Road Trip to Oregon

During the last of March 2008 I decided to drive to Oregon to see my son Dean and his girls. It is about a thousand-mile drive so I had a lot of time to think random thoughts. Here are some of them.

Starting from Newport Beach, I needed to drive through Los Angeles. After moving along in semi stop and go traffic for the first two hours I was finally leaving the Los Angeles basin on highway interstate 5. The highway at this point had four lanes going north. I was on my way up a grade in the Sierra Madre Mountains just past Castaic when two police cars passed me with sirens blasting. I was in the 2nd lane when they passed me and up ahead the two right hand lanes were blocked with trucks. The two police cars squeezed around these trucks on the highway shoulder. As I passed the trucks I saw that a charter bus blocked them with his rear end in the shoulder lane and its front end angled into the next lane. Behind the bus a police car was parked facing down the hill. The right hand door was open and a policeman was standing behind it in a shooting position aiming his gun. Now I knew a red blooded American would swerve over to the curb, jump out of the car, run down to the policeman, and ask the policeman what the problem was.

Not me! I hunkered down in my seat, glued my eyes to the highway in front and hit the gas. I am a gun owner and learned to shoot when I was in the service during the Korean War. I don’t think that hardly anyone realizes just how far a wayward bullet can travel.

Driving along the freeway I thought about the road signs that display distances to city’s and to exit roads. Signs with a lighter green were slowly replacing the forest green road signs. In fact the latest signs replaced were lighter ones yet. I remember when the first freeways were built in Los Angeles. There was a government department responsible for making the signs. The department staff did a study on sign design and visibility and determined that the best sign would be colored green with white letters. The only dissenter was the department head; he wanted the signs to be blue. Since we have a democratic country, it was agreed that blue was the best color and for decades all the signs were blue. When the department head retired or maybe earlier, it was discovered that he was colorblind. From then on all the new signs were green.

When I was passing Sacramento some other memories popped into my head. It had to do with the cities history. You might say that Sacramento was the gateway to the gold fields. It supplied the gold fields with the goods the miner’s needed. It was located next to the Sacramento River right where the American river flowed into it. The 49ers that came by ship to San Francisco took a riverboat up the Sacramento River to where they could go up the American river to the gold fields. As a result, as in San Francisco, there were a lot of wealthy people sprouting up in Sacramento and feeling their importance and power. This enormous wealth set in motion California statehood. The merchants and bankers in Sacramento wanted the California capital to be in their city. There was one very serious problem. Every five years or so the Sacramento River overflowed and flooded the city. Nobody wanted a state capital to be flooded ever.

What to do? The Mississippi River was similar to Sacramento in that it periodically overflowed. Although we think of New Orleans now because of Katrina, it really came into being as the first dry land next to the Mississippi that ocean ships up from coast could dock. I think that was the French Quarter. Riverboats would bring the cotton down the river to sell their goods so it to was a big money city. Unfortunately there was only a small strip of land above flood height. As the city grew swamps and lakes were emptied and homes built. So levies were built to tame the mighty river and hurricanes. History has shown us that levies invariably fail. As some of New Orleans citizens learned, their homes were built on land some 40 feet below sea level.

But the founding fathers of Sacramento had a better idea, although seemingly not feasible. That is, raise the city above flood height. Raising the city by 10 feet was determined as the best practical height. They built 10-foot walls along the outside edges of each street and then filled them to the top with dirt and rock to make new streets. Two story buildings lined most of the streets. As 10 feet is the normal height of the 2nd floor, the owner had the option of making the 1st floor a basement and putting a front door on the 2nd floor or by doing a complete rebuild. I understand that most of the owners did a rebuild. By doing this construction they won the state capital for Sacramento. As a matter of interest, the raised area is now called Old Sacramento and is a state park.

When I was driving from Sacramento to Redding, I passed by many fields of rice. These fields were quite different from the ones I saw in Japan or Korea. Most of the fields there were considerably smaller, in terraced land and looked to be family owned. Someone was generally working somewhere in the fields. In Korea, most all of the farmers use the same piece of equipment. It had a one-cylinder gasoline motor that drove a single front wheel that was under it and toward the front. Then came the plow blades that were controlled with wheelbarrow handlebars by the farmer in the back. When not plowing, the blades were removed and it was used as a water pump or for every other job that needed to be done. A wagon was attached behind to make a three-wheeled cart for going to market etc. Farmers on the road at night were a real hazard to themselves and to automobiles. The carts did not have lights and creeped along the roads. What made it extra dangerous was that the roads were narrow, didn’t have shoulders or turnouts, and had three foot ditches on both sides. The radar sites that I visited were always in these rural or remote areas. Several of the Korean air force pilots that I worked with refused to ever drive at night.

I have drifted from the subject of rice fields. Here in California, the land is leveled with machines using lasers and GPS. This flat land is flooded with the correct amount of water. The rice seeds are sown from airplanes. Bugs are controlled by crop spraying from airplanes. The rice is harvested by combine machines that cut the stalks, remove the rice from the husks (threshing) and bundle the rice and the stalks. No one is in the fields.

I’m back to driving along this long and straight highway heading for Redding. All of sudden, coming over a small hill, there in the distance, rising from the center of the road is a beautiful snow capped mountain, Mt. Shasta!

 

After Redding I started the drive up through the Klamath water shed in the Cascade Mountain range. The picture I took of Mount Shasta was taken at a roadside viewpoint after passing Shasta Lake. Later I was much closer to the mountain. What impressed me most then was that you could see large areas on the side of the mountain where there had been many avalanches.

When I was around the California/Oregon state line I was coming up the grade to Siskiyou summit. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shinning with hardly a cloud in the sky. There were only a few patches of snow and they were well up the mountain. What a difference though when I crossed the summit! Clouds covered me and the sun was totally blocked out. And it was suddenly very cold. Snow was down to both sides of the road. It was pretty obvious to me that I had left sunny California and was now in Oregon. I thought, weren’t the Californians in power wise to pick this spot as a good place for the border to another world. Actually this northern border was established by the powers in Washington for their own reasons to latitude 42º as they did for Nevada and Utah. I’m reluctant to admit it, but seeing the ice and snow covered tree branches, the water flows of icicles, the majestic mountains and the awesome view, the beauty of it all was overwhelming.

Well, here I am grinding along on a long trip so I lapsed into thinking of how it was for me in the past. It had to do with a warning light on the dashboard of my KIA minivan that showed O/D OFF. I was thinking, what a difference road travel is today than it was when I was growing up. Mountain roads were seldom more than two lanes wide, and sometimes just a single lane two-way road. The grades were many times steeper than the modern roads and with a lot of ups and downs. The roads were also more winding and with lots of switchbacks. Some of the switchbacks were so sharp that a truck couldn’t make the turn without first backing up. Many of the roads were just the widening of trails the pioneers used. The roads seldom had shoulders so it was common to have either a sharp drop off the mountain on or a wall of the mountain on the other side. Road markers, street or warning lights did not exist. As you can guess these roads were dangerous and there were many head on collisions.

During the middle 1930s my family did a lot of tent camping. Our favorite campsite was at Green Valley Lake at 7,200 feet in the San Bernardino Mountains. One day climbing up the mountain in a rainstorm, rocks cascading down the mountain knocked out our car’s engine. Another time we were snaking down the mountain in a snowstorm. The road was not marked so we looked for flat spots on the side of the mountain that were not hidden by the snowdrifts. Hairpin switchback curves were especially dangerous. The one thing were didn’t want to do was to miss or slide off the road and roll down the mountain.

As a side note, maybe the biggest difference in public thinking was that if you were hurt, your car damaged etc. it was just your bad luck. You hoped any insurance you had would help but litigation was never considered. Specific out-of-pocket bills were the only items you could hope to be reimbursed.

Roads and safety measures improved rapidly through the decades. Widening roads is extremely expense so the next generation roads were expanded to three lanes. The center lane was supposed to be only for passing but drivers soon used it as a speed lane. The head-on collisions went up. The newer highways are now multi-lane with separate highways for each direction.

Trucks seldom climbed up mountain grades at more than 10-15 mph. Not that they wanted to go so slow but that was all they could do. In going up or through a mountain, car and truck engines were always overheating with boiling over radiators. Going down hill the brakes were always overheating and then failing. Speeding down a hill without breaks was always a scary and potentially a deadly thing. What everybody did to minimize brake trouble was to use the car or truck’s engine compression to give breaking power. This was accomplished by down shifting the transmission to a lower speed. The vehicle wheels would then force the engine to rotate against its own compression. This required a manual transmission. Manual transmissions are still around but most people today don’t know anything about transmissions except that they are automatic.

Engines work better and give the maximum power at a single speed. For the speed you want to go, the transmission tries to match a mechanical gear to that optimum engine speed. With a manual transmission, to shift gears the driver needs to separate the engine from the rear wheels (rear wheel drive cars and trucks were the norm.) This was done with a ‘clutch’ by pressing a pedal down with the left foot. The right arm pushed a ‘shift’ lever that changed the engines gears to a higher or lower ratio. When the engine speed, the new gear ratio, and the car speed were compatible, the driver would release the clutch pedal. Doing this badly resulted in a terrible grinding of gears or worst yet, a separation of the engine from the car wheels. Automatic transmissions did all this for you and were really a marvelous advancement.

When I was growing up, driving a car, and especially a truck, was physically hard work. Without today’s power steering it was not possible to turn the steering wheel without the car moving. Without power breaks you needed a very strong leg to push down the brake pedal and then you could never stop fast. And the clutch.  Driving with a lot of stops and goes were really tough on the left leg. Trucks are many times as large and heavier than a car and required a lot more strength and physical conditioning. I know since I drove my father’s 1Â ton to help him and drove world II 2Â ton trucks when I was in the Korean War service. Driving in today’s stop and go traffic would be a nightmare without the automatic transmission

This whole story on manual transmissions was just a warm-up to what made me think about them. It had to do with the warning indicator on my dashboard that showed O/D OFF. I had driven my KIA minivan for a couple of years and I had never seen it before. It forced me to read the car’s manual for the first time. It meant overdrive off. So how many know what overdrive is? Well even if you do know I will tell you again. When automatic transmissions were first introduced to the car buying public in the 1940s they were a long way from where they are today. For one thing they had a limited number of gears. As car engines became more powerful people wanted to go faster, they needed a higher gear ratio than what was supplied. When the transmissions were upgraded the new gear was promoted as ‘overdrive.’ Overdrive today is known as Drive or ‘D’ on the transmission indicator. The forward drive selector on my KIA was: ‘D’, ‘3rd’ & ‘Low’. I always wondered what happened to 2nd but I knew that the Koreans had there own way of doing things. For instance, they have ‘low’ as the last gear, where I was taught that ‘low’ was the first gear. Now I understood that my KIA transmission really had four forward gears. When O/D OFF showed the top gear was now ‘2nd’ and not ‘D’. This was important as it allowed me to use the engine’s compression to keep my speed down to 60-65 on the long down grades without using my brakes. What a pleasure that is. Especially since my brakes tend to chatter and that’s not good.

I have another story about transmissions. I have a friend, Lon who can’t imagine driving a truck without a manual shift. Through the years Lon has down graded his trucks to smaller one-ton diesel pickups. He is still a Ford man though he is always bad mouthing Ford. A few years ago he wanted to purchase a new Ford pickup with specific specifications. He demanded a manual transmission. No mechanical contraption was going to tell him which gear to use. What I thought odd was that Lon told me that the sales man at the Ford agency told him that the manual transmission that he wanted could not be sold in California. The salesman said that using compression to slow down on hills created too much smog emissions. I understand the concerns but I wonder if it was just normal salesman B.S. Maybe to cut costs the owner just stocked trucks with automatic transmissions. Lon went to Nevada and bought the truck he wanted.

Now I am going over the Klamath Mountains on a four-lane road going 60-70 mph. And the big trucks go up and down the grades without hardly slowing down or speeding up. Cars entered a new age after World War II. Car manufacturers only built military vehicles during the war, which was the time when technology, blossomed.

One of the biggest advancements in trucking is the automatic steering of the rear wheels. I don’t know how it works or what criteria it uses but it has enabled longer, bigger and heavier trucks to navigate turns that they could not do before. You probably remember the old hook-an-ladder fire engine trucks that had a man in his own cab over the rear wheels to steer them. They needed to be long to carry the long ladders. These fire trucks are still around but the tall ladders are not considered as necessary any more. They have been replaced by telescoping cranes that are controlled by a person riding in a platform on the end of the boom. Fire hoses don’t need to be pulled up ladders by firemen anymore either. Instead they are at the end of their own telescoping cranes. You hardly ever see anyone standing on a ladder anymore.

What I found to be amazing though, were the truck cabs pulling what looked to me like a long beam for a bridge span. The beam was made of steel rods and cement and looked to be about 100 ft long. The trailer had at least 16 tires to support each end of the beam. I Saw three of them Going along Interstate 5 during the day with the regular traffic, heading up into the Klamath mountains. That would be impossible without automatic rear wheel steering.

And fast food! What a great convenience. When I was growing up the closest thing we had were lunch counters and other family restaurants, a lot of ma and pa hole-in-the-walls. We did have some drive-ins though. There were car parking spots facing in all around the drive-in. One of many young girls would rush over to your driver side window for your order. A little later she would return with a tray loaded with your order to which she would attach to your door by latching it to the door window frame. I recently saw a reincarnation of the drive-in when visiting Palm Springs. To speed up service the girls were on roller skates.

On my return trip, just over Siskiyou Summit I stopped at a rest stop next to the Klamath River. What I saw were a lot of ring-billed seagulls. The ring-billed seagull is the most abundant gull at Newport Beach and some are resident all year around. The ring-bills at the rest stop were decked out in their finest suits and raising hell with the other gulls. I couldn’t tell if the gulls that frantically got away from the aggressors were cowed males or disinterested females. Most all birds migrate and I guess that is one of the places that they make chicks.

The last incident on my trip was at the rest stop near Tejon Pass. I got a review lesson in physics. The volume of a gas depends on its temperature and the pressure containing it. I was visiting my daughter Mignon in the San Francisco area. I had one of the new plastic mayonnaise containers with the flat dispenser cap. I had stored it in her refrigerator on its cap, upside down so the mayonnaise would all be at the cap and dispense smoothly by squeezing the sides. But I wasn’t at sea level now and it was warmer. Tejon Pass is over 4 thousand feet where the air is thinner. I took my lunch box out to a picnic table and got ready to make a sandwich. I turned the mayonnaise bottle right side up and flipped the cap open.

A fountain of mayonnaise shot straight up about a foot. It curved over toward me and deposited several tablespoons of mayonnaise all over my lap! What a mess. I was thankful that my next stop would be at home. As expected when back at home by the ocean, the mayonnaise bottle now in my refrigerator with the Tejon Pass air trapped inside, the sides of the bottle collapsed inward.