Driving Ms. Pamela – Middle Earth

Driving from Santa Rosa, to Sacramento, to Stockton has a middle-earth feel. You’re leaving the foggy coastlands, mountainous terrain for the heart of the state, the flatland center where drama is left behind. Visited Family Christian Bookstore in Santa Rosa first and had a nice visit with sunny Meghan. Visited Borders and B&N too. Amazing Grace acting up again, but a stop at Verizon fixed her. She’s shut up and behaving now.

From Santa Rosa, edging around San Pablo Bay to Vallejo, the sun came out. An electronic road sign caused some alarm–watch out ahead–‘racing day’. (?) Oh well, we made it. There are lots of SUV’s on the road out here, and big pick-up trucks, even some jacked up hummers. For some reason I’d expected to see only small cars. Driving along – mountains to the north and abundant sunflowers along the roadside, bay water shining to our right, blue skies with silver clouds ruffled from winds aloft, golden fields of hay as we neared Sacramento, stacked in square blocks instead of rolls.

Downtown Sacramento is beautifully designed, but for some reason the place was almost deserted. Uniformed security guards at the entrance to the downtown plaza told us that Barnes & Noble had vacated the spot six months ago, along with many other shops. I’d violated my first rule of the book-tour road: always check the info you get on the web before going out of your way to get some place. You might remember that Sacramento is the source of the gold rush. In 1848 at Sutter’s farm gold nuggets were found. The farmer brought the nuggets into Sacramento to sell and word got around. The next year, in 1949, thousands of people showed up to pan for gold–the gold rush had begun. And that’s why the name of San Francisco’s football team is Forty-Niners.

Booklovers is a wonderful independent bookstore in Sacramento. Bradley Simkins, proprietor, really my made my day. (Thanks Binnie!) He’s a real bookman, knows just about any book or author you can name and loves his work. He promised me he’d read “Secret of the Shroud”, even though he gets hundreds of books to read every month–but mine was the only one hand-delivered! (And all the way from South Louisiana). We talked about such things as linear time versus chronological time, a concept I explored with time-shifting in Secret of the Shroud, but if I tell you why we even got into that conversation, I’d spoil a hot new book just out…correction: ANOTHER hot new book just out. (If you guess why I can’t tell…let me know!)

On to Stockton for the night. Stockton is in the middle of the big San Joaquin Valley, destination of the Joad family in John Sinclair’s novel of the great depression, ”Grapes of Wrath.’This area is called the ‘salad bowl’ of the state because of the fruits and vegetables grown in the fertile soil. Driving down the highway, to the west we see the coastal mountain ranges, and to the east are the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. ‘Grapes of Wrath’ was banned in 1939 for 1 and 1/2 years by the Kern County Board of Supervisors because of Sinclair’s depiction of the treatment of migrant workers in the novel. But in that long depression, this valley was the promised land for the Joad family.

Here’s a picture of the valley taken at sunset from under a white birch tree. These trees are everywhere in Northern California and they’re really beautiful.  At first I thought they were weeping willows.

There’s a wedding going on in this hotel and boy are they loud. We’re going to have to sleep with pillows over our heads tonight!