Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
come to rest on earth with the spectacular cones and spirals of ancient sediment deposits
rising from the prairie. You think, or at least I did, Cool beans! I crossed that sucker! It's
mine!
And you can't encounter other Americans living lives completely different from your
own without being reminded of what you share. A conversation I had in Canby, Califor-
nia, has stuck with me. Canby is in Modoc County in the northeast corner of the state on
a plateau of rolling ranchland fitted among mountain ranges to the east, west, and south,
and a desert to the north. I'd ridden through the pine-forested Sierras to get there, and
it was probably the first time, of many that would follow, that I was taken by how much
space there sometimes is between actual places (places you'd find people, that is) and by
the marvelous vistas that the few who lived in the region lived with. I remember think-
ing, as I pulled into town after twenty miles of early-morning riding, that whereas I see
water tanks on the tops of buildings every day from my bedroom window, the quotidian
backdrop of the lives of Modoc residents features deep black lakes, grass, and scrubland
stretching toward foothills, and, in the distance, the snowy peak of Mount Lassen. (I've
come to think of the water-tank view as the screensaver of my life; now there's a meta-
phor that I didn't have at my disposal in 1993.)
I stopped for breakfast at the Canby Hotel, whose sign featured the carved outline of
a steer's head. A photo I found online recently shows the hotel and sign are still there,
with the addition of a hand-drawn wooden placard leaning against a telephone pole and
declaring the place to be the home of the world-famous Modoc-burger. Anyway, I re-
member the meal I had—pork chops and eggs—and the proprietor, a man named Charlie
who looked like the old actor Melvyn Douglas as he appeared in the movie
Hud
.
“Pretty country,” I said to him.
“Yeah, well, country's all we got,” he replied. He spoke in a resigned, low-volume
growl that I recognized; he could have been a city cabdriver complaining about
crosstown traffic.
Canby, California—that's another point. Entertaining the idea of a cross-country bike
trip, most people think about the length of it, and because of that the endless stretches
of empty road spanning vast swaths of the country, especially in the West, the distances
between places instead of the places themselves. But there are towns, too, so many towns
along the way; you can't believe how many towns, dozens for sure, maybe hundreds,
and each one you pass through represents dozens, maybe hundreds of others you don't
get to see. Each leaves a trace of itself in your memory. A lot of them make an effort to
do so. The welcome signs that greet visitors to many, many places in this country are
touching testaments to local pride. Nyssa, Oregon, for instance, on the Idaho border (not
far from the Bates Motel, actually), calls itself rather dully the “gateway to the Oregon