Dear friends and family,
By the time I left Yosemite, I’d been on the road for 46 days and 9200 miles. I wandered into a campground that evening just west of the park down in the Great Valley, run by the Army Corps of Engineers around one of their irrigation dams down there:
Pictured: the obscure and cowpie-strewn two-tracks Google Maps will lead you down if you’re not careful.
But driving aside, the campground was quite nice and scenic and cheap. And it had showers! What else can you ask for in a campground?
I’ve noticed that when crossing California, you end up getting deja vu constantly. In driving the empty country lanes through the hill country west of Yosemite and the more agricultural parts of the valley, my honest first through was: “wow, this looks a lot kike Texas!”
But that’s completely untrue! I’ve driven the width of Texas end-to-end, and the rollicking golden pastures I saw in the Yosemite Hill Country are nothing like the Cajun swamps, the green shortgrass lands, the rocky badlands beyond San Antonio, or the cracked and sun-baked dust bowls from there to El Paso, all of which can be seen in the drive along I-10. What I realized was that I’d likely seen dozens of movies and TV shows made in California and portraying all these other corners of the country, causing major de ja vu. I don’t have anything profound to say about this other than that it really struck me as odd. I wonder what Californians think when they travel around the rest of the country? Is it “wow, [X] location looks nothing like it did [Y] movie?” Or is it “[X] location looks a lot like [Z] location back in California?” Call/text me, Californians, if you want to chime in!
Pictured: a week’s worth of garlic for Lee family cooking.
The valley, by the way, is positively brimming with fruit and vegetable farms. Squash, apples, cherries, citrus of every variety, root vegetables of every stratum, you name it and California grows it, and sells it for pennies on the dollar compared to the prices some of these crops would command back east! Just look at the price of these avocados!
10 for just a dollar! Sure they’re 1/3rd the size of normal store avocados, but they’re still just as good on toast! Why on earth aren’t they booking plane tickets for these guys to the east coast??? The profit margins Wegmans reaps on avocados could easily send a bushel of these guys on a Frontier Airlines flight east, if not Delta!
I know it’s weird to marvel at farms, especially someone from such a cornfed corner of the world as this midwesterner, but everything I’ve ever seen grown back home is a monosyllabic monocrop: corn, wheat, soy, with a scant fruit orchard in the more touristy parts of the states (this is a direct callout to Door County, Wisconsin and the entire west coast of Michigan). It’s remarkable to see such diverse agriculture covering the entire valley floor!
The avocados may be cheap but California makes you pay it back elsewhere :/
I am waxing philosophical about stonefruit here because I am having a difficult time describing the inexorable pull of the sea I was feeling while crossing the valley, and really that has been growing in me ever since I left Cape Hatteras. For many weeks I felt that I was rising on a great tide, mythically and magnetically pulled westward over the Appalachians, and the Mississippi, and the Sangre De Cristo, and the High Sierras, and finally the coast range. How the moon drew me near every evening, and entranced me with her many faces, ever-changing as the land rolling under my four wheels and sleeping beside me in my cot. And so the tide rose higher, and the swells surged mightily, and the spray howled and bayed, and the sea churned and thrashed and consumed every acre before me until:
I made it.
9400 miles, 47 days, 15 states, and 1 oil change later, I made it.
I can’t believe I’ve made it.
I’ve made it!
You hear that, world?! Do you hear the siren song of the great sea calling you?!?! Do you hear it bellowing from a far away coast, its thrash and wail broken and belittled to murmurs behind your office door??? Do you catch its little whispers in the stifling summer air of sleepless nights alone??? Do you smell the salt in the wind, beyond the coffee pots and the laundry detergent and the trash that needs to go out tomorrow??? Do you feel the pull of the moon drawing you away from all your anxieties and and fears and fights, drawn westward??? And do you feel the overwhelming desire to scream into the never-ending eddies and gales: I do! I do! I do!!!
I DO!!!!!!!
I’ve felt it, I’ve made it, I do. I do. I do.
Stay well everyone,
Evan 💙