After our rest day —the day of plumbing and then a quiet riverside afternoon—we are ready to get back into action.
For an adventure trip on the open road, it’s amusing how quickly we have adopted routines. We love our coffee shop mornings and our afternoons climbing at School Rock. Today we see no need to deviate from that routine.
Travel always reminds me of the value of routines. The word routine has a negative edge, connoting dreary repetition or boredom. But at their best, routines are essential to helping us live the lives we want. The word derives from “a way, a road, space for passage” and suggests a “customary path for animals”, perhaps to drink water. Good routines are efficient, repeatable processes for reliably doing the tasks we consider important. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve appreciated the ability to create home routines that sustain my passions. On a good day, I wake up around five, brew a cup of coffee, and write until it’s time to wake up my children or prepare for work. That routine helps me complete one of my most meaningful and important tasks before most of the world rises. My afternoon and evening routines include exercise, time with my kids, and time with Hannah. I’ve repeatedly read that the lives of highly successful people often look quite boring, because their entire lives are structured around routines that support their calling. Stephen Wolfram comes to mind, who has taken this to an extreme; it looks over-the-top, and yet one senses he has designed exactly the life he wants.
A trip like this upends routines. We wake up in different places each day, and at different times. Our sleep quality varies with our campsite and itinerary. It’s after seven by the time we make it to the coffee shop, and my journaling has taken me out of the flow of writing my book. We eat intermittently throughout the day at odd times. Every day holds a different schedule. The rewards of this lifestyle include novel experiences, adventure, and delight at the unexpected. Yet our vagabond existence also comes with tradeoffs: tremendous time given to daily chores, a growing sense of fatigue, a severe decline in productivity. I partly came here to write, but I’m writing less than I did at home.
So we naturally develop new routines, structuring our vanlife days to swiftly deal with chores and maximize the things we care about: reading, writing, talking, climbing, resting in nature.
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Those routines are about to be disrupted, however: today is our last day in Donner Pass. This evening we will drive to Fresno, where we will stay the night at a Love’s truck stop to facilitate picking up my friend Sam from the airport in the morning. Then it’s off to Yosemite Valley.
Before leaving, we make one last trip to School Rock. On our previous two trips, we climbed Kindergarten Slab. Today we take on a new two-pitch climb, Kindergarten Crack, which begins by following a crack up a dihedral. Unlike the previous climb, this pitch is vertical. It isn’t hard climbing, but climbing anything vertical on trad gear is still a mind game for me. But it’s important to do something new, to keep pushing my limits outward, to ensure that our routines don’t lead to complacency. Within the daily framework we have established here, I want to keep growing.
The climb is uneventful. I feel good; I’m learning. What spooked me a few days ago now feels at least somewhat routine. Halfway up the climb, we belay next to another pair of climbers. I love chatting with strangers at our little improvised outpost 75 feet up a rock face, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Hannah and I both dream about trying “big wall” climbing someday and spending a night in a porta-ledge, a kind of hanging tent for multi-day climbs. This brief belay stop is enough for today.
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After our climb, we start our long descent down Highway 80 toward Sacramento and then Fresno. The pristine alpine environment transforms with each passing mile. The temperature rises. The pure blue sky becomes hazy with dust. This isn’t the California of postcards; it’s the inhospitable white space on the map between San Francisco Bay and the Sierras.
Still, it’s California. I introduce Hannah to In’N’Out Burger. Afterwards, we stop by Winston Smith Books in Auburn, a lovely independent bookstore. Continuing on my nature kick, I pick up a first edition hardcover of Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. Hannah finds a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, inspired by a discussion of the book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s High Sierra: A Love Story. Kerouac wrote the book after spending time in the Sierra Nevada and Cascades with the outdoorsman and poet Gary Snyder.
As we leave the mountains behind, we talk about the accessibility of wilderness. We’re both enchanted with Truckee, but the population enjoying this area is almost all white and affluent, with high representation from Silicon Valley. I spot three Tesla cybertrucks, a vehicle I’ve never seen in person before, amidst the Jeeps and luxury SUVs and other Teslas. I wonder about the barriers preventing other demographics from enjoying such a beautiful place. Basic supply and demand play a huge role. Wilderness as beautiful as Donner Pass is scarce, and what’s scarce inevitably becomes expensive. The median property value in Truckee was $675,000 in 2020, then nearly doubled after the pandemic. I can’t get upset at the demand, because I’m a part of it; I’m a reasonably affluent tech-minded professional who dreams of living in a place like Truckee. Perhaps the problem is on the supply side. Perhaps we have a crisis of wilderness scarcity, just as we do of housing scarcity.
The economics of California’s wild places are very different from Alabama, which lacks the concentrated grandeur of California’s mountains but has abundant forest, hundreds of small lakes, and a much smaller population vying for a place outside. I have learned to love this about Alabama: the multitude of campsites, the ease of making last-minute travel plans, the accessibility of the outdoors to all demographics. If the state’s wilderness lacks majesty, it at least offers everyone a place.
We pull into Love’s Truck Stop just after sunset. It has been a long time since I’ve seen such a big sky. It has its own kind of beauty, with the bold lights of the travel stop glowing hazily through the dust of the flat, empty landscape beyond. We’re at the opposite end of the socioeconomic hierarchy now. In the parking spot beside us, a leather-faced man sleeps in the driver’s seat of a battered blue pick-up truck. What I assume are his worldly possessions are wrapped in trash bags in the truck bed, presumably to protect them from rain. An emaciated trucker with a cigarette dangling from her mouth sets her pet possum loose in the dog park; when it escapes into the parking lot, perhaps drawn onward by some primal instinct to fulfill its destiny as roadkill, she leaps the fence and drags it by the tail back to the dog park, where she stuffs it into a zippered handbag.
There is something beautiful about all this too, this crossroads where the lives of so many human beings briefly intersect. This is my first time overnighting at a travel stop. It has its own subculture, and I take the time to slow down, look, and try to appreciate everything happening around me: the 24/7 bustle, the hundreds of families pouring through on their roadtrips, the rows and rows of semi trucks that serve as the arteries and veins of modern civilization. It’s a modern-day caravanserai, an American silk road.