Best of Jackalope Pursuivant: In the lee of the Sierra Nevada

This post, from 25 November, 2003, is the tale of my trip down from Reno to Boulder City, returning home from the deer-strike north of Eureka. I remember that day, crystal clear. It was an extremely long day.

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Reno.

I slept in. I plotted a course, stair-stepping down Nevada to Las Vegas. I was making great time, and was wondering if I could finish the trip in one day. My fate was sealed when I saw Boundary Peak, Nevada's highest mountain. It was glowing white from fresh snowfall, and the lure of the Sierra Nevada had caught me. I was captivated by the west side of that range last summer, so this time I wanted to see its leeward side. I swung off to the west and made for a longer route. I again changed my plans and decided I might as well visit Death Valley. So as I was wending along Highway 168 between Dyer, Nevada and Big Pine, California, I suddenly realized that my gas was on E. My rented Kia Rio, it seemed, had a top-heavy gas gauge. Its ten gallon tank will take you around 260 miles, but the guage stays fuller than it ought, and then precipitately drops when you get low. I was praying and coasting as I crossed that pass. I lament missing the ancient bristlecone pine forest. 2 days after leaving the tallest trees in the world, I was among the oldest trees in the world. But I didn't dare stop to have a look. I rolled into Big Pine without any sputters from the engine, so I don't know how much longer I might've gone.

I filled up the tank, and finally had the luxury of enjoying the view. The Sierra Nevada were a long, abrupt chain of towering peaks stretching to the horizons. The peaks were freshly snow-capped, though seemingly little snow, or indeed water, makes it far beyond the range. The desert went halfway up the slopes. Incredible, considering the impact the mountains had on me when I visited them last summer. After an ugly, hot drive through Arizona and California, I took a long detour up to Sequoia National Park. From Fresno, you can't even see the mountains. You have only the vague assurance that there are some mountains there, somewhere. By the time you're in the dry grass-covered foothills, you still have no evidence of the great mountains. For all the climbing you do, you still can't believe how high you are until you're overlooking the hazy Imperial Valley. Or at least the same foothills you climbed earlier. I'm sure without the haze the experience is quite normal, but with the haze it's rather magical. At the park entrance gate, I could see immediately the shift. "Yes," I thought, "there are some mighty big trees growing here." Then, another few miles in I was corrected. I had been looking at the wrong trees. Oh. Oh, wow. Whoa.

After the long, hot drive, the tops of the Sierra Nevada were cool, breezy, damp, and utterly beautiful. The drive back down the mountains a couple hours later was very bitter. I drove late into the night to get home, but the side trip was entirely worth it.

That experience informed my decision to forgo a one-day speed run home. So there were the Sierra Nevada. There was Mount Whitney, the highest point in California. 14,494 feet above sea level. Paradoxically, Mt. Whitney is just around 100 miles from Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the United States, at 282 feet below sea level. As I whizzed down the line of mountains on Highway 395, I stopped at Manzanar NHS. Manzanar is the site of one of the 10 relocation camps that housed evacuees of Japanese extraction during WW2.

This story is one of the hot-button issues of WW2 history. The official answer you're supposed to give is that the camps were an abomination and evidence of deep, underlying racism in American society, etc., etc. I had a public speaking teacher at GCC who was daft enough to say America had put ethnic Japanese citizens in 'concentration camps.' I could have exploded. I was ready to explode, but it was the first class and I held off. I should have given her a comprehensive dressing-down on the spot, and transferred out of her class within the hour. (She holds the record for being the single worst college teacher I ever had. Totally incompetent, but that's another rant.) There are no gas chambers on the map on Manzanar. I couldn't find any crematoriums. What, you mean the residents were actually fed? They weren't worked to death as slave labor? There were doctors on site, and they weren't conducting human experiments? The violent death toll from Manzanar, over the course of the war, amounted to two prisoners who were shot by Military Police during a confrontation culminating a strike in December, 1942. Manzanar and its counterparts were no Dachau, and it is disgusting to associate the two.

Manzanar seemed at least as comfortable as the Luftwaffe POW camps in The Great Escape or even Hogan's Heroes. They had wood barracks. Crowded, but not cramped. They had numerous gardens, and their hardier plants are still growing in the empty lots. They had a town hall. They had a kendo dojo. They had their families. It wasn't American life. But it was no torture.

There's no doubt that there is little room in the definition of liberty to allow for the forcible detention of thousands of innocent American citizens. Total war, however, is not an overstatement. In a total war, your entire civilization brings absolutely every effort to bear. It was entirely probable that the Japanese government had placed spies and saboteurs in the US, and it was perfectly likely that at least a handful of Japanese settled in America might be inclined to show more allegiance to the god-emperor of Japan than to Uncle Sam. Some of the prisoners were openly supportive of the Japanese Empire, and yet they weren't summarily shot or moved to military prisons. In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeus corpus. In WW2, Roosevelt moved thousands from the West Coast to relocation camps. Not constitutional. Not ethical. Not legal. Not moral. Still possibly the right thing to do. And still not Dachau, or Abu Ghraib, or even Stalag Luft III.

The site is clearly just beginning to put its funding to use. They have raised an airplane hangar in the WW2 style, and a few surrounding buildings. There are two check points at the front gate, and there is a self-guided dirt road leading past the rows of barracks and other buildings. The place was deserted, and aside from the construction zone at the hangar, the only sign of recent visitors was at the cemetery, way in the back. There, a score of graves with a white obelisk inscribed with Japanese characters. A beautiful, silent, windswept spot.

From Manzanar, I swept into Death Valley. I imagine the drive in the opposite direction would be great, with the snow-capped peaks looming suddenly above the horizon. The road was long and winding, and it dropped way down to more than 200 feet below sea level. Sand dunes. Broad, open, dry expanses of desert. I've been to a lot of National Parks before, and I've never seen one as dull and uninteresting as Death Valley. Desert. Okay, I've seen it. Hurrah. Wheee. The good news is that, having seen it, I have no desire to ever visit again. That's a corner of the United States that I'm done with. I've seen enough desert to know a good one from a bad one, and Death Valley has nothing on a decent Arizona vista.

On the far side of Death Valley, I had to do some creative wrangling to find the unmarked road to Pahrump. Seems it's a small road that goes right through a wild horse preserve. Great. I'm already afraid of hitting a deer, now I have to worry about wild horses after dark.

I made it through safely, only to realize on the edge of Pahrump that the gas gauge is back at E. Drat. Got to a station, filled up, rolled into Vegas. The plan was to find internet access, check Orbitz, find a room. But it's Friday night in Vegas, so the killer rates aren't available and I can't find internet access anywhere. Drat.

A few minor misadventures and I finally found an internet café. By then I had had my fill of Vegas traffic. Booked into the Best Western in Boulder City. Best decision I made all night.

Dinner, however, was the second best. I stopped at the Venetian for Italian food. When you're dining alone, you can go as nice as you like and it's like taking a date to a restaurant half as nice. So I spent rather a lot on the meal, and enjoyed myself. My waiter was a European gentleman with a hairdo to match mine and only 4 fingers on his right hand. He seemed to take offense when I tried pouring my own glass of San Pellegrino. Nevertheless, the shared experience of putting the ol' Gilette to the scalp every day forged a bond between us.

The shopping and dining area of the hotel was gorgeous, with a canal and gondolas. But there's a serious problem with the decorating. Venice wasn't this clean when they first took it out of the box. Nothing could make Venice this clean. Or pleasant smelling. What was odd were all the well-dressed Europeans strolling about as though there were anything dignified about the place. Add to that the ugly Americans in awful clothes, standing around gaping, and the place is rather like Europe after all.

Boulder City that night. Incredible windstorm. Arose the next morning, swung by the Lake Mead NRA (National Recreational Area, not National Rifle Association) visitors center for one last stamp in my National Parks passport, and I made for home. Crossing Hoover Dam without truck traffic is a huge blessing, but I would rather have the traffic and dispense with the original cause of its absence.

One figures perhaps 4 hours for the last leg of the drive, from Kingman to Phoenix. I made it in rather less time. Again, I may have exceeded certain local speed regulations. But huge improvements to the road have taken a lot of the winding out of what was once a very treacherous route. I arrived home Saturday afternoon, weary but happy. 5000 miles in 13 days. One deer slain. Three cars used. One volcano. The tallest trees in the world. The oldest trees in the world. The lowest point in the United States.

Oh, and I'm going back in a couple weeks to recover the van. Cool.