Puttering About In a Small Land

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The trip was new to her. She had lived in Los Angeles for almost nine years but she had never started up Highway 99, the fast inland highway that people took to San Francisco, five hundred miles to the north. As soon as the last Chevron stations and cafés and tract houses had fallen behind, the highway made directly for the mountains; without warning, she found herself in a tight bunch of cars and trucks, traveling at immense speed—her speedometer told her it was between seventy and ninety miles an hour—in a cleft that had been cut into the first row of hills. Ahead of her were the mountains themselves and she thought to herself that they were so desolate. Nobody lived there, certainly. The diesel trucks passed her on both sides; far up in the cab the driver of each eyed her with that dull, aloof disdain that so infuriated her. And then the trucks went around the turn ahead and left her behind.

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