Sticking to the coastline, we pa.s.s more big trees, a lot of seaside villages, brightly painted clapboard houses huddled against the rugged coastline. We encounter more cold, light drizzle, and a seaward wind that makes the fishing boats tethered in the harbours strain and rear against their hawsers like startled stallions. The water looks cold and thick. On the radio, we listen to a weather report that warns of snow squalls higher up in the mountains, with acc.u.mulations of two to three feet. Merilyn and I congratulate ourselves on having stayed by the water instead of cutting inland at Eugene, though at some point, we realize, we are going to have to turn east.

We pa.s.s a sign: Eureka 10 miles.

"I have a cousin in Eureka!" Merilyn announces excitedly, the way one might say, "Oh, I forgot to tell you, I won the n.o.bel Prize last night!"

"His name is Russell Thompson. He moved down to Los Angeles after the war and got into the movies, and now he's retired to Eureka!" I gather it's hard to p.r.o.nounce Eureka without following it with an exclamation mark.

"Great!" I say. "Let's drop in to say h.e.l.lo!"

MY American cousin is really my second or third cousin, I can never figure out which. He and my father shared a set of grandparents. We're not close, but we're blood.

My father, like many men, didn't seem to care much for the family he came from. They lived in Toronto, about an hour and a half away. We'd visit his mother and his brother, who lived in the apartment next to hers, almost every week. The air in the car was always brittle as we drove into the city and still edgy as we came out. Family put my father in a foul mood.

The only relatives he talked about with pleasure were Russell and Russell's sister, Dorothy, cousins he spent weekends with as a boy. Russell's birthday was in the same month as Dad's, and every March, the phone would ring long-distance. "It's Russell!" my mother would call out, breathless-"From California!"-and my father would rush to the phone as if he expected to win around-the-world cruise.

Dorothy's birthday is the same day as mine, so I call her every September. She is full of stories: about another cousin who played piano in a sheet-music store and took off for San Francisco to play professionally; about the time Russell drove back to Ontario from California in a Cadillac convertible, top down all the way.

My American Cousin, the movie, opens with the cousin barrelling up to the family homestead in a flashy red convertible. His name is Butch and he is darkly s.e.xy and safely rebellious in that James Dean kind of way. He's come to spend the summer in Canada, a place where NOTHING EVER HAPPENS, as the young female protagonist writes in bold across her diary. I felt the same way: real life happened somewhere else, somewhere like California.

Russell was lean and handsome, a lion tamer. In the eight-by-ten glossy in my parents' alb.u.m, he wears skin-tight trousers, knee-high boots, and a white cutaway, and he is flourishing a top hat. I think he might be carrying a whip. When my parents talked about him, the conversation always started, "Russell, he's in the movies in California . . ."

What could be more glamorous than that? I met Russell only once, the summer I was thirteen. He drove up to Canada, and we visited him at Dorothy's house in the woods. The day was hot and clear, the water as blue as the ocean. We water-skied, my first time, and somehow the feeling of standing on the water, zipping across the waves, is what comes to me even now when I hear the word "California."

Since my father died, Russell has been sending me photographs, of himself and my father when they were kids, and later as soldiers, fighting for different countries. After the war, Russell hosted a Sat.u.r.day-morning radio show on the Armed Forces Radio Service, Let's Pretend with Uncle Russ. He sends glossies of himself leaning into a microphone with some famous actress or crooner glancing over at him with wry affection. From radio, he moved to television: he was a pirate on The Shirley Temple Show, a dead man on Gunsmoke. But it was on Ozzie and Harriet that he found his home. After the summer we met, he sent me an autographed picture of Ricky Nelson, signed "To Merilyn with love."

I haven't told Russell I would be travelling down this coast. I wasn't sure I wanted the old man he'd surely become to replace the golden Russell of my California dreams. But once I'd made the phone call, heard his voice, so rich and deep, that hint of a laugh waiting to split open wide, I couldn't wait.

"Eureka's not far," I say to Wayne. "Russell says we'll be there in twenty minutes."

WHY do I find the name Eureka so familiar? Yes, it's what Archimedes is supposed to have shouted when he discovered the trick of measuring the volume of an irregularly shaped object: "Eureka!" he exclaimed, jumping out of the bath: "I've got it!" But I don't think that's what's stuck in my mind.

Eureka (without the exclamation mark) is a small city on Humboldt Bay, in the heart of California's big-tree country; it got its name when gold was discovered by some cla.s.sically trained forty-niner in nearby Trinity River during the California bonanza. The 1849 gold rush defined this part of California, draining so many people from southern regions that in one year the population of Los Angeles dropped from 6,000 to 1,600 and the population of San Francisco jumped from 800 to 35,000.

Mining and logging soon destroyed the forests around Eureka and the rivers that drained into Humboldt Bay. When the local natives, the Wiyot, protested the degradation, the citizens of Eureka hit upon a solution. In 1860, the local newspaper, the Humboldt Times, proclaimed that "for the past four years we have advocated two . . . alternatives to ridding our country of Indians: either remove them to some reservation or kill them." Eureka went for the second alternative. A group of citizens calling themselves the Humboldt Volunteers rowed out to a Wiyot village on Indian Island and slaughtered most of the Wiyot who were there celebrating in their annual World Renewal.

Bret Harte, then a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the Humboldt Times, wrote an account of the incident: "A more shocking and revolting spectacle never was exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Women wrinkled and decrepit weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long, grey hair. Infants scarcely a span along, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds."

Without the Wiyot to protest, the degradation continued. By the 1880s, when the gold ran out, there were eighteen sawmills ringing the bay, and the city was supplying lumber to most of the northern coast. So much sawdust was dumped into Humboldt Bay that salmon stopped sp.a.w.ning in the Trinity River. Scientists are still working on ways to get them back.

Scientists! That's how I know Eureka! A few years ago, the Sci Fi Channel aired a series called Eureka. The premise of the show was that the American government was secretly hiding all of its scientific geniuses in Eureka, not an easy secret to keep since the scientists kept inventing things like antimatter and telekinetic computers. In the series, things are always going awry. For example, in one episode, when they create a Star Treklike transporter (it worked by decoding a person's DNA in one place and recoding it somewhere else minus the person's clothes, a complication not thought of by Gene Roddenberry), they inadvertently produce an uber-Einstein kid who could launch missiles just by thinking about them.

"Did your cousin ever do television?" I ask Merilyn.

"Yes," she replies, getting a faraway look in her eye as if she's just turned on the old black-and-white set. "He was a regular on Ozzie and Harriet. "

I never really liked Ozzie and Harriet, but I don't tell Merilyn that. Ricky Nelson wasn't my idea of a rock star. I was a Leave It to Beaver kind of guy. But the difference was one of neighbourhood, not lifestyle. Like most kids who grew up in the Fifties, I formed my idea of what a typical North American family was supposed to be like from watching Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and My Three Sons. Fathers who wore suits to work, mothers who were rarely seen outside the kitchen, children who dutifully did their homework on desks in their immaculate bedrooms and then came downstairs for roast beef dinners during which the problems of the day were calmly discussed, debated, and solved. Parents who listened to their children, went with them to basketball games, took an active interest in their lives. It was our version of the American Dream. Oddly, the fact that I didn't know a single real family that remotely resembled these television families didn't prevent me from believing that there was something wrong with my family, where homework was done wherever I could clear a spot, dinner was a half-hour argument over macaroni and cheese or fried bologna, and no one ever listened to anyone, least of all me. I thought, as I was meant to think, that it was us, not the Cleavers or the Nelsons, and definitely not America, who failed to measure up to reality.

"Did your cousin know the Beav?" I ask Merilyn.

"I don't think so," she says.

"That's okay, we'll go see him anyway."

MY American cousin greets us at the door of the neat olive-and-cream clapboard house behind its matching picket fence. He's wearing a red plaid shirt, the kind farmers and lumberjacks buy at Stedmans, and a comfy zip-up jacket.

"Russell?"

"And which one are you?" he asks, throwing his arms around me.

"Number three." The one who was rarely noticed, who got away with everything.

"You look like your grandmother Margaret."

Russell's hair is still black. He's wearing oversized rose-tinted gla.s.ses. I peer into his face, looking for my father, and I see him, a little. The dark almond eyes; the long coffin of a face. He speaks in CBC tones, sonorous and rea.s.suring, as he leads us along a hall to his living room, which should be the dining room, since it gives onto the kitchen.

"The living room's full of old stuff," he apologizes, waving a hand at a pair of French doors. I glimpse what looks like a plush fainting couch.

We sit on a standard-issue sofa while he eases into his recliner. There is something odd about the floor: it doesn't meet the walls. Russell decided to cover the old linoleum flooring with new hardwood, which he bought at a Home Depot and installed himself. "But I didn't measure the room right so I didn't buy enough wood," he shrugs, as if he's talking about c.o.c.ktail olives or soda water for the highb.a.l.l.s. He started laying the floor in the middle and worked his way out, leaving a gap around the walls. He'll fill it in later, he says, "when I get around to buying more wood." Sitting on the couch feels like floating on a large raft in a very small pond.

The television is on. I watch the credits of a show, thinking I'll see Russell's name. That's what we used to do after an episode of Perry Mason or Ozzie and Harriet.

"I played a ringmaster," he laughs, when I tell him I always thought he was a lion tamer. "That was on Ozzie's show. The producer for Perry Mason saw it and asked if I'd play the same part in a mystery about the circus."

Russell is modest. Too modest for an American. It gives him away. I want him to flaunt a little. He knew Lucille Ball! Frank Sinatra!

Frankie Laine!

I ask him if he's doing any acting, hoping like a thirteen-year-old that he knows Tom Cruise, maybe, or Julia Roberts.

"I just finished a movie," he says. "A small part. I didn't think much of it, to tell you the truth. The language-!" He shakes his head. I have no idea how old he is. Over eighty, I'd guess. If my father were alive, he'd be eighty-eight.

"Whatever happened to Ricky Nelson, do you know?" I ask.

"Died in a plane crash. Awful thing."

Russell gets up and goes into the kitchen to put on water for tea. He married a j.a.panese woman, Chiyomi, who owns Mad Hatter's Tea Party, a tea shop with banks of tea tins against the wall and a few small tables where she serves scones and fancy desserts. She creates her own teas: Russell offers us a selection, and Wayne chooses the Baby Grey.

The kitchen is immaculate. I feel comfortable here, though there is something odd about this room, too. There's not the slightest hint that food has ever been allowed, let alone prepared, in this kitchen: no pots hang from hooks over the island, no kettle on the countertop, no bouquet of spatulas and wooden spoons beside the stove. It is like a kitchen from the set of one of the commercials on The Garry Moore Show, or from Ozzie and Harriet. A fake kitchen. I half expect the back wall to open onto scrims.

The transistor radio above the sink is real, though. It's tuned to a show-tunes station. We stand awkwardly, waiting for the water to boil. We've gone over all the common ground, more than once. There doesn't seem much more to say. Then a song from the Forties comes on. Suddenly, Russell sweeps me into his arms and we swirl around the brightly lit kitchen, hands clasped, cheeks lightly touching, dancing in perfect step.

"Why don't you come home?" I whisper in his ear.

"I'd like to," he says, almost like singing, "but only if I could drive all the way in my Cadillac convertible."

WE leave Chiyomi's tea shop with a Christmas gift bag of Baby Grey, Chiyomi's version of traditional Earl Grey, which includes petals of a blue flower that reminds me of the Steller's jay we saw in the redwoods.

Tea, wine, smoked salmon; without really planning it, we are acc.u.mulating the makings of a fine Christmas Eve meal. The question is, Where we will be having it? Merilyn, unwilling to leave Christmas entirely to fate, has booked us for Christmas dinner at the El Tovar Hotel, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Since this is the twenty-third of December, we have what is left of today and tomorrow to get from northern California to central Arizona.

Rather than continue down the San Andreas Fault to San Francisco, we decide to cross the Coast Mountains here in the north and continue down the Central Valley at least as far as Sacramento, then cut over to one of the other highlighted routes on Merilyn's map, perhaps the one that would take us down through Yosemite and Death Valley to Las Vegas. We'll make that decision when we get there.

Before we left Eureka, Russell checked the weather report for the mountains and told us he had a spare bedroom we were welcome to use.

"Does it have a floor?" Merilyn asked.

Chiyomi laughed.

"What's a bit of snow," I said breezily, and though Merilyn seemed inclined to stay, we climbed into the Echo and headed up into the mountains.

The 599 to Redding is a red highway, which means it is not subject to seasonal closings. Merilyn checked. It follows the Trinity River, travelling against the current from Humboldt Bay up to Trinity Lake, a resort-ringed reservoir created high in the mountains by Trinity Dam.

Hordes of forty-niners swarmed to the Trinity River when California was nothing but a northern extension of Mexico's Baja province. I imagine its banks lined with grizzled prospectors swishing gravel in tin pie plates, but in fact, this roadbed was excavated by a nefarious practice known as hydraulic mining. Rushing water from the river was funnelled into a metal pipe coupled to a canvas hose with a nozzle that, when turned on, shot water at the rate of 150 cubic feet per second. The nozzle was mounted on a tripod like a Gatling gun and trained on the riverbank in order to wash thousands of tons of rock and paleo-gravels, not to mention trees, sod, insects, and small mammals, into sluices from which the debris, theoretically minus its gold, sloshed into the river, clogging its pa.s.sage, destroying salmon redds (sp.a.w.ning beds), making outlets such as Humboldt Bay unnavigable, and in some places raising the riverbed by as much as sixty feet. Hydraulic mining was officially banned in the late 1800s, but it went on much later than that. Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje writes in Divisadero that as late as the 1940s there were still "five thousand full-time gold miners along the banks of the Yuba and Russian rivers," using Anaconda hoses and gas-fuelled dredges "to suck up whatever remained on the river bottoms."

We are travelling through the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. I see the sign and wonder if, in the daylight, we'd be able to see Mount Shasta. At 14,179 feet, it is the second-highest peak in the Cascades. It is snowing now, suddenly-heavy, wet flakes that cling to our windshield. Avalanche snow. We can see only a few feet ahead of us as the road twists and corkscrews up the mountains. At Weaverville, we briefly consider a detour to Trinity Lake, but most of the resorts are seasonal, and, we tell ourselves, those that are open would have long ago been booked for Christmas. We press on to Redding, heading down the eastern slopes into the Central Valley, a seventy-five-mile-wide fertile plain squeezed in the centre of the state between the Coast Mountains to the west and the Sierra Nevadas to the east, with the Cascades and Mount Shasta at the top like a stern paddler at the high end of a very long canoe.

Redding, a city of some hundred thousand souls, is bigger than we expect, too big to tackle this late at night. We turn south onto the I-5, rejoining it for the first time since Washington. All we want is a place to sleep that will be easy to get to and out of in the morning. Soon we are well south of Redding.

"Anderson. That looks small. Surely there'll be something nice and reasonable here," Merilyn says.

She checks out a few chain motels, but with the storm, no one is offering a discount tonight. We settle at last into the Valley Inn, which is privately owned but looks as though in happier times it used to be a Days Inn. The place is so unremarkably dreary that it could stand for all cheap motels everywhere: one bed, one lamp, one reproduction painting (usually Van Gogh's Starry Night, sometimes Monet's Yellow Irises) hanging above the coffee-maker tray on the credenza. I often wonder why motel owners don't put reproductions of local paintings on their walls. Perhaps they think they'd be stolen. Or that if people want to see the local landscape, they can look out a window, but if they want to see what the night sky above Arles, France, looks like through the eyes of a complete lunatic, they'll have to rent a motel room.

Are we supposed to like it that all motel rooms are the same? Maybe it has to do with what Patricia Hampl, in Virgin Time, calls "the anonymity at the core of all travel"-we are not meant to feel like our usual selves in a motel. But I suspect the idea is to make us feel more at home, as though we're sleeping in the same bedroom night after night, under the same floral bedspread, over the same grey mottled carpeting, with the same blond-wood night table and matching sideboard, the same malfunctioning clock radio, our coats hanging from the same stainless-steel coat rack. And the same smell, something between underarm fungus and hospital disinfectant. The same outlet mall next door, waiting for us as familiarly as a corner store. If we wake up in the wee hours to go to the bathroom, we don't have to turn on the light to find our way, we can stride confidently through the dark and know exactly when to reach out for the bathroom doork.n.o.b.

Had we followed Highway 101 all the way down the Pacific coast, past San Francisco, we would have come to San Luis Obispo, the site of the world's first motel-the Milestone Mo-Tel-which opened in 1925. The charge for a two-room bungalow complete with kitchen and an adjoining garage was a dollar and a quarter, but Merilyn probably would have got that down to seventy-five cents with extra pillows. Nineteen twenty-five isn't that long ago: my father was born in 1925; Wyatt Earp was still alive. The Great Gatsby was published that year, as was Mein Kampf. In 1925, George Bernard Shaw won the n.o.bel Prize in Literature, and Calvin Coolidge declared that "the business of America is business."

"America," wrote Doris Lessing, "has as little resistance to an idea or a ma.s.s emotion as isolated communities have to measles and whooping cough," and, true enough, from San Luis Obispo, the motel business spread across the continent like head lice in a kindergarten. By 1940, there were twenty thousand motels in America; by 1960, there were sixty thousand, all mom-and-pops. The mom-and-pop motel was the quintessential American idea: quick, inexpensive, and infinitely expandable. All you needed to start one up was a strip of roadside property and a few cabins. The shortage of building materials during the Second World War made motel owners squish the string of cabins into one long row house with a common foundation, wiring, and plumbing system. But the war also mobilized the American middle cla.s.s, put them all in cars, and put them to work building hundreds of new highways (originally for troop transport to, or flight from, the coast), blue veins that spread into out-of-the-way places where the only things to see were hot springs or grizzly-bear habitat or a ghost town, and the only place to stay was a mom-and-pop with a name like the Dew Drop Inn or Peek's Motel or the Desert Palm Motor Court.

In 1956, President Eisenhower signed into law the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which created the interstate system and rang the death knell of the old highways as well as the mom-and-pop motels.

Gradually, the small roads were superseded by multi-lane throughways with turnpikes and overpa.s.ses and cloverleafs that bypa.s.sed every town, killing the small motels that fringed them. New corporate chains were built along the interstates; ma.s.sive, multi-storey edifices, with signs rising above them like lighthouses, visible across six lanes of traffic going sixty miles an hour. We saw dozens of them as we dropped down the I-5 from Redding to Anderson: Best Westerns, Holiday Inns, Quality Inns, Days Inns, Hampton Inns, Vagabond Inns, Clarions, Super 8s, La Quintas, Best Values, Econo Lodges, Travelodges. Illogically, unlike the mom-and-pops, they cl.u.s.ter like flies near cities and towns and spread out to hide in rural regions, where someone might actually need a place to stay.

The room we are a.s.signed is so demoralizing I suggest we go out to find a restaurant before we even open our suitcases. Unpacking seems so permanent.

MIDNIGHT is what it feels like, though it's only a little after eight. It is dark and cold, too cold for California, and we haven't eaten since lunch. We're usually good about finding interesting places to eat- not so good when it comes to choosing a place to stay. For fifty miles I've been saying, "That looks promising," or "How about the one up ahead, the one with the blue lights?" but I can't get the timing right and we're past before the words are fully out. "Do you want me to turn around?" Wayne asks. It sounds like a challenge to me. What if the place is no good? We'll have stopped for nothing, lost more time. I hear my father barking at my mother as we drive through northern Ontario, past cl.u.s.ter after cl.u.s.ter of holiday cabins, and I say what my mother always said, "No, it's fine, let's keep going, there'll be something better ahead."

Driving across the coastal range also reminded me of driving across northern Ontario. Rocks and trees, trees and rocks, the road a string carelessly curled across the slopes. Mist when we started out, snow at the highest elevations, and through it all, endless, rugged forest. I've been astonished by the wilderness, not only here, but all through Oregon and Washington State. Apart from the urban gauntlet we pa.s.sed through that first day, we've seen few towns and even fewer homesteads carved into the bush. I had imagined the United States to be thoroughly populated. Not like Europe, perhaps, where every sc.r.a.p of land is owned and worked, but not like Canada either, where the population density works out to only three people per square kilometre. We rank 226th out of the 237 countries in the world. The United States is 176th, with a density of thirty-one people per square kilometre. They must all live in the East, because driving through those mountains we saw no houses, no lights, no cars on the road. At least the signs became more hospitable once we crossed into California. After Oregon's terse declarations, Watch for Falling Rocks seems almost conversational.

Anderson has about it a whiff of northern isolation, too. It advertises itself as a city, but if it is, we can't find it. On its website, where I look to find a restaurant, its greatest claim to fame is its revitalization program. The sign coming into town says Home of Anderson River Park. It has a river. It has old buildings. But does it have a decent restaurant?

The streets around our motel are drab and all but deserted. Wayne and I both tense as a knot of youths bursts out of the darkness and shoulders past us, laughing. Finally, after walking for blocks, we spot the Family Restaurant.

"Sounds good," I say, trying for optimism.

"As long as there's food," Wayne grumbles. "My stomach's dropped down into me a.r.s.e." Now it's his cousin in Newfoundland speaking.

We open the door and a warm fug of grease reaches out to haul us in. The place isn't busy, but the waitress waves us to a booth near the other occupied tables, cl.u.s.tering her clients together. We eye the food on their plates as we pa.s.s, then order hamburgers from the stained menu. It seems the safest thing. The plates, when they arrive, are heaped to overflowing. Who can eat this much food? What's wrong with it that the restaurant is so anxious to get rid of it?

We sit in a booth, surrounded by enormous people eating Brob-dingnagian mounds of freedom fries and chicken-fried steak. We haven't noticed the size of Americans particularly, although they are, according to the statisticians, the plumpest people on the planet. Over 60 per cent of adults in the United States are overweight, compared with something around 35 per cent in Canada (the Canadian stats are self-reported, so it may be wise to add a few percentage points).

Across from us, two gigantic men and their obese women fuss over a roly-poly baby who seems to belong equally to them all. It is impossible not to eavesdrop: their conversation fills the room, squashing us into silence.

They have just come from a prison where they were preaching to the infidels. I wonder if it was Folsom State, which isn't far from here. Folsom was one of the first maximum-security prisons in the United States, and it is the second-oldest correctional inst.i.tution in the state, next to San Quentin. Americans seem to like prisons. Californians especially like prisons. Thirty years ago, California had twelve prisons and fewer than 30,000 prisoners. Today, after decades of tough-on-crime legislation, the state has close to 175,000 inmates living in thirty-four correctional facilities. One in every two hundred California residents is being corrected. And this statistic doesn't include the tens of thousands incarcerated in county jails. The annual cost of these corrections to California taxpayers is about $10 billion a year, almost exactly what the state spends on its public university system.

Johnny Cash made Folsom State famous by writing "Folsom Prison Blues" and by singing a couple of concerts there. "They were the most enthusiastic audience I have ever played to," Cash said. But not so enthusiastic about church, apparently. Our restaurant neighbours caught one of the inmates with a paperback inside his hymnal.

"Jesus will get him for that," the biggest mountain-of-a-man chortles, shaking his head with what looks like glee at the thought of this felon burning in eternal h.e.l.l. I can't help wondering what the book was. Catch-22, I hope. Maybe In the Belly of the Beast.

The baby starts to fuss. The chortler lifts her onto one enormous paw and flies her like an airplane over the table, swooping over the half-eaten food until she throws up a stream of greasy white that arcs across their plates.

I turn away. It's an odd place to say it, but I miss my family. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and I have no idea where I'll be. They couldn't reach me if they wanted to.

I shift my gaze to the corner booth, where a gargantuan police officer is tapping at a computer while a prep.u.b.escent girl with all her baby fat intact talks non-stop about her mean and nasty school friends. The man never once looks up, not even when she suddenly goes quiet.

"I wish I could talk to my mom," she says finally.

"She's out of your life," he snaps, squinting into the screen, "and that's a good thing. She can't screw you up."

I wonder, for one horrified moment, if that's how my children think of me. "The Family: They f.u.c.k You Up" is the t.i.tle of one of my favourite issues of Granta magazine.

"Remember that issue of Granta about families?" I say to Wayne, looking for consolation.

"Yeah, the t.i.tle was taken from a line in a Philip Larkin poem." He's going to recite it. He always does; he has that kind of memory. I pull my coat closer and wrap my arms around myself in the corner of the booth.

But he doesn't. We exchange a soulful look. He's missing the children, too.

5 / ROUTE 66.

WHEN we leave Anderson in the morning, there is still snow on the ground, but nothing to be alarmed about.

We decide to buy food so that we can have dinner in our room and stop briefly for supplies in Sacramento, following the signs to the historic district of the state capital, thinking we'll find some quaint local offerings, but the streets are roped off, the houses tarted up like a theme park and populated with shops selling tourist T-shirts and caramel popcorn. We get a coffee and m.u.f.fin in a Starbucks, where the clerk tells us about a grocery store that might be open.

Perhaps because it ends with "o," I half expect the city to look like what I expect of Monte-Cristo or Capistrano, an early mission turned into a secular city, and am surprised to find how ordinary it is. It was never a mission, of course: it was named for its location at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers and was founded by John Augustus Sutter, who built Sutter's Fort on the spot in 1844. It was his workers at Sutter's Mill on the American River who, in 1849, while taking a lunch break, found the gold nuggets that started the California gold rush.

When we pa.s.s the State Capitol, a white pillared and domed Roman Corinthian edifice, I tell Merilyn it looks like the White House.

"I've never seen the White House," she says. "Have you?"

"Just in pictures. Look at the back of a twenty-dollar bill."

"Really?" she says, taking her wallet out of the glove box. "You're right. How weird."