California Rest Areas

Donner Pass, up by Soda Springs, that rest area is the exception. Ten out of ten. If there's another rest area in the whole country that hooks up to a national hiking trail system, I haven't stopped there. Donner Pass. We plan our route around how to make a stop during day light hours. Just walk out back, either 80 east or west, and keep walking. More than once we've walked across the rocks, though the pines and stopped at the lake. It's California, even in this new century. Take your clothes off and dive in. Otherwise, I give California rest areas a 5.5 overall. Usually there's no where to walk out of them. Not like Texas that backs them up to secondary roads. Not like Iowa that puts some little paths twirling over a hump of a hill and not like Tennesee that doesn't fix the breaks in the fence with lady's slippers waggling just on the other side. But California still has ghosts, dusty, trying to unwedge from cars early in the morning. Heads covered with fists of tangled hair. Their faces are pasty and underbaked. They splash water against their eyes and look like they've been traveling, searching, for weeks on end. Late at night trucks spill into the parking areas like tin cans packed on over stocked shelves. Tony and I pull in, turn off the truck, push the screens into the open windows. We throw most the covers off and settle in. In the dark, headlights twist over our heads.