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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

California Calling. Fred takes a run to the West Coast

Coffee thermos brimming with hot java, Caterpillar diesel purring under the floorboard, road atlas at my side, I recently returned to California in a friend's eighteen-wheeler. It had been 25 years since I visited the West Coast.

Rolling down Interstate 10 from West Texas to Arizona, I found the desert still haunting, especially at twilight. Out in California, I rekindled my love for the Golden State. It remains a wonderland of geology and biology. Crowded, yes, but her natural beauty rises above the teeming cities, smog, and jammed highways.

The journey began in San Antonio where I joined old friend Dana Caputo and his '95 Freightliner powered by a 435 horsepower Caterpillar. Dana has logged almost 1.2 million miles in that rig, same engine. We loaded in the Alamo City and Corpus Christi, my hometown, but there was no time for sentimentality.  With a full rig, we ran across the Edwards Plateau toward the Chihuahua Desert. From Kerrville to Ozona to Sheffield, about 200 miles, the road sliced through the heart of the limestone hills. Rock walls on both sides of the road sometimes blocked the low-hanging sun. The truck weighed about 70,000 pounds, so Dana had to drop a gear or two or three on some of the steeper climbs. Still interesting how the rigs hunker down for the climb, and the four-wheelers whizz by. But overall, we could run about seventy. We slept in the double-decker sleeper in Van Horn that night, about 120 miles east of El Paso, and for the first time in months, I felt cool air blowing across my skin.

Up at about 5:30 the next morning, I caught a strong buzz on thick truck stop coffee, white lines in our headlight beams, and a sunrise over my right shoulder. Because the interstate takes a northwest angle and follows the Rio Grande between Van Horn and El Paso, I enjoyed pink and blue hues in the side mirror and out the window. The landscape before us was also waking up. Jagged mountains appeared on three sides like eerie silhouettes that guarded the desert floor. Gargoyles. But soft and oval-shaped hills often broke up the horizon. Some resembled ice cream cones.

We replaced an air hose in El Paso and rumbled through Texas Canyon, a lunar landscape with oblong and oval-shaped boulders hanging in precipitous locations that defy gravity. We snubbed the tourist trap called "The Thing" (some sort of fake mummy, I heard) and visited an old haunt called the Tucson Truck Terminal. The TTT took me back to my days on the road, late '70s through mid '80s, and is about the only truck stop I found on this journey that isn't part of a large chain.

We spent the night in Phoenix, visited a sports bar with enough flat screen TVs to watch every game of the San Francisco Giants 2010 championship season at once.

Rolling again the next day, we crossed the Colorado River, looking wet and cool as it flowed through sand and gravel marking the state line between Arizona and California. The next two days, we unloaded near San Bernardino and in Los Angeles. A homeless guy on Crenshaw Blvd. got kicked out of a McDonald's for trying to access the restroom. Then up 101, Ventura Highway, like in the old pop song by America.

The drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco was always special. And it holds its charm more than a quarter-century after I last drove it.

Endless, steep, brown hills and mountain ranges marched past on the right. The Pacific Ocean played peek-a-boo through fog banks on the left. We rolled through Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo. The cool Pacific air was invigorating. You don't get weather like this in Central Texas until mid-October.

Then we slipped into the Coastal Valley; auburn hills on both sides bracketed the highway. The Freightliner hummed along at fifty-five because that is the statewide speed limit for trucks.

The long, flat valley was decorated with endless vineyards and almond and fruit tree orchards.  Row after row, these farms stand testament to the efficiency of irrigation. Almost everything else was dry, everything but those verdant fields connected by miles and miles of water lines.

Once we hit San Jose, the traffic backed up and the land changed from open, rural and agricultural to urban, cramped with tight neighborhoods and high-reaching office buildings. And I caught glimpses of the south end of the bay on my right. That night, we had a nightcap with another long-time trucker named Buck. He has been a contractor, owning his own rig, since the early '70s. Buck and Dana said the owner-operators who haul furniture, movers, are an endangered species, down by about two-thirds since their heyday in the early '80s. Like sailors on the San Francisco docks, we traded yarns, recalled some of the colorful characters that a transient occupation attracts, and lamented the good old days.

When I lived out of a diesel rig, countless kids and parents approached me at rest stops, truck stops, motel and mall parking lots. The children wanted to blast the air horn and have their picture taken. But the adults often yearned to take a cross-country trip in a big rig.

Traveling in a truck is special because you get a bird's-eye view of the landscape through that windshield, seven, eight feet above the pavement. Imagine riding on the roof of your car. Trucking also adds another dimension to travel. You are hauling, moving, transporting goods. Unless you are running empty, called deadheading, there's a different sense of purpose than your typical family vacation. People I have moved coast-to-coast often said upon my arrival: "We sure are glad to see you."

Next, the ride home. I say adios to old friend Dana and catch a Greyhound. Oakland to Austin, two all-nighters on the bus in a 42-hour trek.

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