Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
At Jackson, I found that Highway 88 was open through the mountains-the first open pas-
sagethroughtheSierrasinalmost300miles-andItookit.IhadexpectedthatIwouldhave
to take the next but one pass along, the infamous Donner Pass, where in 1846 a party of
settlers became trapped by a blizzard for several weeks and survived by eating each other,
an incident that caused a great sensation at the time. The leader of the group was named
Donner. I don't know what became of him, but I bet he took some ribbing whenever he
went into a restaurant after that. At any rate, it got his name on the map. The Donner Pass
wasalsotheroutetakenbythefirsttranscontinentalrailroad,theSouthernPacific,andfirst
transcontinental highway, old Route 40, the Lincoln Highway, on their 3,000-mile journey
from New York to San Francisco. As with Route 66 further south, Route 40 had been cal-
louslydugupandconvertedintoadull,straightinterstatehighway,soIwaspleasedtofind
a back road open through the mountains.
Anditwasverypleasant.Idrovethroughpine-forestedscenery,withoccasionallongviews
across unpeopled valleys, heading in the general direction of Lake Tahoe and Carson City.
The road was steep and slow and it took me much of the afternoon to drive the hundred
or so miles to the Nevada border. Near Woodfords I entered the Toiyabe National Forest,
or at least what once had been the Toiyabe National Forest. For miles and miles there was
nothing but charred land, mountainsides of dead earth and stumps of trees. Occasionally I
passed an undamaged house around which a firebreak had been dug. It was an odd sight,
a house with swings and a wading pool in the middle of an ocean of blackened stumps.
A year or so before, the owners must have thought they were the luckiest people on the
planet,toliveinthewoodsandmountains,amidthecoolandfragrantpines.Andnowthey
lived on the surface of the moon. Soon the forest would be replanted and for the rest of
their lives they could watch it grow again, inch by annual inch.
I had never seen such devastation-miles and miles of it and yet I had no recollection of
having read about it. That's the thing about America. It's so big that it just absorbs disas-
ters, muffles them with its vastness. Time and again on this trip I had seen news stories
that would elsewhere have been treated as colossal tragedies-a dozen people killed by
floodsinthe South,ten crushed whenastore roofcollapsed inTexas, twenty-two dead ina
snowstormintheEast-andeachofthemtreatedasabriefandnotterriblyconsequential di-
versionbetweenadsforhemorrhoidunguentsandcottagecheese.Partlyitisaconsequence
of that inane breeziness common to local TV newscasters in America, but mostly it is just
the scale ofthe country.Adisaster in Florida is regarded in California in the same way that
a disaster in Italy is regarded in Britain-as something briefly and morbidly diverting, but
too far away to be tragic in any personal sense.
