Hannibal and Her Elephant

It was snowing on U.S. 101 north of Ukiah when I drove through. Where it wasn’t snowing, it was sleeting. Where it wasn’t sleeting, it was raining. The road was as slick as ice. In fact, it was ice. Along with the variables of snow, sleet and rain came fog. I felt as though I were driving through a milk shake.

“This is impossible,” I said to my wife, who sat next to me. “I can’t see the road, but if I could it would terrify me.”

“You exaggerate,” she said. “That’s why they took you off news.”

“Exaggerate, hell. Look through the murk. Two cars have spun out. A truck is over the side. Red lights are flashing. Even the snowplows are grounded.”

“You want me to drive?”

The implication is that if she were driving all this wouldn’t be happening. The snow, sleet and rain would cease to fall. Sunlight would burst through the gloom. All God’s children would be safe.

“No,” I said, “when they find our bodies in the spring thaw, I want them to know I was at the wheel. It’s company policy.”

“Relax, Martinez. These are just flurries.”

“It was an accumulation of flurries that did in the Donner Party.”

“Press on.”

This isn’t exactly a column about L.A., but it is traditional among columnists returning from vacation to write at least one column on the vacation itself. It buys time necessary to restore the motivation that made us columnists in the first place.

Anyhow, there is a kind of local angle here. Seventy-five percent of Eureka, which was our ultimate goal, is populated by people who left Los Angeles for calmer if not sunnier climes. That is an estimate based on four strangers I talked to. Of the four, three had lived in the Greater L.A. area.

“I guess you’ve got fond memories of the Southland,” I said to an old geezer who ran a small store near Fortuna.

“Not one,” he said firmly. “It was like living in a sewer.”

Another equally miserable old man, this one a motel manager, said all he ever got out of L.A. was sinus infections and cardiac problems.

“I could have died in Azusa,” he said, “and no one would have given a damn.”

“You could die in Eureka and no one would give a damn,” I said.

“Why do you argue with people?” my wife asked later. “We’re here to have a good time.”

“That’s my way of having a good time.”

Our purpose in going to Eureka in the first place was to spend the holidays with our son, his wife and their darling Nicole, who is a 2-year-old genius. She sits at a toy piano and pounds out songs she has composed. One of them goes, “Mary had a little lamb that followed her to school one day and she threw him out the window, wheee! “

“It sounds like something you might have written,” my son said to me.

“It sounds like something he might have done, “ my wife added.

I offered to buy Nicole and fashion her into the writer I know she will someday be.

“She’s not for sale,” my son said.

“Two thousand dollars,” I said.

“Sorry.”

“Two thousand five hundred.”

“You can’t sell babies in America,” he said.

Eureka is honest country. Redwoods march from the mountains to the sea. The air rings with the clarity of chimes. A back road that slopes to the south jetty of Humboldt Bay offers vistas of startling beauty, rising like wonderlands from a misty surf. You don’t see that in Azusa.

But getting to Eureka was no fun in what will someday be recalled as the Blizzard of ’88.

“This is madness,” I said to my wife as we wound out of Willits into the chaos of the storm. “We will be swallowed up in the white-out and disappear forever. And don’t ask if I want you to drive.”

The worst part was between Laytonville and Leggett. I would alternate between praying for Caltrans to close the road and fearing that if they did, my wife would want to ski cross-country to Eureka. She is a remarkable woman. Nothing will keep her from family. I feel that way about martinis. We’re a nice couple.

“We’re almost there,” she said as the wind howled around us.

“Almost where?”

“Just keep going.”

“Why is it I feel like one of Hannibal’s elephants?”

“Hannibal,” she said, “had spunk. That’s what got him through the Alps. You, I am sorry to say, do not have spunk.”

“Hannibal also lost most of his elephants. That’s why elephants to this very day hate spunk.”

“You want me to. . . .”

“Don’t say it!”

We made it OK. Except for our near death in the Blizzard of ‘88, it was a lovely trip. They wouldn’t sell Nicole but I got first rights to Mary had a little lamb and threw him out the window.