Highway 46

Posted on November 1, 2005 in Vacations

A few miles east of Paso Robles, you come to a range of yellow hills, plush and looking like the fur of an especially fine shorthair cat or a straight-combed alpaca. The San Andreas Fault digs a trough down the center of these lomas whose curves, I remember thinking, resembled the thighs of a woman with puffs of olive pubic hair cradled in the runoffs.

The hills suddenly die after the highway splits and 46 rolls down into the Central or Great Valley. (That’s the one you can see on any map showing California or from a spacecraft.) The color of the land turns to bone. Along a stretch parallel to the hidden rift to the west, swarms of oil derricks bow and rise. “Bugs” is what Leah says she calls them. “Grasshoppers” is how I remember them. They come in many colors: orange, black, white, forest green, and mongrels of these four.

We passed through these at twilight, just before we arrived in Lost Hills. You can see this covey of fast food restaurants and gas stations several miles away. We stopped for a parsimonious dinner at Carl’s Jr. and then let our car join the stream that flowed towards Los Angeles along Highway 5.

I called my friend Mindy as Lynn aimed our automobile towards the Grapevine. Stars of light peered out from a night that lay west at the horizon line. I remembered these to be the derricks we had passed just forty minutes or so before and described them as such. How had it been that I had never seen them by day? The only answer could have been the tule fogs, low shreds of evaporated water that stubbornly cling to the ground even on the hottest days. Late in the afternoon and early in the evening, they lost their power to conceal, I concluded.

The flattened constellations ran in their groove alongside us past the town of Buttonwillow. Mindy hung up so she could go out to dinner with Leah. I stared for a long minute at the stellar beacons of my country’s strength and greatest weakness.