Up the coast. April 25th to May 10th

California speed-run. Thursday 4/25 to Thursday 5/02, Los Angeles/Yaanga, Yosemite Valley, and San Francisco/Ahwaste

I’m in Los Angeles now–once the site of a Tongva Indian town called Yaanga, which was forcibly relocated by Spanish & Mexican settlers multiple times, before eventually the Americans completely destroyed it 150 years ago.

Most of my time in LA is spent seeing some friends and family. I catch up with my friend Stuart while staying with him Thursday into Friday, and while he admits he hasn’t actually explored much of the city since moving out here and can’t recommend much for me to see, he’s at least able to show me some of the good nearby Mexican food spots. Around the city on Friday, I go to the Japanese-American Museum, where there are some old items and remains of cabins from the Japanese internment camps during WWII. I also see the Great Wall of Los Angeles, an almost 3000 foot-long mural showing California’s history and many cultures. That night Stuart is going out of town for the weekend, so I hear back from a Couchsurfing host who can take me in for Friday, Kiel. We don’t get to know each other much since he has work the next morning, and I give him a lift there after an early breakfast.

Saturday afternoon, I have a really nice time meeting some very distant older cousins, David Berman and and his sister Thelma (my grandpa on my dad’s side met them a couple times, though my dad never has). Thelma, 95 years old, is a stubborn little thing bent over practically at a 90-degree angle, but is still sharp and very energetic, always chatting away. They keep very extensive family tree records; we’d known about them through the years since they send us Hanukkah cards every year. They take me to an old Kosher deli nearby, though they’re more secular. We talk more about our family connections (they do more of the talking since they know more about all that), and share a lot of stories. I don’t always follow what Thelma is saying or who she’s talking about, but it’s still just as fun listening to her. Sometimes they’ll joke around with each other with Yiddish words, though they’re not fluent. They’re definitely some of the last standing members of that bastion of old second-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and I’m very glad I got to meet them for a bit.

That night I then rush off to another quick family reunion that night with my cousin David and his family. I catch up for a bit with David and Dorothea and their son Otto, stay the night, and they send me off with a great breakfast the next morning before I go up to Yosemite. I found another traveler over Couchsurfing, a Canadian named Rebecca, who’s in LA now and is trying to get to Yosemite, so I got to pick her up and we share the cost of gas (very good for me here, since gas in California right now is as expensive as the desert is hot). I haven’t really adventured much with other travelers these past few weeks, unlike when I was meeting them all the time in hostels around South Africa, so it’s nice to have a companion for a bit.

So Rebecca and I get into Yosemite that evening, park in one of the campsites, and Rebecca embraces the life of a rubber tramp for one night, turning the front seat into her bed. The next morning we wake up early to get started. Rebecca is also on a tight schedule as she has to get to San Francisco tonight to meet a friend before she flies home the day after. But this past month traveling across the country, I’ve become the master at squeezing things in to unreasonably short amounts of time, so I agree to the injustice of giving Yosemite only half a day. We drive out of the campsite, and after passing through a tunnel we get our first view of the valley. It’s hard for me to explain exactly what makes it so uniquely beautiful. The sheer rock walls on either side with small waterfalls cascading down them, the masses of pine and fir trees at the bottom jutting up, and the still, mirror-like pond that you see the further in you go all combine to just make a magical place. We take in the sight as the sun rises, then drive further down into the valley, passing one of the waterfalls, where there’s still some snow.

I mentioned a bit before about the Indians who lived in the Big Bend and Grand Canyon areas before they were turned into national parks, but Yosemite is a much more severe example of the colonial foundations of American parks. The main indigenous peoples of Yosemite are Ahwahnechee. They were ethnically cleansed from here in the 1850s by the Mariposa Battalion, a rampaging California militia that took charge of subjugating the region during the gold rush, along with many other practical death squads. Some tribes, like the Miwuk, were allowed to keep living in the valley through the 20^th century after it became a national park, and many worked in the growing tourism industry. But the National Park Service itself evicted most of them in the 1960s. In the past few years, the NPS has slowly allowed Miwuk refugees and their descendants to return to the valley and rebuild their villages in certain areas.

There’s not much more I can say that really captures the beauty of Yosemite—it just is. Rebecca and I use our short time to go up one of the trails, by Columbia Rock, absorbing more views from the middle of the valley and some more waterfalls. In the afternoon we have to leave since Rebecca needs to be in San Francisco, much to my regret; of all the places I sped through on this trip, Yosemite was the one I probably did the least justice to. After getting a quick look at one of the sequoia tree groves, we head three hours west, and the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge soon shine out in the evening as we approach the San Francisco Bay Area, historic land of the Ramaytush Ohlone Indians (they would call it Ahwatse, “place by the bay”).

After crossing the huge bridge, I drop Rebecca off near where she’s meeting her friend, then head a little further out of downtown to a truck stop for the night. Tuesday I just wander around the city, still feeling yanked out of my brief hours in Yosemite. I do get to see a bunch of the old counter-culture pilgrimage sights around Haight-Ashbury, now unsurprisingly an extremely commercialized area, and the nearby Golden Gate Park. In the evening I go towards San Jose to stay with Sarjan, my first college roommate, and we catch up. The next morning I go towards Berkeley to visit with my mom’s friend Nancy and her family. I watch the sunset over the bay, and think about how in a few months I’ll be further west over the Pacific, in China for the fall. That night I also meet up with Nadya, who was also on the Palestine delegation. She tells me about some of the work she and other locals have been doing to combat evictions from the skyrocketing rents and costs of living in the Bay Area. I have another Couchsurfing host for the night nearby, John, who gives me some good advice for when I go to Yellowstone in a couple weeks.

Thursday morning I thank John, and I’m off again. I found another companion through CS who’s also going north, another Jon (this one from England), willing to chip in for the gas. I go to pick him up near the Tenderloin neighborhood downtown. So far I haven’t said much on this trip about gentrification, rising homelessness, and similar problems in American cities, in the middle of everything else I’m seeing, but here it’s impossible to ignore. San Francisco is fast becoming one of the most expensive places to live in the country, largely due to the growth of the tech industry in the area. Homelessness is off the charts here, as it is along much of the West Coast cities, and Tenderloin, infamous but still home for many people, is one of the last holdouts in the main part of the city where residents haven’t yet found themselves forced to move somewhere further away.

I pick up Jon, and cross the bay once more as we begin our fast trip north. He has to get to Seattle, where I’ll rendezvous with my friend Daniel.  We go quickly towards Oregon, and that’s it for my time in California. I unfortunately didn’t get to see much; I didn’t even make it to any redwood trees. But the West Coast in general is pretty expensive, so I’m spending less time here before making my longer return east, and hopefully I can come back one day to get a fuller experience.

Cascadia. Thursday 5/2 to Friday 5/10, Ashland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland

I haven’t said much so far about the actual driving, the “road” part of road trip. I’ve mentioned how just traveling with my backpack and taking buses around back in the Middle East and South Africa wasn’t always as glorious as it sounded, and that’s the case too with my “rubber tramping,” for some different reasons.  It’s not always as easy as it sounds, cruising across the continent, dashing from place to place with the freedom of the road. Sure, I don’t have to deal with the type of problems when it’s just me and my backpack, like figuring out public transportation routes and times, always finding a place to stay each night, things breaking inside my backpack, sweating while hauling the thing around in the sun. Sometimes I can get pretty gross and unkempt after a few days straight of staying in the car while in more wild areas, especially during my travels through the national parks, though I can sometimes get showers at campsites. And in the crowded cities, I’ve always got to find a place to park the damn thing! No way to win. It also doesn’t help that I’ve given myself a pretty tight timeframe before going off to Europe at the beginning of June.

But of course, I’m not complaining about having two months of my life to roadtrip across the country, I’m just mentioning some of the difficulties; traveling is still awesome as ever more often than not, and the challenges are a part of it. Hell, I’ve got AC for hot days, and heating for the occasional cold night (and blankets for sleeping on those cold nights). I’ve got plenty of space for food in the back, and I’ve settled into a pattern of cereal, cold toast & cream cheese, and bananas for breakfast, peanut butter & jelly for lunch, and turkey sandwiches for dinner, with some side options of crackers, apples, or chips. Occasionally, I’ll sample some of the cuisine of whatever region I’m traveling through when my budget allows for it, and of  course whenever I stay with a friend or a host I can make more interesting meals in their kitchen, instead of my sandwich diet in the car.

There can be long, uneventful hours on the road through uneventful landscapes, but I don’t really mind long drives by myself. I do like my company around other people, but I can be pretty introverted, so I can keep myself busy with my thoughts, my observations of any towns or more colorful landscapes that I pass. Sometimes I get temporary companions, like Rebecca and Jon recently. And of course, there’s always music. Since starting my drive going through the South from Jersey, I’ve mostly been listening to the radio. I’ve got some music and podcasts through my phone, but I like hearing the stations in the different places I go. I sometimes used my phone’s radio app in Palestine and South Africa too, and it was pretty cool to hear their music, even if it was often in a different language.

And I have to admit, I’ve started to appreciate country music over this past month. Not all of it, mind you—not the real wailing ones about trucks, the flag, or guns—but some of it is actually really good. I already liked folk music and blues, and all these genres are kinda related anyway, there aren’t always clear boundaries between them. Some of the instrumentation is cool, the twangy singing is alright in moderation, and the lyrics can be pretty meaningful, especially since I’ve got my newfound interest in farming and agriculture now. “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys”— it’s all about how tough a life of farming and ranching is. That’s poetry right there, the fundamental struggles of rural living not just in the US but anywhere in the world, anytime. I wouldn’t be the first one to point out how the mockery of country music is often very elitist, coming from urban and suburban people like me against the country hicks they see themselves as superior too, and I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of this myself.

While I’m preaching about how we all shouldn’t ridicule country people in the South and West as uncultured rednecks, I also should add that Dixie and Middle America mustn’t be romanticized either. Driving through as a white guy, for just a few weeks, I don’t personally see much of rural American-style bigotry, beyond symbols like some confederate flags and Trump signs, which I’ve also seen around back in the suburbs of the Northeast as well (my own hometown of Mahwah definitely leans more Republican). But flipping through the radio stations during my southern odyssey, my growing enjoyment of country music has often been interrupted by something darker that deeply offends my New York metropolitan-area progressive persuasion—conservative talk radio. You can hear some of these guys on AM radio back in the Northeast too, but definitely not on your average FM frequency. Down here, they’re all over the FM stations. I hear some of the regular icons that people in these parts grow up hearing, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, along with some mid-tiers ones like Mark Levin, and even some of the newer “young and hip” voices like Ben Shapiro. I listen to some of them with interest for a bit, the usual stuff about blaming poor people and minorities for their own problems, but I can only stand about five minutes of Shapiro’s facts and logic before switching it.

Anyway, I’ll cut off the political ranting, but I will also mention that I hear some disturbing trends of more ideologically Alt-Right talking points seeping into the screed of the more mainstream conservatives. Most notably, I hear an interview with Elizabeth Johnston–better known as the Activist Mommy on Facebook, who has perfected the art of the “angry right-wing rant in the car video” genre–where she mentions how (((“cultural Marxism”))) is indoctrinating kids into supporting transgender rights, rails against the Deep State trying to take down Trump, and goes on about George Soros destroying America by funding groups like Black Lives Matter, etc. Even just four years ago before the 2016 election cycle, you definitely wouldn’t have heard a run-of-the-mill conservative voice using phrases like those. I can report that unlike my feelings for country music, my feelings for conservative talk radio do not improve during my drives. I’m always down to broaden my musical horizons; my political ones, not that much.

So, back to the trip up north. Jon is a good companion to have. He takes some turns driving, since this is a long haul, and he’s got plenty of his own travel stories to share; Jon’s in his late 30s, and has been traveling now for pretty much all of the past three years. He was a microbiological researcher before, but he became disillusioned with it after he saw how much effort and time he would put into experiments and studies on different microscopic subjects, only to find that most of the time the research process didn’t actually yield any useful results at all. Jon is able to give me lots of advice for traveling in South America, which I’ll get to later this year. I also share with him my new appreciation for country music on the radio, and he also marvels at all the evangelical Christian preachers while tuning through stations; he’s never heard anything like that on the radio back in England.

We pass through some scenic countrysides, at one point with Mount Shasta in the distance to our east. That evening we stay with a great Couchsurfing host near Ashland (Oregon), Pam. Pam, almost 70 years old, is a huge veteran traveler, having made her own trips across the US and India using Couchsurfing. Jon and I make dinner for all three of us in her kitchen using some ingredients we picked up earlier. The next morning Pam sends us off with breakfast, and insists on hosing down my car’s dirty windshield as we pull out of the driveway. Jon and I keep driving through the beautiful woodlands and rivers of Oregon and into Washington.

Towards the end of the afternoon Josephine’s check engine light suddenly starts blinking. We pull over to a rest stop, turn the car off, and check online for advice on how bad this might be; I can’t tell what’s wrong just by looking at the engine. I try turning it back on; the light is still on, but not blinking anymore. It’s not likely to be anything too serious yet, and it’s just a couple more hours to Seattle, so we press on, and I plan to get the engine checked tomorrow. We roll into Seattle that night and are hosted by Heorhii, a Ukrainian with a bunch of roommates from Belarus and Kazakhstan. Talking to some of them about Kazakhstan makes me much more eager to visit Central Asia someday.

I thank our hosts Saturday morning, and say farewell to Jon Kirby, the wandering disillusioned microbiologist. I pick up my friend Daniel from the airport, and I was going to have the car examined next, but the check engine light has completely disappeared. I keep an eye on it for the rest of the day, and it doesn’t come back. There’s not too much more of interest for me to report on my days in the Northwest region, also known as Cascadia. Daniel has come out here for his own trip down the West Coast before flying off to China for another friend’s wedding. We head up together across the Canadian border through the lands of Coast Salish tribes, and visit our friend Doga in Vancouver for a few days. Vancouver’s more laid-back than the other west coast cities, there’s plenty of great Korean and Japanese food, and we get to hike some of those Pacific Northwest woodlands and a mountain in the area.

Tuesday I get the car an oil change, and we head back south to Portland, on historic land of the Multnomah Chinook tribe. Daniel stays one night with me at the house of Corrina, my Couchsurfing host for the next few days. The next day I explore a bit with Daniel before I see him off to the bus station as he heads further south. I mostly take the next couple days easy, and do some planning for my next few weeks heading back east from here. Corrina’s got a really cool intentional community-style house with half a dozen other people. There are always other travelers here; sometimes Corrina has travelers from Workaway (similar to WWOOF) stay to help out with housekeeping and their gardens. I help out a bit with cleaning their chicken coop, and I get to help them cook up some communal meals in the kitchen.

Portland is another city that competes with Austin for being weird; the fact that Portland is the home of maybe the only vegan stripclub in the country says a lot (no, I can’t report back on any personal experience there, I just heard about it from other people I met). They’ve got great public transit in the form of a light rail, so it’s easier for me to get to downtown here. There’s good live music as always, though I don’t find one single nexus of anarchy like I saw at Austin’s 6th Street. I also have a reunion in town one night with an old friend from summer camp, Henry. On Friday, I finally get to see some of the infamous underground tunnel systems of the West Coast cities. San Francisco and LA have some too, but I have a bit more free time here, so I join a tour group. The guide takes us to a trap door in the sidewalk, and we just walk down beneath the street. Most of the musty, dimly-lit passages are actually pretty roomy, though some are more cramped, and there are even entire rooms.

These tunnels were used starting over a hundred years ago for everything from flood control, moving legal goods between hotels and restaurants, moving more illegal goods like opium and alcohol during Prohibition, and perhaps a few times, shanghaiing—kidnapping unsuspecting drunk men to work on ships in the Pacific. It’s debated as to how often that last one actually happened; in reality it probably wasn’t all that common. Still it’s cool to walk through these, even though their possible use for human trafficking is a bit gruesome. There are plenty of old artifacts throughout the rooms, like decaying shoes and grisly-looking rusted tools that make it look like a natural horror movie set. Urban archeologists are still excavating the tunnel system today and uncovering more stuff.

And that’s really it for my two-week speed run of the West Coast. Mostly just a bunch of reunions with friends and family, and I got to see a few things along the way as well. It’s already time for my trip back east! I made my deadline to meet Daniel in Seattle, and now, I’m setting myself another tight deadline, with Daniel too: in three weeks, he’ll be flying from China to France, where he wants me to join him for the 75^th anniversary of D-Day on June 6^th. I’m gonna get back to Jersey in time, even if I wear myself and the car out, so I can fly to meet him there before my traveling in Britain.