Excerpts from Sam McManis’ Crossing California
`I
was tired, bone tired. Not the kind of tired that is of the Man-I-Really-Worked-My-TushOff-Punching-the-Clock variety, or even the soporific blahs that come from sheer unadulterated boredom, and certainly not the type of tired that involves actual physical exertion of, say, running a marathon or scaling Half Dome. No, this was a specific kind of tired known, at least to me, as California Freeway Ennui. I had just concluded yet another week-long sortie into the wilds of California. I’d visited deserts high and low, a traffic-choked metropolis, a few one-pump-of-the-brake-pedal towns, a mountain retreat and a seaside highway. I’d even traversed a dusty trail to the summit of Mt. Wilson, where, if you squinted real hard and engaged in selective observation, you might forget you’re still in Los Angeles, where even after all these years the air is opaque and palpable. Weary as I may have been, longing to just set cruise control and zone out
all photoS Co u rtESy lind En p u bliSh ing
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on Interstate 5 back to my Northern California home, I had one last mission to complete: to stand in the center, the dead geographic center, of the state. It was stupid and sentimental and probably would be a colossal disappointment, but so be it. I had seemingly been everywhere else in California, all four corners and many pit stops in between, but had always put off this side trip, mostly because it was so far afield—about 7 miles south of North Fork in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where pine and oak battle for arboristic supremacy and where a gas station is as hard to find as an extinct grizzly—and I had always quasi-scheduled it on the return trip from a Southern California sojourn. Something always came up. I’d be barreling down the Grapevine, that asphalt DMZ that separates SoCal from the Central Valley, where you can view miles of flat agricultural land straight ahead on I-5 and look east and see the Sierra range from the Highway 99
and th E SaCraM Ento b E E .
route. Inevitably, I’d think up excuses not to veer right. It was either the wrong time of year and snow would be obscuring the center-of-California marker said to be put there by proud Sierra dwellers, or ominous summer thunder clouds would loom over the range, or I was losing the light and the prudent thing would be to put it off to another time. This time, I remained vigilant and veered right onto 99. No more excuses. The center of California, and the enlightenment that I surely thought would come to me there, awaited. I followed the GPS (which, in the foothills, I like to think stands for “Giving Poor Service”) directions exactly as plotted. Naturally, I got lost. I had gone 7.1 miles beyond North Fork, as directed. I had seen that the highway, which changed names several times, had turned into Italian Bar Road, which was right on course. I had passed the U.S. Forest Service office, another marker. But now I found myself whizzing by a sign welcoming
me to Fresno County—decidedly not my destination. Lost, I tell you. Hopelessly lost. Donner Party lost. As I pulled over to the soft shoulder to regain my bearings—and fret about the mere quarter tank of gas I had remaining—my smartphone was dumbstruck: “No service.” I put my head against the steering wheel, ready to bag the whole idea, which was flawed from the start, anyway. Then it hit me: How futile even to try to get to the center of California, either literally or figuratively. It may exist on some brass marker set in stone on some nondescript hillside, but what does that have to do with trying to find the real heart of the state, to understand the inner core of California’s being, to, in the callow words of the new-agey folks I encountered so many times in my travels, center one’s self? Enough. I turned the car around and headed back.