The Exodus, Day One
Day One: Portland to Sacramento, 580 miles
Oregon is just too damn big.
There’s nothing more depressing than driving all morning, stopping to fill the car with gas, and listening to your entire road trip iPod playlist, only to realize that you’re still in the same fucking state you started in.
However, there’s few things more exciting than driving past the Eugene exit that says ‘University of Oregon’ and suddenly being further south on I-5 than you’ve ever personally driven before. Actually, there’s probably a lot of things more exciting than that, but for me it was a real Lords of the Rings style soundtrack swelling moment to pass through Eugene and then into the land of evangelical billboards and men who wear cowboy hats and bolo ties.
Movies have taught me that a road trip can go one of two ways: You can either grow closer to the people you’re traveling with and learn a valuable lesson about love/friendship, or you can get sidetracked in some small town and be brutally murdered by inbred hill people. As I was driving alone, I prepared for the worst and made a point of keeping my doors locked as I drove through Medford.
Once I’d cleared Medford, though, the Siskiyous loomed ahead, a stretch of Interstate even more peril-fraught than the last. Two years ago, on the way to the Holiday Bowl with the Oregon Marching Band, we traveled through the Siskiyous on motor coaches, at night, in the middle of a late-December snowstorm.
This, in the dark, plus Will Ferrel.
I’m talking about pitch darkness, thick snowdrifts, and sheer drops just on the other side of the frosty guardrails. I was able to avoid an all out panic attack because we were watching Step Brothers on the coach DVD player, but even that was not a huge comfort - Step Brothers is great and all, but if I had to choose the last movie I ever watched before dying in a bus accident, it wouldn’t be that.
I was driving my Dad’s Subaru – The Mystery Wagon, as Alexander and I call it – which has proven to be a more than reliable car for driving around Portland, Los Angeles, and the flatter sections of I-5. But climbing the Siskiyous, which have some of the steepest grades in the entire Interstate Highway System, was about as easy for The Mystery Wagon as it would be for me on a unicycle.
On the way up the pass, I was flooring it, the speedometer hovering at 45, impatient Southern Oregonians in Ford pickups with horsepower equivalent to the Enterprise swinging around into the left lane and blowing past me with ease. I could practically hear my engine talking to me:
“Vroom, y’all… Energy prit-ay, prit-ay low right now… Oh, Truman, hills ain’t exactly my deal, y’all… You ever see a Subaru goin’ up a hill in a commercial? That’s because climbin’ hills ain’t our deal… How much more Siskiyou do we got, here?”
Once I’d made it up and over and then more or less coasted down the other side and across the California border, I had to stop at a border control checkpoint. I was not expecting this – Oregon has no such restriction on people coming into the state – and was unsure what I was getting into when I pulled up to the guard booth.
“You have any fruit with you?” He asked.
“No.” I said.
“Have a nice day.” He said, waving me through.
Now, first of all, what did these four guards do to get them a job sitting in little booths in the middle of nowhere, asking people if they’re driving around with fruit in their cars? Either they really enjoy asking for fruit or they all fucked the wrong guy’s wife.
Furthermore, if I did have any fruit with me that I’d purchased in Oregon, there’s a good chance that it probably wasn’t grown there. A lot of our cheap fruit comes from outside the state, usually from big time agricultural producers. Y’know, like California. As a matter of fact, any fruit I would’ve been carrying probably would’ve made the trip up from Davis along the same damn stretch of I-5, the only difference being that the truck wouldn’t get stopped going into Oregon because we’ve got the good sense not to get butthurt about what fruit is going where.
I had always joked that the space between Ashland and Sacramento was basically a deserted, postapocaylptic wasteland, but when I was saying it I’d always treated the statement as an exaggeration – surely there had to be something there; I was just ignoring it for the purposes of comedy. However, having driven that expanse firsthand, let me tell you: There is seriously nothing.
Sure, when you first cross the border there’s Mount Shasta, and I suppose the nonstop 24 hour University of Oregon Greek system houseboat party in Lake Shasta that’s been going on since 1973 counts as a settlement of some sort, albeit reeking of Axe and Natty Light. But really, beyond that, there’s just a solid 300-odd miles of emptiness.
After a few hours of rounding corners and cresting hills only to find more nothing, I started going stir crazy. For so long my only human contact had been the grim, distant faces in the other cars and lumbering 18-wheelers I was perpetually passing. I wanted to drive through a city full of people, just to know I wasn’t all alone in the world – I was so desperate, I didn’t even care that the people in question would all be Californians.
Thirty miles outside Sacramento I stopped at a wide place in the road to get my car filled with gas, only to find that in California, they expect the driver to do that himself.
Savages.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I was brought up in a just society of law and order, where when you need to gas up you pull up to the pump and shut off your engine, and presently a glum faced teenager or a hardworking single mother will trot up and ask what sort of gas you want in your car, and when you tell them, they do it. That’s just how things work in Oregon – in restaurants, waiters bring us food, at gas stations, waiters bring us gas, and we don’t pay sales tax on any of it.
Savages.
The whole way to Sacramento I’d been thinking up sick burns about Sacramento to use here, because until then my only experience with Sacramento had been on the aforementioned motor coach trip to the Holiday Bowl, where the band stayed the night in Sacramento on the way down and on the way back. Heading south, Sacramento seemed to us like just a grimy downtown packed to the gunwhales with hobos sleeping on wet pavement. On the way back, we were in Sacramento on New Year’s Eve, and never before have I seen that many whores just out and about in public.
But the fact is, after ten hours on the road spent dodging semis, struggling up and down hills, and longing for evidence of anything resembling human civilization, seeing Sacramento’s skyline on the horizon beyond the fields and trees was one of the most beautiful things in the world, even if it was just Sacramento.
Just Sacramento
When I arrived, I dropped off my stuff at the Days Inn down by the Interstate, which truly was everything an Interstate motel in Sacramento should be. Then I set out to meet Molly, of Writers fame, for dinner, as she is the official Person I Know Who Lives In Sacramento™.
Molly lives in the neighborhood from American Beauty. This isn’t a metaphor or some crappy attempt to convey the pristine suburbanity of her neighborhood; they literally shot the exteriors for the movie American Beauty in Molly’s neighborhood. This is about the coolest thing that could ever happen in anybody’s neighborhood, ever.*
*What’s that? Why, yes, they did film part of a movie in Sellwood, the neighborhood in Portland where I live. What movie? The 2008 hacker thriller Untraceable, with Diane Lane. 14% on the Tomatometer, perhaps most famous for giving birth to the line, “HE HACKED INTO MY CAR!”, which makes about as much sense as “HE HACKED INTO MY DOG!” or “HE HACKED INTO MY GROCERIES!”
In the course of margaritas and Mexican food, I discovered that Sacramento, like most cities except Salem and El Paso, gets significantly nicer the further you are from the Interstate. On the way to dinner we passed no fewer than three palm tree lined parks, not to mention a crap ton of beautifully restored old buildings the likes of which you could easily find in Portland. My impressions were also bolstered by the fact that Molly paid for dinner, because free food (especially free Mexican food) has been scientifically proven to improve my opinion of things. Too bad soccer didn’t buy me dinner…
On the way back, we passed by a couple of carloads of boisterous youth blasting air horns, which Molly explained was some part of local gang initiation rites. As I ducked my head and prayed that I wouldn’t get shot by disenfranchised minorities, I realized that I was having a Real California Experience.
Truman Capps will return with Day Two, which includes an honest to goodness car chase.
Shit, I did that? Does this mean I get to have a mountain named after me or something?
Oregon is just too damn big.
There’s nothing more depressing than driving all morning, stopping to fill the car with gas, and listening to your entire road trip iPod playlist, only to realize that you’re still in the same fucking state you started in.
However, there’s few things more exciting than driving past the Eugene exit that says ‘University of Oregon’ and suddenly being further south on I-5 than you’ve ever personally driven before. Actually, there’s probably a lot of things more exciting than that, but for me it was a real Lords of the Rings style soundtrack swelling moment to pass through Eugene and then into the land of evangelical billboards and men who wear cowboy hats and bolo ties.
Movies have taught me that a road trip can go one of two ways: You can either grow closer to the people you’re traveling with and learn a valuable lesson about love/friendship, or you can get sidetracked in some small town and be brutally murdered by inbred hill people. As I was driving alone, I prepared for the worst and made a point of keeping my doors locked as I drove through Medford.
Once I’d cleared Medford, though, the Siskiyous loomed ahead, a stretch of Interstate even more peril-fraught than the last. Two years ago, on the way to the Holiday Bowl with the Oregon Marching Band, we traveled through the Siskiyous on motor coaches, at night, in the middle of a late-December snowstorm.
This, in the dark, plus Will Ferrel. I’m talking about pitch darkness, thick snowdrifts, and sheer drops just on the other side of the frosty guardrails. I was able to avoid an all out panic attack because we were watching Step Brothers on the coach DVD player, but even that was not a huge comfort - Step Brothers is great and all, but if I had to choose the last movie I ever watched before dying in a bus accident, it wouldn’t be that.
The Mystery Wagon looks just like this. I don't have any pictures of it and I'm too damn lazy to go outside and take one now.
I was driving my Dad’s Subaru – The Mystery Wagon, as Alexander and I call it – which has proven to be a more than reliable car for driving around Portland, Los Angeles, and the flatter sections of I-5. But climbing the Siskiyous, which have some of the steepest grades in the entire Interstate Highway System, was about as easy for The Mystery Wagon as it would be for me on a unicycle.
On the way up the pass, I was flooring it, the speedometer hovering at 45, impatient Southern Oregonians in Ford pickups with horsepower equivalent to the Enterprise swinging around into the left lane and blowing past me with ease. I could practically hear my engine talking to me:
“Vroom, y’all… Energy prit-ay, prit-ay low right now… Oh, Truman, hills ain’t exactly my deal, y’all… You ever see a Subaru goin’ up a hill in a commercial? That’s because climbin’ hills ain’t our deal… How much more Siskiyou do we got, here?”
Once I’d made it up and over and then more or less coasted down the other side and across the California border, I had to stop at a border control checkpoint. I was not expecting this – Oregon has no such restriction on people coming into the state – and was unsure what I was getting into when I pulled up to the guard booth.
“You have any fruit with you?” He asked.
“No.” I said.
“Have a nice day.” He said, waving me through.
Now, first of all, what did these four guards do to get them a job sitting in little booths in the middle of nowhere, asking people if they’re driving around with fruit in their cars? Either they really enjoy asking for fruit or they all fucked the wrong guy’s wife.
Furthermore, if I did have any fruit with me that I’d purchased in Oregon, there’s a good chance that it probably wasn’t grown there. A lot of our cheap fruit comes from outside the state, usually from big time agricultural producers. Y’know, like California. As a matter of fact, any fruit I would’ve been carrying probably would’ve made the trip up from Davis along the same damn stretch of I-5, the only difference being that the truck wouldn’t get stopped going into Oregon because we’ve got the good sense not to get butthurt about what fruit is going where.
I had always joked that the space between Ashland and Sacramento was basically a deserted, postapocaylptic wasteland, but when I was saying it I’d always treated the statement as an exaggeration – surely there had to be something there; I was just ignoring it for the purposes of comedy. However, having driven that expanse firsthand, let me tell you: There is seriously nothing.
Above: Something.
Sure, when you first cross the border there’s Mount Shasta, and I suppose the nonstop 24 hour University of Oregon Greek system houseboat party in Lake Shasta that’s been going on since 1973 counts as a settlement of some sort, albeit reeking of Axe and Natty Light. But really, beyond that, there’s just a solid 300-odd miles of emptiness.
After a few hours of rounding corners and cresting hills only to find more nothing, I started going stir crazy. For so long my only human contact had been the grim, distant faces in the other cars and lumbering 18-wheelers I was perpetually passing. I wanted to drive through a city full of people, just to know I wasn’t all alone in the world – I was so desperate, I didn’t even care that the people in question would all be Californians.
Thirty miles outside Sacramento I stopped at a wide place in the road to get my car filled with gas, only to find that in California, they expect the driver to do that himself.
Savages.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I was brought up in a just society of law and order, where when you need to gas up you pull up to the pump and shut off your engine, and presently a glum faced teenager or a hardworking single mother will trot up and ask what sort of gas you want in your car, and when you tell them, they do it. That’s just how things work in Oregon – in restaurants, waiters bring us food, at gas stations, waiters bring us gas, and we don’t pay sales tax on any of it.
Savages.
The whole way to Sacramento I’d been thinking up sick burns about Sacramento to use here, because until then my only experience with Sacramento had been on the aforementioned motor coach trip to the Holiday Bowl, where the band stayed the night in Sacramento on the way down and on the way back. Heading south, Sacramento seemed to us like just a grimy downtown packed to the gunwhales with hobos sleeping on wet pavement. On the way back, we were in Sacramento on New Year’s Eve, and never before have I seen that many whores just out and about in public.
But the fact is, after ten hours on the road spent dodging semis, struggling up and down hills, and longing for evidence of anything resembling human civilization, seeing Sacramento’s skyline on the horizon beyond the fields and trees was one of the most beautiful things in the world, even if it was just Sacramento.
"Sacramento: Existing Since 1839!"
Just Sacramento
When I arrived, I dropped off my stuff at the Days Inn down by the Interstate, which truly was everything an Interstate motel in Sacramento should be. Then I set out to meet Molly, of Writers fame, for dinner, as she is the official Person I Know Who Lives In Sacramento™.
Molly lives in the neighborhood from American Beauty. This isn’t a metaphor or some crappy attempt to convey the pristine suburbanity of her neighborhood; they literally shot the exteriors for the movie American Beauty in Molly’s neighborhood. This is about the coolest thing that could ever happen in anybody’s neighborhood, ever.*
*What’s that? Why, yes, they did film part of a movie in Sellwood, the neighborhood in Portland where I live. What movie? The 2008 hacker thriller Untraceable, with Diane Lane. 14% on the Tomatometer, perhaps most famous for giving birth to the line, “HE HACKED INTO MY CAR!”, which makes about as much sense as “HE HACKED INTO MY DOG!” or “HE HACKED INTO MY GROCERIES!”
In the course of margaritas and Mexican food, I discovered that Sacramento, like most cities except Salem and El Paso, gets significantly nicer the further you are from the Interstate. On the way to dinner we passed no fewer than three palm tree lined parks, not to mention a crap ton of beautifully restored old buildings the likes of which you could easily find in Portland. My impressions were also bolstered by the fact that Molly paid for dinner, because free food (especially free Mexican food) has been scientifically proven to improve my opinion of things. Too bad soccer didn’t buy me dinner…
On the way back, we passed by a couple of carloads of boisterous youth blasting air horns, which Molly explained was some part of local gang initiation rites. As I ducked my head and prayed that I wouldn’t get shot by disenfranchised minorities, I realized that I was having a Real California Experience.
Truman Capps will return with Day Two, which includes an honest to goodness car chase.