LAST STOP BEFORE TAHOE

Tourists driving from Sacramento or the San Francisco Bay area toward Lake Tahoe often take Route 50. They pass through Placerville (a.k.a. Old Hangtown), then along an area called Apple Hill, filled with many orchards and vineyards. Apple Hill is extremely popular in the fall, when city folk bring their children to stroll through the orchards, sample a wide variety of apples, and buy pies and donuts. So popular that the highway may be crowded in September or October.

Before getting low on gas or groceries, Tahoe-bound people are apt to stop in Pollock Pines. It has everything they are likely to need before starting the beautiful but long drive to Lake Tahoe.

At the west end of town, they can take Exit 57 from the highway, the exit that leads to Pony Express Trail. Yes, this road actually is part of the historic nineteenth-century trail used to deliver the mail by young riders on horseback. Near Exit 57 is one of the original stations, now enlarged and converted to a restaurant called Sportsman’s Hall. Many other stations between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento survive, but mostly as ruins. Here, you can have a meal while surrounded by photos and artifacts of the trail. (It’s not for foodies, though. The menu is basic meat and potatoes, plus some good pies and pastries.)

Either by going back to U.S. 50 or by staying on the trail and continuing east for a few miles, you can reach the east end of Pollock Pines (Sly Park Rd., Exit 60 from the highway). Along the way on Pony Express Trail are two good motels, a Best Western and the Westhaven Inn. In what passes for a downtown, visitors can shop at a Safeway, a CVS, several small restaurants, beauty shops, auto supply stores, and gas stations. Note: The gas is a bit higher priced here than in Placerville, back 15 miles to the west, but it’s a long drive to the next station! A charming branch of the county library (open Tuesday through Thursday only) and a post office are useful stops for some visitors. Public restrooms are found in the stores and restaurants.

About six miles south of town on Sly Park Rd. is a large reservoir called Jenkinson Lake. Nine campgrounds here have spaces for tents and RVs. Fees for single-vehicle sites range from $32 to $80 a day.  Popular with both tourists and locals, the reservoir offers boating, kayaking, and hiking. You can look at the lake and check the weather on a webcam [http://www.slyparkweathercam.com/] hosted by local realtors.

Once past town, and fortified with gas and food, you can begin the magnificent drive uphill to Lake Tahoe along the American River. Or, you may decide not to leave but to buy a home and settle down, as I did several years ago. Like me, many elderly people choose to retire here among the huge pine trees.

 

Copyright  © 2018 by Carol Leth Stone

 

                                                                                                                                                   

LIVING IN TRUMP COUNTRY

After living in large cities all my adult life, in 2007 I moved to El Dorado County in California.  Though the scenery is beautiful here on the western slopes of the Sierra, the area is impoverished. Once a thriving logging area, it has been hit hard by the recession and other factors. It is of course crowded with Trump people.

One of the things I like about this area is the friendliness of the people.  My neighbors are always helpful. Though I am not particularly extroverted or sociable, people often chat with me in stores or on my walks. It’s a nice contrast to the behavior of city dwellers.

Since the Trump campaign, though, much of the usual friendliness has vanished. Like many other places, this area rapidly became segregated into “red” and blue” areas. Being violet was just impossible. Furthermore, the reds far outnumbered the blues. Young men drove around in pickups waving the Confederate flag. Pro-Trump lawn signs appeared. I overhead snide comments about Obama and about LGBTs. Though the election is over, the division has remained.

It made me wonder, how do people become conservative or liberal? My own history can provide some clues. Berrien County in Michigan, where I was born in 1937, was and is still extremely conservative, much like El Dorado County. It hardly seems credible now, but I don’t remember hearing about the Holocaust during high school. It might have something to do with the county’s large German population, or with anti-Semitism in general. Certainly Jews were considered inferior in my home town. We saw Jews only in the summer, when Chicagoans came to summer homes at the nearby lake. Like other “resorters,” they were tolerated but not really welcomed. So, I grew up with an anti-Jewish attitude that now embarrasses me.

Similarly, Joseph McCarthy was considered a hero. The newspaper we all read was Col. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune,  which praised McCarthy and right-wingers in general. When I voted for the first time in a presidential election, it was for Barry Goldwater.

Religion, too, was conservative in Berrien County. There were Catholics and traditional Protestants. (Today the county is even more conservative in that regard. Evangelicals seem to have taken over.)

Still, today I am an unabashed Bay Area liberal, a Unitarian and the widow of a Jew.  My views on politics and social issues are far to the left of center.

How did my transformation take place? If I had stayed at home, as some of my high school classmates did, I might not have changed, at least not to this extent. Instead, I went to college and then to grad school, where I learned much about science, and especially about how to be skeptical and analytical. I met liberal Jewish professors  and was exposed to their values and ideas. Though I went to a Baptist college, the religion classes were nontraditional, and the Methodist church I attended in the early sixties had a charismatic, liberal minister. Later, I became a Unitarian.

 In the workplace I met a variety of people with different viewpoints. Though my formal education was valuable, informal education was even more so. Living in a variety of communities taught me about people at various socioeconomic levels and ethnicities.  

So, my own history leads me to think that education and broad experience are the answers to Trump thinking. Even in rural areas like this one, children can be exposed to the ideas and values that will lead them to become intelligent, ethical citizens.

It is also encouraging to see that since the election, closet county liberals have come out in the open. A few weeks ago the nascent El Dorado Progressives (EDP) group advertised an organizational meeting at a local church, expecting 90 or so people to show up. I attended, and barely got in the door. About a thousand angry citizens came to find out how they could resist the coming autocracy. Since then, many of them have stormed into town hall meetings held by our local Congressional representative, Tom McClintock, one of the most conservative House members. There is hope for the future, even here in Trump country.



Protestors at a McClintock Town Hall meeting. (Photo published in the Mountain Democrat.)

BOOK CLUB ESCAPE

After moving to El Dorado County I wanted to meet some people with similar interests, as I had done in previous places. This turned out to be harder than I expected, partly because I don’t really fit in here. I am a San Francisco Bay liberal; the majority of people here are conservative Republicans, Tea Party members, NRA supporters. I am a Unitarian; the closest Unitarian church is an hour’s drive away. Though that might be all right on Sunday mornings, it is in the evenings that conspiracies are hatched and friendships are formed. (I can no longer drive after dark.) Most Sierra Club hikes are too strenuous for me. Having worked for fifty years, I had no intention of looking for a job! The closest library branch needed volunteers; I tried that for a while and enjoyed it, but our travels make it hard for me to commit to any schedule. That also eliminated many other possibilities for volunteer work.

We spend much time in the library anyway when we are not traveling, and one day I noticed that the county library has a book club that meets once a month in the morning. That made me hesitate. My picture of book clubs has always been of uneducated readers reading lightweight books and making inane comments, or of members using the club as an excuse for gossiping about local events and drinking a lot of wine. However, I was getting desperate for intelligent companionship. (My partner provides a lot of it, but I was eager to meet other women.) So, I attended the next book club meeting to see just how bad it was.

It was a pleasant surprise. About a dozen intelligent people gathered to discuss that month’s selection. One of the librarians, Tamela Entrikin, was the leader. She had thought carefully about the book and, like a skilled teacher, encouraged us to comment without dominating the discussion herself or letting us wander too far onto other subjects. Tamela gave me a list of the books to be read in coming months. While I had read a couple of them, the rest were unfamiliar titles or books I wanted to read. Traveling would not be a problem, as members often cannot attend for various reasons. Thanks to my Nook, I could even download books on the club’s list and read them while traveling.

That was three years ago. Since then I have enjoyed getting to know the other members and reading many of the books. Though of course some have been on topics that did not interest me, in general I have liked rediscovering old favorites or being introduced to unfamiliar authors. If not for the book club, for instance, I probably would have not read Marja Mills’ The Mockingbird Next Door, which led to my interest in the Harper Lee mystery. (My last post gave the details.) Our reading Olive Kitteridge introduced me to Elizabeth Stroud. Being a retired science writer, I have been disappointed that we read too few science-related books, but you can’t have everything. I can find those books on my own.

Perhaps the greatest benefit, though, has been meeting compatible people. El Dorado County, though a cultural backwater in some respects, does have a friendly, knowledgeable community within it. I am grateful to have found it.

LIVING NEAR THE KING FIRE

Ordinarily we have to travel to find much excitement, because our homes in El Dorado County are in a scenic area that is generally bucolic. Lately, though, the excitement came to us. While out for a Sunday morning walk about ten days ago I was listening to a local radio broadcast, and heard something about a fire north of us. The sky was clear, and I couldn’t smell smoke, so I ignored any danger for a while.

Soon we learned that a fire was burning over several hundred acres of forested land just north of Pollock Pines. Luckily, the homes there are scattered and surrounded by defensible (cleared) spaces, making it unlikely that they were in much danger. Surely, we thought, firefighters would soon bring the fires under control, and that would be an end of it.

We were wrong. Over the next week the fire went on burning, spreading first to 2800 acres, then to 10,000 acres. On one particularly hot and windy day it swelled to 80,000 acres, more than a hundred square miles. A giant pyrocumulus cloud spanned the sky, and smoke and ashes began raining down. El Dorado County had the dubious distinction of  having the largest California wildfire of 2014.

Now, the fire is still spreading. It has grown to more than 95,000 acres, and at its easternmost edge is only a few miles from beautiful Lake Tahoe. A dozen homes have been destroyed, thousands of acres of forest have burned. Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes temporarily; some have gone back to intact homes, others have found smoke or worse. Thankfully, no lives have been lost, though four firefighters (including a prison inmate who was working on the front lines) have been injured.

Highway 50 is not too wide at Pollock Pines, and a successful effort has been made to keep the fire from spreading across it. Only that highway and a reservoir lie between hundreds of homes, including ours, and the fire.

Highway 50 is no longer “the loneliest highway in America.” Thousands of firefighters from hundreds of miles away, even from Idaho and other states, have hurried along it night and day. Overhead, helicopters carry water, and planes drop fire retardant on the flames. All along the road, people have posted signs thanking those who have come to help.

Fifteen miles to the west of Pollock Pines, the county fairground in Placerville is being used for the many cattle and other animals that had to be moved out of the burning area. Fire engines, bulldozers, and huge mobile dormitories for the firefighters fill the parking lot of a nearby Raley’s supermarket.

As the fire has moved to the northeast, we have been less affected by it. The air is clear again here, though there is still some smoke in the Lake Tahoe area. Life seems normal again in many ways. This morning it is even raining, for the first time in months. The rain is a double-edged sword, though. Falling on the clayey soil here, it will make it harder for firefighters to keep their footing.

The fire will probably continue raging for weeks. Now more than 40% contained, it cannot last through the approaching rainy season, but the effects will be long-lasting for the scarred land, the burned forests, some homeowners, and the wildlife.

 

 

 

WHO WAS AT THE WINDOW?

 

 

When camping in national parks and forests, of course we’re cautious about predators. We store food in bear boxes or the RV fridge, watch for mountain lions when we hike, look behind rocks for rattlesnakes before sitting down, eye scraggly-looking strangers with initial suspicion.  Just as we don’t display jewelry or electronic gear when walking through city streets, we don’t invite trouble in the boondocks.

At home we feel safe in general. Our home bordering  the El Dorado National Forest is hidden from the road and seems immune even from the occasional El Dorado County crime.  So, when we saw a paw print in the pollen on a bedroom window, we were startled. What could have made a print that large, more than four feet above the ground? It was definitely  nothing human.

Our first thought was the neighbor’s large dog, which tends to wander through our yard and leave his paw prints on everything, but we compared the print with the original dog paws, and realized this animal was much larger.

Could it have been a black bear? Bears do wander into the surrounding area once in a while, and the paw looked like the right size. Bears are notorious for tearing apart anything that might contain food, and that might give us a clue.  In a nearby area not long ago, a bear broke into a cabin where the owner had left a liquor supply. After smashing a bottle of rum, the bear promptly lapped up the rum, got very drunk, and tore apart everything in the cabin. So we looked around for any disturbance, found our compost pile looked untouched, remembered that we have no liquor, and concluded that our visitor was not a bear.

That left us with the frightening main possibility that a mountain lion had been there. The print seems to match those I found online, but I am no expert on identifying animal tracks. (Or scat, aside from deer and dog poop.) We plan to have the county trapper look at a photo of the print soon. In the meantime, we will be a little more cautious walking in the woods—or even walking out the front door.