The Late Afternoon of Time

"It seemed a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue pacific and it's advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldeness in the late afternoon of time ... he drove into the Oakland Bay Bridge and it carried us in. The downtown office buildings were just sparkling on their lights...." - On The Road.

Yes, indeed! Here we are! I can see the Pacific Ocean from where I'm sitting. From the Lincoln Tunnel all the way to the Oakland Bay Bridge which carried us into San Francisco late this afternoon (I have a video clip of this but it has been uploading all night and still isn't finished, so I'm going to cancel it) - we've driven across a whole continent, seemingly in a matter of minutes, as if in a dream.

From El Paso we had the longest day's driving to reach Palm Desert where we found a warm welcome and hospitality with Bud and Penny (whose real names aren't Bud and Penny, but that's what everyone calls them!). Originally we were due to break that leg of the journey in Tuscon, Arizona at the Desert House of Prayer, but because of the delay with the car we had to make up time to get back on schedule for Sean to catch his plane from SF to the UK on Friday morning. I'll be returning to Arizona the week after next to spend some time at the Desert House of Prayer.

We headed north into New Mexico and then west into Arizona with the desert becoming hotter and drier as we went. We stopped at a rest stop just before we crossed into Arizona, and an elderly woman who was walking past the car spotted the B.C. licence plates and asked us where we were from. On hearing that I'd come from Vancouver, her face lit up and she told us that she'd spent her whole married life there before moving to Ohio. In 1946 she won the 100m sprint for Canada, but then sadly suffered an injury in training and so never made the olympic team. She was our generation - she'd have been a young woman when Jack & Neal made their journey across the country in 1949. I've been thinking about this generational shift idea a lot on this trip as I've met people of Jack & Neal's generation (my parents' generation) and found a connection with them - I think of Frank who hosted me in Lowell, who was born the same year as Kerouac (1922) and who grew up in and around Lowell.

At one point on the road driving in Arizona, I looked up to the left and I was sure I could see The Lions that stand above Vancouver as if transplanted in the deserts. See what you think:


We made our way up through Arizona past Tuscon and Phoenix and then north to "towns in Arizona I'd passed in 1947 ... Wickenburg, Salome, Quartzite" stopping along the way for refreshment and to look at the amazing cacti that we could see all around us. Then on to Palm Springs and Palm Desert, where we spent two nights. Yesterday we spent a day in Joshua Tree National Park, and it was really good to have some down-time after three very full days on the road.


Today was the last leg of our journey, from Palm Desert to San Francisco. Unlike Kerouac, we didn't labour in snowy passes toward the town of Mojave, "the entry way to the great Tehachapi Pass" - no snow to be seen, only sunshine and blue skies, giving us warm temperatures.

"Up ahead we saw Tehachapi Pass starting up. Dean took the wheel and carried us clear to the top of the world. We passed a great shroudy cement factory in the canyon. Then we started down. Dean cut off the gas, threw in the clutch ... In this way we floated and flapped down to the San Joaquin Valley. It lay spread a mile below, virtually the floor of California, green and wondrous from our aeriel shelf." - On the Road.


At Bakersfield we picked up the 99 and from there it was straight up through Tulare, Selma "where I had lived and loved and worked in the spectral past" and Madera, on up to Manteca where we cut across to Oakland as late afternoon in time turned to evening, "which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in."

"...we staggered out of the car on O'Farrell Street ..."