Vignette from an unfinished piece chronicling a road trip to California and a hike of part of the Sierra High Route in August 2018. This section was written while driving north on U.S. Highway 395 out of Owens Valley.
As we passed Lee Vining, the audible toil of the engine had begun to tell of our ascent from Owens Valley. I thought in that moment of little Bodie, the ghost town hidden in the secret hills, a relic turning untouched beneath the sky as a quaint memento of the great ecstatic rush that threw this wild state from crawl into its first fervent gear all those years ago. An old dirtbag in a trail town once told me there was still gold in California, and good money in it for those who took to the hills with eyes to the ground in its search. I was unsure then whether to believe him, but I knew that, if there was no gold, there was surely treasure still to be found in these hills and all across the land within these borders. I pictured the endless horizons of fields and vineyards that stretched skyward from the countryside all around just to feed the streams of produce the great cities devoured in days and in years, and the towering wind farms that cast their gigawatt nets into the sky to drive the wheels of commerce and industry in those cities hundreds of miles distant, and the network of highways like a web of concrete arteries floating endless streams of metal that drew it all together and kept its wheels ever turning in some monstrous, unfathomable gear. All of it was one thing, one dominant silhouette on the world’s map, shoved against the sheet of a continent on one side, dropping sheer over cliffs into the Great Sea on the other, and reaching bold like heavenly pride from hellish desert depths to granite steps in the sky and verdant fields beyond; it was everything and everywhere, drawn up in enormous scale and spoken into existence by the same heroic breath of God that once dreamt of there being light, and so there was California.
© 2020 Ilyas Taraki
notes from my iPhone 