I thought about how this side of the Sierras was so different from the Central Valley, just on the other side of the mountains. I had gone there once, late last summer, my first trip there alone. The terrain was much different from the Eastern Sierras, flatter, with smog hanging low over parched fields of yellow. I had hoped that I could find some kind of wilderness as I drove through farmland. The air was thick with smoke, and the entire state had been in the midst of another heat wave—102, 104, 108 degrees, even. Everything felt apocalyptic, like the land was gripped by sickness. And among the signs calling for us to let God re-enter our lives, and testaments of having been saved scrawled on particleboard near driveways that led to small, squat houses, I saw the dead walking alongside the road. They weren’t dead, exactly. They just appeared near death: shirtless, methed-out men wandering the roads. Shuffling between the sun-fried grass and road, dirt-hued, with shaved heads. They weren’t walking together; instead, they were poking out of the landscape about a mile apart from each other, heading somewhere even they couldn’t see.

Driving through those parts of California had made me feel like I was becoming sick, too, so I left and crossed the Sonora Pass to head east, through windy mountain roads where controlled fires were being set. I stopped to watch one as it tore through a vast stretch of trees, and helicopters dropped water down. The air was thick with a smoky fog, and periodically rain would fall through the haze. There was snow in the higher elevations even while everything burned down below. I was above the smoke line, far up in the Sierras, where the deeply packed snow melted down into narrow rivers. I pulled alongside the stretch of road and got out behind other people who had abandoned their cars in order to walk on the snow. Mountain flowers mixed with bright-green grass, and I was glad I’d thrown a winter coat into the trunk of my car before I left.

I watched as people slid around on the snow and felt their joy to have a reprieve from the sickness boiling just down the mountain. It felt like nothing could hurt those of us who had ventured up here. And with no phone service of any kind, nothing could hurt me, either. I didn’t have to anticipate a phone call beckoning me to a hospital room, because one wouldn’t come if I stayed up there. And so I began seeking out places where I was unreachable.

I sat quietly at the bar and drank as the men around me continued to talk about slights at work. When I paid for my beers and walked outside to the waning light of dusk, no one was on the street, not even hikers leaving the trail to look for somewhere to stay; there was no one to escape into.

39.