Black-indigo Sierra

Entering the Tahoe valley at night on 80 from the Bay Area delta, the night, indigo black, folds in, heavy, a few miles northeast of Sacramento. Entering the Sierra foothills, it's tar pit black, the sky, the numerous trees that you can't see, but feel, and the slow, upwinding road add to the lost-in-space feel of the experience. It's quite striking. The mountains begin to assert their dominance as you slowly wind up to Donner Pass, where they once asserted it unequivocally, as the mass of 87 people, taking a short cut, got caught at what is now Donner Lake, just a few miles away and 2,000 feet below their golden gate that would lead to the Golden Gate, so named because it's the only exit to the ocean for landborne glaciermelt, snowmelt, rain, and mysterious groundwater for 2,000 north-south miles of central and north California. Instead, as Richard Rhodes' The Ungodly tells us, they lost half their crew that winter and some ate each other. "It was the world's worst wagon-train tragedy." What a statement!

The striking, huge bronze caste pioneer family memorial at Donner Lake State Park, at Donner Lake, where the Donner Party built roughshod cabins and lean-tos that American mythical winter, is not of any of their party, but a dude and wife and young daughter and babe-in-arms that came three years before in 1854, and called an "American hero" by the accompanying bronze plaque, for having survived alone at the lake while nursing an illness and a generally frail body.


But check out that sculpture! 20 feet tall at least, and one look at those praire-sprouted, mountain-tinged people, squat, strong, weather-beaten, mule-ish, but overwhelmingly indominatable, you feel they could muzzle-gun hunt deer and bear, huddle against wind and rain and hellish snow storms and trudge mile by mile across country and survive. It's all there in that belt.

All water west goes to the Pacific; all east of the Sierra evaporates. That means Truckee River, which courses magnificently through the charming side of the freeway of that 16,000-populated ski- and country-living town. The river's the only outlet from the great Lake Tahoe and flows east 20 or so miles to Pyramid Lake, where, if it be true, it meets its east-side Sierra evaporation fate.

Woke up in the morning and had my friend, masseuse, assess my what-must-be broken rib. The break's been pinpointed to just under my left arm, but where the ribs are still thick and heavy like a train.

She put one hand on either side of my bare-skinned back under my arms and in the morning cold grey light felt softly both sides for a few minutes, and then pinpointed the hurt. Felt like a protruding bone maybe. No good.