January 18, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 3

January 18, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 3

It's Thursday December 29th and my wife IM and I are up early from our peaceful night at the Hilton Sedona Resort & Spa. From the air, the hotel has the outline of a staple that had been removed, bent in the middle with both ends curved in a shape of a stylized “C”. Our room is in the middle of the “C” two rooms away from the registration desk. After we get cleaned up, I call the front desk to say the bill they slipped under my door was correct and to check us out. We load up the Chevy Trailblazer and head out Highway 179 south about 10 miles to get back on Interstate 17 heading north toward Flagstaff. Once on the Interstate, we’re traveling along the Mogollon Rim, an escarpment that begins just south of the Grand Canyon and runs southeast through Arizona and into New Mexico nearly 300 miles. The rim continues being shaped by the North American Continental Plate's relentless drive against the Pacific Plate—wrinkling and stretching Arizona's geologic crust, minutely reshaping the state’s mountain ranges and valleys, ridges and depressions, and mineral outcroppings. In the Sumo wrestling match, the Continental Plate is successfully bullying the Pacific Plate, shoving it northwest-ward at a rate of 600 feet every million years.

The lifetime of humankind is so insignificant when measured against the earth’s four-and-a-half-billion-year lifetime. The distinctive layers of Courthouse Bluff in Sedona contain a written record of over a half a billion years of geologic activity, when the entire region was close to the equator. By contrast, the human’s lifetime on earth is barely a couple of million years. The distinctive red color comprising over half the bottom of the 1200-foot Courthouse Bluff bear evidence from hundreds of million of years ago of the iron oxide staining the sandstone comprising these structure. The layers of white interspersed with the red sandstone tell the story of the region being inundated every several million years by the ancient Pedregosa (the Spanish word for “stony or rocky”) Sea. The once-submerged whole of the Western U.S. later went through cycles where the Pedregosa invaded whole sections of the landmass. With each successive inundation, millions of aquatic life forms buried themselves in the sediment of that sea to be compacted into the layers visible now in the exposed multicolored limestone and sandstone cliffs. Will the remains of humankind be among those layers some hundreds of millions of years hence? It does make you wonder about the ultimate question of what this is all about. It’s like we’ve all come in on the middle of the movie and it’s been going so long that no one recalls how it started and no one is smart enough to figure out how the movie will end. What’s more infuriating is that none of us will have the slightest clue of the end when we have to leave, though the answer may lie in the place we arrive when we leave this one—if such a place exists.

Less than 30 minutes on I-17 and the Chevy Trailblazer is nearing the Interstate 40 junction. We’re heading toward the San Francisco Mountains that tower over the college town of Flagstaff. Somewhere above the tree line of Piñon-Juniper at lower elevations and Ponderosa Pine, Fir and Bristlecone Pine at the highest elevations, is the towering peak of 12,633-ft high San Francisco Mountain. Over the past 6 million years, this range has produced over 600 volcanoes, the youngest of which is Sunset Crater which last erupted less than a thousand years ago. We’re tourist rummaging among the remains of ancient natural disasters.

At Interstate 40, I nose the Trailblazer westward and feel a sudden jolt of excitement heading toward the Golden State. On this stretch of highway we are riding the path of famed Route 66. In the U.S. highways are revered in the same way railroads are in the U.K. We celebrate them in song, make television series about them—Route 66 with Martin Milner and George Maharis, who played Tod Stiles and Buz Murdock, respectively driving this famed highway in Tod’s 1960 Corvette Convertible, another memory from a fast receding past. The last time IM and I drove Interstate 40 going to Santa Fe, we stopped in Williams to pay our respects to the road. That thought came to mind as we zoomed westward Williams off to our left a little west of Flagstaff. Old Route 66 runs straight through downtown Williams along Bill Williams Boulevard. On that earlier trip to Santa Fe, we stayed in Williams to visit the Grand Canyon. We decided to book passage on the train that daily runs to the canyon in the morning returning in the late afternoon. The train ride resembles a theme park ride with musicians and actors plying their trade and passing the hat afterwards. For generations raised on constant stimulation, a journey with no diversions except the natural scenery you’re passing makes for an endless journey and the performers do a brisk business. We stayed at the hotel/motel close by the train station in Williams, which offered a packaged deal: room and ride.

Beyond Williams is the town of Kingman, Arizona, the last of the larger towns of I-40 before the California border. On the earlier Santa Fe trip we exited I-40 at Andy Devine Avenue in Kingman. (The road gets its name from the movie actor, born in Flagstaff, Arizona, who played Roy Rogers’ sidekick as well as in many other movies—many westerns.) We stopped at a Denny’s near the off ramp for breakfast after trying to find a breakfast café like the one I remembered from the days I was a kid traveling with my family and like the ones depicted occasionally in Route 66, the TV series. This time we exit the interchange for gas at Woody's Food Store near the offramp, but IM and I both remembered the last Denny’s meal we had here and decided to forego breakfast though we can clearly see the restaurant across the street.

The trip from Kingman to Needles seems to take no time at all and suddenly we’re leaving Arizona and heading into California toward the Central Coast and the ocean-front town of Cambria our destination for the day. It has been overcast most of the drive from Flagstaff and as Needles recedes in our rear view mirror the gray gloom continues. The drive for the next 140 miles is largely through uninhabited stretches of the Mojave Desert, as I-40 meanders, curving around and over low rise mountains. Along the way we catch sight of trains along the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. They’re heading to or from Barstow, a hub for railroads east and west and north and south, where hobos still make connections. The city was a jumping off place for immigrants from the dust bowl traveling west on Route 66 to seek a new life in California. Route 66 still lives in Barstow along Main Street. The desert city is also at the junction of three major highways—I-15, I-40, and California 58. We take the latter as our road west.

Driving California 58 is a tour through John Steinbeck’s early 20th Century California: miles of farmland, most of it farmed by corporate giants, the heavy equipment that replaced the early mechanical and animal powered farm implements of Steinbeck’s time, nowhere to be seen, though their existence is clearly evident. California’s miles of fertile land basks in a climate that allows crops year-around, most if not all harvested by John Deere equipment or migrant workers—today from Mexico not from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas as in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Along other stretches of Highway 58 are oil pumps appearing like a field of giant preying mantises sucking oil deposited beneath the ground collected over 100s of millions of years in the deep recesses of geologic strata. Incredibly what took hundreds of millions of years to form, we’re burning on our westward drive in a billionth of the time.

I think of that primeval Pedregosa Sea, inundating this land millions of years ago depositing plant and animal life to be covered over by successive generations. Today’s tenants of the land are layering it with the detritus of modern time—junk cars, beer cans and soft drink containers, and every other man made package—that millions of years from now will represent our contribution to the geology of this world. Scary thought, no? Along the way we pass Edwards Air Force Base and the town of Mojave before reaching the town of Tehachapi. It sits atop a 40-mile transverse mountain range named for the city. Like a huge brace, the range lies perpendicular to the two opposing plates trying to squeeze California as if attempting to keep apart two warring factions that no amount of restraint will deter.

We reach Tehachapi at a quarter past one in the afternoon and I stop at the Summit Chevron station at 400 Steuber Road, just off Highway 58. The place is mobbed with RVs, SUVs, and passenger cars. I manage to find and open pump, whip out my credit card, insert it into the machine and it starts pumping gas. Outside the wind is blowing and the clouds that have kept the day overcast seem nearer—perhaps because we’re 3900 feet above sea level. The winds over the Tehachapi pass are that strong and persistent that it is home to windmill farms to rival those we passed in our outbound journey through Palm Springs and Indio. After filling the tank, IM and I press on in the gloom down into the great central valley and the town of Barstow This is the as country and western as California gets. And it’s a haven for 18-wheelers hauling every conceivable commodity under the sun.

We work our way through Bakersfield on 58, catch California Highway 43, the Stockdale Highway, for a short stretch before it intersects Interstate 5. There we head north for a few miles before coming on the Highway 46 exit, which we take west for just under 100 miles before reaching California 101. Highway 46 is a two lane road with sections of passing lanes for traffic going uphill. As we near the intersection with 101, the land on either side of the highway suddenly sprouts vineyards for as far as the eye can see. This is the central coast wine growing region, depicted in the movie “Sideways.” At the 101 junction, we head south for a couple of miles as 46 and 101 become one, then head west as 46 abruptly breaks away to run toward the ocean. The drive along this stretch of 46 is over the Coast Mountain Range and as we reach the summit we finally see the sun. It’s a welcome sight after so many miles of dreary gray overcast. We arrive at our room at Cambria Landing on Moonstone Beach in Cambria around 4:30 and finally manage to stop moving and leisurely watch the sun dip below the western horizon. The perfect end for a long day of driving.