4 April 2006, Truckee CA

Water continues to fall from the sky. Today when I was skiing it was rain, same as when I pulled into town, but temperatures have dropped and now it is snow. There are several 7000+ ft passes between here and Bishop so I may need to delay until Thursday. This will no doubt force me to go back to TDXC for the fresh powder and then spend another evening in this comfy cabin.

Yes, part of me feels slightly guilty at how easy this trip is. In historical terms, of course. It will be challenging enough for me, as I am, it must be admitted, a bit of a city boy. Even I, who biked myself out to Wolf Point, MT. Do not confuse natural wit and ruggedness with mulish stubbornness. The latter I have in plenty but nature and I are still on somewhat uneasy terms. What I mean by a bit too easy is that I cannot help comparing myself to naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their willingness to undertake journeys that by modern standards would be like going to another planet – on uncertain conveyances into unmapped territories with perfectly alien animals and potentially hostile natives. Wallace and his kind had a certain wildness, which, as I try to make my own transition from being a theoretician to having an actual understanding of nature, I envy them.

Truckee is probably like a lot of small towns in America, except that a lot of money comes pouring in from Sacramento and the bay area. It reminds me a lot of Napa, same mixture of posh and outdoorsy, and in both places I find myself doubting the provenance of the buildings. In Napa so much goes into having a particular look, in trying to evoke some image of France or Italy, or even just the homegrown Napa wine culture of a century ago, but the upstarts who can’t innovate spend fortunes making things look old. Nothing out here in the West is that old anyway and the end result is that I feel like I’m living on a movie set.

After skate skiing on some unpleasantish snow I took an extremely long shower and then walked down the street to the Truckee Diner, which is on West River Road, between the tracks and the river, like our place. I went early to avoid the rush, but the town is a different place on weekdays, and I shared the place with a couple from New Jersey, instantly recognizable as tourists by their clothes, their fidgety nervousness (skiers at this time of the day tend to resemble collapsed balloons), and their excessive curiosity regarding the trains. A lot of them go through the town, it’s true, but I’m not sure anyone gives them much thought except when they tie up automobile traffic at the one poorly-situated railroad crossing right in the middle of town. They stop here at night and make vaguely animal-like noises sitting there across the street, grunting and sighing.

The man asserts that he is probably the only person to have eaten in the Truckee Diner in both of its homes, here and back where it lived in Pennsylvania before someone got it in his head in 1995 that Truckee needed even more architectural confusion. Something authentic and displaced to go with all of the authentic brick hotels, banks, and movie theaters now crammed full of kitschy gift shops. I wonder what we will make of places like this in a hundred years. History is a real omnivore, and most of its droppings are totally indecipherable.

Lonely country up ahead, boys. Tomorrow I will rearrange the contents of my own uncertain conveyance to give more ready access to stoves, tents, sleeping bags, etc.

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 4April2006 )