spontaneous actual roadtrip to San Francisco - Friday May 25 2001    

The straw that broke the camel's back and made Republican Senator James Jeffords renounce his Republican Party affiliation was reportedly an argument over funding for special education. We're talking here about the purchasing and maintenance of short school buses, the provision of padded indoor playground equipment, and other such things to help school systems deal with the needs of the many special people among us. When Jeffords expressed his dismay at the deep cuts being made to special education, he was reportedly reminded by a conservative colleague, "Special education is not a Republican issue." This is yet another case of the usual conservative definition of life: it begins at conception and ends at birth. Now I'm listening to the President stumble through his remarks on the subject. Not only could the President himself perhaps benefit from a little special education, but the very tone of his voice seems to convey a complete lack of comprehension for what just happened or what it could possibly portend. I don't know about you, but I generally find it more reassuring to get a sense of wisdom and control from a major world leader.

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Sometime during the workday, a global email came around reminding us that Monday was a holiday, Memorial Day or something, and we didn't have to come in. Holidays are so few and far between, especially in this part of the year, that it came as a complete surprise. When I came home I told John about my unexpected freedom and he immediately suggested that we drive somewhere and get out of town for a couple days. It sounded like a great idea, but where to go? At first John thought maybe we should head out into the mountains and sit around a campfire for a several nights, but then it occurred to him that I'd probably had more than a lifetime's worth of that sort of thing so we decided to drive to San Francisco instead. Unlike in Los Angeles, I actually have connections in San Francisco. There is, for example, a reasonably verbose (if only two person) San Francisco contingent amongst the Vodkatea posters. So I posted a message in Vodkatea asking if anyone (that is, Fandango Matt or Jen Wade) wanted to put us up. Within an hour Jen Wade had written me and we had a place to stay. God I love the internet, even if I rarely take such real world advantage of its capabilities.

John was off with Chun and his sister Maria eating dinner, sushi no doubt, but when he came back he was jazzed to go. First he had to nix his weekend yoga plans with Chun, which involved a ten second phone conversation (she quickly called back to ask if he was angry with her but of course he wasn't). I said something kind of mocking about this and John said, "Look, I didn't say anything to you when you got engaged to your girlfriend while on ecstasy."

Departing at 8:30pm, we took John's VW Golf up the I-5 up to San Francisco. North of the San Fernando Valley the I-5 passes the town of Santa Clarita. Its only distinction is a vast valley-filling commercial wasteland containing the only Walmart I've seen in the Los Angeles area. Beyond Santa Clarita, the 5 crosses a range of high mountains at the Tejon Pass (elevation 4144 feet) and then plunges down into the grand Central Valley of California. The stretch of highway navigating this terrain is called "The Grapevine," and my only exposure to that term is in the early 80s pop song Sausalito Summer Night by an otherwise unknown band called Diesel. The song documents the same trip we were taking, but in a car much more like my Punch Buggy Rust than John's 1999 VW Golf:

We left for Frisco in your Rambler
The radiator running dry
I've never been much of a gambler
and had a preference to fly

You said "forget about the airline,
let's take the car and save the fare."
We blew a gasket on the Grapevine
and eighty dollars on repairs

(chorus)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard

Hot summer night in Sausalito
Can't stand the heat another mile
Let's drop a quarter in the meter
and hit the sidewalk for a while

I'll have a burger and a root beer
You feed the heap some other grade
A shot of premium to boot, dear
We'll get across the Golden Gate

(chorus)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard

Cashin' all my checks
Cleaning out my bank
Spend it on a Rambler
with a wormhole in the tank

Look out over here
Watch out over there
Can't afford a blowout
'cause we haven't got a spare

(chorus)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)
All aboard

Yes, I'm that old. Anyway, as we neared one of the summits prior to the Tejon pass, we suddenly found ourselves mired in gridlock, moving 2 miles per hour on average. There was absolutely nothing to do but simply endure the situation. We really wished we'd bought beer at that last gas station. Though the shoulder was temptingly wide, John couldn't quite bring himself to bust a move. Evidently no one else could either. When we pulled up beside a big tractor trailer, I rolled down the window and we asked the driver what the had happened to cause this horrible traffic. Truckers always know what the deal is because they have a CB radio network that functions as sort of a hybrid between the internet and oral tradition. According to the trucker, someone driving southbound had slammed into the median and "the body" had been ejected into the northbound lanes. Obviously, if "the body" had survived the impact, the ejection and the landing, he or she was immediately crushed beneath the wheels of northbound vehicles. Moving this slowly was so depressing that John didn't even want to listen to music. He turned the radio down and joked about how much fun it would be to start a fight with some other motorist. Then he proceeded to switch lanes impulsively and bitch out other drivers in mock anger. The only amusing thing I could think of during this time was the concept of the "Jake Brake" (officially called a Jacobus Brake). It's standard equipment on large trucks and uses engine compression to somehow slow vehicles on steep mountain grades. Perhaps you've heard a Jake Brake before on a lonely mountain highway late at night. Blurabub-rub-rub-blah-blah-blah-bal-rub-rub-blah! It's as eerie and mysterious in its own way as the hooting of an owl.

Two miles later we were moving again. There below us to the north was the vast rectilinear flatland of the Central Valley, its roads indicated by the glowing stipples of farmhouses. From this distance, all the lights made it seem as if it might actually be a fairly populous place but of course there's nothing much down there except endless cropland and one or two huge cattle feedlots, (aka "Cowschwitz"). Though the speed limit was 70 mph, John rarely let the need drop below 80. Somewhere not far up the valley, we switched and I drove. It was the first time I'd ever driven his car, but I did just fine. He was comfortable enough with my driving to nod off for awhile, occasionally awaking just long enough to ask if everything was okay.

At first I was reluctant to drive as fast as John had been driving, but the car just seemed to be happiest at 80 mph: at that speed nearly all the meters are pointing straight up and the car handles exceptionally well. What's more, there were plenty of other cars driving at least 90, and whenever I'd see one I'd just tag along behind, knowing that if anyone was going to get pulled over it would probably be the leader of the pack. Consequently, I was able to average 90 miles and hour for fairly long stretches of road. Like every other non-law-abiding behavior, speeding without being caught is definitely a skill. It's one John seems to have mastered; he drives like a maniac all the time and his only moving violation is from a stoplight-mounted camera in Beverly Hills.

I do have this one observation about the other drivers on the 5. Why does it seem that so few people know the rules that govern the left hand lane? When someone comes up behind you in the left hand lane and there's no one in the right hand lane, you're supposed to move over to the right hand lane and let the faster motorist pass. Similarly, if you're in the left hand lane and someone is in the right hand lane and then someone comes up behind you in the left hand lane, you're supposed to get past the person to your right, pull into the right hand lane and let the faster motorist pass. All too often, even in the dead of night on an otherwise deserted freeway, cars would sit side by side in left and right lanes, forming a sort of moving roadblock preventing faster drivers from getting through. Was this the manifestation of a widespread form of passive-aggressive sadism?

(One of my readers wrote to me to suggest that perhaps these people had their cruise controls set to the same speed and they never consider acceleration, even when people approach rapidly from behind. In other words, people allow their intelligence to fall to the level of their computers, becoming tactless highway morons in the process.)

About 75 miles from San Francisco, John woke up and was impressed that I'd managed to maintain the hectic pace he'd set. He resumed driving duties and before long we were crossing the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. As we did so, all I could think about was that photograph from the 1989 earthquake showing a fallen segment of bridge and a motorist who almost fell into that gap (and not showing the one who did).

Following the overly-complex Mapquest instructions downloaded onto John's Palm V wasn't easy in San Francisco's arbitrary jumble of streets and strangely-angled intersections. I'm still amazed at how all the particulars of street angles get translated by Mapquest into driving instructions, for example, "Turn SLIGHT LEFT onto MARKET ST, Turn SLIGHT RIGHT onto 17TH ST."

When we parked the car and stepped outside into the weather, Jesus Christ it was cold, foggy, and spitting rain was sort of falling from the sky. Here it was, late May, and the weather wasn't any better than I remember it from January of 1999.

Jen Wade is the über host. In her typical matter-of-fact methodical manner she'd gone ahead and laid out a wide variety of sleep options on the floor of the one room in her apartment that isn't a kitchen or a bathroom. It was 3am, but we were so excited to be in San Francisco we had trouble falling asleep, instead talking for a long time about the drive and everything else except the one taboo: online journals.