#10 - On the Road
"With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road"
It is with the first words of Kerouac's On The Road that we begin our American trip: two weeks of travel before reaching our next step in a farm in Oregon, near Portland.
After landing in Phoenix, we meet Victoria, a friend who joins us for a week of travel in the American West. We pick up our rental car and flee to the east of Phoenix in a national park. We arrive quickly and plant our tent near Lake Roosevelt. Upon awakening, as we discover the surroundings, we meet an old man who works in the area. Bill Pope is 82 years old and comes every day to clean the garbage left by tourists. When he was our age, it had been three years he was in South Korea, where the army had mobilized him. After a career in the Navy and Marine, he had retired and quietly watched his children and his thirty grandchildren grow. From our first meeting with an American, we are strongly marked by the deep calm of a man who lived well, and this touching tendency of some Americans to deliver their life story.
We spend two days around this huge lake where we alternate between swimming, fishing and reading sessions under the strong sun of early spring in Arizona. We appreciate the vastness of the landscape and especially the tranquillity of the place: there is no one around to come and break our peacefulness.
Realizing that our meals consist almost exclusively of fruits and vegetables that we sometimes accompany with a piece of meat, we realize gradually the influence of the education we were given by Fred and Uta in Uruguay. While eating meat is always a deep pleasure, nothing makes us happier than to bite into a juicy tomato or a melting pepper.
One morning a passing ornithologist gives us a short class on the birds that can be seen here. She shows us through her binoculars a Bald Eagle - the eagle symbolizing the United States - sitting on his branch as on a throne.
Wishing to keep the quietness of these great lands, we drive all day long brefore leaving paved roads and planting our tent in wild desert of Kofa between two giant cactuses at the bottom of the huge red mountains. A hare scoots under our feet as we dig a shelter for the fire that allows us to cook our dinner this night. The evening light really gives us the feeling of being in the middle of a show that has been played for thousands of years here.
Time is unfortunately not stopping, and we need to head east, to San Diego. The route we take is breathtaking. It starts along the Mexican border - and we see the "wall" preventing illegal immigration, which stands in the desert. We then abruptly return in a desert of dunes reminiscent of the Sahara. The road then starts to climb the rocky mountains where there is no vegetation. This lunar vision reminds us more of a clip of Pink Floyd than the traditional clichés California.
Before reaching the Pacific coast, we stop one last time to discover a part of California that we know less about: its mountains. We plant our tent at Lake Cuyamaca, 1500 meters above sea level in a paradise that nothing seems to disturb. The night is cold but waking up there is magic: from an arid Arizona desert we moved in 24 hours to this peaceful place looking even better than the beautiful Swiss landscapes.
But once more we need to go, and it is with pleasure that we finally perceive the Pacific Ocean.
We plant our tent at a campsite along the coast. The beaches are huge and it is for Tristan an opportunity to swim for the first time in the Pacific Ocean, in the company of a seal playing in the waves about ten meters from him. Again, the tranquillity of this place affects us, and having three hundred meters of free space between our nearest neighbour and us on the beach is a formidable luxury. Even for the two Southwest lovers we are, it is difficult not to recognize that the waves of the Pacific are really beautiful.
Tristan doesn't forget his roots
Our evenings are similar: wood fire where we grill meat, corn, onions, peppers, eggplant and zucchini. Without the comforts of home, we have less entertainment and therefore more time to spend around the fire, discussing about our day or arguing about the ideal cooking time for onions on the fire.
The car must be returned at Los Angeles, hence we still go up north and we get stuck in traffic every time we cross a tourist place. The beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu are invaded by millions of people and we decide to continue to the north and decide to stay in a remote creek. Traffic jams and floods of people coming from the other side of the world to take a picture of a place they already know from movies and clips they saw strengthen our desire to avoid these tourist places during our journey. One feels better without agitation. Since campsites are full, we decide to sleep in our car, still full of salt after our ocean bath. We find a spot along the road to park our car, among the villas of millionaires north of Los Angeles, and we eat a fish and chips before spending a night more than pleasant in our loyal Toyota Corolla. We finally take Victoria back to her plane before returning the car.
The view on Malibu from our 5 stars camping spot!
While ending this incredible week of car, we have mixed feelings. There is no denying that the autonomy that comes with a car allowed us to visit beautiful isolated places. But we also isolated ourselves, thanks to this car. How can we actually claim to have visited a country after having only driven through it? Comfort has made us independent and independence has relatively isolated us from the Americans that we wanted to meet. It is therefore with our eternal smile and a lot of energy that we start a second trip, supposed to be more improvised.
Edouard, a fellow from our business school, offered us to sleep with him the first night in Los Angeles, before heading back north. This is an opportunity for us to realize that the French also know how to show their generosity. To honor our presence, Edouard organized a dinner with all his friends, with whom we share a great time. We had lost the habit of interacting with young French people like us, but the tact and intelligence of Edouard make this return to social life easy and exciting.
The next day, we think leaving him, as we start our road to San Francisco. But hitchhiking in the United States is not as easy as we imagined. For several hours, we remain thumbs up, watching the indifference of Americans yet often alone in their car. We are moving a few miles North with Roma, a very nice former hitchhiker in Europe, but this is not enough. Her appearance is deceptive: in spite of her tattoos and her style a little trash, she pursues a doctorate in philosophy and speaks about phenomenology and Husserl while driving! Ultimately, it is the police, certainly alerted by local people, that let us know we are not allowed to hitchhike where we are.
The experience was disappointing but rewarding. We understand better the situation by talking to our neighbor table of the McDonald's where we came in search of WiFi. This postman indeed explains to us that he used to travel widely in his youth. Back in the 70s, he says, it was very easy to cross the country by hitchhiking. Today, people are afraid and fear intrusion into their privacy. To comfort us, and because we remind him of his childhood, this man invits us to lunch by telling to the servers a sentence quite nice to hear "Give to these guys whatever they want."
We spend one more night at Edouard’s place, and the next day we take a bus to San Francisco. The ride is beautiful along the Californian plantations.
Somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco
We plan to spend three days in San Francisco before hitchhiking to our next farm in Portland.
Our days in San Francisco leave us a very strong memory. Hosted again by a friend of our school, Antoine, we find a state of mind that would have been hard to imagine. The young people we meet share all an idea: technology will save the world from all of its problems. Thanks to technological innovations, it seems that illness and poverty can be eradicated or at least mitigated.
At first we give a critical look to this way of thinking that seems unrealistic, especially in view of the number of beggars in the streets of San Francisco. Don’t these innovations increase primarily the gap between the rich and the poor? And are the Oculus Rifts and the IPhone 7 really going to make the population happier? Yet it's hard not to be seduced by the beauty of the ideal followed by these young people with a confident energy.
A Frenchy in Frisco
Anyway, San Francisco seems to us as a world in the United States, very different and more attractive than what we saw in Los Angeles.
However, we must go back on the road quickly. We are especially in a hurry; we are expected on the farm on April 8th. But life in these cities reminds us too strongly of our Parisian lifestyle, from which we try to get away.
On the road again
We are therefore once again very happy on Saturday as we cross the Golden Gate with our bags on the back, to go north. Once again, we encountered difficulties: hitchhiking is really not the most natural thing in the States. But after six hours without any success, our perseverance pays off. Alan Joseph, alone in his van has agreed to take us a bit to the north. For 10 years, he has pursued a path that he does not seek to control: he lets his life being guided by his meetings, and he has lived and worked in Alaska, Mexico, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark and now works in an Hostel near San Francisco. He offers to take us for a beer in a small brewery, and again we are lucky. While we thought we would have to put our tent on the edge of the road, a young American, interested in what we told to Alan Joseph offers to host us for the night. This is where we are writing, before heading back to the North in a few hours.
Next Sunday, if we finally get to our destination, we will write to you from our farm in Portland, where we finally resume our agricultural activity.
Until then we wish you a good week,
We’ll be back next Sunday