I decided
to go to Yuba City because I needed to see somewhere new without staying out
the rest of the night, and also for curiosity of what lay north on the 99
since, until I just recently began thinking about it, I had the impression
ended near my house at the 80. On the road map in my car, 99, north of 80,
turns from a prominent blue highway to an undemonstrative green line and this
was enough to convince me that it must hold a whole lot more charm going north.
(I was right, by the way. It does.) Chico was too far and also – in my mind,
which is based on nothing concrete (but only in this instance) – the kind of
place best explored with a fellow adventurer. I was on my own, so Yuba City it was, which was compounded by the
fact that people in the Sacramento area – if they speak of Yuba City at all –
always seem to accompany the words with an apologetic eye roll, as though they
aren’t entirely sure they should be acknowledging its existence at all. I’ve
learned from experience that that is usually the type of place I like best.
“What the
hell’s in Yuba City?” their looks seem to say.
And they’re
pretty right. For the most part, nothing much IS going on in Yuba City, I guess.
But in my opinion, the best towns usually are a whole lot of little Nothings Much:
nothings much on a map; on a Google search; in
travel magazines and local newspapers. When people generally have nothing much
to say about a place, it seems to hold on better to its own sweet charms, without becoming increasingly over-priced, commercialized, crime-ridden, tourist-trappy, irreverently
copied, or crassly built-up. Good people live in Nothing Much towns,
minding their own business and adding their own particular specialness to the
universe. (Of course, it’s also true that some Nothing Much towns really are
nothing much, or worse, Muchly Awful, and the reason they get no recognition in
any way from the civilized world is because they would much better be abandoned
entirely by the civilized world and left to become a nothing much part of the
natural world again instead. But in my experience, these types of Nothing Much
towns usually do become infamous in some way or another, acquiring names like
Stockton, or Compton, or San Francisco.)
See what it
boils down to is that people tend to believe that something is Nothing Much if
it:
- lacks bars, restaurants, hipster coffee shops, or street lights, or
- lacks the striking, unsurpassable beauty of natural wonders like Mount Everest or the Redwood Forests.
All those wonderful, undemonstrative, mysterious places in
between become Nothing Much and are spoken about with subtlety by
people who have grown up in or around their nothing much reputations. Yuba City
is one of those places. And when I tell you about some of the things I saw in
Yuba City, you may persist in believing it is a Nothing Much town. But you’d be
crazy if you didn’t develop some small amount of appreciation for the Buttes.
 |
| (If only I had a picture of the septic tank bull!) |
Up here,
you can tell a lot about a town from its welcome signs. Small town slogans
sprinkled along the 99 reveal the cities’ greatest prides and the words give
them an identity, an importance, which they do not possess on a road map. The welcome
signs in Solida inform you that you are passing through the Raisin Capitol of
the world; Lodi reminds you that Napa is not the only place to find good wine;
Galt’s proud of its wildlife preserve where you can find elephants amidst the
almond orchards; Sacramento is the City of Trees; and, well, Davis has
bikes.
There is
nothing written on the one welcome sign leading you into Yuba City from the 99,
except for the words: YUBA CITY WELCOME and the silhouettes of waterfowl flying
above a sparkling river. (I’m assuming this is a reference to a bird hunting
area nearby called Dingville, which from what I can understand is not actually
a place so much as a state of mind. If you can’t appreciate a name like
Dingville, even if it is only a state
of mine, you have greater problems than than this blog can address.) What I got from the
welcome sign is that Yuba City doesn’t feel the need to be famous for anything.
My kinda town, I thought, as I drove past, finding solidarity with the sign. Neither do I.
The City of
Commerce in Yuba City, where you are supposed to be able to find visitor
information, is a charming old Victorianesque house located on a corner in a
parking lot with a Foods Co and a Starbucks. It was Sunday, and closed. Still,
I walked up to peek in the windows and, mostly, to see if there happened to be
any signs around it pointing to a yellow brick road that might lead me to the
Buttes. Because somewhere along the drive up the 99, I realized I wasn’t really
going to Yuba City anymore. I was heading for the Sutter Buttes. And it was
those Buttes, for me, that were the real magic of Yuba City (although the
patriotic Indian man on a bike was a close second).
 |
| (I did not take this picture. I got if off of Google images. But this is the sign I saw.) |
I first
heard mention of the Buttes from a friend of mine at UCD, a native Davisite and
lover of our Nor. Cal. natural world. Knowing how endeared my heart is to my
own sweet Seal Beach, he is constantly trying to prove to me that Davis is a
better place. One day, he was harping about the sky. (Okay, I’ll admit it, but
only because he will never read this. He wasn’t actually harping and he was absolutely
right. The Davis sky on that particular day…and many days before and since…was
breathtakingly splendid.)
“Look at that sky,” he told me (or something of
the sort).
The sky was stretching all around us, intermingled with white and
pink wisps of clouds across the vast, kind blueness, as though the entire earth
was merely a crumb at its doorstep and I tried to hide the appreciative sigh
that caught in my throat as I looked at it. I didn’t need to look up at that sky. It was all around me,
like a curtain of sun-kissed air, and it was wildly beautiful. And I remember
thinking – though I would never admit it – that it even rivaled those eternal,
million-shades-of-blue, stretching-on-forever, kneeling-at-the-foot-of-God
skies against the Pacific horizons of Home.
“And
sometimes,” he continued, jerking me out of my reverie as only someone
hell-bent on pushing your buttons can do, “if you look out to the north, you
can even see all the way to the Buttes.”
My heavenly meditations were really
over when he got to the word buttes. See, I had heard the word before, but much
like fjords and badlands, it was a word that had created its own, foggy and not
quite graspable image in my mind, developed solely by an overactive and
romantic imagination, as opposed to any personal experience.
“I have heard that word,” I told him. “But I don’t know what you mean.”
He tried to
explain, but for things like buttes and fjords and badlands, explanation will
never do. To know what a badland is,
you must see a badland. And though
pictures on Google images may give you some idea of what to look for, they are
as abstract as a word on a page in this regard. You do not know what a fjord is until you have touched a fjord. And that was the first time I knew that I must
touch the Buttes.
It wasn’t
until I was having another discussion with some other friends that I really got
butte fever. From them I learned that the Sutter Buttes are surrounded by
private property and try as it might, the state can’t seem to wrench any of the
land from the families who own it in order to create a public, protected
passage to the Buttes. The occasional charity event or school fieldtrip or
environmental effort will allow people passage up the Buttes from time to time
so they aren’t impossible, but a mere
slip of a person without any search warrant or land ownership really has
no business – according to everyone but herself – going to the Buttes at all.
(As a matter of fact, this is not true. I have learned since my almost-visit to
the buttes that you can drive up
through the Buttes, but if you are bound and determined to do things the legal
way, you cannot stop in the Buttes. Because in this regard, I am by
no means bound or determined to do
things the legal way, this new knowledge gives me great confidence that I will
find myself satisfyingly in the center of the Buttes next time I try. But I did
not have any of this insight at the time and the Buttes seemed as out of reach as
Knee-Knock Rise.) Of course, the seclusion and inaccessibility of the Buttes
only served to fascinate and frustrate me further. Besides which, despite the
inconvenience, I was, and continue to feel, delighted that private citizens
still have the power to do as they please with their own damn land, and that
every single place of worth and mystery in the world does not have to be
thrown to the public to become fussed-over and picnic-tabled and desintation-ey.
My love for the Buttes grew stronger and my determination remained. Private or
not, I needed to touch those Buttes.
So it
shouldn’t have been of any great surprise that I found my enthusiasm over Yuba
City replaced by a more reverent and eager excitement over visiting the Buttes.
Except that the realization came together for me gradually, as I drove up the
99, piecing together where I was heading and what lay ahead. Up here, where I
cannot see or smell the ocean, I very rarely know which direction I am going,
so I suppose it is expectable that I didn’t realize I was aiming for the Buttes
until I created a mental image of myself driving toward Davis on the Causeway,
complete with self-fabricated compass rose which indicated that the direction
to my right – the direction in which I knew the Buttes to lie – also happened
to be North, the direction in which I was heading that day on the 99 toward
Yuba City. You have heard that timeless, sagacious saying by John Muir: “The
mountains are calling and I must go.” That day, the Buttes were calling,
softly, at first, without my even knowing, but then, finally, loudly enough
that I knew where I was going and that I felt in my chest, when they suddenly
met me around a bend, rising up into the plain sky, a sight for sore eyes, a
trumpeting feeling of admiration and awe.
The
ultimate end to this story may seem anticlimactic. I did not, in fact, manage
to touch the Buttes that day. I learned later that, as it turns out, I was
about ten miles south of being where I should have been to get on the road that
would have led me there. The Buttes remain an enigma to me, for the time being.
But the navigating I went through in my attempts to reach them was exhilarating
nevertheless. Weaving in and around the small land plots and miniature farms of
Yuba City, through all the flat, mellow terrain, I would constantly and
suddenly move around a building and see the Buttes again, silhouetted against
the California sky, strong and old, and wise, giving dignity and adventure to
this small chunk of nothing-much earth. Having neither the craggy elegance of
the deep desert buttes, nor the demonstrative personality of a mountain range, these
Sutter Buttes are merely, magnificently, the placid buttes of home, alive with
all the moving, pulsing natural world which we know so little about, wholeheartedly
“fulfilling,” as Dickenson says, “absolute decree / in casual simplicity.” And
I felt, driving out of Yuba City – a failure, perhaps, by some standards – my
heart patiently pulsing with them.
 |
| (I did not take this picture either...obviously.) |
-R.E.A.
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