The Life in My Years

October 14th, 2022
I’m on a one night layover in Prison Town, USA. No, I’m not staying in a 6 x 8 concrete studio, courtesy of the great State of California. I am a less than satisfied guest of the Super 8 Motel, in Susanville, California. It ain’t all that super but we’ll leave the details to the Yelpers and the Trip Advisors. I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much. Accommodations are a lot more rudimentary a few minutes away at the lockup nearby.
(Prison Town, USA was the title of a PBS documentary about Susanville that aired in 2007)

From where I’m sitting, there isn’t much to recommend Susanville. To be fair I haven’t been downtown. The Super 8 is located on the bleak flats just outside of downtown, smack next to an entrance road to the Lassen County Fairgrounds. There’s a tire shop/auto wrecker across the street, and kitty corner to the motel is a Walgreens. Make no mistake, there’s no mistaking this place for Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. If this is representative of the town as a whole then the Susan that the ville was named for must’ve been pretty damned ornery.

Maybe the “historic downtown” is quaint and interesting with the usual collection of a candy store, an ice cream shop, a family diner, and a divey bar where colorful, hard bitten, old timers in dirty ball caps grumble about Sacramento and DC into rocks glasses filled with cheap whiskey. There may even be one of those country stores that sells scented candles, kitchen gadgets, local jams, wooden signs emblazoned with pithy down home philosophy, and dish towels embroidered with Old Glory; the insulting part being that all of that Americana is made China (Except the local jams but who knows these days. Local might mean local to Shenzhen).

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Like many of the small rural towns that sprouted in the mid-nineteenth century, Susanville started out as a logging and mining town. It was, at other times, a rail hub and an agricultural town.

Now the town’s main industry is incarceration. Counting three prisons in the immediate vicinity (the High Desert State Prison, the minimum-medium security California Correctional Center, and the Federal Correctional Institution, in nearby Herlong), nearly one-third of the population of Susanville is realizing the dubious hospitality of the Golden State, complete with the proverbial three hots and a cot. (When I visited Susanville all three prisons were in full operation. Since then, the California Correctional Center has been deactivated)

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I’d driven south down Highway 395 from Fort Bidwell, California. Breezed past a recitation of small town California with small town names; McArthur (population 334), Likely (population 99), Sage Hen, Pinnio, Madeline (allegedly there’s a post office here but all I saw was a shuttered grocery store/filling station), Brockman, and Moran.

I stopped to stretch my legs at Thermo – or what was left of it. The remains of a gas station and a market, and some scorched appliances bracketed by the remains of a matched set of brick chimneys.

The only sound was the occasional passing car, the crunch of my shoes on crushed rock, and the rustling of litter pushed around by the breeze. Maybe that breeze is carrying the ghosts of the dream that started this place only to suffer the slow death that comes from the want of customers and cash. The only signs of recent life here are a drained six pack of Sol Beer, and an empty Jack Daniels bottle.

What looks like a little memorial inscribed with random messages and adorned with plastic flowers hangs from a post in front of the shuttered market.
Happy Easter 2020.
Peace.
Happy New Year.
Bucky’s spirit lives.
There’s even a touch of ironic optimism, Good Luck is With Us.

As I wandered around, a tractor passed by. The driver, wearing the de rigueur soiled ball cap, slowed down, looked at me and we waved to each other.

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Between these towns is boundless open space, at times beautiful and surreal, at other times desolate and foreboding, but always in its own peculiar way mesmerizing. There’s something that’s attractive about this desolation. For some, the ones who live in houses, barely visible from the highway in the midst of the companionless open space, isolation is a state of being. For those loners, the desolation is their own personal vision of civilization.

Unlike many of California’s highways where communities are welded together by roadside strip malls populated with Home Depots, Marshalls, rows of auto dealers and their acres of parked cars, and the vulgar commercialism and mediocrity of Olive Gardens, Applebees, and cheek by jowl fast food joints, the only things, man-made, that connect small town to small town out here, are the highway itself and an almost endless thread of barbed wire fencing, a sometimes shimmering, but more often poetically rusting, symbol of rugged American individualism.

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The other thing that connects these communities is Donald Trump. California may be sapphire blue (libtard la-la land to the nation’s Rust and Bible Belts) but Modoc County in the far northeast corner of the state is blood red.

In 2020, Trump carried Modoc by 72% to 26.5%. Just south of Modoc, in Lassen County, Trump won 75% of the vote. This is right wing Christian country, Trump territory – the realm of MAGA. Out here, Governor Gavin Newsom is Satan incarnate. You’re as likely to see a hand painted “Fuck Biden” sign out on this vast range as you are a cow.

This is the California that told Gavin Newson what he could do with his COVID restrictions. This is the California where school board meetings are battlegrounds between people who think that The 1619 Project is un-American propaganda that should be banned and the tiny handful of liberals and plain middle of the roaders who believe free thought is good thought. Some residents of this part of the state want to join with equally right wing counties in southern Oregon to form a 51st state. They already have a name for it – the State of Jefferson.

If you want to get a more complete feel for the political climate all you have to do is turn on the radio.

Most of the way, I rode in silence. That’s if you consider silence the wind through the open window, rubber meeting the road and the very occasional car (395 isn’t called the loneliest in America road for nothing) whooshing past in the opposite lane. That’s classic driving music.

As I approached Susanville, I turned on the radio to taste some of the local flavor; five conservative talk shows, one God station, a sports talk show, a Spanish station pumping out Norteno music, and one adult pop music station (I went with the Norteno music).

Out here in rural California MAGA-land, there’s a kinship between the fire eating conservative talk show hosts and the preachers on the God stations. They minister a common gospel that’s a venomous cocktail of downright mean evangelical religion and hard right politics, all of it Q tinged.

God, guts and guns is the local motto on the bumper stickers and in the hearts of locals who fly yellow Gadsden flags in their front yards, and sport t-shirts emblazoned with the sillouette of an AR-15 and a written invitation to “Come and take it.” God, guts and guns is the contradictory holy trinity out here that believes in a judgemental, wrathful God who doesn’t hold with homosexuality, choice, and uppity single moms. A God who bestowed His (stress His) blessing on every person’s right to own a killing machine (was that during his rest period of the seventh day that he thought that one up?). They hold onto their motto and they hold firmly to the ikon of the rugged, spiritual (read, Christian), American individual. Hold them in their collective fist like a little plastic Jesus that they won’t let get pried away by liberals, DEI, 1619 Projects, homosexuals, or immigrants who speak in foreign tongues. Out here, Donald Trump isn’t just a President (and most still believe that he is the rightful President), he’s the fucking saviour.

I would love to sit down in a diner in one of these small towns (at least the ones that have a diner), and talk with one of my political opposites. Truth be told though, I’d be more than a little bit afraid to.

This is not your Nancy Pelosi’s California.

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When you leave 395 and get onto Highway 139 for downtown Susanville, you catch the stark, sobering view of the grim high walls, the looming guard towers and the gleaming concertina wire of the High Desert Prison. The bleak stockade is more than a stone’s throw from the road yet close enough to chill your blood.

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I’m staying in tonight. Write, read and watch TV while I dine on a frozen burrito and a can of Hormel’s Chili without the beans. Even I can’t stand myself after having had beans.

The things you come across while sitting at the writing desk in a Super 8 Motel room while waiting for your burrito to heat up.

I open the drawer and the first thing I notice is that the housekeeper doesn’t empty the drawer – ever, if the stack of receipts is any indication.

A peek into people’s lives.

Classic wings, buffalo, mild, with creamy ranch from Round Table Pizza.
More wings. Barbeque this time.
A charge against Dens Riley’s Visa debit card for a burrito and a chicken scramble with an extra egg from Cravings in Chester
Exfoliating scrub purchased from the Walgreens across the street. Someone was feeling a little crusty.
Another Dens Riley receipt from Round Table. The server was Jesus. That sounds about right. My Christian friends all say that Jesus is there to serve us.
A bacon burrito from Copper Kettle in Chester.
Chinese take out from the Happy Garden in Chester.

The microwave dings, and after flipping through all of these food receipts, the burrito has lost whatever luster it had when I started the microwave.