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.