Geek Rant vs The Gold Rush Highway

Greetings Geekranters!

Memories, as I noted in my last blog post, seem to have greater resonance the further I get from the town that I once called home. The more that I adjust to this discordantly different and strangely similar new homeland, the more my thoughts are captivated by the past. Drawn by echoes to things that I had thought long forgotten.

Or maybe, its just a function of getting older, merely amplified by distance, looking through rose colored lenses at the golden tinged summerland of youth forgetting that in its own time, it had difficulties and pains a plenty, just as much as today does.

The sea, all memory, spoke to me on those seaside highways and sang to me, filtering through the windows of our hotel room in Shelter Cove, California, sounding like the sea has always sounded yet still the song was subtly different. Maybe California just captivates the human spirit without us even realising.

This is the state, after all, that set the hearts of The Doors on fire, led The Eagles down the inescapable corridors of Hotel California and offered The Beach Boys an idyllic teenage lifestyle to sell to the rest of the world. This is the land of Hollywood, the land of cities and landmarks that even now saturate and dominate modern western culture. 

Waking up in Shelter Cove, that morning, I had to acknowledge that there was something otherworldly to this place, here was so much that was familiar but at the same time strangely unknowable. Hauntingly alien, but not in a negative sense, it was merely that here was a place so much bigger, more immense and more wild than any place I had been before. 

Shelter Cove was, in many ways, this feeling made manifest. To me, it was totally different to anything that I had ever imagined California to be and I'm pretty sure that sentiment would be echoed by many others if they visited that eerily beautiful place.



It was in a myriad of ways, very similar to Crescent City, with the same haphazard quality in its building and layout and the general isolated feel to the surroundings. Here, however that feeling was magnified many times over. Rather than a small yet bustling town standing on green scrubland and fields gently sloping towards, Shelter Cove seemed to cling to rocks that jutted out into the Pacific, a final bastion of civilisation caught between the tempestuous sea and the steep incline of the surrounding hills.

Everywhere, the houses seemed old and neglected, the paint peeling, seemingly deserted. On closer inspection, however, it became clear the houses were a lot newer than they at first appeared, their exteriors doubtless showing the ongoing impact of living so close to the weatherbeaten might of the Pacific Ocean. Nothing resists such forces for very long.

One road ran in and out of the strange little town, the tarmac winding backwards and forwards through high hills, clinging to the side of them at impossible angles. It felt like the lair of old smugglers and pirates long since gone down to the inky blackness of Davy Jones' Locker and it may well have been, once upon a time. All I knew at that moment is that it was the most isolated place I had ever been to in my life, but still it spoke of mankind's ability to survive and thrive wherever life takes us.

Shelter Cove was the last of the settlements on that lonesome highway that we stayed in. If, as I have said, our journey through California had been the partial discovery of an unknowable place, an enigma, something that seemed to have no relationship to what we had previously envisioned in our minds. That in those moments we had glimpsed a landscape defined by nature and characterised by a rural sparseness of population and habitation. A location that sometimes made you question whether the rest of the world existed. If, if it was that and more, then the California we were about to drive into was everything we thought California was and still was nothing we had imagined.

That day, which just so happened to be U.S. Independence Day, was our longest uninterrupted drive of the trip so far. This was to be our big push, taking us from the rural wilderness of the Redwoods and the northernmost reaches of the state to the more populated regions further south. By the time we'd finished on that day the distance we would have travelled, including all our detours and trips, would be nearing one thousand miles. To quote Otis Redding, we were "headed for the 'Frisco Bay", four hours later we would be there.

Memory is a funny thing, especially I've found when I try to recount all the hours of driving that we did, it jumbles in my recollection, the places that we didn't stop bleeding into one, names on a road sign. The bigger towns and cities and the places we stayed were easy to recall but so much of America is made up of the in-between places, the towns that lie on the way to somewhere else. A great proportion of this country lies beyond the knowledge of many of us who only know this land through osmosis, through books, television and movies, through music and culture, or those of us who once went on a weekend getaway to New York City and now think that we are experts on a whole land. 

After traveling so far and seeing a lot more than I ever imagined I would of this fine nation, I realised that it is those places that define this nation of ideas and dreams. It is not, as far as I could tell, a country of huge cities, jungles of concrete, glass and steel that dominate the landscape. It has those places, to be sure, but the America I have started to see is a country defined by its backcountry, its out of the way places. This is a country it seems, unremarked and unlooked for, a land most tourists don't discover, founded on communities built with the stuff of dreams on the border of the wild.

Reflections on a car window, blurred images rushing past, gone in an instance, merging in my mind into one. Still, they are a significant part of what makes America what it is. Traveling south through this environment, I remember feelings rather than definite places, the spirit of the place rather than its geography. The colour of the hillsides changing, the forests receding and giving way to cultivated fields. Gone were the dramatic rock-cuts and lonesome wind blown highways giving way to a pastoral dream that felt like some lost part of the Mediterranean, six thousand miles away from Europe.

This was truly a land of plenty, in many ways an agrarian paradise. This was also the beginnings of American wine country. As we drove along, small billboards next to the roadside advertised wine tasting after wine tasting, tours of vineyards, fresh fruits and vegetables available at ridiculously cheap prices, which admittedly was the only cheap thing about California that we found. It was something of an ongoing struggle to persuade ourselves that we didn't have time for such diversions. Here was an area that could have been a holiday all on its own and many people do merely come here to sample the wine and marvel at the vineyards.

It all rolled past lazily, like a mid-summer afternoon does in the halcyon days of our youth when your heart doesn't know what work or responsibilities are yet and all of life seems to move at a slower rate. My memory was stirred but not memory of a particular place or event, instead it was a recollection of feeling, a calling of the heart. The whole place steeped in innocence and those summers of childhood that never seemed to end, stretching forward for weeks on end in warmth, friendship and adventure.

The traffic increased from this point onward however, crashing into my pre-adolescent reverie like the first overtime shift that I ever did, blowing the warm feeling apart. Still, despite its increase, it was nowhere near yet the non-moving gridlock of LA and its surrounding counties. 

In the end, San Francisco seemed to appear out of nowhere, at least it did for us, approaching the city from the North. In most of the towns of any great size that I  have visited in my lifetime, One hits the suburbs of a city first, outliers drawing you into the centre of the conurbated mass. This is especially true, it seems of much of the Mid-West where many towns lie on great plains and can been seen long before they are reached. 

As we approached the city, a narrow road winds through the hills, turning to and fro and leads to a simple looking road tunnel, the Robin Williams tunnel. On the other side, the entirety of San Francisco Bay opened before us, the blue water glittering in the sun, directly in front of us, the Golden Gate rose majestically in front of us. The whole scene unravelled in front of us, a panorama of blue, green and rusty red. The Bridge guarding the entrance of the bay, a safe haven against the elemental power of the ocean. All over the hills were covered in buildings. This was definitely different to the sparsely inhabited wilderness we have grown accustomed to.

Here was the end of the lonely highway and the beginning of a California that was more familiar but also still strangely different. It is at times like this that I am amazed at how far I've come from where I began and all the lonesome highways that led me here. Its strange how much of my life now is a safe haven against the ravages of the world's oceans and tempests and how much I have yet to discover of this world. 

Until next time.

Goodbye Geekranters.