Tehachapi to Bakersfield

The drive from Tehachapi to the Bakersfield Flying J is an easy 56 miles.  By Tehachapi you are out of the true desert, and shortly winding through the Tehachapi Mountains which are covered in oak and grassland.  This is lovely scenery.  It is only the last day of Spring and already the grass in these hills has dried, yet it is not a dead brown. The hills are a bright, wonderful shade of gold.  Which must explain why there is a community nearby called Golden Hills.  This landscape is so different from the lush green of the Midwest or the rich greengrass of Wyoming.  This grass must make haste with the short wet season, flushing out in green with the rains of late winter and very early spring, heading out and drying long before summer begins.  But it is no less beautiful and it tugs at my heart, because although I am still nearly 300 miles from home, this is a landscape I've known all my life.  It is not unlike what the hills of Yerba Buena, later to be called San Francisco, must have looked like before they were transformed by steam shovel into the densely built city where I was born.  These rolling, golden hills dotted with oak trees are found in many places in central California, and I’ve known and loved them all my life.

These are particularly spectacular examples of this kind of landscape, and that alone makes them worth seeing, but when you add in the trains you get a picture that is almost too perfect to be believed.  Tehachapi’s trains are beloved by rail fans, and there are few more picturesque places to trainspot.  As I drove along, to my left a long train wound among the hills.  I actually watched this train rolling through two tunnels at the same time.  There might possibly have even been a third tunnel, I couldn’t tell.  But I can promise you that parts of the train were visible on both sides of one tunnel while rolling out of a second tunnel.  It was so perfect it looked like an intricately designed model train display come to life.  If you love (or even just like) trains, part of a day hanging in and around Tehachapi and the Tehachapi Mountains will reward you with many fantastic vistas of trains in striking scenery.  It’s a great chance for photographers with a little skill.  Which I’m afraid I don’t have much of, and anyway I was driving, so there was no chance for me to catch that perfect picture for you, the one of the long train winding its way around the shoulders of the mountains and in and out of tunnels.

I grabbed this pic from here, which is a good read about Highway 58, a very scenic road, by the way, with awesome views of the Mojave Desert scenery, my beloved Joshua Trees, and the Tehachapis.

 

Before long I was descending into California’s great Central Valley.  This is the breadbasket of the state, and in fact grows food that supplies much of the country.  It is rich agricultural land, with a mild climate that allows multiple crops a year.  Irrigation and flood control have transformed the historical feast or famine cycle of flood and dry into an evenly watered farmland that produces huge amounts of food crops.  Bakersfield has oil wells, and is known for that “Bakersfield sound,” made famous by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.  Some views as you drive through Bakersfield look arid and dry, with pump jacks nodding in the flat, white distance.  But other angles let you see the abundant farmland that surrounds the city.  Bakersfield is a bit of a rough and scruffy town, but like a lot of other places that have grown up with time, new development has slapped a bit of a genteel topcoat onto much of it.

I wasn’t spending much time in Bakersfield.  A quick stop at the Flying J to get a quart of oil for Goose (she only used one and a half quarts in more than five thousand miles of hard driving!!!), a chance to walk around a little, fix a fresh cold drink and use the facilities, and I was on my way.  It was odd to think about the last time I had been at that Flying J.  It had been less than six months ago, coming home from Slab City with friends just after New Year’s.  I was numb with both grief and wonder.  Wonder at the great gift of healing and love I’d been given, and grief at the loss of an extraordinary human being who had shared his last days and hours of life with me.  That had been winter, with the damp and chill so bleak after the hard, dry, brightness of Slab City.  Now it was summer, and the sun was hot, the air full of birdsong even over the rumbling of the trucks idling, the smell of growing things mixed with diesel exhaust.  It was a different season, and I was close to having accomplished a great task and come through a great adventure.  But I was not home yet.  I was afraid of getting cocky and jinxing the whole thing with overconfidence, so I tried to treat these last miles as just another part of the drive.

I pulled out onto the road, a short jog north on 99, a westward cutover on 46, and then north on 5.  Next stop, Harris Ranch.