19.07.12 - Road Tripping

I started off this morning with a pit stop at the garage to check tyre pressures, oil and water. Mostly because I had Mum’s voice in my head nagging me about it. Getting out of the city was easy, across the Bay Bridge and onto highway 80 towards Sacramento. I had read an article about Nevada City (California) in a magazine so I had picked it as my first stop. The first bit of the drive was through

uneventful landscape, the heat steadily rising. I stopped for lunch in Marysville; I could feel the change in atmosphere immediately. I guess SF has its own special kind of atmosphere though. Everything felt much slower, people spoke slower, there was hardly anyone around, the shops were quaintly parochial. There was a Cowboy Corral shop, a huge show repair shop run by two guys who looked like Hell’s Angels, a bikers shop run by a similar guy, a huge diamond jewellery shop, lots of antiques shops selling a whole assortment of junk. The one that I went in to had old glass bottles, books, videos, comics, skillets, dolls, pin badges and two surly old custodians. I bought a cowboy book to get into the spirit of the West. I am really not far from the cultural coast so I can only imagine what the middle of the country is like. Creepy as hell probably. I saw a woman painting her white picket fence and I am only 2 hours out of SF. I went to Carlos’ Fine Dining Mexican Restaurant for lunch. Fine dining would be pushing it, a lot. The food looked pretty bad and was pretty bad. Everything had a skin on it, the sauce, refried beans covered in greasy melted cheese. There’s something about American food that just makes you feel fatter as soon as you’ve eaten it. And something is giving me bad skin. I am not going to come back the bronzed Californian goddess I had imagined.

Pressing on the country started to look interesting; small bleached hills studded with dark green trees and random scatterings of bluey rocks. Very like some of Australia, it had the same big country feel to it. The landscape is pure Americana; old farm buildings, houses with porches and swing doors, old rusty cars decomposing, farm machinery old and new, cows, horses. You could spend your life taking picture postcard photographs. Then as I approached Nevada City the hills got bigger and the trees changed to pine trees, everything was greener. There are lots of small wineries around here. I took a small detour to go to a town called Rough and Ready, one of the oldest settlements in Nevada County (1849), the town is named after a company that was named after a military man, Zachery Taylor ‘Old Rough and Ready’. It is called The Great Republic because in 1850 they tried to secede from the Union in protest about a tax on mining claims. I went into the only shop and to my surprise there was an Arab behind the counter; I did not expect to see anyone who wasn’t white out here.

I found the perfect radio station that played classic road trip tunes, we had Born to Be Wild, The Boys Are Back in Town, She Was Just 17. My favourite road sign was ‘Speed Limit Enforced by Aircraft’, I didn’t see any aircraft though, I was imagining the aeroplane chase scene from North by Northwest.
Nevada City is an old mining town, as are all of the others around here. The main street runs up hill from the freeway with covered walkways on either side. My inn was at the top of the hill, just at the end of the shops. Like tourist towns everywhere there is a selection of shops to extract money from passing trade; clothes shops, jewellery, furs, and general tat. There is no proper food shop in the centre, not one that sells fruit and veg anyway. I went to the Fire Station Museum; a tiny little place in the old fire station (it became too small when they swapped horse drawn for motorised fire trucks) full of some American Indian bits, some Chinese bits (the gold attracted many Chinese to the Wild West) including opium pipes and the altar from the old Chinese temple. Upstairs there was a selection of old things; clothes, kitchen implements, guns, uniforms, photographs. The kind of things that many bigger museums wouldn’t

bother to display because they have too many exquisite things but in this context are really interesting. (The photo is an early x-ray tube). The weird thing is remembering that the beginning of white history out here is so recent, only about 150 years.

The town feels like a larger, Stockbridge with a hippy streak, and a few bums. They are everywhere. it seems. Maybe not as stuck up as Stockbridge, and no butcher. The corner shop here is run by an Indian family, another unexpected occurrence, and there is a Jamaican restaurant about to open called ‘Cool Runnings’, who would have thought it. I can’t be in Hicksville yet, damn.

For an evening’s entertainment I went to The Music Man, playing at the theatre on the main drag. It wasn’t until I read the programme (all programmes so far have been free) that i realised that it was local am dram society performance. I was expecting Micheldever Panto with an American accent but thankfully the standard was quite a lot higher, although bad American am dram would have been funny. I think that I saw the Music Man in Regents Park with Auntie Ant, years and years ago. It rang a few bells. The performance was great fun and I sat next to a lovely older couple, she reminded me of my friend Hannah Ellis (who incidentally I am going to see in Mexico City in a few weeks), really sweet. They live about 15 miles away, in a tucked away place by a lake. Apparently it’s full of retirees but of the slightly cooler, Californian variety.
To bed! Shattered.