Alistair Cooke's American Journey by Cooke Alistair

Author:Cooke, Alistair [Cooke, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2006-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

8

The Pacific Northwest

California begins in Mexico and ends in the Pacific Northwest. Going north from Redding, you start a slow but continuous climb into mountains. There would be nothing strange in this anywhere south. But when you get into them and watch the Sacramento River dropping away from you and foaming through deep gorges whose peaks are granite, you realize that these mountains are different. You look out the car window and see spruce and Western hemlock everywhere. Quite suddenly you know you have parted from a whole climate system and the many ways of working and worrying united by it. Technically, you are in California, but you have climbed away from what, back East, you most persistently recall as California – the sparkling orange groves, the sweeping valleys of grapes, the dusty eucalyptuses on sun-baked roads, the missions and the open-shirted men, the neon drive-ins and the super-duper hot dogs, the flat beaches overhung with the smell of oil, the tawny hills and the snakes squashed on the turn of a cement road. Above you no more is a cloudless haze but sooty smears of cloud against a gray sky.

After the contrast of green orchards and flat valleys you have lived through, the sight of Mount Shasta, very close and out of scale, is so unexpected that it looks like a quick construction job by Henry Kaiser, topped off with fake Hollywood snow. It stands out quite alone from a comparative plain, an immense artificial pile, whose snow in summer is draped as rhythmically as icing, and having the yellowish cast of a production on a bad Christmas card. This view of it in no way detracts from its grandeur, and I imagine that coming on it from the north it would appear more awesome and less odd. ‘Lonely as God and white as a winter moon’ was the tribute of Californian poet Joaquin Miller.

The river canyon winds through solid walls of pine, and at Dunsmuir and Shasta Springs you come on small mountain resorts that might be in the Colorado Rockies. This sort of country is ideally exciting and restful for a correspondent to drive through; his senses are stimulated but there appears to be no price to pay, for over the canyon’s edge is inaccessible forest, with no sign of life, in peace or war, to be reported on. It is absolutely innocent of news value.

The holiday is short-lived. Weed is a lumber town whose nearby slopes are graveyards of black stumps. And from here north there is no more guessing about what the mountains have done for the war. After a rest from climbing across the grazing land of the Shasta Valley, you come to Yreka City, and wherever there is a clearing by the narrowing forest road there are great piles of stripped wood and, over the treetops, the whistle and rattle of lumber trucks. Several times through the narrow gorges of the Siskiyou Mountains I had to crawl, on steep grades, behind trucks loaded with lengths of pine and fir.

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