The Roquefort Files

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always had this awestruck mental image of California as being a sort of promised land, a blue-sky’d, blue-sea’d capsule of American culture where everyone and everything eventually washes up on the way to the Pacific. Having been there to see it for myself once already I really should know better than to idealise the place, and certainly for all the glitz and glamour it has warts aplenty, but still my slightly delusional fondness for it persists.

All this is to say that for a second time, crossing into the Golden State was a disappointingly anticlimactic experience. A simple welcome sign marked the border; the scrubby, rocky landscape that stretched out before us and the sun which beat down upon it were indistinguishable from the Oregon side. There was no sense of occasion.

If I might give my rose-tinted enthusiasm free reign for a moment, I am appalled at this oversight. Where’s the Hollywood bluster, the Gold Rush swagger, the knowledge that the world can visit California and come away realising that the state is a world unto itself? More specifically, where is the life-size Terminator model bidding us welcome in a grating metallic voice? Where, exactly, is the somersaulting cheerleading squad spelling out the word ‘Californ-I-A’ with the flash of pearly whites and the shake of a pom pom? I wanted something, anything to give us some clue that we weren’t in Kansas (or indeed Oregon) anymore.

But there was nothing.

Surely, at the very least, the welcome sign could display something other than a crushingly literal “Welcome to California”. Can no-one at the tourist commission marshal a thought-provoking quote, or a pithy statistic? Here you go, guys, these are on me:

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.Edward Abbey

California: richer than 96% of countries in the world, and loving it.California Legislative Analyst’s Office (paraphrasing)

You’re welcome.

Just after the state line we were flagged down at a border post and asked to declare any fruit, vegetables or meat we might have been bringing in (to keep out invasive insect and plant species). We assured the border cop that we weren’t smuggling bananas in from Oregon and headed south. Mount Shasta, still streaked with snow, loomed large in the windscreen soon after we’d crossed the border, and the I-5 took us right into its shadow through a pass at 3,000 feet. Mount Shasta is, of course, where the not-at-all-mythical Lemurians live, having emigrated there from their ancestral home of Lemuria, the not-at-all-mythical lost continent which once bridged the Indian Ocean. The Lemurians are said to have a sixth sense, an extra-sensory perception conferred by “a walnut-sized organ that protrudes from the center of their foreheads.” Just to be on the safe side, we didn’t pick any hitchhikers.

The road took us south through the small but characterful town of Yreka and then onto Shasta Lake where we stopped to take some photos of the enormous Shasta Dam, both happily Lemurian-free despite their names. Perhaps the Lemurians are understandably hydrophobic, what with their apocalyptic submersion of their native continent some time conveniently before the dawn of recorded history.

As we headed further south, the mountains peeled off to the east and west and left us in the centre of a massive plain of olive groves. The land stayed like this for what felt like an eternity, and we eventually gave up and stopped for the night in the small town of Williams, about a hundred miles north of San Francisco.

What a hole.

Williams is notable for precisely nothing. Like Newport back in Oregon, again the streets were deserted other than for the occasional gun-rack-equipped pickup truck tooling slowly by, its driver craning his neck to eyeball the out-of-towners. We got a room at a Motel 6 next to what appeared to be a chemical plant, ate a colossal, starchy meal in Granzella’s, one of the town’s two non-franchise restaurants, and watched a True Blood marathon until we we were tired enough to fall asleep despite the rumblings of passing semi-trailers.

Our only real objective for the next day was to reach San Francisco and book into our hotel (note the luxurious absence of an ‘s’ for a change), but the closure of the Bay Bridge directly to the south caused us to take a detour west into the Napa Valley and then Sonoma County: wine country, and wine country’s less famous sibling. The Fidel and Raúl Castro of Californian wine-producing regions, if you will. Picking a winery almost at random, we parked the car and wandered into the reception. A bronzed, middle-aged woman greeted us briskly.

“Hi. How are y’all doing? What can I do for you?”

“Uh, I’m not sure, really.”

“Okay…”

“We just stopped because we thought it was the done thing. What normally happens at these places?”

“We do tours, and you can taste some of our wines.”

“Ah, gotcha. Sounds good.”

And so our guide took us for a walk, relating to us the history of the Cline Winery as we wandered in the sun through the collection of buildings dotting the property. It turned out that the owner, Fred Cline, is the grandson of a certain Mr Jacuzzi (of, you know, jacuzzi fame) and had bought the winery with money inherited from his grandfather. The winery apparently specialises in Zinfandels, but disappointingly, given its owner’s family tree, does not extend to making bubbly at all.

Slightly bizarrely, and providing evidence that eccentricity is alive and well among the moneyed classes, the winery also boasts a building housing the California Missions Museum. This is a collection of 21 scale models of the Catholic missions which used to dot California’s Camino Real, made for the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition and subsequently rescued from obscurity by the owner’s wife. Our guide showed us in, waved hello to the volunteer manning the desk, and waited with just a hint of impatience as we stopped to read the information displayed at each model. I was fascinated, but not by the models themselves.

“This is pretty weird, eh? I mean, they’re nice models and everything, but what made her want to open a museum dedicated to them, and only them?”

She smiled a brittle smile, clearly chafing at the need to showcase her employer’s personal mania. We dutifully snapped a couple of pictures, including one of the mission in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and said goodbye to the guy on the desk. He wilted slightly as silence descended once more on his miniature Catholic empire.

Back in the main building, Ash and I propped up the bar as our guide poured us shot after shot of Cline Cellars’ finest (“I’m getting a grapey sort of mouthfeel. Maybe I should try another”), and we stumbled away with a bottle each of white and red. Marginally tipsy, we perched on the low stone wall surrounding the car park and basked in the sun until the buzz had worn off. Next up: San Francisco.