screens, and practicing their smiles before a mirror.
Willow Creek drew its inspiration from the Old West, from buckboards, grizzled prospectors, and weathered barn siding. It had a rustic, no-nonsense atmosphere, a quality of being literal that came as a relief after the slippery sadness of Hoopa. The businesses in town pointed up a country person’s distaste for anything fancy.
Bob’s Shopping Center
Hodgson’s Department Store
Chris’s Forks Lounge
Wyatt’s Motel
Hansen’s Logging Supply
The simple, forthright names suggested a smalltown responsibility, as well. If you were offended by the service somewhere, you could look up Bob or Chris or Old Man Hodgson in the phone book and cuss them out. They might cuss at you in return, but that was the way of discourse in the West, although insults had replaced sixguns as the weapon of choice.
At Big Red’s Cafe, a hungry crowd had gathered for lunch and gossip. The menu guaranteed that everything was fresh, except for the help. Like Red, many of the patrons were big, really big—big in the bones and big in the stomach. The daily special, a pork tenderloin sandwich, sounded good, so I took a stool and ordered it.
A gigantic man in a logger’s plaid shirt walked in and sat down next to me. He said to the waitress, who was wiry, feisty, and skilled at riding herd on the regulars, “Mary, is that pork tenderloin a pretty good-sized sandwich?”
“It’s better than nothing,” Mary answered.
“Aw, hell. I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries.”
“Same as you did yesterday.”
The giant grunted and snatched absently at a circling fly, a sure harbinger of summer. He began telling anyone who’d listen about his morning at the history museum over in China Flat. He’d swept the floors and had sorted through the new T-shirts, which featured a crosscut saw as part of the museum’s logo.
In the Far North, you found museums everywhere. History had become an exercise in nostalgia, maybe because the past with its vision of gainful employment for all was more intelligible and had more resonance than the tapped-out present or the imponderable future.
Willow Creek was once an important timber center, just as it had once been a Gold Rush settlement, but its loggers were confronting the same rigid restrictions and protests that currently prevailed elsewhere in California, and layoffs were common. Although the loggers were surrounded by trees in Trinity National Forest, they were often kept from cutting any down, so the folks in town werecounting on tourism as a quick fix for their economy, like the people in Crescent City.
It seemed to me that they had a chance of succeeding. They had some good campgrounds, and better hiking, fishing, and weather, but their window of opportunity was still brief. Snow could start falling by early October, and it would certainly fall in November, and Trinity County was not known for its skiing. The county was even emptier than Del Norte, four times as large but with fewer residents—about fourteen thousand of them on more than 2 million acres.
Mary brought my pork tenderloin sandwich. Big Red had breaded and deep-fried the meat to infuse it with even more calories and cholesterol and give it some greasy-spoon oomph. When I took a bite, hot oil poured down my chin, as in a medieval torture, and gave me a nasty burn. The oil left a raw, red blister below my lip that scabbed over and finally turned into a scar. It was still there when I crossed the border into Mexico.
That evening, I camped on the Trinity River. Beneath some pines and some Douglas firs, on ground tinted a burnished red by iron ores, I staked my tent, as diligently attentive as I had been as an eight-year-old, when camping meant a night in a Long Island backyard. I smelled the pine needles and watched the scrub jays and the sparrows and the crazy little chipmunks scooting around like wind-up toys.
It was tremendously satisfying to be alone by the Trinity River. There was
Willow Creek drew its inspiration from the Old West, from buckboards, grizzled prospectors, and weathered barn siding. It had a rustic, no-nonsense atmosphere, a quality of being literal that came as a relief after the slippery sadness of Hoopa. The businesses in town pointed up a country person’s distaste for anything fancy.
Bob’s Shopping Center
Hodgson’s Department Store
Chris’s Forks Lounge
Wyatt’s Motel
Hansen’s Logging Supply
The simple, forthright names suggested a smalltown responsibility, as well. If you were offended by the service somewhere, you could look up Bob or Chris or Old Man Hodgson in the phone book and cuss them out. They might cuss at you in return, but that was the way of discourse in the West, although insults had replaced sixguns as the weapon of choice.
At Big Red’s Cafe, a hungry crowd had gathered for lunch and gossip. The menu guaranteed that everything was fresh, except for the help. Like Red, many of the patrons were big, really big—big in the bones and big in the stomach. The daily special, a pork tenderloin sandwich, sounded good, so I took a stool and ordered it.
A gigantic man in a logger’s plaid shirt walked in and sat down next to me. He said to the waitress, who was wiry, feisty, and skilled at riding herd on the regulars, “Mary, is that pork tenderloin a pretty good-sized sandwich?”
“It’s better than nothing,” Mary answered.
“Aw, hell. I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries.”
“Same as you did yesterday.”
The giant grunted and snatched absently at a circling fly, a sure harbinger of summer. He began telling anyone who’d listen about his morning at the history museum over in China Flat. He’d swept the floors and had sorted through the new T-shirts, which featured a crosscut saw as part of the museum’s logo.
In the Far North, you found museums everywhere. History had become an exercise in nostalgia, maybe because the past with its vision of gainful employment for all was more intelligible and had more resonance than the tapped-out present or the imponderable future.
Willow Creek was once an important timber center, just as it had once been a Gold Rush settlement, but its loggers were confronting the same rigid restrictions and protests that currently prevailed elsewhere in California, and layoffs were common. Although the loggers were surrounded by trees in Trinity National Forest, they were often kept from cutting any down, so the folks in town werecounting on tourism as a quick fix for their economy, like the people in Crescent City.
It seemed to me that they had a chance of succeeding. They had some good campgrounds, and better hiking, fishing, and weather, but their window of opportunity was still brief. Snow could start falling by early October, and it would certainly fall in November, and Trinity County was not known for its skiing. The county was even emptier than Del Norte, four times as large but with fewer residents—about fourteen thousand of them on more than 2 million acres.
Mary brought my pork tenderloin sandwich. Big Red had breaded and deep-fried the meat to infuse it with even more calories and cholesterol and give it some greasy-spoon oomph. When I took a bite, hot oil poured down my chin, as in a medieval torture, and gave me a nasty burn. The oil left a raw, red blister below my lip that scabbed over and finally turned into a scar. It was still there when I crossed the border into Mexico.
That evening, I camped on the Trinity River. Beneath some pines and some Douglas firs, on ground tinted a burnished red by iron ores, I staked my tent, as diligently attentive as I had been as an eight-year-old, when camping meant a night in a Long Island backyard. I smelled the pine needles and watched the scrub jays and the sparrows and the crazy little chipmunks scooting around like wind-up toys.
It was tremendously satisfying to be alone by the Trinity River. There was
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