As I said yesterday, we elected to just drive back to Los Angeles rather than depend on an airline that seemed less than reliable. They were possibly going to downsize the aircraft from a Dornier 328 jet to a Beech Kingair. For those not in the know, that’s about a loss of 15+ seats and not great for standbys. We never did get any solid information on whether or not the plane actually left, but we had already been back in L.A. for more than three hours by the time it was scheduled to land (which we don’t think it did). UPDATE (as of Aug 25): The plane did eventually depart…but about 20 hours late and from a different airport. It diverted to Fresno yesterday afternoon and later made it to Bishop in the Eastern Sierras, a different airport from its original scheduled stop. It then flew from Bishop to Carlsbad, California (north of San Diego), and then took off and finally landed in Mammoth just before midnight. It didn’t make it back to Hawthorne (close to LAX) until the next day around noon. This would have been rather problematic for us as we would not have had a car, a hotel, or a plan.
So if you plan on flying Advanced Air, expect the experience to be a bit basic.
After grabbing a few pastries at the nearby bakery, we packed all of our things and made one last stop to the rock shop. I was telling Nicole about geodes and how I was given one for free in some national park area shop when I was about 9. The problem was that they gave it to me as a whole rock, so it wasn’t for another year or so that I was able to ask some workers at our house to use their big saws to cut it open and expose the crystals inside. Nicole was so inspired by this story that she wanted to acquire her own geode.
Luckily, Nicole could get her geode cut open on the spot. She seemed pleased with the results. It’s the kind of service and focus that you expect from the rock shop. With luggage and rock in hand, we got in the car and started heading southeast. It was a bit unfortunate to have to drive that distance on the same day that work was being done on the 405 that resulted in the closing down of 3 lanes and a 30 minute delay. Flying over that gridlock would have been nice. Nevertheless, the long drive gave us some time to ponder our brief sojourn to Owens Valley.
This was obviously not the most normal of weekend getaways, but I had wanted to visit an internment camp and Nicole is usually game for a bit of dark history. I got some valuable footage for my documentary and even learned a few things. The biggest takeaway having had to drive it both ways is the real isolation of it all. It may have taken us nearly four hours each way, but imagine doing the route on a packed Greyhound bus in 1942 when the roads weren’t so good. Furthermore, it is perhaps a little insulting to the folks in Lone Pine that their area was chosen as one of the most isolated in the country.
If you’re wondering, Lone Pine got its name from an incident in 1955, when Marty McFly drove over one of two twin pines in a DeLorean at old man Peabody’s tree farm. The rest as they say is cinematic history. The real story, however, is not all that different, but does not include a red-vested teenager driving a DeLorean. Anyway, Lone Pine is a bit of a sleepy town. Its persistence in time seems to be a result of hikers using it as a jumping off point to scale nearby Mt Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States. Most people staying here did not appear to be in town to check out an internment camp.
At times, it was hard to remember where we were as it certainly didn’t feel like the California we know. Lost in time and purpose, Lone Pine is in many ways a time capsule for a different era. Food options were of course limited and Nicole was baffled by the lack of a food delivery service like DoorDash. People were friendly enough, but there was a roughness to them. The no-nonsense female bartender at Jake’s saloon could definitely have beat me up and I’m not ashamed to say it. The buildings are a bit rundown. It’s just a different way of living altogether.
Of course, all of this complaining about the town and needing to drive instead of flying is a bit petty when the backdrop of the trip is about people who had zero say about how they got to the area and when they could leave. Several books have been written by internees that painted a fairly vivid depiction of what camp life may have been like — especially at Manzanar. Even so, it was good to experience the location in person with the harsh weather that goes along with it. They weren’t joking about the wind and the dust.
The fact that the internees actually managed to grow crops in this area is a testament to their skills and ingenuity. As I was telling Nicole, I felt like I wouldn’t even have bothered to make a nice rock garden as I would probably be in denial that this was going to be anything longterm. Hopefully, we as Americans have learned something from this, but it always seemed that my American history classes ended abruptly in school. “Did you all finish reading The Grapes of Wrath? Let’s spend the next couple class periods talking about chapter 3 and the turtle crossing the road. Next week we will get into World War Two and talk about our summer plans.”
And that’s that. I have some vacation days set aside for the end of September, so you’ll all have to wait a couple weeks for more in-depth reporting from me. In the meantime, I shall work on my documentary and you can watch the NPS documentary and Back to the Future to get a sense of what this area is all about.
passports & pepto bismol 