The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [123]
When I was eleven, we went to California, the very state that housed my dream tree, but we only went to places like Disneyland and Hollywood Boulevard and Beverly Hills. (Dad was too cheap to buy a map showing the homes of the movie stars, so we just drove around and speculated.) A couple of times at breakfast I asked if we could drive up and see the tree with a road through it, but everybody was so dismissive – it was too far away, it would be too stupendously boring for words, it would probably cost a lot of money – that I lost heart and stopped asking. And in fact I never asked again. But it stayed at the back of my mind, one of my five great unfulfilled dreams from childhood. (The others, it goes without saying, were the ability to stop time, to possess the gift of X-ray vision, to be able to hypnotize my brother and make him be my slave, and to see Sally Ann Summerfield without a stitch of clothing on.)
Not surprisingly, none of these dreams came true. (Which is perhaps just as well. Sally Ann Summerfield is a blimp now. She turned up at my high school reunion two years ago and looked like a shipping hazard.) But now here at last I was about to fulfil one of them. Hence the tingle of excitement as I slung my suitcase in the trunk and headed up Highway 63 for Sequoia National Park.
I had spent the night in the little city of Tulare, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. This is the richest and most fertile farming country in the world. They grow over 200 kinds of crop in the San Joaquin Valley. That very morning, on the local news on TV, they reported that the farming income for Tulare Country for the previous year was $1.6 billion – that’s the sort of money Austin Rover turns over – and yet it was only the second highest figure for the state. Fresno County, just up the road, was richer still. Even so, the landscape didn’t look all that brilliant. The valley was as flat as a tenniscourt. It stretched for miles in every direction, dull and brown and dusty, and a permanent haze hung on the horizon, like a dirty window. Perhaps it was the time of year, or perhaps it was the drought that was just beginning to choke central California, but it didn’t look rich or fruitful. And the towns that speckled the plain were equally dull. They looked like towns from anywhere. They didn’t look rich or modern or interesting. Except that there were oranges the size of grapefruits growing on trees in the front yards, I could have been in Indiana or Illinois or anywhere. That surprised me. On our family trip to California it had been like driving into the next decade. It had all looked sleek and modern. Things that were still novelties in Iowa – shopping centres, drive-in banks, McDonald’s restaurants, miniature golf-courses, kids on skate-boards – were old and long-established in California. Now they just looked older. The rest of the country had caught up. The California of 1988 had nothing that Iowa didn’t have. Except smog. And beaches. And oranges growing in front yards. And trees you could drive through.
I joined Highway 198 at Visalia and followed it as it shot through fragrant lemon groves, ran along the handsome shoreline of Lake Kaweah and climbed up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Just beyond Three Rivers I entered the park, where a ranger in a wooden booth charged me a $5 entrance fee and gave me a brochure detailing the sights beyond. I looked quickly through it for a photograph of a road through a tree, but there weren’t any pictures, just words and a map bearing colourful and alluring names: Avalanche Pass, Mist Falls, Farewell Gap, Onion Valley, Giant Forest. I made for Giant Forest.
Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park are contiguous.