, including black-necked stilts and whitefaced ibises, the latter striking for their long-curved beaks. I could hear sandhill cranes cronking in the deep grass nearby but spotted only one pair, moving slow and long-legged and poking at the ground with their beaks. Two mule deer waded across a bay in one of the ponds.

The air was still, the sun still low, but already the morning was hot, and the day would get much hotter yet…. Instead of continuing north, I headed east twenty miles over the Warner Mountains to the town of Cedarville (pop. 514 ) because on the map it seemed to be a sort of geographic dead-end. You wouldn’t pass through Cedarville on the way to somewhere else. Not far beyond, the pavement gave way to gravel and dirt roads, which headed out into the high desert where there were no more towns, up to southern Oregon and over to western Nevada.

Several restaurants lined the short main street (one was in the midst of a Sunday breakfast to raise money for the school), and a couple small stores too, though most were closed. I stopped at a thrift/junk/antique store called “Good Things” and rummaged through old stuff and cast-offs. The old woman in charge wore an oxygen tub in her nose, and over her ears, and I asked which of the dirt roads to the north, going back over the mountains, was the best to take. She said, “I don’t know, I’ve only been her ten years.” But just then another woman came in, in substantial make-up and big sunglasses and a nice Sunday pants suit, and she said, “Take Fandango Pass, the other’s kind of rough.” She looked at the other woman, “I’ve been here seventy years, so I guess I can say,” and then they laughed.

The road up to Fandango was pretty good but steep, and the van just crawled along the switchbacks. This was the route gold seekers took in the California gold rush of 1849. When they got to the top, they would do a jig or dance or fandango, to celebrate the accomplishment….

I got back on U.S. 395 and rode into the town of Lakeview, Oregon. In 1984, I was hitchhiking through the town and two cops stopped me and ran my license then told me to move along; it was night so I walked out of town and threw down my sleeping bag in a just-cut hayfield. A couple years ago the librarian at the town library was helpful and friendly and let me use the internet for much longer than the allotted one hour.

I drove through the town several times, scouting possibilities; I planned to stay for the afternoon and wait out the worst of the day’s heat. I spotted a Safeway, but there was no Starbuck’s inside; no other coffee shops in town either, none open anyway. I settled for the Burger Queen. Inside the walls were red, the curved formica benches of the booths orange.  I had a burger and fries, no Coke, Pepsi….

I stayed for three or four hours, reading and writing, watching the locals come in for ice cream, big families with broods of pale, tow-headed kids, the boys’ hair all close-cropped, the girls’ hair all long and well-cared for. The children took giant swigs of soda then gasped for breath, their eyes glittering….

On the way out of town I couldn’t help myself and stopped at the I.O.O.F. Cemetery and looked at every one of the hundreds of gravestones. My favorite names were Waltine Barber and Vevay Boone. One large monument, dated 1901, was for fifteen-year-old Fred Snelling, “the brave young hero who lost his life attempting the rescue of a drowning comrade.”

Lake Abert wasn’t far north of town, and beyond the lake was a big and open and dry land, tan and gold, and only a rare ranch road off to some distant cattle operation or to a small reservoir not for recreation but for the cows…. A low-slung badger appeared on the shoulder, wanting to cross the road, but he thought better of the timing and moved quickly back into the brush as I passed…. I drove along with the windows down and air swirling loud and fast inside the van, through the hot evening as the light faded away, and I wanted to take each road and go off into the sagebrush and see what there was to see….

Instead I looked for a good place to park for the night, and it took a while, till just before dark, before I found an open patch to the right of the road, a dis-used staging area for road maintenance crews. In the middle of the moonlit night I sat up to look about and spotted something large and black thirty yards off, where there had been nothing of that sort when I’d gone to sleep. A strange 2001: A Space Odyssey moment of fear and confusion…. But then I recognized the large, blocky object as a cow. Further off, behind, were another dozen or two of the black cows, back along the edge of the sagebrush. Okay, I thought, I guess I don’t mind sharing my night’s home with you, and I went back to sleep.

Building D

When the guard opened the door to the visiting room, I walked to the back and gave my pass to another guard, a man with a gut so large and a belt festooned with so many items that it was hard to imagine him running or even trotting after a troublesome inmate. He told me to take table 17, in the back corner; he pointed. Eight other tables were already occupied, and everyone was sitting facing the guard desk. The round, institutional tables had been cut down, so the tops were just a foot or so off the floor. I suppose so no one could pass contraband under the table.

Stan didn’t know I was coming. And they don’t tell the inmate until you reach the visiting room. I’d arrived at the prison at 8:30, the start of visiting hours, but a lot of people were ahead of me, and it took an hour and a half before my number was called in the processing building. They ran my license, noted down my necklace and singe car key, shuffled through my plastic baggy of one dollar bills, then had me step through the metal detector; I signed a piece of paper, had the inside of right wrist stamped, then exited out the back of the building into the sun. The outer door of the sally port, in the high perimeter fence, slid open and I stepped in, waited in the cage for the outer door to open, then, inside the prison, walked down the long grounds to Building D.

I sat at table 17 for what seemed a long time. There’s no reading material in the room, none can be brought in, so I sat and watched the other tables. Six of the eight men were Hispanic, one Asian, one maybe Samoan. Most of the men had shaved or close-cropped heads, goatees. But a couple had long dark hair pulled back tight and the length tied into a bun at the nape of the neck. The Samoan man sat with a woman and seven-year-old boy, a chess set on their table; they were all clearly excited to be together, and the man kept putting his hands on the boy, making the boy laugh. Just in front of me a handsome, guileless looking young guy sat with his mother; he had a tattoo on his neck but it didn’t make him look tough. Next to them was a family, a Hispanic man with shaved head, his wife and mother and three kids. On the other side of the room were several couples. I wondered what the men had done but it was impossible to imagine….

Everyone had vending machine food spread on their tables, and periodically they got up to get more. The inmate would go too but stand behind the red tape on the floor a couple feet from the machines and point at what he wanted: sodas, candy, chips…. One machine was full of frozen food, ice cream bars and burritos mostly. Another was the sort with sliding doors, and one could choose from various sorts of sandwiches and salads and microwaveable items…. Above the adjacent microwave were bins of condiment packages….

Stan finally appeared after I had waited forty minutes. “I didn’t believe it at first,” he explained. “I said, ‘nah, it’s not for me, it’s a mistake.’ But the guard came back and said, ‘no, you got a visitor.’” Stan rubbed his unshaven face. “They said I looked a little rough.” He laughed. He has a thick moustache that hangs down over his lower lip, a bushy soul patch, and a week’s growth on cheeks and neck. Later he said that they’re supposed to get to shave three times a week but it’s more like once a week. A disposable razor is brought by the cell, and an hour later the guard returns to collect the razor.

After we had talked for a few minutes, we moved to the vending machines. Stan noted that he hadn’t been in this visiting room before. Last time I visited he was on lockdown, which means you can only talk through a window.

He walked down the line of vending machines…. I got him a Dr. Pepper, a Heath ice cream bar, a bag of jalapeno potato chips, then a bbq pork sandwich. “Yeah, that one,” he said, after first picking the Philly cheesesteak. “We don’t get pork. Because of the Muslims.” I microwaved the sandwich and we went back to our table. I’d gotten an ice cream bar for myself too. No one likes to eat alone. Everyone in the room except the guard was eating the vending machine food.

We talked for three and a half hours and ate a large amount of junk (though not as much as at other tables), until visiting hours ended at 2:30.

Like the other men, Stan was dressed in faux-denim pants, big and baggy and ill-fitting, dark blue with large yellow lettering: “CDCR Prisoner.” He wore a pale blue shirt with the same lettering, the material like that of doctor scrubs, also loose fitting, with a white t-shirt beneath. “These are my good clothes,” Stan joked, holding out the front of his shirt with the tips of his fingers. Back on his tier most of the inmates wear just gray shorts and the t-shirts.

As he finished eating each item, Stan neatly folded up the packaging and consolidated it with other wrappers. Later when he had a bag of Skittles, he dumped them out and divided them into separate piles by color and ate all of one color before moving on the next. “The guys on the tier say I’m OCD,” he said, “but I just like to have things clean.”

He has a job as second-watch porter in his section, and this seems to have improved his life considerably. That and being off lockdown. They were on lockdown for six months straight, which means he only left his cell twice a week for a shower, and that in handcuffs. “It ain’t easy being in a twelve by eight cell with another man for that long,” he said. “Even little things bug you. Like, I think you should stand over the sink when you brush your teeth, not walk up and down. And if your celly has bad gas? You can’t do anything…. So, yeah, there’re fights sometimes.”

But the porter job gets him out. He’s responsible for keeping the tier clean, which is apparently work he enjoys. Earlier in the week, he had washed the inside of the door of each cell, below the slot where their meals are passed in. “There’s food all dripped down those doors, and no one’s going to do anything about it.” This effort was highly appreciated. “Yeah, most porters don’t do shit. They figure, I’m in prison, what are they going to do?” But Stan’s hard work puts him in good not just with the other inmates but with the guards. “So their supervisor comes by, and he sees the place is clean, and he thinks the guard’s doing a good job.”

Stan likes a clean tier—he complains about the air and his chronic sinus infections—but mostly he wants to be in good stead with the other inmates and with the guards because it’s good for business. And the porter job makes it possible for him to do business. “That’s what I do, that’s what I’ve done all my life. I hustle.” A portion of the business is in art: some inmates have skills, and they draw images on handkerchiefs. Sports team logos are particularly popular, especially the Oakland Raiders. But sometimes they do drawings for kids, a teddy bear or something like that. Stan sent one to Naomi after Rosalie was born. Generally these handkerchiefs go for $20.

But he doesn’t do deals in cash. The currency consists mostly of toiletries from the prison canteen: toothpaste, bodywash, deodorant. “I got about a hundred dollars in my cell right now,” he said. “Somebody said, ‘Stan, he’s a high roller.’” He snorted. “Yeah, I’m rolling in body wash. And I don’t even use that stuff. I got anti-bacterial soap.”

Each day, at the beginning of his porter watch he goes to each of the 75 cells on his tier and he asks, “’Do you need anything? Anything I can do for you?’” It’s an important service. “See, I’m out, and they’re locked up. So I pass a note to another cell, or a cd, or some deodorant. I do the errands, and sometimes I do deals…. And I go to everyone.”

Meaning all races. The prison is segregated, both officially and unofficially. On television monitors in the processing building, lockdown status is listed by building and within each building by groups: “Whites, Blacks, Southern Hispanics, Northern Hispanics, Others, and Mexican Nationals.” And most porters only serve their own group. “But see there are only 12 whites on my tier,” Stan said. “There’s not enough of us.” The porter has a wider responsibility, and Stan needs more latitude for business. But he’s rare in cutting across racial lines.

“Most of the whites are locked down,” he explained. He didn’t mean on a general lockdown, but that they have requested some sort of special sequestration, in a separate building. “Maybe they’re afraid of getting stabbed, or maybe they refused to do a stabbing. Or something…. They don’t won’t to deal with the shit.”

Though Stan has been doing well lately, he said it’s a “poor” prison. “I see into all these guys cells, and half of them don’t even have a tv, they don’t have shit.” Stan said that any prison economy is based on drugs, and there’s almost no drugs at High Desert State Prison. “This is the toughest max prison in the state, as far as control goes. The only places tougher are the super max places, like that one in Colorado where they keep the Aryan guys buried underground.” There’s demand but little supply, little contraband.

But if drugs are scarce, there’s a lot of action around food. To my surprise, Stan eats little of the food provided. “It’s crap,” he said. “You can’t eat it. Most of it goes right in the toilet.” (The three meals are brought to the cells. Until a few years ago, Stan ate in a “chow hall,” but they discontinued that practice. “There always trying to minimize times when they have to move us.”) He and his cellmate eat dry cereal with milk for breakfast every morning. They buy a box of granola from the canteen and sprinkle a little of that in their bowls too. Any meat they put into another bowl and save for lunch, or for the “spread,” the midday and main meal.

The spread is communal, with various people contributing. The base is always top ramen. Stan laughed and pointed at the food on the table in front of us. “This stuff is weird to me because there’s no top ramen in it.” They’ll put in meat, maybe some vegetables. Some of the stuff is from the canteen, preserved foods, but some comes from the kitchen. His cellmate works in the kitchen and can take food with him after his shift. “Like if we have chicken a la king—you can’t eat it—but he’ll pick out the chicken and then wash it off and fry it up. We’ll use it for the spread, or maybe he’ll make sandwiches and bring them to us.”

His cellmate is scheduled to be released next month. He’s thirty-eight and has been in prison twenty years. “Minus seven days,” Stan said. He got out after eight years, but did something, I don’t know what, and was back in after seven days, and that was twelve years ago. “Statistics say he’ll be back again,” Stan said, with a rueful smile. “But he’s supposed to go into some drug program when he gets out.”

Stan’s going to get a new cellmate, someone he knows from Centinela Prison (where he was before) and who’s also from San Diego. His best friend at High Desert. Here’s where being in good with guards helps—he made an informal request for the new cellmate, and he’s been told he’ll be taken care of….

We shared two bags of microwave popcorn, and Stan drank two more sodas. I still had more one dollar bills, but he said his stomach hurt….

Stan told me that where you’re from in California makes a big difference. “It’s called set-tripping,” he said. “You know, like your tripping on your setting…. It’s gang stuff. If some guy’s from your enemy neighborhood, then you’re not supposed to have anything to do with him. You’re supposed to hate him. The white guys do it now too, even though it doesn’t make any sense for them…. It’s just prison shit.”

Stan asked about the girls, and we talked family stuff…. And he talked a lot about the various conspiracy theories he subscribes to. He reads a lot, novels, but also what he calls “study books,” which he refers to in explaining the state of the world as he sees it. For example, a one world government often sows strife for its own ends (in Syria, for example)…. The drug trade is used by the government as a form of social control…. Satellite microwaves can be and are used for mind control purposes…. “I know you probably just think I’m crazy,” he said more than once. Yes, but his explanations are mostly lucid (if less than convincing) and he’s otherwise sharp and perceptive….

We talked about my hike, and he said that one of his foster homes when he was a teenager was in Big Pine, between Bishop and Lone Pine. He liked it there. “I should’ve stayed,” he said. “I probably wouldn’t be sitting here in prison if I had.” Such regrets slipped into the conversation periodically. Stan seemed more realistic about his future on this visit. He doesn’t think he’s ever getting out. But he can’t quite bring himself to come out and say it so baldly.

At 2:30 one of the guards announced that visiting time was over. Immediately everyone stood up from their tables and shuffled over to the trash cans with handfuls of food wrappers. People hugged and kissed briefly, then the inmates went to one corner of the room, where they are supposed to wait to be taken back to their cells. Their families lined up at the exit door.

Outside the afternoon was brutally hot, over one hundred degrees. The people walked along the inside of the fence, quiet and subdued, and gathered outside the sally port. A sign said only eight people at once, so it took a while to get into the processing building. Our wrist stamps and jewelry were checked, and then we went to our cars, and we waited in a long line at the entrance booth while our driver’s licenses were checked one more time and our trunks searched. A guard cupped his hands against a side window of the van and peered inside. Then he stepped back and opened the gate and waved me through, and in a moment I was out, with the road before me.



Susanville



Just after dawn I crossed the road by the campground and gingerly clambered over a barbed-wire fence. I climbed up a steep, dry slope, among ponderosa pine and jagged outcroppings of dark rock, following well-used cow paths. Periodically I came onto small openings, level benches thick with sagebrush, then, beyond, climbed again…. I kept expecting to see some cows, but I did not.

Eventually I came to a narrow dirt road that traversed the ridge just below the top, and I headed north on the cow-tracked road. The woods were quiet and desiccated, and while the morning was cool I could feel that within a couple hours the heat would come on hard…. After a while I came to a spot from where I could look down on Frenchman Lake. I left the road and started back west and down, figuring I’d come onto the road again…. But soon I could see high dark cliff walls on the other side of the canyon, and I figured they were on my side too. I cut back south, traversing an open slope of rock and brush, probing for a way down…. I descended precipitously into a ravine, and it surprised me that cows had made the same descent before me….

I was back at the campsite after a few hours. It had been good to walk, but the hike had felt a little pointless. I’m still in the thrall of a linear trail…. Not that the PCT goes anywhere, really, just north, but it does feel like you’re making some sort of progress. Of course a walk for a walk’s sake, and a bit of exploring is worthwhile too….

I only had about eighty miles to drive to Susanville, my destination for the day. High Desert State Prison, one of California’s maximum security facilities, sprawls among the sagebrush a few miles from town. That’s where Jenifer’s brother Stan lives, and I planned to visit him the next day, Saturday. But I had to occupy myself in the interim….

I drove through the town (pop. 18,000) several times, reminding myself of the possibilities (I was here last summer too). I tried the Starbuck’s first, but all the tables were filled with other slackers and their laptops. But the Safeway next door had a Starbuck’s too, and all those tables were unoccupied (because, I’m guessing, there was no wireless in the grocery store). I got a sandwich at the “Signature Café” counter, bought a San Francisco Chronicle, and settled down for the long afternoon among the grocery shoppers and the small army of black-aproned employees…. I read, broke out the laptop after a while, later transferred to the real Starbucks to check email….

Late in the afternoon I spent time at a used bookstore on Main Street, one of the most disorganized bookstores I’ve ever seen. At the foot of the shelves in each section were piles of excess books. I glanced at the top layer of this overflow, but found digging through the three feet beneath a daunting prospect…. It was the sort of bookstore with a whole lot of “almost” books but little in the way of books I really wanted. I did end up buying a novel, The City & The City by China de Mieville. 

I drove to the town park and sat in the shade by the van for a time and read my new book…. Waiting for the long day to end…. Later, I got a bean cheese burrito at Fiesta Mexicana and drove ten miles out of town to the west, and parked for the night at the Devil’s Corral Trailhead, at the halfway spot of the Bizz Johnston Trail.

At any such unofficial camping place I worry that the authorities will object. But the lot was far enough off the road, and the van was hidden among the pine trees, and no one came down to check.

Zephyr

 

In Carson City I had to wait a long time in the hot sun to cross the street because four hundred women on motorcycles were riding by in a slow, mile-long pack. A gathering of the Motor Maids had come to town. Most of them were over forty but otherwise they appeared an eclectic group. Some were in leather, some in the bright racer colors, some displayed stuffed animals, some sported spikes on their helmets…. The most conservative wore what seemed to be the official club uniform (though apparently now anachronistic for most of the maids): black polyester pants, royal blue mock turtlenecks, and white cotton vests with the club insignia on back.

I had stopped in Carson City to see the state capitol. The grounds were a green and leafy oasis in the dry and arid town. The capitol building itself proved the most modest of any I’ve seen. No grand spaces or elaborate trimmings (no metal detectors either), though the hallways were hung with the usual large and self-important portraits of past governors. The old building isn’t the whole state government architectural story these days; it serves as the office of the governor, while the legislature meets in a separate and neighboring building, a new and much larger structure, stuccoed and non-descript.

When I came out the Motor Maids had gathered, bike-less, on the grounds in the shade of the trees, waiting for some sort of address. I walked among them and thought about staying to hear what was going to be said, but I felt out of place….

I had set off from Heleen and Tom’s early in the morning. It was hard to leave. The living is good, the company felicitous, at their lovely house on the eastern edge of the Sierras….

An hour to the north of Bishop I stopped at Mono Lake to walk among the tufa, odd limestone formations on the south shore—features that formed and stood underwater until Los Angeles, in the 1940s, started diverting the mountain streams that feed the big lake. The water level dropped substantially over the ensuing years, and while efforts have been made more recently to mitigate the damage, the shoreline is still hundreds of feet lower than it was before the intervention…. The lake is three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean, and about the only creatures that live in the water are brine shrimp. But those are enough to attract 60,000 California gulls each year, which nest on the two big islands in the middle of the lake. Wilson’s phalaropes are common too, though they are on their way farther north. A black strip of alkali flies carpets the verge of the lake, and they get up briefly and noisily as one walks along beside the still, clear water. These too are a significant source of bird fodder.

I shared the first half of my walk with a Japanese family, the second with a German family. They had both come a long way to take their photographs, and they were diligently pursuing the task. I wanted to ask, what do you think? Isn’t this weird? What about those flies, huh? At the nearby visitor center I watched a dated film about the lake, which began with a re-enactment of pre-settlement Indians fleeing a volcanic eruption. Their hair was much too 80s and much too clean.

alkali flies



Soon after I got on the road again I picked up a hitchhiker. He was a PCT hiker who had come down from Sonora Pass, and he was trying to get all the way up to South Lake Tahoe to pick up a package at the post office there. I don’t often pick up hitchhikers, but he was obviously from the trail, and it seemed just as obvious that I had a duty to give as I had been given….

He was short and stocky and in his early sixties, and his clothes and pack were sun-bleached with long use. He introduced himself as Zephyr, even before I told him I had been on the trail too. He came from Maine—and he had the accent—and had started the trail at the Mexican border in late April. “Too late,” he said. Last year he hiked the Appalachian Trail. “I’m retired,” he told me, “for the second or third time.” He face was tanned and lined, and he had a long, gray chin beard, with the bottom portion tied off in a rubberband.

We rode together for a couple hours, and we talked about the trail most of the time. It seemed odd that he was jumping so far ahead for a box (he could’ve re-supplied closer by), but he said that he had accidentally put the maps he needed in the Tahoe box. He was unwilling to proceed “blind,” and I could see that.  Eventually it came out that he had been hiking for some time with another man, someone he met on the trail, but they’d had “an argument” (he didn’t elaborate) and parted. He had been relying on his former partner’s maps….

We talked of different places along the trail, and fellow hikers too. It turned out that we knew, or had met, some of the same people…. He knew Diesel, the man I met my last night on the trail, and he had met the Belgian guy, Frederik, at Muir Trail Ranch—and indeed, Frederik had found plenty of food in the free buckets, successfully re-supplying (as he had told me he hoped to do).

I dropped Zephyr off just south of Carson City, at the turn-off to Tahoe. I considered taking him up, but it was an hour and a half out of the way, and we were already running out of talk, riding along in silence for much of the last portion. He hadn’t decided if he would walk south from Tahoe back to Sonora Pass, or hitch back to Sonora and continue north…. He seemed to have lost some of his appetite for the hike. His wife, he told me, was coming out to Reno in a couple weeks, and he was thinking he might go home with her, that maybe he’d done enough. Three months on the trail. It’s a long time….

I went to a Raley’s in Carson City, after my capitol visit, a regional grocery store chain. It was my first time in a grocery store in a few weeks. Walking along the aisles, I felt quietly ecstatic. So much good food, right to hand…. I bought french bread, cheese, avocados and carrots, potato chips, juice and ice….

I passed through Reno to the north, and an hour later just before sunset pulled into a campground in Plumas National Forest. The hills were clad with ponderosa pine and sagebrush, and a small stream ran by my site. Big clouds of campfire smoke drifted through the trees, and most sites were occupied by people who were staying the two full weeks allowed.  I cut up bread and cheese, and tomatoes from Tom and Heleen’s garden, and put ice cubes in my water bottle, and sat in the back of the van, and ate and read and listened to a Reno Aces baseball game and generally felt pretty good.  



No walking

On my hike I lost two things. The cap for the filter (which covers the outlet port) and the key to the van. The key had been in my right front pocket for the first four days, and I kept thinking, I should put that away. Then the fifth day it wasn’t in my pocket any more. Luckily, though, Heleen and Tom had been better stewards of the extra key I had left at their house.

Early in the cool morning I went out to the van and opened the side door and sat in the back seat. I experienced a great and calm satisfaction. The van is sort of like a backpack, but with even more stuff; the substantial and endearing difference is that it will carry me where I want to go, I don’t have to carry it.

The PCT thru-hikers refer to a day off as a zero day,” in that they cover no miles. I had a zero day at the house in Starlite. I could have gone off" on a bike ride with Tom, but instead I sat in the living room with Heleen and read The New Yorker and dozed, then read some more…. Later, for lunch, Heleen cut up bread and Dutch cheese and tomatoes from the garden.

The afternoon was hot again…. I did get off the couch long enough to pack some of my gear in the van, do laundry…. But mostly I sat and read or chatted….

In the evening Tom and Heleen had a dinner date with colleagues from the hospital, a radiologist and her husband. These were not people they knew well, or apparently had much in common with, but the radiologist, a Russian woman, was new, and Tom was being friendly. They invited me along, but I thought it best to stay home…. Even though they were going to the Thai restaurant down at the airport.

Before dinner they were supposed to stop at the couple’s house in town to meet their one-year-old baby. Heleen, who had reservations about the outing, voiced half-joking reluctance about visiting the baby. “Now, if it was a puppy or a dog….,” she said, laughing as if she were joking. But I don’t think she was.

I had the house to myself, and sat on the floor in the living room beside the coffee table and ate leftover bean burrito and pizza and read the latest issue of Harper’s, reveling in and appreciating the culinary and cultural gifts of civilization.

Sixteen days north, one day south

Down at Nevada Beach on Lake Tahoe I stood in the early morning sunlight and watched a young boy swim out in the cool, clear water, to where his family’s jet ski was moored. He climbed on board and started it up and came slowly putt-putting into shore, where his father filled the gas tank from a plastic can. A motorboat towing a water skier passed a hundred yards out, running parallel to the beach; every few minutes another zipped by, and eventually the wakes of these boats came onto the brown pebbly verge at my feet. Far out on the big lake a colorful hot air balloon drifted low over the water. Nearby a fence cut off access to the southward stretch of the beach, to keep the public off the private waterfronts of mansion owners.  I stood for a long time, watching, and considering the various ways of having fun, and how they were substantially different down here in what seemed like “the world” compared to the trail crest up among the mountains.  A number of such mountains ringed the lake, and I tried to pick out where I had camped two nights previous….

At ten I checked out of my 12^th floor room, using the television remote. Across the street I got on the airport shuttle bus and rode an hour and a half to Reno.  At the airport I bought a ten dollar pre-made sandwich and thought about how I could’ve made more efficient leftover use of last night’s buffet offerings. Yes, the muffin and orange had helped cover breakfast, but I had neglected lunch.

The Eastern Sierra Transport bus could hold twenty but only five of us got on at the Reno airport. Two young guys from New Jersey started a conversation with a young guy from Pennsylvania. None of them had ever been west before, and all three were heading for Yosemite to hike the John Muir Trail. They talked logistics and equipment, and I was a tempted to jump in and offer my experience. But I didn’t.  I decided they didn’t need my information or foreshadowing; they seemed sufficiently prepared, and whatever was ahead they could come to on their own. One of the New Jersey guys took a number of photographs out the window, of the mountains to our right. I thought, later those pictures are going to seem worthless, after you’ve gotten up close.

When I got off the bus in Bishop, it was 6:30 in the evening and the temperature was ninety-six. I went into a K-Mart and bought a marker to make a sign for hitchhiking. Then I walked a mile to the center of town, where I stopped into Las Palmas Restaurant and got a bean and cheese burrito to go. At a quarter after seven I started up Line Street towards Starlite and Tom and Heleen’s house, the last segment of my day-long trip.

I’d tried calling them both but had gotten no answer. I knew that they had been on a backpacking trip of their own, starting the 19^th. I thought they might be back, but apparently not. So I would have to hitchhike up to their house. Once I reached the van, I would be home and reliant no more on buses or my feet or random drivers….

The problem was that the light was going fast. I couldn’t take a chance on standing still and hitching, so I started walking, my back to the traffic, my left hand out holding a small sign that read “Starlite.” Many cars passed, but no one slowed…. It certainly is best to face potential rides, rather than placing one’s anonymous (and in this case backpacked) back to drivers. But if it fell out that I had to walk all the way, then I needed to use what light was left…. I thought it was maybe six miles, which would stretch the limits of the remaining day.

Turns out it was nine miles, and there was no shoulder, and I would’ve done most of the walk in the dark…. But after two miles, while I was stopped to write a second sign—“or any bit”—a man in a pick-up going the other way stopped and asked where I was going. When I told him he said, “I can do that,” and he turned around and I got in.

He was a meaty, red-faced man in a ball cap, in his forties and, I figured out after a few minutes, a little drunk. He introduced himself as Mike and we shook hands. I told him about the hike, and my day of travel, and he said he’d like to do more hiking, as people who don’t hike often do…. He had moved to Bishop six years before, from Bullhead City. “I’m raising my fifteen-year-old son,” he said. “He’s bipolar, and down there, that wasn’t a good place for him.” Bishop, though, was, he said. Mike repaired spas and pools in the summer, did more general construction work in the winters. “I used to build custom homes, down in Arizona. I can do just about any of that sort of thing.” His son was off on a vacation with his parents. “He’s coming home tomorrow. So tonight I thought I’d go have a few beers after work, play a little darts. You know.”  He told me three times on the drive: “Have a few beers, play some darts, you know.”

Up at the house in Starlite, Tom was in the driveway. They had just gotten home from their trip (and had tried calling me, but my phone didn’t work once I left the town center). Mike got out of the pick-up and introduced himself to Tom and they shook hands. He told Tom that he worked on spas. I shook hands with him again before he left, and thanked him for his help. I’d thought I had a long dark walk ahead of me, and then suddenly I didn’t.

Tom and Heleen and I talked and talked, telling about our trips. They had gone up into the nearby mountains, staying mostly above 10,000’, with their friends Stacy and Jen, and those two soon appeared with pizza and salad. Stacy made me a bowl of salad, and I ate my burrito while they ate the pizza. Periodically one of them would point at one of the two sleeping dogs and laugh and say something about how they were played out after running around the high country for five days.

I was pretty tired myself, though much of my day’s movement had been undertaken sitting in a bus seat…. I’d thought to maybe spend the night in the van, but Heleen and Tom assumed I would take the guest room again, so I did.

South Lake Tahoe

Just before dawn a brief hard rain fell, loudly pelting the tent. There was little reason to get up at five as usual, since I had such a short distance to hike. I thought, no, I’ll let the tent dry out some first. Then it rained again, long and hard enough to give form to a small subterranean flow along the underside of the tent (luckily just along the left side instead of across the middle). Better let that dry out too. A third burst soon followed.

But by seven the sky seemed to have cleared, so I rose and packed my gear, put it away wet for the first time on the trip.

The first mile was a steep descent in tight switchbacks, down through big trees and big boulders, down to a creek crossing. I met a group of four older men coming up, each with a decades-old backpack; the first man, who was quite heavy, said, “Tell them I’m an hour ahead.” The next man was only a couple minutes behind, and I tried to pass on the message, but he snorted and said, “I saw him, I know where he is.”

It was just three and half miles down to U.S. 50, a fast and busy two-lane road. Usually when I cross roads I hang back in the woods and try to cross when no one will see me. That was not possible here…. On the other side, I climbed up through thick woods, passing a number of vacation cabins, and after a last mile and a half descended to Echo Lake and the small log-cabin store beside a boat launch. That was it for me and the PCT; I would walk no farther north.

Tracks, the young guy I met a couple days ago, was at the store, as were two other thru-hikers. The post office portion of the operation doesn’t officially open till eleven, and it was ten, but inside the store someone said they’d go ahead and get my box for me. I opened the box, transferred some of the stuff to my bear canister, I’m not sure why, then mailed the rest back to myself, spending fifteen dollars to mail what probably amounts to stuff worth less than that amount. I just didn’t want to carry it, and I couldn’t bring myself to toss it out. The other hikers had re-supplied too and didn’t need any more (one of them tried to give me half a bottle of olive oil).

A note on food: when I arrived at Echo Lake my bear canister held three energy bars, a few tea bags, my own half bottle of olive oil, and a largish bag of trash. I had not rationed food, but ate pretty much the same amount each day, including the last morning. So, right on the mark, apparently, which gave me no little satisfaction.

Another rain storm passed by while I was messing about, and they would repeat throughout the day. It would have been a wet day on the trail…. Back in the store I ordered a vanilla milkshake, and while six dollars seemed like a lot, it tasted pretty fabulous.

Tracks had spent the previous day in South Lake Tahoe. He had waited around the store parking lot, asking visitors for a ride (it’s a busy place), but it took some time before he was successful. I did not like the idea of buttonholing strangers as they got in their vehicles, and then having to deal with their lame excuses…. So after just an hour at Echo Lake, I walked a couple miles out the entrance road, back to U.S. 50 to try my hand at hitchhiking the traditional way.

I crossed the busy road, walked down to the start of a pull-out, put out my thumb, and the first vehicle pulled over.

It was a VW camper van, one older (an 82’) and more rickety than mine, driven by a man named Brian. South Lake Tahoe, my destination was only a dozen miles, but the ride took an hour, in part because of the heavy traffic on 50 through the long town. Also, we stopped by a friend of Brian’s house, so Brian could pick up his BMX bike. He had left it there after a July 4^th party. “I was too wasted to ride it home,” he said.

Brian was probably in his early thirties, with black hair and a black goatee flecked with the first of the gray to come. He wore a ball cap and was listening to a Grateful Dead cd. He was coming from Santa Cruz, where he has a job as a bartender and manager at a restaurant on the beach. But during the week he has another bartending job in Tahoe, at one of the smaller casinos. “I’ve been going back and forth for about six months now,” he told me, “but pretty soon it’s just going to be Santa Cruz. Time for a change.”

He had been in Tahoe for most of his adult life. He had recently divorced after ten years of marriage, and his house in Tahoe would be officially foreclosed on just four days hence. “I’m thinking of camping out there one night this week, you know, just to say good-bye” he said. “My ex wants to do the same, and I think she wants to do it on the same night. But I’d prefer separate nights.”

Currently he’s housesitting for a friend in town, a man who is hiking the PCT this summer. Apparently this man is doing thirty and forty mile days. “He’s a fucking animal,” Brian said. “So he’s the head of the ski patrol at Heavenly, you know?  And he’s famous for never wearing gloves. Doesn’t matter the weather, he never wears gloves.” I was put in mind of a story I’d heard years ago, about an old guy mechanic who didn’t use wrenches or sockets: he could remove any bolt with his fingers.

Despite his recent difficulties, Brian seemed optimistic.” I’m just going through some transitions, man…. And I’ll still come back to Tahoe a lot. I love the lake, and I’ll come up to snowboard, and I have a lot of friends here…. But down in Santa Cruz it’s a good job, and I’m going to start surfing more….”

When I told Brian I wanted to go to the Apex Hotel (where Tracks had stayed the night before, for $55), he expressed doubt. “That’s a long way from the lake, man, and that’s the part of town where all the crackheads and shit live.” I didn’t want to disappoint him, but he didn’t offer up in other economical alternative…. Just then my phone buzzed and I reached into my pocket. Earlier I’d texted Alix asking her to look up cheap motels. Her message said the Horizon. I passed on the suggestion to Brian, and he sat up in his seat, excited and said, “Perfect, man, that’s the one.”

The Horizon is just across the border in Nevada, and part of a complex of four huge casino/hotels standing in a cluster (Harrah’s, Harvey’s, and the Montbleu are the others). It’s near the lake shore and apparently far from the crackheads. “It’s the cheapest one,” Brian said, “because they lost their gaming tables license. It only has slots.” But one can walk across the street to one of the other casinos for blackjack and craps and roulette and poker. “It used to be called the Sahara,” Brian said, “back in the day. Elvis played there, the Rat Pack did too, all those dudes, and for long engagements.” The sign out front of the Montbleu promised performances from Sublime and Cypress Hill later in the week, Toby Keith in early August.

Brian dropped me at the lobby entrance and inside I paid $55 for a room with a king-sized bed on the 12^th floor. I took off my shoes and sat on the edge of the bed for a time, trying to adjust to the sudden change in my circumstances. My tent in the woods in the morning, walking down the trail…. And by noon, four hours later, I’d come through busy Tahoe, among thousands of other visitors, and landed in a casino hotel room high up in the air….

After a while I spread my wet gear out around the room, then took a long shower, one of the very best of my life.

Later I went out and walked a mile or so to get out of the most touristy stuff and had a burrito at a taqueria in a little strip mall and read the newspaper and felt happily tired and quiet. It rained again on me on the walk back…. I explored all four casinos, where the lights and sounds of the slot machines flashed and banged, and people smoked and drank at the gaming tables.

Back at my room I finally turned on the television. I put on a baseball game.

For dinner, I tried Harrah’s buffet, supposedly the best, but there was a line so I settled for the Montbleu, $13.95 plus tax. I ate a ridiculous combination of foods, none of it particularly memorable. On my first plate, a slice of cheese pizza, a piece of rosemary chicken, a piece of fried chicken, some salad, and three California rolls. The second plate, sweet and sour chicken, a dab of low mein, a slice of beef brisket….Next cake and ice cream. I took along with me when I left an orange and a muffin and a piece of chicken….

Afterwards I wandered into the sports book and watched the Yankees game (picked out among a bank of a dozen screens), to see Ichiro in his first game for New York.

Back in the room I flipped through the tv channels without much success, and eventually turned off everything and lay in the dark wondering at all that had happened in my long and strange and stimulating day….

I thought of the trail too. At Echo Lake, I’d said good-bye to Tracks when he set off, north back on the trail. The next section crosses through the rocky and barren Desolation Wilderness, and as I watched him go I felt a little wistful and wondered if maybe I should be going on too. But no, I’d had a good day, and I was ready for something different for a time.

Carson Pass

The seven miles to Carson Pass was an attractive mix, up and down, sage and forest, volcanic and granite. I was glad I walked the stretch in the cool and captivating morning, instead of pushing on in the late afternoon the day before.

I had my usual mug of muesli in a jumble of big granite boulders, out in the treeless open at the foot of a high ridge…. A steep stretch of trail followed, then a return to the volcanic and a traverse of red rocky slope, then down into woods once more.

At the pass I found a full trailhead parking lot and a small log building. The cabin, which I had not known about, is a summer-only welcome and information center for hikers, both day and longer. On this morning it was staffed by three volunteers, retirees, and they indeed welcomed me, with great friendliness and hospitality.

Each wore a green Forest Service Volunteer vest and each was around seventy. Bruce was tall and bearded and rugged, while Tom and Linda (a couple) were small and neater in appearance, he clean-shaven, she with make-up and a careful blonde hairdo. But they were hikers too, as it came out as we talked, experienced in the Sierras and recently returned from a hut-to-hut trek in the Dolomites (Linda said that the food proved much better than she had expected. “I thought it would just be pasta and tomato sauce from a can, but no, the food was wonderful.”).

They had me sign the thru- and section-hiker register, and when I said I was from Minnesota they all made “oh!” sounds indicating surprise and pleasure, as if this was a very good if unexpected place to live. Tom told me he had family in the town of Pillager (west of the Twin Cities), while Bruce said he had a relative in Lino Lakes (an outer-ring suburb). This sort-of sanguinity made them happy and me too.

They peppered me with questions, about my hike, about Minnesota, and I turned from one to the other as I answered. Their demeanor suggested genuine interest, and after ten minutes I was in love with them.

“Would you like an orange?” Linda said. I would, and after I started peeling it she brought over a small trash can and held it out, as if she would wait for each discarded piece, but I took it from her and said thanks and put it down at my feet. It was a challenge to eat the orange and keeping answering their questions at the same time, but I didn’t mind.

Bruce asked if I needed water, and he took one of my bottles and filled it from a large jug (no plumbing at the pass). He told me that as many as 600 people will visit the trailhead on a busy summer day. “It’s the wildflowers,” he explained. “Up there by Winnemucca Lake—you passed a turn-off—it’s supposed to be the best conditions in the Sierras for wildflowers. Of course, they’re good other places too, but everyone wants to go up there….”

The three of them got off onto the subject of dogs, specifically how people are supposed to keep their dogs on a leash but few do. “We walked up to the lake late yesterday,” Linda said, “and five were off. One got lost.”

 “That happens all the time,” Bruce said. “And at least once every season”—he’s worked at Carson Pass the last six summers—“at least one dog is never found.” We all thought about that for a moment, a dog alone and lost up in the mountains…. Bruce said, “Maybe it went off a cliff chasing a rabbit, maybe coyotes got it, but you never know.”

On a happier note, Linda asked if I wanted a nectarine, to follow up the orange. “A lady brought by a whole basket just this morning,” she said. I ate the nectarine as I crossed the road and started up the trail on the other side, and it was perfect.

Six miles of up and down, mostly up, brought me to Showers Lake, at 8600’. Someone was camped at the best spot on the small lake, which was bordered by grass along one side, pale stone on the other. I found the second best spot, just across the outlet stream on the rocky side, and here I did my laundry. I would reach Echo Lake and civilization the next day, and supposedly a washing machine soon after, but I couldn’t stand the state of my shorts and t-shirt any longer. I hung them up on a small spruce tree, and then clouds rolled in rather inconsiderately…. Still, they dried enough after a time, and I set off again, downhill now, and precipitously….

After a while I came to a tiny creek, crossed with a single step, then came to it again lower down, and here I camped for the night. It was only three in the afternoon, but I’d come eighteen miles. More to the point, I only had five more miles to Echo Lake, and, as with Tuolumne, I did not want to arrive late in the day. Especially since this time I would not be camping at the re-supply point but would have to hitchhike to a nearby town. Most of all though, I wanted to camp out one last time up in the mountains and away from any road…. 

The site was superb, a flat bench of brown duff on a steep mountain slope, with the small creek running down one side, big mountain hemlocks looming overhead, and a high wall of granite on one side. Through the trees I could see the south end of Lake Tahoe far below. There was room for a large group, and my small tent looked puny standing between two of the massive trees….

I was sitting on a rock reading when two thru-hikers came by. I’d seen them on and off during the day, in the distance behind. They were friendly and talkative, just the sort I’d been hoping to meet up with over the last two weeks…. The man was in his forties, shirtless and barrel-chested, his once pale skin dark red from all the days and weeks in the sun; he was unshaven and hatless and his gray-hair stuck up in various directions. She was more demure, with long dark, straight hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, plump arms and light-brown skin; she put me in mind of one of Billy Jack’s devoted female followers….

“Im Michigan Wolverine,” the man said.

“And I’m Evenstar,” the women said, more quietly but smiling cheerfully.

I told them my name, and like most other people they took it for a trail name. I also told them I was finishing my hike at Echo Lake.

“No!” Michigan Wolverine said. “Do one more. Go to Sierra City! It’ll be great!”

Evenstar nodded in agreement, and I thought to myself, maybe I should…. But then, only if I can hang out with you two. But after a few minutes they were on their way, headed for Echo Lake and the fleshpots of South Lake Tahoe. All the thru-hikers take a holiday there…. Before they left, the man said, “I hope we’ll see each other again along the way.”

After dinner—couscous and tuna, and the last tortilla—I was cleaning up and preparing to retire to my tent, when another hiker appeared, a lone man. He was going south but his beard and worn clothing appeared to mark him as another thru-hiker, which he was. He introduced himself as Diesel.

He had come off the trail at Tuolumne and then spent a week in Reno and South Lake Tahoe with a friend. He’d decided it would be easier to walk back to Tuolumne, then hitch north to Tahoe, rather than the other way around. He’d been with a group of fellow hikers from the start, and they were still coming north, and he was looking forward to surprising them when their paths crossed.

Diesel was full of talk of his just-finished weekend at one of the hotel/casinos in South Lake Tahoe. There had been an annual celebrity golf tournament, and evening gatherings and shows, and he had spotted a number of well-known sports and entertainment figures. The latter included Robin Williams, and others I can’t remember, but Diesel was most interested in the football players. The highlight had been shaking hands with Jason Witten, a tight end for the Dallas Cowboys. “I got a picture of the two of us together,” Diesel said, clearly still excited. “See, he went to the University of Tennessee, and I went Tennessee too.” With his long beard and trail-battered equipment, he didn’t look like an ardent sports fan or someone who could be so smitten by celebrities. But there you go.

“Last night in the casino,” he told me, “I was standing right by Rodney Harrison”—a former defensive back for the New England Patriots—“and I said, ‘how’d you do?’” This referring to the gambling. Harrison had laughed, said not so good. But then he asked Diesel a favor. “Hey, man,” he said, “I’m not going to get back over to Harrah’s, can I get you to swap me for this chip?” The chip was for $100, and it sounded like a scam to me, but Diesel happily forked over the cash, and apparently it worked out since he didn’t say anything to the contrary….

Diesel ended up camping nearby.  I told him he could share my site, but he said it was okay, he used a hammock so he didn’t need a flat spot.

I got in my tent and started to think of the day ahead but then stopped. That would come soon enough. Instead I cast back over the previous fifteen days, especially the eight since leaving Tuolumne. I had come 160 miles since then, 270 since leaving Bishop. On the trail from Tuolumne I had gained 27,000 feet in elevation and lost just about as much…. I’d seen a lot of mountains and rocks and creeks and lakes and trees and flowers and chipmunks…. I’d thought about a lot of stuff.

I thought I might miss it, but I also thought the days ahead off-trail would be interesting too.