I have a new favorite drive in the world. It's a sidetrack of a back route down a sleepily forgotten part of the Sierras. It leaves the Tahoe basin at the southern end--not such a bad drive in itself--and wraps around the tallest of the basin's mountains before climbing up and over a beautifully barren and rugged pass to drop 8000+ feet to the valley along an emigrant route.
From lake level, where the trees are anywhere from still-green to gold to bare, the road climbs up above the color line to the painfully crisp air of late autumn with panoramic views first of the lake and then of Hope Valley, where two narrow lanes of faded and cracked asphalt wind around soft marshes, pasturelands, and through golden tunnels of aspen. At the highest point, there's a construction delay while they blast the roadway wide enough to give full sized vehicles wiggle room around a turn.
For some reason, I was impatiently peeved when I pulled up and learned it'd be close to two hours before I could get through the construction zone. And then I remembered that I had nowhere to be before dusk, so I took out my crosswords and spent the time sitting in the sun with high-Sierra air blowing through open windows while listening to some interesting music--a Hovhaness omnibus from the library--accompanied by distant blasts of dynamite. What more could you want?
After the construction, I was behind a camper doing at most 40, which had me well conditioned by the time the emigrant spur branched off the main highway.
For the first while, the road was rough and patchy around blind corners of erratic and varying severity punctuated by a general descent but without the stability and predictability of a steady, bulldozed incline. Doing 40 was plenty.
Then the turns opened up and it was just stupid fun--good enough visibility to see what and who's coming, and just enough of a descent to make it exciting even when cautiously approaching a turn (and come winter, I'll wonder why my traction isn't exceptional).
So I was cruising along, not necessarily fast but in a flurry of screeching tires and stupid smiles, when the road straightened out along the top of a ridge. I could see well over a mile of perfectly straight roadway without turnouts or spurs dropping at maybe 4%.
The WRX switch flipped.
I dropped a gear and dropped my foot.
It felt like pushing an airplane into a nosedive.
I glanced down after shifting back to fifth.
There was a wettish sound--imagine dropping a jellyfish onto wet sand from head height--as my mind sorted out the presence/absence of ones and zeroes.
Then there was a grunt as I realized that I've flown a number of airplanes that will not willingly go that fast.
And then I got enough revs built up for the turbo to really kick in.
Fortunately, Stupidity Straight fed into a series of gentle turns, and I had ample opportunity to leisurely drop a couple multiples of the speed limit. And as the wind dropped from thunder to roar to bellow, I heard a strange sound--it was about like a police siren, only an octave too low and with variable pitch and duration.
This does not do one's cardiovascular system well, even at a sedate 85.
Nothing wrong in the gauges, nothing visibly smoking or unhappy, no secondary signs or symptoms from the car, but this strange sound kept on.
Just after I decided I'd killed the turbo and keeled over, money-wise, the noise died in an explosion of percussion from the speakers.
It was whale song in a Hovhanness composition.
The trail ejected me onto a county road that wound around pastures and plots, through small-time communities with single-building schools little chanced in mindset or appearance since the gold rush. Block-by-block stop signs halted progress, tractors and bikes and costumed kidlets turned most of the countless blind corners into potential news stories, and I felt great relief at being one in a line behind a school bus.
And then I was suddenly in Placerville, on a four-lane freeway, ejected into the other California, the one marred with congestion, patrolmen, pollution, overpopulation, a global audience and nearly-universal recognition as just about the biggest, richest, most progressive and proactive, welcoming and enabling place in the world.
If only we could make it live up to the hype....
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