The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [126]
‘I’d like the chicken fried steak,’ I said.
‘You’d like the chicken fried steak?’
‘Yes. And I would like French fries with it.’
‘You want French fries with it?’
‘Yes. And I would like a salad with Thousand Island dressing.’
‘You want a salad with Thousand Island dressing?’
‘Yes, and a Coke to drink.’
‘You want a Coke to drink?’
‘Excuse me, miss, but I’ve had a bad day and if you don’t stop repeating everything I say, I’m going to take this ketchup bottle and squirt it all down the front of your blouse.’
‘You’re going to take that ketchup bottle and squirt it all down the front of my blouse?’
I didn’t really threaten her with ketchup – she might have had a large boy-friend who would come and pummel me; also, I once knew a waitress who told me that whenever a customer was rude to her she went out to the kitchen and spat in his food, and since then I have never spoken sharply to a waitress or sent under-cooked food back to the kitchen (because then the cook spits in it, you see) – but I was in such a disagreeable mood that I put my chewing-gum straight into the ashtray without wrapping it in a piece of tissue first, as my mother always taught me to do, and pressed it down with my thumb so that it wouldn’t fall out when the ashtray was turned over, but would have to be prised out with a fork. And what’s more – God help me – it gave me a tingle of satisfaction.
In the morning I drove north from Sonora along Highway 49, wondering what the day would bring. I wanted to head east over the Sierra Nevadas, but many of the passes were still closed. Highway 49, as it turned out, took me on an agreeably winding journey through hilly country. Groves of trees and horse pastures over-looked the road, and occasionally I passed an old farmhouse, but there was little sign that the land was used for anything productive. The towns I passed through – Tuttletown, Melones, Angel’s Camp – were the places where the California Gold Rush took place. In 1848, a man named James Marshall found a lump of gold at Sutter Creek, just up the road, and people went crazy. Almost overnight, 40,000 prospectors poured into the state and in a little over a decade, between 1847 and 1860, California’s population went from 15,000 to nearly 400,000. Some of the towns have been preserved as they were at the time – Sonora is not too bad in this regard – but mostly there’s not much to show that this was once the scene of the greatest gold rush in history. I suppose this is largely because most of the people lived in tents and when the gold ran out so did they. Now most of the little towns offered the customary stretch of gas stations, motels and hamburger emporia. It was Anywhere, USA.
At Jackson, I found that Highway 88 was open through the mountains – the first open passage through the Sierras in almost 300 miles – and I took it. I had expected that I would have to take the next but one pass along, the infamous Donner Pass, where in 1846 a party of settlers became trapped by a blizzard for several weeks and survived by eating each other, an incident that caused a great sensation at the time. The leader of the group was named Donner. I don’t know what became of him, but I bet he took some ribbing whenever he went into a restaurant after that. At any rate, it got his name on the map. The Donner Pass was also the route taken by the first transcontinental railroad, the Southern Pacific, and first transcontinental highway, old Route 40, the Lincoln Highway, on their 3,000-mile journey from New York to San Francisco. As with Route 66 further