The Lost Continent (35 page)

Every year my father would call a family powwow (can you believe this?) to discuss where we were going on vacation and every year I would push for going to California and the tree with a road through it, and my brother and sister would sneer cruelly and say that that was a really mega-dumb idea. My brother always wanted to go to the Rocky Mountains, my sister to Florida and my mother said she didn’t care where we went as long as we were all together. And then my dad would pull out some brochures with titles like “Arkansas—Land of Several Lakes” and “Arkansas—the Sho’ Nuff State” and “Important Vacation Facts About Arkansas” (with a foreword by Governor Luther T. Smiley), and suddenly it would seem altogether possible that we might be going to Arkansas that year, whatever our collective views on the matter might be.

When I was eleven, we went to California, the very state that housed my dream tree, but we only went to places like Disneyland and Hollywood Boulevard and Beverly Hills. (Dad was too cheap to buy a map showing the homes of the movie stars, so we just drove around and speculated.) A couple of times at breakfast I asked if we could drive up and see the tree with a road through it, but everybody was so dismissive—it was too far away, it would be too stupendously boring for words, it would probably cost a lot of money—that I lost heart and stopped asking. And in fact I never asked again. But it stayed at the back of my mind, one of my five great unfulfilled dreams from childhood. (The others, it goes without saying, were to have the ability to stop time, to possess the gift of X-ray vision, to be able to hypnotize my brother and make him be my slave, and to see Sally Ann Summerfield without a stitch of clothing on.)

Not surprisingly, none of these dreams came true. (Which is perhaps just as well. Sally Ann Summerfield is a blimp now. She turned up at my high-school reunion two years ago and looked like a shipping hazard.) But now here at last I was about to fulfill one of them. Hence the tingle of excitement as I slung my suitcase in the trunk and headed up Highway 63 for Sequoia National Park.

I had spent the night in the little city of Tulare, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. This is the richest and most fertile farming country in the world. They grow over 200 kinds of crops in the San Joaquin Valley. That very morning, on the local news on TV, they reported that the farming income for Tulare County for the previous year was $1.6 billion and yet it was only the second highest figure for the state. Fresno County, just up the road, was richer still. Even so, the landscape didn’t look all that brilliant. The valley was as flat as a tennis court. It stretched for miles in every direction, dull and brown and dusty, and a permanent haze hung on the horizon, like a dirty window. Perhaps it was the time of year, or perhaps it was the drought that was just beginning to choke central California, but it didn’t look rich or fruitful. And the towns that speckled the plain were equally dull. They looked like towns from anywhere. They didn’t look rich or modern or interesting. Except that there were oranges the size of grapefruits growing on trees in the front yards, I could have been in Indiana or Illinois or anywhere. That surprised me. On our family trip to California it had been like driving into the next decade. It had all looked sleek and modern. Things that were still novelties in Iowa—shopping centers, drive-in banks, McDonald’s restaurants, miniature golf courses, kids on skateboards—were old and long established in California. Now they just looked older. The rest of the country had caught up. The California of 1988 had nothing that Iowa didn’t have. Except smog. And beaches. And oranges growing in front yards. And trees you could drive through.

I joined Highway 198 at Visalia and followed it as it shot through fragrant lemon groves, ran along the handsome shoreline of Lake Kaweah and climbed up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Just beyond Three Rivers I entered the park, where a ranger in a wooden booth charged me a five-dollar entrance fee and gave me a brochure detailing the sights beyond. I looked quickly through it for a photograph of a road through a tree, but there weren’t any pictures, just words and a map bearing colorful and alluring names: Avalanche Pass, Mist Falls, Farewell Gap, Onion Valley, Giant Forest. I made for Giant Forest.

Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park are contiguous. Effectively they are one national park and, like all national parks in the West, it is a good-sized one—seventy miles from top to bottom, thirty miles across. Because of the twisting roads as I climbed up into the mountains, progress was slow, though splendidly scenic.

I drove for two hours on lofty roads through boulder-strewn mountains. Snow was still lying about in broad patches. At last I entered the dark and mysterious groves of the giant sequoia (
Sequoiadendron giganteum,
according to my brochure). The trees were tall, no doubt about it, and fat around the base, though not fat enough to take a highway. Presumably they would get fatter as I moved deeper into the forest. Sequoias are ugly trees. They soar up and up and up, but their branches are sparse and stubby, so they look silly, like the sort of trees three-year-olds draw. In the middle of the Giant Forest stands the General Sherman Tree—the biggest living thing on earth. Surely the General Sherman was the one I was looking for.

“Oh boy, Chevette, have I got a treat for you!” I called out and patted the steering wheel fondly. When at last I neared the General Sherman, I found a small parking lot and a path leading to the tree through the woods. Evidently it was no longer possible to drive through the tree. This was a disappointment—name me something in life that isn’t—but never mind, I thought. I’ll walk through it; the pleasure will last longer. Indeed, I’ll walk through it severally. I will stroll and saunter and glide, and if there aren’t too many people about, I might well dance around it in the light-footed manner of Gene Kelly splashing through puddles in
Singin’ in the Rain.

So I banged the car door shut and walked up the trail to the tree and there it was, with a little fence around it to keep people from getting too close. It was big all right—tall and fat—but not
that
tall, not
that
fat. And there was no hole through its base. You might just about have managed to cut a modest road through it, but—and here’s the important thing—no one ever had. Beside the tree was a large wooden board with an educational message on it. It said, “The giant General Sherman is not only the biggest tree in the world, but also the biggest living thing. It is at least 2,500 years old, and thus also one of the oldest living things. Even so, it is surprisingly boring, isn’t it? That is because it isn’t all that tall or all that fat. What sets it apart from other redwoods is that it doesn’t taper very much. It stays pretty fat all the way up. Hence it has a greater bulk than any other tree. If you want to see really impressive redwoods—ones with roads driven through their bases—you have to go to Redwood National Park, way up near the Oregon border. Incidentally, we’ve erected a fence around the base of the tree to keep you well back from it and intensify your disappointment. As if that were not enough, there is a party of noisy young Germans coming up the path behind you. Isn’t life shitty?”

As you will appreciate, this is somewhat paraphrased, but that was the gist of it. The Germans came and were obnoxious and unthoughtful, as adolescents tend to be, and stole the tree from me. They perched on the fence and started taking pictures. I derived some small pleasure from wandering in front of the cameraman whenever he was about to click the shutter, but this is an activity from which it is difficult to extract sustained amusement, even with Germans, and after a minute or two I left them there jabbering away about
die Pop Musik
and
das Drugs Scene
and their other adolescent preoccupations.

In the car I looked at the map and was disheartened to discover that Redwood National Park was almost 500 miles away. I could hardly believe it. Here I was 300 miles north of Los Angeles and yet I could drive another 500 miles and
still
be in California. It is 850 miles from top to bottom—about the distance between London and Milan. It would take me a day and a half to get to Redwood National Park, plus a day and a half to get back to where I was now. I didn’t have that kind of time. Gloomily, I started the car and drove on to Yosemite National Park, seventy miles up the highway.

And what a disappointment that proved to be. I’m sorry to moan, I truly am, but Yosemite was a letdown of monumental proportions. It is incredibly, mouth-gawpingly beautiful. Your first view of the El Capitan valley, with its towering mountains and white waterfalls spilling hundreds of feet down to the meadows of the valley floor, makes you think that surely you have expired and gone to heaven. But then you drive on down into Yosemite village and realize that if this is heaven you are going to spend the rest of eternity with an awful lot of fat people in Bermuda shorts.

Yosemite is a mess. The National Park Service in America—let’s be candid here—does a pretty half-assed job of running many of the national parks. This is surprising because in America most leisure-time activities are about a million times better than anywhere else. But not national parks. The visitors’ centers are usually dull, the catering is always crappy and expensive, and you generally come away having learned almost nothing about the wildlife, geology and history of the places you’ve driven hundreds of miles to see. The national parks are supposed to be there to preserve a chunk of America’s wilderness, but in many of them the number of animals has actually fallen. Yellowstone has lost all its wolves, mountain lions and white-tailed deer, and the numbers of beaver and bighorn sheep are greatly depleted. These animals are thriving outside Yellowstone, but as far as the park service itself is concerned they are extinct.

I don’t know why it should be, but the National Park Service has a long history of incompetence. In the 1960s, if you can believe it, the park service invited the Walt Disney Corporation to build a development in Sequoia National Park. Mercifully, that plan was quashed. But others have succeeded, most notably in 1923 when, after a long fight between conservationists and businessmen, the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the northern part of Yosemite—which was said to be even more spectacularly beautiful than Yosemite Valley itself—was flooded to create a reservoir to provide drinking water for San Francisco, 150 miles to the west. So for the last sixty years one of the half-dozen or so most breathtaking stretches of landscape on the planet has lain under water for commercial reasons. God help us if they ever find oil there.

The great problem at Yosemite today is simply finding your way around. I’ve never seen a place so badly signposted. It’s as if they are trying to hide the park from you. At most parks the first thing you want to do is go to the visitors’ center and have a look at the big map to get your bearings and decide what you want to see. But at Yosemite the visitors’ center is almost impossible to find. I drove around Yosemite village for twenty-five minutes before I discovered a parking lot and then it took me a further twenty minutes, and a long walk in the wrong direction, to find the visitors’ center. By the time I found it I knew my way around and didn’t need it anymore.

And everything is just hopelessly, depressingly crowded—the cafeterias, the post office, the stores. This was in April; what it must be like in August doesn’t bear guessing at. I have never been anywhere that was simultaneously so beautiful and so awful. In the end, I had a nice long walk and a look at the waterfalls and the scenery and it was outstanding. But I cannot believe that it can’t be better run.

In the evening I drove on to Sonora, through a tranquil sunset, along sinuous mountain roads. I reached the town after dark and had difficulty finding a room. It was only the middle of the week, but most places were full. The motel I finally found was grossly overpriced and the TV reception was terrible. It was like watching people moving around in front of funhouse mirrors. Their bodies would proceed across the screen and their heads would follow a moment later, as if connected by elastic. I was paying forty-two dollars for this. The bed was like a pool table with sheets. And the toilet seat didn’t have a S
ANITIZED
F
OR
Y
OUR
P
ROTECTION
wrapper on it, denying me my daily ritual of cutting it with my scissors and saying, “I now declare this toilet open.” These things become important to you when you have been alone on the road for a while. In a sour mood I drove into town and went to a cheap restaurant for dinner. The waitress made me wait a long time before she came and took my order. She looked tarty and had an irritating habit of repeating everything I said to her.

“I’d like the chicken-fried steak,” I said.

“You’d like the chicken-fried steak?”

“Yes. And I would like french fries with it.”

“You want french fries with it?”

“Yes. And I would like a salad with Thousand Island dressing.”

“You want a salad with Thousand Island dressing?”

“Yes, and a Coke to drink.”

“You want a Coke to drink?”

“Excuse me, miss, but I’ve had a bad day and if you don’t stop repeating everything I say, I’m going to take this ketchup bottle and squirt it all down the front of your blouse.”

“You’re going to take that ketchup bottle and squirt it all down the front of my blouse?”

I didn’t really threaten her with ketchup—she might have had a large boyfriend who would come and pummel me; also, I once knew a waitress who told me that whenever a customer was rude to her she went out to the kitchen and spat in his food, and since then I have never spoken sharply to a waitress or sent undercooked food back to the kitchen (because then the cook spits in it, you see)—but I was in such a disagreeable mood that I put my chewing gum straight into the ashtray without wrapping it in a piece of tissue first, as my mother always taught me to do, and pressed it down with my thumb so that it wouldn’t fall out when the ashtray was turned over, but would have to be prised out with a fork. And what’s more—God help me—it gave me a tingle of satisfaction.