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Show RLVER "Nowa Vince," I saidjiving him with a lousy Chico Marx Italian accent that I knew he didn't appreciate: he always said he felt Italian not at all, but he still didn't like my ethnic humor. "I aska you, whena Christobal Columbus discovera d'America, you think he had a reverse gear? No, da boat she only go one way!" "We need a reverse gear," said Vince. "What for?" "Oh Jesus." "Really, Vince, take it for a sign. We can't turn back." After much work we loaded the van with spare tires, sheets of plastic, bags of clothes, sacks of provisions, an old mattress, many sleeping bags, a Coleman stove, tools, cameras, books and notebooks, a guitar, an outboard engine, and all the spare parts we could lay our hands on. We struck out for Northern California and cruised around Santa Cruz and Berkeley. Then we set out on Interstate 80, heading for the American heartland. I'll never forget the exhilaration of climbing over the Sierra Nevada in that ragged old van, coming over the top of the stark stone mountains and gliding down into the Nevada desert. When we left California behind, the very atmosphere seemed different, the air thinner and clean. In the open desolate country beyond Reno, the desert drifted by like a dream, unchanged since the ice age. The road was still a battered fifties two-lane, Woody's road and Kerouac's road, a narrow, treacherous asphalt ribbon crowded with diesels that rushed past like tornadoes, a two-lane highway that has about as much in common with an interstate highway (those great bitumen rivers) as a bottle rocket has with a Saturn booster. Time slowed down. We left California and re-entered America. -52- |