Friday, July 23rd, 2010--Driving through Fresno

En route to Los Angeles, Alice and I are driving through the dry, hot great valley--89 degrees at the moment. Patrick is 37,000 feet above us right now, almost directly overhead, traveling at 550 mph--that's fast! We used the iPad to track his flight:






We spent the night in Merced after a long drive from Eugene--we'll post a few backtracking photos later. It was hot in Merced--especially since we couldn't figure out how to use the air conditioning--so much for that college education. At 6 am I figured it out, but only after a dream about accidentally driving our friend's Larry and Kay's van off the Tacoma Narrows bridge when I forgot to set the emergency brake--sorry about that!

Right now we're listening to Vampire Weekend's album contra on the radio--we've also had the Ben Gibbard/Jay Farrar album on--their translation of Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur called "One Fast Move or I'm Gone"--very moody, good traveling music for a long highway--but I wouldn't probably wake up to it in the morning, or I might decide not to get up right away.

I found a bunch of good California songs on my iPod, too--California Girls, Jonathan Richman's California Desert Party, and of course the lovely California Stars by Billy Bragg and Wilco.

Last night we saw a few California stars--Jupiter high in the south, even through the evening fog, Venus setting in the west--so clear we can almost see its almond curve as it looked through Galileo's first telescope.

We've also been reading about earthquakes in the local newspaper--800 miles of San Andreas fault line and many other smaller ones--scientists talking about predicting earthquakes by examining the donut-like pattern that they seem to occur in--while, of course, Alice and I are eating donuts at the coffee shop. We'll see.

Driving past vast rows of trees--maybe plum trees?--on each side, the grass burnt brown, the bumpy four lane Highway 99 transected by a long flowering hedge--nice touch California. We've been reading about the Tule fog--only in winter but a persistent deep valley fog. We'll be heading into the coast area after LA, so we'll be getting ready for a little cool costal fog there. In the spirit of Basho's Narrow Road, a poem for the moment:

Highway overpass
yellow tassel top of corn fields
Tulare's warm hand

Location:Tulare,United States