Editor's note: Longtime New Mexico writer Wally Gordon who usually writes from Edgewood, New Mexico is dispatching from his rural romps in lesser traveled California.
Edgewood is a tranquil rural village of pastures, mountains, cows and blue skies. This Edgewood is in northern California at the base of Mount Shasta, at 14,179 feet the tallest summit in the region and the second tallest anywhere in the Cascade Mountains.
Shasta’s year-round snowfield and five glaciers hang over Edgewood like a living presence, a white ghost exhaling pure, cold air over fields and homes. Rising some 11,000 feet above the village, the massive mountain doesn’t just dominate the skyline; it is the skyline. It is as if Sandia Peak rose 2 miles above Albuquerque instead of 1 mile and was sitting virtually on top of the city.
The main gateway to Mount Shasta, midway between San Francisco and Portland, Ore., is the charming town with the same name as the mountain, a surprisingly low-key, un-touristed kind of place, the kind of place a traveler happens upon and then stays and stays.
A bearded young man I met in town said he had been hitchhiking several years ago when two men picked him up and drove him to their cabin. This tale seemed to be headed for a tragic ending, but that’s not his story. The young man stays with his new friends for two weeks, has a ball, and now returns to find the cabin and the town unchanged. “It’s a wonderful place,” he said.
I, too, was tempted to stay. It took a good deal of will power and my wife’s steady prodding to get me to move on.
The village seems on a calm sunny fall day like a bit of heaven, the meadows around it unimaginably lush, the snowfield above it impeccably pristine, the streams clean and clear. People here seem to move at a gentle pace, unhurried and unworried, unlike the crowded, hectic, high-speed lifestyle of most Californians.
There are herds of horses hereabouts, and an occasional llama, too, animals seldom seen in the northern California countryside.
We stopped for a royal breakfast at the Black Bear Diner in Mount Shasta, an eatery that has become a legend in its own time. It started in 1995 with a family making pies from their patch of blackberries that they shared with a bear. It now has become a famous interstate chain. Their trademark is enormous quantities of fresh, flavorful and fine food. My wife and I split a single breakfast. “Good choice,” the waitress commended us without the slightest sign of irony. We could barely finish our half-meals, leaving the restaurant stuffed to the gills.
Before leaving the Shasta area, my wife and I drive the length of the Everitt Memorial Highway, the main gateway to the mountain’s extremely challenging ascent, and hiked for several hours along the lower reaches of the mountain to South Gate Meadow, mostly above the tree line, but the last segment through an impressive old-growth woods to a meadow sheltered on all sides by steep rocky slopes and watered by a gentle stream running off a south-facing glacier. We picnicked on the lush grass, and wandered a ways up the stream. It too was the kind of place I didn’t want to leave, but with clouds building on the horizon, we finally did.
Journeying in northern California in the midst of the federal government shutdown is tricky. Some areas are open, some closed, some in the gray area in between. A park or a campground may be closed but the trails are open. The visitor’s center may be closed but the campground open. Further complicating matters, some parks are jointly managed by the federal and state governments. The famous but daunting Pacific Coast Trail crosses this area and is open, but many facilities on or near it are shut down. The longer the closure lasts, the more facilities will close.
The weather here is another obstacle. It can be harsh, and so can life in these parts. Appearances aside, this area like most of California has been in severe drought. Vast Lake Shasta, south of Mount Shasta, has dropped 115 feet in three months and is still dropping a foot a day. Some canyon branches of the lake have dried up completely. Where we camped, we could look down into a canyon with the lake glistening distantly in the bottom—more than a hundred feet below the discolored rock rim where the lake must have been in the recent past. The lake in fact has shrunk so much that it is difficult to get to it. What today are its banks is only a sea of mud.
A ranger in a campground tells us that bears and even a cougar have been seen there for the first time in memory. When we get up in the morning, we see the bear’s handiwork: a trash can overturned with its contents spilled along the paths.
One campground where we stop has been theoretically closed by the federal government shutdown. The water has been turned off but the gate across the entrance road not yet locked. We worry that if we stay, we will find ourselves locked in the next morning.
In the campground there is a lone camper, a gold miner, young, bearded and scraggly, wet, exhausted and discouraged, toasting his sore bare feet beside a small fire in front of a makeshift shelter. Asked if he has found much gold, he replies dispiritedly, “Not as much as I had hoped.” Now he is expecting rangers to chase him out of his temporary home tomorrow or the day after. He is resigned to his fate, however, if unhappy about it.
This inland part of the state, just north of the flat, agricultural Central Valley and just south of the redwood forests of the far north, is an idyllic area. To the north and the south people are poorer.
The giant farms, laser-leveled and worked by thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans, is a world apart.
So is the area further north. In fact, it was once, and may perhaps be again, the locus of a movement to create a separate state, the State of Jefferson. The primary road through three northern California counties and one county in southwestern Oregon is labeled on the AAA map as State of Jefferson Highway, otherwise known as the Klamath River Highway. By any name, however, the “highway” is narrow, winding and steep with only one lane in places.
In December 1941, on the eve of World War II, the area declared its independence from California, mainly because of the state’s disinterest in building roads and undertaking other development project. The war changed all that, bringing money into the region and giving people other things to worry about, like the life and death of their sons fighting around the globe.
Now once again, the secession movement is seeing something of a revival. A proposal for a national monument has residents particularly exercised. “No Monument” signs adorn the shoulders of the State of Jefferson Highway along its entire length. A big part of the problem seems to be that the monument might require removal of dams along the Klamath River, the State of Jefferson’s main waterway. Countering the scores of “No Monument” signs is a lonely brave one declaring, “Yes Monument Remove the Dams.”
California is such a diverse, divided and segmented sate, geographically, economically and ethnically, that secessionist movements have always existed, and probably always will.
The north talks of seceding from the south, the Central Valley from the coast. Each region feels it is getting the short end of the government stick and would do better on its own. Yet somehow the 38 million people of America’s most populous state manage to hang together rather than hang separately, as Ben Franklin might have put it.
October 16, 2013