All Intensive Purposes

As Verlyn Klinkenborg writes, if you live in Northern California and are headed for somewhere other than Southern California or Oregon, you have to go over the Donner Pass and across Nevada on Interstate 80:

A couple of weeks ago my dad pointed out that there is only one major route out of California over the Sierra Nevada if you are north of Bakersfield. That road is Interstate 80. Other roads cross the mountains, but in a tentative, almost exploratory way. Eighty is the way in and the way out. The roadway has been blasted with cold and heat. And if, while you're climbing it, you happen to remember, as I did, that this is the one eastern crossing out of northern California, the route somehow seems unduly fragile, cutting its way through time.

It was fitting to have to beat my way out of the state against a headlong storm of rain and wind just a few degrees above ice and snow. The weather sounded an appropriately epic note for the beginning of a drive across country. And yet when we made it down at last into Reno and past Sparks and out into the open sea of sage, it struck me once again how un-epic the trip has become. I always tend to think of the whole crossing at once - from California to upstate New York. But out in the open of Nevada, heading north to Winnemucca, for instance, the sense of the whole slips away, and there we are, on a well-paved, empty patch of road, as if we were driving only from a nearby ranch exit - "No Services" - to the neighboring town.

Driving across Nevada, a few names cling as you pass - Pumpernickel Valley, Starr Valley - but what sticks in your mind is the look of the country, the floating hulks of far-off mountain ranges to the north and south. The Humboldt River was over its banks along much of the route. There was water standing everywhere, and the mountains in the distance were still thick with snow. Where there were cattle, they stood deep in the new grass.

Sometimes, dropping into one of those valleys, I caught sight of a double track making headway straight across the sage and disappearing in the distance. It might have been made by a pickup, but I imagined it was made by an old ox-drawn wagon. It was another one of those encounters with an inconceivable past, a moment when the pure obstinacy of humans rises up in all its force. Rolling along at 70 miles per hour with perfect cellphone coverage and the sound of a recorded book filling the cab of the pickup, I was nevertheless struck by how suddenly we could drop into the here-ness of place simply by pulling over to the side of the road, turning off the engine and walking off the asphalt.

I wondered whether those earlier travelers, whose greatest threat was slowness, not speed, were ever overwhelmed by the particularity of the ground they covered, or whether they kept their minds leaning constantly forward. A trip is always an abstraction, in some sense, a way of diverting attention from the step after step, the mile after mile.

Nowhere have I ever had that problem as much as in crossing Nevada (though I've never been across West Texas).