On the Back Roads (12 page)

Rod McQuillan teaches math in the valley schools. In the early 1970, he and his wife Jackie left southern California bound for Idaho. But they found Surprise Valley first and never left. In 1989, they bought the fourteen-room Sunrise Motel and RV Park in Cedarville.

“He's made of spring steel,” someone said of fifty-four-year-old Rod. Followed everywhere by Ralph, his foot-high terrier, Rod starts his days at 6:00 a.m., unless the sun comes up earlier. Like most small-town entrepreneurs, Rod has no fantasies of getting rich. In fact, he is taking out most of his revenue-producing RV sites to put in trees, shuffleboard, and a putting green.

“Why create amenities for motel guests who just come here to sleep?” I ask.

“Makes my head feel good.”

Janet Irene is another high-energy entrepreneur who understands small-town economics. A few years back, she stood in front of her half-empty duplex on Main Street and wondered, “What should I do with this wonderful old building?” Now alone, her two children grown, the valley has been her home for twenty-five years. “Maybe a place for folks to eat,” she thought. Although her only experience with restaurants was having eaten in a few, she drained her savings and turned half of the duplex into the Country Hearth Bakery and Restaurant. As money came in, she expanded it. “I don't believe in borrowing,” she said. “People should not spend what they don't have.” Fact is, she doesn't even take credit cards.

“Surround yours elf with what you like and make your work your hobby,” is Jan's approach to life. As for surroundings, her needle point decorates the res tau rant. Kerosene lamps with tall glass chimneys dress every table. At night, they light the restaurant. “In Georgia, where I grew up in the Okefenokee Swamp, the glow of a kerosene lantern adds a soft sweetness to everything.”

Boarded-up buildings tell of what worked here once but doesn't anymore. A movie theater. A flour mill. A trading post. All castoffs. On some buildings, For Sale signs tell of abstract hopes. On others, caved-in roofs tell of no hope at all.

Without a doubt, the American pioneer still flourishes out here. Their covered wagons go faster, their roads are better, they have most of the comforts and discomforts we all share, but they live close to the land. While our predecessors of a century ago made towns from almost nothing, these pioneers are reshaping them from what was left over and left behind.

Most buildings in Surprise Valley have been recycled and reclaimed, many more than once, but never replaced. Some have simply evolved. For example, the combination pool hall, bar, and paperback library in Eagleville—the next town over—was built in 1891 to be a general store. Which it was and might still be were it not for the guy who somehow
hauled a pool table into the valley over Fandango Pass. That was in 1931, the same year he put the pool table in the store. Today, the original plank floor of the old store has a boot-worn furrow circling the pool table. Obviously, the folks in Eagleville wanted a pool hall more than they wanted a store. Apparently, they still do. The store was never renovated. It just evolved.

Dave Hunt's corner grocery, built in 1900, is a recycled branch of the Bank of America. He's got the vault to prove the building's ancestry. He just wishes he had the vault door.

“And now you take in cash for vodka and chewing tobacco,” I said, examining his behind-the-counter inventory. I had stopped to say good-bye to Dave on my way out of town.

“We sell a lot of chewin' tobacco.” Dave leaned his chair back on two legs and reached for a can of mint snuff. “You know what this is? It's snuff with decaffeinated tobacco… de, denicotined is what I mean. I can always tell when its time for the road crews to get their annual physicals. About two weeks before, they start buying this stuff.” He held up the can. “Don't know who they're fooling. Somebody, I guess.”

I told Dave that I was heading south but would be back some day.

“Don't open any sucker jars!”

T
he Sierra Nevadas thrust their jagged peaks far beyond the timberline, the forest habit at of the largest and the oldest living things on Earth. A single block of granite, the Sierras form a continuous barrier along much of the California-Nevada border. Stretching about 400 miles, they run half the length of California. Winter in these mountains allows southern Californians to boast of skiing on fresh snow after breakfast and swimming in the ocean after lunch.

They are the loftiest mountain range in the country {excluding Alaska}, with a dozen peaks rising more than 14,000 feet. Forests of pine and fir cover the western slopes to an elevation of 9,000 feet. Here are groves of sequoias, some of the largest trees in the world, and three national parks: Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia. At lower elevations grow bristlecone pines, the oldest known living things. The range was named for the Sierra Nevadas in Spain, which contain that country's highest mountains. There the word means “Snowy Range.”

It was the Sierra Nevadas, tame and running out of elevation, that I crossed to get into Surprise Valley. Now I travel east of them, heading southbound through Nevada. To get on
the other side and into California, the obvious choices are the wide-bodied Interstate 80 through Reno or maybe Highway 50 out of Carson City and by busy Lake Tahoe.

If I use either of those, the easiest routes, I will miss something for sure. Those roads are for traveling, not for journeys. The map shows another route, a black line over the mountains with a number 88. It lay just ahead. Why not?

N
owhere in this whole county is there a high-school football game on a fall Saturday or a basketball game when the snow flies. They don't even have a high school prom up here. In Alpine County, kids don't get to eat a Big Mac, hang out in a 7-Eleven, or go to a movie here. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't see a dentist in this county. Credit geography and blame their forefathers for this happenstance. It goes back to 1854, when they were drawing up country boundaries.

Alpine County has no high schools, theaters, Golden Arches, dentists, 7-Elevens, banks, ATMs, or traffic lights. It's tied together by one road that goes over Ebbetts Pass, elevation 8,730 feet. The pass is closed in the winter, which can be six months. So the county is split in two—economically, politic ally, and socially. That's why Alpine County has no high schools. After the split, it's just too small.

High in the rustic timber country of the eastern Sierras, it is a speck on the mammoth range that is most of California's east side. It ranks eighth in smallness among California's fifty-eight counties (776 square miles) and first in the least number of people. A county official has rounded off the population
at 1,200. Others say that's bogus since a third of them don't live here in the winter.

Markleeville, elevation 5,500 feet and population 165, is on the west side of the pass. It is the county seat. Kids here go to high school in the next county, which is Douglas, in the next state, which is Nevada. In fact, people up here do most things in Nevada. They think of it as “downtown,” and speak of it as “down the hill.” More than that, they identify with Nevada. Many of them fervently wish that they were part of it and get frustrated that they aren't.

Radio stations heard here are all in Nevada. So the talk shows rehash issues of that state and maybe national ones, but certainly not those of California. Their “local” television is from Reno, even on cable.

As in Surprise Valley, the Sacramento Bee is available, but most everybody in Markleeville reads the Record Courier, the daily paper of nearby Minden, Nevada. “How can I do my shopping without knowing where the sales are?” That's how one lady explained her preference for the Nevada newspaper.

Politically, it's a real mess. Local media blanket them with Nevada politics, but to vote intelligently in their home state, it's a research project. Although Ronald Reagan was governor of California for eight years, Nancy Thornburg, a forty-year resident here, admitted, “I never saw Reagan on television until he ran for president.”

Nancy is the historian of the county. The magnificent museum here had been her work, more her passion, since 1964. We drank ice tea together in The Deli. Her visit was shortened by a leg of lamb. One of her three daughters was having a thirty-something birthday dinner. Nancy had to leave to get the roast in the oven.

Before leaving, Nancyn told me that Jacob Marklee homesteaded 160 acres here, ran a road through it, set up a toll station, and collected money from the wagon trains that passed through. Sounded to me like he was an uncharitable opportunist, but she said it was a common practice then. Wagon masters willingly paid any man who made a road for them. Apparently one person was not so willing, or at least
not happy, with Marklee. His enterprise ended when someone put an ax in his head. Still his name lives in the town he founded in 1861.

Silver mines boomed here in the late 1850s. That's why they had to create the county. They needed a place to file mining claims. Alpine County's population peaked at 5,000 in the 1860s, supported by mining, logging, and ranching.

Logging lasted after Mother Nature quit giving out silver and the mines closed. Eventually logging shut down too, not because Mother Nat ure quit making trees but because politicians and environ mentalists began running the timber industry. Some ranching goes on, but tourism and county government is what supports Markleeville today.

“This county is about 95 percent government land, all timber. They own it. They control what happens on it. We used to share in the revenue from logging, but that's gone, and most of our tax base with it,” Nancy explained. She paused, as if to collect the right words. “The real problem—the irony of it—is that Smokey the Bear has done his job too well. We have overprotected these forests to where we can't touch them. Unfortunately, we can't protect them from what they are full of—bugs and rot. That creates a dangerous fire risk that gets worse all the time.”

Nancy compared her life in a tinder-dry national forest to that on an earthquake fault. Disaster will strike someday. The only question is when. “We are surrounded by a real fire threat,” she said. “What we need, what we have pleaded for, is fuel reduction. Some selective clearing and cutting. It is too explosive now.”

The degree of fire danger is determined every day by the U.S. Forest Service and posted at conspicuous places. Approaching town this morning, the sign I read warned of High Fire Danger. The next level up is Extreme. Beyond that, there is no warning, at least on posted signs. Last year they had five days of extreme fire danger here.

The Deli belongs to Warren and DeAnne Jang. They work in it all day, part of the night Saturday, and live over the general store next door. DeAnne's parents own that. They close
in the winter and work in their other deli on the other side of the mountain.

Under a tack on the wall are dollar bills. “One for every year,” Warren explained. “The first dollar we make each season, we tack up there. The same customer has provided three out of the five.”

At the sandwich center, where DeAnne spends most of her day, the line of orders hanging on clothespins was getting longer. Assorted administrators and adjudicators of Alpine County sat under umbrellas on the front deck. The county offices were closed for lunch.

The courthouse, next to the general store, was built in 1928. It's not the oldest building in town but will be someday. Made of gray stone, it has that look of immortality, the requisite of a county courthouse in the American West. It is definitely unlike the aged, wood-frame structures that line the rest of Markleeville, about two blocks on both sides of Highway 89.

There are no sidewalks. “It saves the trouble of rolling them up at night,” Dean McKinley said, from a seat at the bar of the Cutthroat Saloon. The Saloon's mal or business, according to Dean? “Lotto tickets! Buyers come up from Nevada. This is the biggest Lotto place in California.”

“They told me that at Stateline, down on I-15.”

“Well, then, the second biggest.”

The Cutthroat Saloon, part of the Alpine Hotel, was moved here board by board from somewhere else in 1886. Many of its original square nails still hold it together. This place, and Mario the owner, are popular with weekend motorcyclists. In front of the Saloon, a sign reads Harley Parking Only.

Dean looks to be in his forties, lives alone on some wooded acreage, seldom gets a haircut, and seems to suffer little from having no visible means of support. “Next weekend is Mario's birthday,” Dean told me. “This town will be all motorcycles. Mario throws a free barbecue, the biggest in the state.”

Dean looked at me expectantly. I had nothing to say.

“Yep, the biggest in the state, probably anywhere.” Unchallenged, he now felt safe with the claim.

Dean goes south in the winter. “I'm back in the spring, in time to see the arrival of the white license plates. They're like an invading species each summer, driving hither and thither, burning up government gas and polluting the air. They ought to be required to carpool and pick up folks hitching rides,” Dean said.

“You talking about the Forest Service?”

“Well, the botanists, archaeologists, geologists, and whatever-else-ists they send up here. Most of them are still wet behind the ears. They are not elected by anyone. They don't even live here. I never see ‘em at night, like to talk to. Yet they have more to say on what happens in this county than everybody else put together. Shouldn't be! Just ain't right.”

With that, Dean stormed out the door and headed across the street. His drink was still on the bar.

“He'll be back,” the bartender said. “He just went to get his mail.”