DAY 12 - CONTINUED

We hit Eureka an hour later, grabbing some burgers and milkshakes at DJ’s Diner & Drive In.  There wasn’t much else in the way of shopping or entertainment in town, so we got our passport stamped and continued on our way to Austin where we filled our gas tank and got our next stamp.  We walked down the utterly dead Main Street for a few minutes, looking around inside the only other open store in town, an antiques shop, hoping to find a Loneliest Road shot glass or postcard.  With no such luck, we hit the highway yet again.

In spite of the fact that snow covered several of the mountains around us, the temperature was in the upper sixties.  I rolled down the windows and popped another mix into the CD player.  This one, my “Classic Rock Driving” mix, was full of cruisin’ southern rock songs with great electric guitars and awesome guitar solos that went on forever.  With the wind blowing in my face, one hand hanging loosely over the steering wheel, the other drumming the Mazda’s roof, and my head bobbing along to songs like “Slow Ride” by Foghat, “Up Around the Bend” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and “Jessica” by the Allman Brothers, I grinned, relishing the feel of the (very) open road.  Ahead, Highway 50 narrowed to a dot at the horizon.  To our left and right we saw only sand and shrub, with telephone poles and a continuous barbed wire fence (and the road of course) as the only evidence of human intervention.

The skies were starting to turn cloudy and a few isolated drops fell as we pulled off the road to check out the remains of an old Pony Express changing station.  The FedEx of its time, the Pony Express was a privately run enterprise intended to keep the eastern states in touch with the western frontier by running messages via horseback from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California.  Changing stations like this were positioned every 15-20 miles along the route where riders could quickly switch their load to a fresh horse and continue on. 

The logistics of running such an ambitious operation made it impossible for the Pony Express to turn a profit.  When you took into account the costs associated with a fleet of horses, plus hazard pay for riders and station staff working in frontier areas known for hostile Indian attacks, the endeavor barely made enough money from the moment of its inception to stay in business.  When a transcontinental telegraph was completed eighteen months after, the Pony Express became obsolete overnight, leaving little evidence of its own existence behind.  A few crumbling stations like the one on the side of Route 50 are all that remain of the legendary mail delivery service.  All that was left of this particular station were a few waist-high stone walls. 

I was a little put off by the fact that the ruins were contained on the other side of a chain link fence topped with barbed wire.  But I guess I understood.  Route 50 is a fairly major thoroughfare, running from Washington, DC all the way to San Francisco, California.  Lonely road or not, it still brings with it plenty of inconsiderate tourists who have as much regard for historical relics as they do for a McDonald’s restroom.  Lord knows if that fence wasn’t there, the few remaining stones would now be nothing but scattered pebbles on the ground from countless parents encouraging their snot-nosed kids to climb on the walls for pictures. 

A sign on the other side of the road indicated that there was another station, even better preserved than the one we’d been looking at, about two miles away via a hiking trail.  Yet another thing that on any other trip we might have thrown on a backpack to go check out.  But when you’re traveling on a road that dubs itself the Loneliest in America, where the nearest town could be as much as fifty miles away, and the nearest hospital even farther than that, the prudent thing is to keep your pregnant wife as close to the car and road as possible.

“Someday,” I told Lauren…  Someday.

A few miles later we passed a shoetree on the side of the road.  Hundreds of shoes had been flung over the branches of this hundred-foot-tall cottonwood.  Everything from sneakers to boots to scuba flippers and even horseshoes.  Scattered about the bottom of the tree and in the ditch behind it were dozens more that had fallen out.  I grabbed a bundle of about ten shoes that had all been tied together and tried to heave them back up into the tree, missing the lowest branch by several feet.  How on earth did people get some of these bigger bundles onto the higher branches?  They certainly couldn’t have thrown them that high.  Somebody must have climbed at least part way up to plant them on the tippy-top branches.

There are dozens of shoetrees all over America, each with a story of its own.  The story (urban legend?) behind this particular shoetree is that a married couple was spending part of their honeymoon camped beneath the tree.  One night they got into an argument and the woman told her husband that she’d sooner walk home than drive with him.  “Well then you’ll be walking barefoot,” he told her then threw her shoes into the tree before driving off to have a drink at a nearby bar.  The bartender convinced the man to go back and make amends with his wife, which he did, and a year later they brought their first child to the tree and threw his shoes into the branches as well.  Since then, people from all over the country have been making contributions.  I don’t know how.  They must have an arm like Joe Montana to hike those big bundles up there.  But I digress.

Fallon and Fernley were the last and biggest towns on Route 50, but we still couldn’t find a single store that had a Loneliest Road shot glass or postcard.  In Fernley, we had to go to four different gas stations before we found one that had the last “I SURVIVED” stamp for our passport.  We didn’t poke around in either town.  Evening was approaching and we were aiming to make it to Orangevale, California, to my friend Laura’s house by nightfall.  So after a day full of discovery and adventure, we left the Loneliest Road and hopped on the interstate.

I had first heard about The Loneliest Road in America from the book DESPERATION by Stephen King.  As the story goes, the ancient demon “Tak” rises from an abandoned silver mine in the middle of nowhere along Nevada’s Route 50, and proceeds to kill every man, woman and child in the fictional title town, as well as several travelers passing through – in increasingly grisly and ghastly ways of course.  I read the book and promptly decided that I needed to drive that road and see for myself just how lonely it was. 

After today, my conclusion was that yes Route 50 is remote, yes it is desolate, and yes its towns are the kind of sparse transit towns I had been seeking in my search for Backroad, America.  But Route 50 is in no way unique in its remoteness.  One of my favorite drives when I lived in Southern California was a small road out in the Mojave Desert that ran from the town of Twentynine Palms a hundred miles north to Interstate 40, passing through just one little town on the way – Amboy, population: 20.  There was nothing quaint or precocious about the town.  It simply was what it was.  A dusty little town in the middle of nowhere.

The towns along Route 50, for as dusty and remote as they were, still had the faint air of tourism clinging to them.  I’m sure that was largely due to the cute little survival kit we were carrying around as well as the bright blue “Loneliest Road in America” signs plastered all along the highway.  For as much as this area has embraced that moniker, and for as much as they’ve made the best of bad publicity, the fact that they play it up so much and try to make it as fun as possible has, in a way, tarnished the sense of eerie danger I was hoping to find here.  It was like they had turned something cool and ominous into something safe and friendly.

Don’t get me wrong.  This is still not a road to be taken lightly.  Breaking down out here can become a dire situation, since most motorists tend to be squeamish about giving rides to people in the middle of nowhere.  And despite the passports and the pretty blue signs, this really is one of the most continuously remote and least touristy highways in this country.  And as far as traffic went, there were times when we were the only car for ten miles in any direction.  So all in all, yes Route 50 was lonely – lonely enough even for me.  But whether it can be considered lonelier than any other road in the country… well that’s open for discussion.  

Cruising along on I-80, we skirted past the mini-Vegas city of Reno.  It had been threatening to rain since mid-afternoon and as we began our ascent into the Sierra Nevada mountains, the skies finally opened up.  Uh-oh.  Rain I could handle, but I knew as we went higher it would turn to snow.  And snow it did.  Pretty soon I saw flashing highway advisory signs encouraging me to tune my radio to their AM station.  A recorded voice repeated the same message every sixty seconds.  A blizzard was assaulting the mountains ahead of us.  All cars going beyond a certain point on I-80 and U.S. 50 were required to have either four-wheel-drive or chains on their tires.  All other mountain roads were closed indefinitely. 

What to do, what to do?  We didn’t own chains.  Not much use for them in Eastern Pennsylvania.  And even if we did, I had no idea how to put them on.  At the last exit allowable, I saw a garrison of police and Caltrans vehicles blocking the road with men in heavy-duty snow gear checking all cars for chains.  I didn’t know what we were going to do, but I did know we needed gas, so I pulled off the exit and sat in a long line of other chainless cars on the off-ramp.

My first thought was to just say screw it, get a hotel in the area and drive to Laura’s in the morning after they had plowed the roads.  But a quick look at the map told me this was probably not an option.  We were in Truckee, California, right in the shadow of Lake Tahoe, and this was still the peak of ski season.  Any hotel in the area would mostly likely cost us considerably more than the Motel 6’s and Super 8’s we’d been staying at.  Plus as we merged onto the local road, I realized I had no idea where I’d even go to find a hotel.  Darkness had fallen early because of the blizzard, and save for a gas station and a few houses, I saw very few other signs of civilization, much less commerce in the area.  I didn’t feel like searching for a hotel that might or might not exist on a narrow two-lane mountain road in the blinding snow at night.  Then again, I had no idea how we’d be able to make it over the mountain without chains. 

Maybe we could park somewhere and just sleep in the car for the night?  If nobody could point us to a nearby hotel, what other option did we have?  Pulling into the gas station, the question was answered for us.  In the window was a big red neon sign that proclaimed simply but boldly: “CHAINS.” 

We gave our wheel measurements to the clerk behind the counter and for fifty bucks he sold us our chains.  The instructions seemed easy enough, but I had never done this before and… did I mention that it was snowing?  I soon realized the middle of a blizzard was no place to start learning a new skill.  I tried attaching the chains to our front tires for almost fifteen minutes while the snow literally piled up on my back.  I was determined because according to a woman Lauren had spoken to in the ladies room, this was supposed to be easy.  “Even, I can do it,” she had said.  Fortunately for all involved, my manly pride lost its fight with my freezing fingers and I took the advice of another woman who told us to “just let the ‘chain monkeys’ do it.”

We drove back to the interstate and paid twenty dollars for one of the heavily bundled Caltrans workers to put the chains on our car.  He reminded us to keep our speed to thirty-five or less while they were on.  We said thank you and resumed our ascent. 

The going was slow.  Cars and trucks were backed up for miles as the snow continued to pound the mountains.  I didn’t have much faith in these chains and felt certain we were going to wind up stranded on the side of the road as the temperature continued to drop.  I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when we passed a sign that seemed to only confirm my fears: “Donner Pass.”  It was somewhere near this spot in 1846 that a wagon train of pioneers, The Donner Party, got snowed in by a surprise blizzard and had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive the winter.

My tensions eased gradually as I began to trust in the chains on my tires.  If you’ve never driven with chains, let me tell you that it evokes the most amazing sense of control.  Every time I stepped on the gas, the car would shimmy back and forth for a second, the way it will when it can’t find traction, and then suddenly it would just grab hold.  Just like that we’d be going in a straight line, the chains biting into the road and holding us in place.  Heavy duty SUV’s (sans chains) were spinning out and getting stuck as we rolled passed them with ease in our little Mazda Protégé.

Nevertheless, I was white-knuckled on the steering wheel the entire way. We called Laura to give her our status and then called Lauren’s father to check out the Weather Channel online and see just how far this blizzard extended.  He assured us we only had another fifty miles or so before we were out of it.  Of course, at the speed we had to maintain, that was another two hours.

Lauren couldn’t wait that long to pee and fortunately there was a rest stop a few miles later.  After she did her business, I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to get back to the interstate.  The plows hadn’t touched this parking lot and the snow was as high as the Mazda’s underside.  But by God those chains did their job again and after a brief shimmy, they bit into the tar and we were off. 

I should mention that the chains we bought were Cobra chains by Quality Chain Corp.  I’m not sure if all chains are created equal, so if you’re ever in the same situation, go with Cobra and you’ll never be left stranded.

(To the accounts payable department at Quality Chain Corp:  Please make all checks payable to Brian Hodges.)

As we finally began descending, the snow gradually turned to rain and before we knew it, there was another checkpoint with Caltrans workers making sure everybody took their chains off.  We could have paid an additional ten dollars to have another chain monkey do it for us, but I was determined to do something useful and self-sufficient with this car this week.  Now that I wasn’t being snowed on, it was easier to keep my patience and in less than ten minutes, I got both chains off.  A man in a minivan even walked up and asked me how to do it.  I told him, “I honestly don’t know,” then directed him to the chain monkey farther up. 

Able to do seventy-five again, we made it to Orangevale in less than an hour.  It was nearly midnight and we were starving, so we swung through my second favorite fast food chain in the west, Carl’s Jr. for a Famous Star burger, fries and a Coke.  Delicious and cheap – a perfect combination. 

After a long day of near death adventure on lonely roads and snowy passes, we finally pulled into the driveway at Laura’s house.  I hadn’t seen Laura, one of my dearest friends in the world, in over three years, and when she met us at the car our hug lasted minutes, not seconds.  I introduced her to my wife and they hugged like old friends.  Laura felt Lauren’s belly and told us both congratulations.  Then we lugged all our bags into the house and settled in for a few days of much needed rest and relaxation. 

ONTO DAY 13