On a Lonesome Highway in California

It's the slow season for tourists in central California, two days before the New Year.  You've been droning along sleepy two lane roads for hours since waking up at a tired little motel in the desert.  You'd like to break for lunch, and maybe take the pooch on a little walk.  You stop at a roadhouse that looks like it may not have changed since the 1950s. Given the pace of change in most of the state, it's mildly surprising to find some feature of the landscape that has resisted change.  But here it is...

You walk out back with the hound on a leash, and then you notice all the rattlesnake warning signs on the fences and so you decide to cancel the walk, buying off your floppy-eared pal with a treat and settling him in the car while you go inside to eat. Your phone thrums; a cell phone seems oddly out of place here, and you'd almost forgotten you had one in all those miles of unpopulated desert.   It's a text message from your friend Dan; you're supposed to visit Dan and Margaret in Watsonville later in the day…

"Where are you?"  

"Lunch stop in Cholome; not sure of spelling.  East of Paso Robles."

"Excellent almond waffles in Paso Robles.  You're in Cholame."

"Thanks."

"At the Jack Ranch Cafe?"

"Yep.  Too hungry to wait for Paso."

"You know that you're near the spot where James Dean crashed his Porsche and died, right?  The bacon-Ortega chile cheeseburger seems to be the hot call. "  

"Thought JD bought it closer to Salinas."  He'd been on the way to Salinas, anyway.  You remember that much.  Testing his 550 race car with a mechanic friend.

"Nope.  You're right there.  In fact, there's a memorial sign right outside the Jack Ranch Cafe.  Might be worth seeing the spot."

The sculpture outside was commissioned and donated by a Japanese businessman in the late 1970s.  It has a sort of Zen understatement about it, and manages to enhance the dignity of the old tree it enfolds. The stainless letters spell out Dean's lifespan (he was 24) and the sheet aluminum reminds you of how they used to build race cars.  You can imagine the stillness and fly-buzzing heat of early evening in late September just over sixty years ago, broken by the rasp of an air-cooled engine in the distance.  Number 130, it was…

                                     

Later on, you'll find out that forensic analysis concluded that Dean, having collected a speeding ticket in Bakersfield, was probably not speeding, maybe going only 55, and that he'd braked and swerved, but that the Ford turning across his path, and driven by a college student, was too big an obstacle to avoid.  That Rolf Wutherich, the mechanic, survived and never talked about it.  Later on, you'll hear that #130's engine and transmission were transferred to another car which was involved in a fatal racing accident, and that #130 fell off a truck on the way to a traffic safety exhibit, killing a truck driver, and that it eventually disappeared completely.  But you don't know any of that right now.  You reflect that it's fine you decided against having that beer with lunch, and you watch for rattlesnakes on the way back to your car.

Photo credits:

Top:  vendorgirl.com
Center:  the author
Bottom:  Porsche AG in welt.de