The folks were nice, the martinis weren’t

Returning to L.A. from anywhere that is peaceful is not unlike a shock to the system caused by sudden renal failure or a bite to the head by a king cobra. The eyes pop open, the brain shuts down, the mouth goes crazy and a normal person is taken with the overpowering urge to turn around and go back.

I returned from vacation on a night as sweet and warm as heaven, but the traffic was like a scene in a Godzilla movie with everyone fleeing Tokyo, bumper to bumper no matter in which direction one desired to move, and the noise was cranked up by about a hundred decibels.

Personally, I loved it.

I will grant you that there is something appealing to spending time in a town like Mineral (population 143), near the south entrance of Mt. Lassen, where the motel has no telephone or television and the most common patrons of the only restaurant in town are gorilla-sized bikers with arms longer than their legs and tattoos over most of their visible parts.

Without the presence of motorcycles, there is hardly any sound in Mineral, which is kind of spooky when you stop to think about it. That was true along almost the entire Barkley Trail that we took from Vancouver, Wash., staying in towns so small they had to hire a burglar to break into the feed stores or they’d have no crime at all.

I call it the Barkley Trail because it repeated the route of our dog’s last journey a few weeks before he died. I’m writing a book about Bark and I wanted another look at the route before I jumped into a sea of words and began, well, dog paddling to reach land.

We drove through cheerful little towns and down peaceful little lanes where hardly anyone cared about what was happening in the monstrous spread between Santa Barbara and San Diego. They moseyed about happily and said, “Howdy, folks” a lot and sat in front of the local barber shop smiling. God knows what they were smiling about. I was afraid to get too close for fear I’d catch whatever fever was distorting their faces.

The only serious traffic problems seemed to be caused by recreational vehicles driven by men who waved and mouthed the words “Howdy, folks” and little children in the back who waved and held up their dog, which pawed the air in an animal wave and seemed to bark, “Howdy, folks.”

Even truckers honked howdy with their air horns. It was all so damnably folksy that after a while I began experiencing waves of nausea, and Cinelli said that the trouble with me was that I lacked the ability to tolerate niceness. “You don’t even look right smiling,” she said. “Your grin is maniacal, like Jack Nicholson’s in ‘The Shining.’ ”

Part of my problem was that no bartender in any small town from Vancouver to L.A. knew how to make a martini, and the wine they poured bore labels like “Ann’s Batch.” Grape crops lined a lot of the highways in all three states of Barkley’s Trail, so I’d guess that the primary cottage industry wasn’t selling doilies or homemade preserves but bootlegging “vino blanc.”

I could almost tolerate a wine that tasted a little like dandruff shampoo when it seeps into the corners of your mouth, but getting a bad martini was like discovering, too late, you had been given the wrong medication for a fatal disease that was slowly eating away your insides. On one occasion, I became so intrigued with the strange flavor that I asked the waitress what the bartender had put in it and she replied, “Dunno,” which translates from ruralese to “I don’t know.” I thought about asking the bartender but Cinelli suggested that he probably dunno either, so I let it go. It might have been best not to know.

Entering L.A. we ran into a traffic jam on the 101 that existed for no visible reason whatsoever, and when it broke open a woman sped past and gave me the finger for driving too slowly, even though I couldn’t have moved faster had I wanted to. Cinelli calls it the feminist salute. I waved back.

We changed clothes and instantly made reservations at the best restaurant we could think of in order to ease back into the L.A. culture. It’s a Brazilian steakhouse called Fogo de Chao. Whatever meat you order is sliced right at the table exactly the way you want it in a room that looks a little like the imperial ballroom of a doge’s palace. The martinis are composed of stars and clouds and soft music, if you get my meaning, with the perfume of night-blooming jasmine circling the glass.

So it’s good to be back in the land of noise and crime and traffic and the kind of energy that drives you upward and crazy. At least the restaurants are great, the martinis are cool and no one ever says “Howdy, folks.”

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.