March 9, 2005 – Touring California en Route to Santa Fe

March 9, 2005 – Touring California en Route to Santa Fe

In 1999, my wife “I” and I made a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico driving her car, which had very low mileage—as all her cars do since she doesn’t commute and her daily trips are all within a 10 mile radius of our house. Well we were going to put some miles on her car and the trip began on Friday July 23rd. From San Jose we drove south on 101 and cut across to Interstate 5 by way of Highway 152 just south of Gilroy. Interstate 5 in the middle of July runs through some of the hottest parts of California with the temperature near or exceeding the 100 degree mark at different points along its length.

We left the Interstate at Buttonwillow getting onto Highway 58—the Rosedale Highway—through the California described in John Steinbeck novels, farmland as far as the eye can see with thousands of acres under cultivation. Sixteen miles from the Interstate we pass through the town of Greenacres, of significance to anyone into old 1960s sitcoms—though the TV series was two words, whereas this town ran the two words together. Another 16 miles and we’re in Bakersfield and on our way to Tehachapi. I pass a kid in a 60s Chevy doing close to 80 get back into the right lane a quarter mile ahead of him and keep moving driving the speedometer up close to 90. My wife’s car has some heart—I gave it that.

As you leave Bakerfield, Highway 58 starts to climb into the Tehachapi range, a short transverse range running southwest to northeast that connect the Coast Ranges on the west with the southern end of the Sierra Nevada mountains on the east. As we begin our steady climb over into the mountains, the kid in the Chevy get tired of being left in the dust by a old guy in a new foreign car so he pushes the petal on his Chevy and passes me with authority doing over 90 while I idled along at 75 as the mountain had slowed my progress and I hadn’t emptied my gas tank at a faster pace to compensate. From Caliente, which is 20 miles or so west of Bakersfield, to the city of Tehachapi—at the summit of the range—the rise is 2,735 feet, reaching 4000 feet above sea level. About fifteen minutes after the kid in the Chevy passed us, we saw him stopped by a CHP cruiser getting a ticket. I felt bad that I kind of provoked his plight, but if I had not done it, someone else would have. It was his fate to get a ticket that day.

In this desolate part of California—with its wide open spaces it’s hard to picture it being part of a state known for its sprawling gridlocked freeways in northern and southern metropolises. It’s high desert and the one man made marvel that can be found here is the railroad that runs for miles along stretches of Highway 58. And the trains being pulled are of incredible lengths, boxcar after boxcar, tanker after tanker, container carrier after container carrier. I cringe thinking of being stopped at a railroad crossing waiting for one of them to cross. To get these behemoths up the incredibly steep grade, Southern Pacific—then Central Pacific—Railroad engineer William Hood designed the Tehachapi loop. The track literally winds one complete turn around the summit of the range at Tehachapi pass. The loop is 3,799 feet long, with a typical diameter of about 1210 feet. Chinese workers from Guongjhou, which used to be Canton, built the railroad using dynamite, picks and shovels. They called the loop Walong—it is an incredible piece of construction.

Once over the pass, we descended into the great Mohave Desert, passing over the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the other manmade marvel, which was the McGuffin in the movie Chinatown with Jack Nicholson and Fay Dunaway. Once beyond the town of Mohave, we pass the edge of Edwards Air Force Base, then Boron—I visualize Ronald Reagan in black and white introducing the TV show Death Valley Days sponsored by 20-Mule Team Borax. The 20-mule teams ran from Death Valley to the town of Mojave during the late 1800's, a 20-day journey that averaged 15 to 18 miles a day—and I complain about my daily 40-mile, hour-and-a-half-round-trip commute. Beyond Boron we make good time passing through Barstow—a major railroad-switching town. My uncle Robert worked for the railroad out of Barstow from the time my grandmother died until he passed away on Valentine’s Day in 1968, the day our oldest daughter “M” was born.

The rest of the drive is uneventful and the scenery out the window of our air-conditioned sedan is Mojave Desert to the horizon in every direction you look. I push the speedometer needle close to 90 and make for Needles on the California-Arizona border where we have reservations at the Best Western Motel. There we see the cool fast flowing waters of the Colorado River rushing to escape the sucking force of California and Arizona Aqueduct siphoning its life giving essence to feed parched fertile farmlands on either side of the border-line, between the two states. A trickle of the once mighty flow will escape to Mexico, but not before being stopped at the Imperial Dam and the Laguna Dam, a few miles from the Mexican border. Tomorrow, the journey along historic Route 66.