A Note from the Road
A Note from the Road
Hello, Citizens of Twain.
Apologies for being briefly MIA. I’ve been on the road, trying to follow the adventurous footsteps of Mark Twain himself. I took Highway 49 and did my best to imagine what this country felt like in 1849, and later when Twain passed through. It’s not easy, with freeways slicing through the hills like afterthoughts.
We stopped at several places he must have known. His cabin is still up here, outside Mariposa. There are a few surviving old-time bars that have been operating since those early days, their names and timbers stubbornly intact. But they now sit surrounded by gas stations, housing developments, and big-box stores. It’s hard to erase all of that from your mind long enough to see a miner, his mule, and the weight of his gear moving slowly through the dust.
Nearby are modern casinos, built on Native American land, operating under a different set of rules than the towns around them. Places like Chicken Ranch, where you can gamble and drink all night but are not allowed to sleep in your car afterward. That part feels… new. And strange.
There are no Gold Rush–era brothels left here. The wild, unruly West has been edited, regulated, and repackaged, often onto the very land that was taken first.
It makes you wonder what happened to the wild world that once was, and what replaced it instead.
The refrain keeps looping in my head like an old television echo:
Back in the day when girls were girls and men were men…
And history, as always, was a little messier than the song suggests.
More soon, from the road.