17 August/18 August 2019 ★ † FT Weekend 17Spectrum
We wander through a barn where
farmers are blow-drying their cows. The
bins are covered in plastic American
flags. The kids win a soft toy by throwing
ping-pong balls into floating cups. A
stall is offering test drives of Ram
pick-up trucks. The trucks are nearly
two metres tall — the gas-guzzling
antithesis of an electric car. Do I need a
car like this if I live in San Francisco, I
ask an attendant. “It parallel-parks
itself,” he points out, hopefully.
Leaving Sacramento, the maths are
getting tighter. The car has 138 miles
left; we’re 142 miles from Reno. Don’t
worry, I think, we can stop at Truckee.
We pull in for lunch at Cricket’s Coun-
try Kitchen — slogan: “You’re a stranger
only once.” A rib-eye steak, with three
eggs, potatoes and toast, is just $12.99.
Presumably the price excludes health
insurance. A model railway dangles
from the ceiling, with a train whizzing
round with the dessert menu. There are
signs saying: “God watches when you
tip” and “This place is not normal.”When you plan a road trip you some-
times forget how much time you will
spend staring at asphalt. On Highway 80
from Sacramento, there’s little to mar-
vel at, except American drivers’ habit of
changing lanes with no indicators or
braking room. On each side there are big
box retail stores with vast car parks. “It’s
the American way,” says Jason.
The environmental writer Wendell
Berry argued that roads actually stop
people from experiencing the landscape— roads “go over the country, rather
than through it”. Certainly, you can’t
feel the soil, or the heat, or even hear
the sounds.
Kerouac lived on the road because he
could forgo home comforts. We live on
the road because we don’t have to forgo
home comforts. We have air condition-
ing, and music, and roadside services.
The Ram truck even had noise-cancel-
ling speakers.
We turn off the 80, into hills lined with
pine trees. Nevada City is a former gold-
mining town, now lined with chichi gal-
leries and the odd electric car. “I’ve been
seeing more and more. A couple a day,”
says a shop assistant, selling me a bam-
boo toothbrush.
We had hoped to meet Gary Snyder, a
Buddhist poet and friend of Kerouac,
who lives nearby. But Snyder, now aged
89, emails to say that his water-pump
system has broken, and he has his work
cut out fixing it.
“Problem #1 with humans and
the rest of the world is overpopulation —
but there are plenty others,” he adds
for good measure. It seems rather
removed from the carefree travels of
the 1950s.
On the street, a man offers me half a
peach, and introduces himself as Fruit
Dude Pat. “This is all I’ve got left,” he
says, motioning to a box of peaches in
the back of his pick-up.
What’s it like farming in California’s
Central Valley? “Hot.” What if the cli-
mate keeps getting hotter? “It’ll be like
Death Valley. And when there’s no
water, nothing grows,” he smiles. “You
can’t fight Mother Nature! Put solar
panels in. You can’t grow nothing? Har-
vest the sun!”
The car needs to harvest some sun.
We are down to 59 miles on the dash-
board. Our back-up Supercharger sta-
tion — Truckee — is 53 miles away. I take
a deep breath and type the destination
into the navigation system.
Uh-oh. Computer says no. Truckee is
within the dashboard’s range, but that’s
only an average, and the route is uphill.
The navigation predicts we will run out
of battery on a scenic mountain pass,
halfway to Nevada.
We consider various strategies. Can
we extendbattery life by driving slowly?
Yui suggests turning off the air condi-
tioning. “We could get towed,” shrugs
Jason, who helpfully is an AAA member.
It’s a tough one. Should we embrace
the joy of maybe running out of battery,
or should we head back to recharge?
They don’t teach this in journalism
school. We reluctantly decide to go back
to Sacramento for a charge.
The Supercharger station is located at
a Tesla dealership on the outskirts of
the city. The man is unforgiving. Do
drivers often run out of battery? “No.”
Surely some people are idiots? “Not
here. Anyway, it’s roadside assistance’s
problem.” (I ask if he owns a Tesla, and
he says he’s going to buy one as soon as
he can afford one. Electric cars are not
yet ready for the Henry Ford model of
worker-consumers.)
In 30 minutes, we are ready to go. I
unplug the charging cord, which is so
hot it almost burns my hand.
Yui takes the wheel, and we raceContinued from page 1through the curves of the Tahoe forest.
In the back, only one of the kids throws
up. It’s 100F, but there’s still snow on the
ground. We leave the air of California
behind — “air you can kiss”, as Kerouac
called it — and then Reno appears, una-
shamed of its seediness.
Kerouac didn’t dwell on Reno. Then
again, he never lived to see the Eldorado
— a nine-storey car park with a hotel
and casino attached. A sedan with a dis-
abled badge has parked in the electric-
vehicle charging spot. A security guard
on a bicycle shakes his head and radios
for back-up.
In the casino, I meet Alfonso, who
arrived in the US from Mexico aged
eight. He and his wife Mona are Trump
supporters who live in Sacramento;
Nevada is their getaway from California
liberals. They know all the bar staff by
name. “This is our playground,” Alfonso
says. “There are no rules here.” Mona is
sure that one day she’s going to win the
big one. Alfonso, whose family were
gamblers, is less convinced: “Sometimes
she gets it right, sometimes she doesn’t.”
They show me how to play poker
on the machines, and ensure the bar-
tender keeps bringing me free beer.
When we say goodbye, Alfonso leans in
and says earnestly: “The world, the
planet — it doesn’t matter where
you go, it don’t mean anything without
company.” It could have come straight
from Kerouac.
Casinos are designed as mazes so
gamblers can’t leave. The next morning
I tried to exit the Eldorado for breakfast,
but eventually gave up and resorted to
eating avocado on bagel next to a row of
slot machines.The National Automobile Museum in
Reno claims to be “one of the top 10
automobile museums”. This is not as
seductive a strapline as the curators
think. Nonetheless, the collection of old
cars does hammer home just how nor-
mal a Tesla is, at least in design. Look at
the 1927 Lincoln, modelled on a horse-
drawn carriage, the three-wheeled 1937
Airomobile, resembling a submersible,
or the 1961 Fiat 600 D, with a curved
front body that makes it look like a loz-
enge. These were trying to reinvent
what a car looks like.
The museum also has a Tucker, with a
rear engine and centre headlights. Its
maker, one Preston T Tucker, was inves-
tigated by the Securities and Exchange
Commission — beating Elon Musk to
that distinction by fully 70 years.
Musk has said his mission is to cata-
lyse change in the car industry towards
zero-emission vehicles. But if electric
cars are to dominate the market, it may
take a change of approach. There are
federal and state tax credits in the US —but these “are falling in the hands of
those wealthy individuals who probably
would have the Tesla anyway”, says
Antonio Bento, an economics professor
at the University of Southern California.
Moreover, Musk has refused to sell his
cars through independent dealers.
Bento’s own experience suggests dealers
currently are steering buyers towards
petrol vehicles. “I was asking questions
about the [electric] Nissan Leaf, and
dealers were trying to sell me a truck,”
he says. It might be more efficient to
scrap tax credits and give bonuses to
dealers who sell electric vehicles.
Even then, says Bento, electric vehi-
cles will only go so far in reducing emis-
sions: “We also need strategies to reducethe total number of miles travelled.”
That means better public transport,
congestion charging and building
homes nearer to where people work.
In 1970, the writer Joan Didion toured
the rural south and declared it perhaps
“the last place in America where
one is still aware of trains and what they
can mean, their awesome possibilities”.
We saw several freight trains on the
way to Reno, but the passenger services
— one per day, nearly seven hours
in duration, and not even from central
San Francisco — do indeed lack
“awesome possibilities”.
The rise of the automobile was not
inevitable. Until the 1920s, US cities
were dominated by streetcars. Kerouac
worked on the railways, bummed rides
on freight trains, and talked of a “ruck-
sack revolution” of hikers and walkers.
It was after the second world war that
the highways became king. In 1956, the
year beforeOn the Roadappeared, Con-
gress mandated that all the proceeds
from federal fuel taxes go towards build-
ing and maintaining highways. That
ensured funding for roads to the new
sprawling suburbs; public transport,
often in the hands of private operators,
was left stranded. The same law also
mandated the construction of the Inter-
state Highway, of which the I-80 is part.
The automobile came to sum up
American freedom and aspiration.
Planners such as New York’s Robert
Moses believed it was the future, and
their vision shapes the US today. Once
neighbourhoods have sprawled, build-
ing public transport to serve them
becomes vastly harder.
After the night in the casino, we drive
by Tesla’s Gigafactory, where, with the
help of Panasonic, the company is mak-
ing more powerful batteries than any-Kerouac,
but cleaner?
The collection of old cars
does hammer home just
how normal a Tesla is —at least in design
It’s a Sunday afternoon —
50 years to the day after
‘Easy Rider’ was released —and we hit traffic
one else. The plant has cost $4.5bn to
date, and could become the world’s big-
gest factory by square feet. But it’s still
dwarfed by the expanse of American
nothingness surrounding it. A guard
threatens to call security. “If you take
photos, they’ll take your film.”
A mile from the Gigafactory is a filling
station with a bar. It also sells bumper
stickers with slogans such as “PORN”.
“My daughter’s got that one in the bed-
room,” says a woman pointing at one
sticker saying “Ammo is expensive.
Don’t expect a warning shot.” I smile
politely, and walk quickly towards the
car. We have 270 miles to travel. The
kids alternate playing scissors-paper-
stone and falling asleep. “Jack Kerouac
must have been very talkative,” muses
Yui. We listen to Ethiopian jazz and
chew on Japanese seaweed.
Eventually, San Francisco is within
shooting distance. I wonder if we should
charge the car just in case. “Charge it!
Charge it!” chant the kids, whose names
I should have learnt by now. “Super-
charge it! Supercharge it!” The battery
has become a source of entertainment.
We stop in a car park in Vallejo, and
charge an extra 50 miles quicker than
we can all use the bathroom.
We pull in later to buy apricots and
plums from a man named Mahmood,
who arrived in the US in 1972. “I owned
a small farm in Lebanon, now I own a
small farm in California!” he smiles
broadly. His nephew shows me how to
tap a watermelon like a stud wall to
check its quality. “They make fun of the
Arabs, but it works,” he laughs.
It’s Sunday afternoon — 50 years to
the day afterEasy Riderwas released —
and we hit traffic. Endless lines of fami-
lies heading back to the city, replete with
bicycles and suntans. The inefficiency of
it all is inescapable.
As night falls, I drop off Jason, then
Yui and the kids. I hand over the car,
with 81 miles (in theory) still left to
drive. By accident, I finally discover how
to turn on the hazard lights — using an
actual switch, not the touchscreen.
InOn the Road, Sal Paradise and Dean
Moriarty “saw the whole country like an
oyster for us to open; and the pearl was
there, the pearl was there”. But oysters
have grit too, and America is full of it.
Traffic jams, six-lane highways and
characterless out-of-town retail stores.
This is the real America. If Tesla sparks a
revolution, it will still be an asphalt one.
As I drove across California, I wished for
another way. In the sedentary, stultified
days of the 1950s, the rebellious path
was to hit the road. In a world of perpet-
ual movement, perhaps the more rebel-
lious path is to stand still. And to lobby
for better public transport.Henry Mance is the FT’s chief
features writerClockwise
from main:
a classic car in
downtown RenoWatching the
sunset on the
North Shore of
Lake Tahoe
after an
unexpected
charging stopAn Elvis Presley
cut-out next to
an electric
Toyota Rav4 at
the national
Automobile
Museum, RenoA ‘long-
jumping’ dog at
the California
State Fair in
Sacramento
Photographs by Jason Henry
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