Week 8: Just Call Me A Mountain Man
(or, a writer and his van go down, and up, and up and down, and up, and back down)
HOLY COW I’M BEHIND ON THIS THING
…I mean, who’s surprised? I keep calling myself a writer on here and could there possibly be a more grand tradition and worthy stereotype than a writer blowing deadlines? It’s basically required behavior; I have a reputation to uphold here. And this whole ‘write one blog a week’ thing is entirely self-imposed, which kind of means I’m my own boss here, and let me tell you: I work for a real piece of shit.
Only problem is, I kind of enjoy writing this thing (most of the time, see last week’s post for an example of when I don’t) and one of the reasons I’ve been procrastinating on it so hard is that I’m trying to write about shit that is almost three weeks ago, and in the context of my life right now, that might as well be three years. I’m gonna post a picture of my first mountaintop in Northern California- I am using zero exaggeration when I say that feels like three months ago to me. I genuinely can’t believe it’s only been two and a half weeks.
So! Because I’m the boss and nobody’s yelling at me yet, I’m gonna cheat a little and catch up this week. I find I’m thinking about the sections of this trip less as ‘weeks’, and more ‘runs’- The Route 2 Run, The Seattle Run, the Vancouver Run, the 101 Run.
So let’s recap the Mountain Run here and conveniently ignore the fact that it took two weeks instead of one, and then to make the numbers work out and because I’ve been wanting to do it, I’ll do a little recap of the Westward Ho! Adventure (so far) maybe tomorrow.
And THEN, no promises, but I’d really like to talk about the adventures when they’re a little fresher, days instead of weeks. Sound good?
I mean, I can’t hear you, so I don’t know why I’m asking. Also, I’m gonna do it anyways. Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to, right?
(One of the other reasons I’ve been procrastinating is that my brains haven’t been feeling so great this week and my Creative Juice Jar only has a little bit of juice sloshing around in the bottom of it just now, and I gotta save that for like, my book. So, apologies in advance if we’re a little lackluster in the ‘pithy bon-mot’ department this time around).
THE VAN PLAN, MAN
So here was the plan: I needed to be in Las Vegas by early October; that gave me just under three weeks to thread my way down through California. Now, if I’d hopped on Route 5, I could have gotten there in a couple long afternoons, but this adventure ain’t about the destination, baby, it’s about the… Well, I still don’t really have any idea what it’s about. A bunch of things? Mostly complaining about small inconveniences and whining about emotions, if this blog is any indications. BUT IN ANY CASE, I was in no hurry.
So, it was time to see some shit. I looked at my map, tried to find a good balance between interestingly twisty roads (rule of thumb tends to be: the twistier the road on Google Maps, the more jaw-dropping the vistas) and not beating up my gas budget too bad. Figured I’d meander across Northern California, dip my toe over in Nevada and check out Reno, hop over the mountains and take a gander at Lake Tahoe, then mosey my way down the back side of the Sierra Nevada mountains. And then do a little hop across Death Valley, a skip down into the desert of Nevada, and a jump into a little town called Las Vegas. Sin City, if you’re nasty.
And… drumroll, please…
I just kinda… did that. Pretty much went totally to plan. No catastrophes, hardly any hiccups. Pretty much just a non-stop series of insanely picaresque sleeping spots, mind-bogglingly gorgeous drives, a pretty solid- if unspectacular- string of writing sessions in soul-destroyingly beautiful locations, and not even one McDonalds double-cheeseburger. Towns and amenities were very few and very far between, so I spent a ton of time in the van; made all my own coffee, found some new stuff I could cook on my little butane stove, found some creative snacks, and developed a crippling- and I suspect, life-long- addiction to Spindrift sparkling water.
(Pro Move: Take a cold Spindrift, and take a big swallow. Now, take your Vodka or Gin of choice, and fill the can back up. And, ENJOY. If you don’t have access to ice and drinking in bars is getting old, this is an EXCELLENT little van cocktail. Especially if a very wonderful and kind soul put you on their Costco card so you can get cheap gas, but you also bought like, a five gallon drum of Kirkland Gin (quite good) and another five gallon drum of Kirkland Scotch (bananas good for the price). I think we should start a betting pool on if I can drink all that before the year is over. I’m guessing NO.)
LOVELY TO EXPERIENCE, NOT MUCH EXCITING TO TALK ABOUT
So… yeah! It was a really great two weeks, but I’m struggling to find interesting stories to relate. I had some trouble finding internet and cell service in and around all them mountains, but work is slow this time of year so even that wasn’t too much of a problem, and being cut off from service makes it easier to focus, writing-wise. Let’s see if I can remember a few things, though:
Redwoods- even the small ones up in northern Cali- DO NOT DISAPPOINT. I hadn’t particularly planned on driving through the Sequoia National Forest when I finish off my California Run next month, but holy hell I’m gonna make it a priority now. Those things are real big, bruh.
Northern California is a weird place- very remote, very rugged, beautiful in a forbidding way. Reminded me of West Virginia, oddly enough. I didn’t love it, but I’m glad I saw a bit of it. Felt like it should be part of Oregon, or like… it’s own thing. It didn’t feel like ‘California’, is what I’m saying.
These fuckers out here just don’t give no kind of shit about vehicular safety on steep mountain roads. I can’t even guess at the number of times my front tire was about six inches from a six-hundred-foot drop. Guardrails? Hah! The road folks around here are too worried about putting in turnouts every ten feet to bother with guardrails. I’d been worried about this kind of thing- I have a bit of a fear of heights and I thought it would freak me out to constantly be one slight twitch of the steering wheel away from tumbling down a mountain and dying in a badass fireball. Well, I mean, it did freak me out, the first five hundred times or so. Now? I don’t give no kind of shit right back! Guardrails are for weiner babies. Exposure therapy works!
I’d love to figure out the elevation changes I made on this run; the amount of times I went from 1k above sea level up to 9k in the space of a half-an-hour was… well, it was a lot. I’ll pop a few pictures in here below (and plenty more on Track My Tour) but they laughably don’t do that kind of thing justice. Being eight or nine thousand feet above the valleys, plains, and cities below is just something you have experienced- and don’t need it described- or you haven’t, and no amount of words or pictures are gonna get you there.
Go spend a few days in Lake Tahoe before you die. Rent a boat, go waterskiing, drive around the lake- I did the whole drive in an afternoon. I’ll go back once I sell a screenplay or figure out how to retroactively acquire a rich uncle.
The back side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains ain’t a bit like what I expected- I thought it would be heavy forests and big trees. It’s a lot more grand, desolate vistas, mountains cascading off into the distance in infinitesimally different shades of blue, immense valleys of gold and gray threaded with a single road, towered over by vast chunks of young stone pushed up through the crust of the earth like God’s fists… It’s real purty, is what I’m saying. It’s also kind of odd, that drive, because just over those mountains is like, all the Ansel Adams shit, right? Like, all of the most famous national parks are right there, but you can’t get there and you can’t see them. It’s kinda cool.
The sunsets- I mean, god damn. I promise I’m not trying to push Track My Tour- I have no idea if anybody even looks at that thing but I kinda love putting up my ‘vacation pictures’ over there where they ain’t gonna bother nobody. But if you click in, you’re gonna see some goddamn sunsets. They do those different, out here. I don’t know if they use AI, or what- maybe they have one of those Hollywood special effects CGI teams working on them or something. Every goddamn evening is like something out of Avatar (Cameron, not Airbender).
There is a place called Mono Lake that is the most science fiction place I’ve ever seen. If anybody was ever stupid enough to give me money to make a movie, I’d shoot all the alien landscapes in the weird places I’ve seen on this trip. And a bunch of ‘em would be set in the Sierra Nevadas.
I was driving across one of the big valleys when it started raining- but still super sunny out. And so I got a rainbow- the coolest rainbow of my life. It ended literally at the end of the road in front of me- and then when I found a place to park a little past that, BAM. Double Rainbow. And then, Triple Rainbow! I have photographic evidence of the double, but I can’t see the triple in the pictures- damn you, Google!
Death Valley was a huge letdown- Oh, it was stunningly, insanely, bleakly gorgeous, and I’d shoot half of my sci-fi epic there, and was easily some of the coolest, most beautiful, wildly interesting landscape I’ve ever seen in my life… But I like, didn’t even die once.
California Rest Stops > Oregon Rest Stops > Washington Rest Stops. The California rest stops I stayed in were all-but-deserted, have really nice bathrooms, and instead of nine thousand signs making it very clear that you are CAN spend the night there if you absolutely have to, but they REALLY don’t want you to, the Cali Stops are just like, hey, don’t stay longer than ten days, okay? Smooches!
I’ll probably dedicate a whole post to this, but WHOOSH, man, the cities and populated areas out here are pretty damn unfriendly to us van folk. It’s hard to find a parking lot, Wal-mart, or even Planet Fitness that doesn’t have a bunch of signs saying we ain’t welcome. I had a security car come park right next to me three different times, pointedly, until I moved on- and I bought stuff from the store! It’s not impossible to find safe havens in the towns and cities, but it ain’t easy, neither. I can see why people don’t do this forever.
WELCOME TO RENO, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
One of the most fun things about this trip is having my expectations flipped upside down, their bottoms paddled, and sent to bed without supper. I literally only went to Reno because gas there was $3.26 and in Lake Tahoe it was PUSHING EIGHT DOLLARS A GODDAMN GALLON, WHAT THE FUCK CALIFORNIA, THERE BETTER BE GOLD FLAKES IN THAT SHIT OR SOMETHING. And it was only like, an hour out of my way, and it had been a couple weeks since I treated myself to a beer, some wings, and the sight of people that weren’t ones I made up in my head.
But I don’t know shit about Reno! I was in Laughlin, Nevada once, a long time ago, and buddy? I wasn’t impressed. I have very conflicted feelings about Las Vegas (which we will explore soon, trust me) but it’s not like, a place I love. I was hoping for a halfway decent coffeeshop, and then maybe a halfway decent bar, with some halfway decent wings. Hoping that parking wouldn’t be total murder, hoping there wouldn’t be TOO many signs up telling me that my sort weren’t welcome here.
What I wasn’t expecting was two of my favorite coffeeshops I’ve ever been in! One of them was a late-night place, open till midnight or 2am or something, and if I lived in Reno I would be there every day. Parking was wide open, free curbs from hell to breakfast, and Reno’s a gambling town- RV’s and vans are just as welcome as anybody else, baby.
It’s got a crazy good ‘cool neighborhood’; I wanted to go in every restaurant I saw; had that hard-to-define air of not-trying-too-hard cool. Loved it. And even the downtown casino section was totally my vibe; all the casinos look like they’re out of a Frank Sinatra movie. Lotsa old gold, lotsa incandescent pin lights, lotsa 1970’s vibes. I didn’t try, but I bet that I could have found a slot machine somewhere there that actually takes real quarters- not something you can find in Vegas. Trust me, when I was there last, we tried.
And the wings? Top ten list, easy. Reno is fuckin’ awesome. Who could have guessed?
THE MOUNTAIN RUN, DONE AND DONE
Woah, I just recapped two whole weeks and I don’t think I talked about my feelings ONCE! Amazing. Thought I’d give you a break, but not too much of one. I’m gonna try to fire off a nice little recap of this WESTWARD TOUR in a day or two, check back in on how we started and how it’s going, try to catch up to present day. I’m sure feelings will abound.
Oh, also! I haven’t TOTALLY forgotten that this is ostensibly called ‘The World’s Longest Book Tour’ and I haven’t mentioned any book shit in forever. Well- and this might totally be user error- but I don’t think they really read out here? Like, I haven’t been in a lot of cities and not even a lot of sprawl, but bookstores seem to be few and far between. Even Barnes & Nobles are kind of hard to find- at least along the routes I’ve been traveling. I’ll be doing some bookstorin’ in Vegas, and then definitely more when I head back to finish exploring California. I’m still trying to find my book in every state! And I’ll be doing more conventions! I’ll cut down on the sweeping vistas and get back to work! I swear!
(I don’t swear. I mean, I’m going to tour most of California- vistas are gonna abound.)
Thanks, everybody; definitely would have had to drive some less-twisty roads and skipped a few mountains without your help and contributions. And despite my procrastination, I really do love writing these- but would DEFINITELY have quit if I didn’t know at least two of you would be a little sad about it.
Gin for the citrus fizzy waters, rum for the coconut ones.
Just be careful when you start the Straylight Run. He can be tricksie, the Mute, 'an he play a mighty dub.