Driving Day

With Janet safely back in Kentucky and my visits in San Francisco completed, I got in the car early this morning (o.k. not so early to those in the Eastern Time Zone, but early here).  I left behind the hotel next to the San Francisco airport where we had spent the weekend.

It was a lovely spot.  surrounded on two of four sides with the bay that at times filled its banks with powerful chop and at others left only a tenuous looking stream in the midst of mud flats.  In the distance, the hills between the airport and the ocean were covered with an almost continual bank of clouds that rolled down like waves on occasion to coat the lower ground with fog.

I pulled out and headed south on the six lane wide ribbons of asphalt.  When I finally left the urban sprawl behind, the road began to climb.  The plants became heartier and more numerous.  I drove up into the cloud bank and a gentle mist began to settle on my windshield.  The temperature remained cool as it had for our entire stay in San Francisco with highs each day in the low 60's.

The fog began to lift as I descended from the mountain and the world had changed.  The temperature began to rise reaching the mid 80's in just a few hours.  I found myself in a huge and fertile valley.  Every hundred yards or so were farmer's curbside produce stands.  The offerings varied from cherries to asparagus to oranges to grapes.

The road took me through Gilroy, which if you didn't know, is the garlic capital of the United States.  And if I hadn't known ahead of time, I would certainly have known after the olfactory assault through the car vents.  For the next three hours, I drove through flat, fertile farmlands surrounded by double hitched produce trucks both empty and full.  They appeared to be big corporate farms, but their orderly rows and abundant life brought a sense of hope.

Finally, I began my climb out of the beautiful and vast farmland and began to again see the scrub on mountain sides.  According to the signs, the climb was through a pass that reached 4000 feet.  Looking to the side of the road, there was at one point a crystal clear body of water with a boat pushing out a white plume and wake.

I spent the first hours of my journey in rapturous wonder at the beauty and variety of California.

But then, I started to descend out of the mountains in the LA basin and it was no longer the gentle fog on cat feet that rolled from the mountain, but a blanket of  oppressive smog that obscured my view.  The traffic clogged like arteries after White Castle.

I think it was exactly what Tolkien had in mind when he created Mordor.