I was born at my house in rural Mendocino County and grew up there, never traveling farther south than the Bay Area until I was 18 years old. At the end of my junior year in high school, my family collectively decided that my sister and I could skip out on the dreaded STAR testing and take a week off to drive with our dad down to the alien territory known as Southern California.
Technically, the main objective for the trip was visiting my grandmother in Redlands, as well as the gaggle of aunts and cousins that dwell in Upland, Alta Loma and all the other cities my mind lumps together as “L.A.”
However, since my sister and I were less than thrilled about spending time with a bunch of relations whom we barely knew or had never met, we planned to pad the trip with jaunts to other places, such as the desert and the San Diego Zoo.
On the morning we left, we piled our gear into the back of my dad’s 1984 red Isuzu Trooper, hugged Mom and the dogs goodbye and hit the road, heading toward Sacramento and Interstate 5.
I had never driven on I-5 before, let alone in Southern California, which for me begins after San Francisco, though that’s probably not the technical border. I soon discovered that I-5 is dull whether you’re riding on it or driving on it in either half of the state, and I waited impatiently for each chance to pass a big rig at 70 miles per hour.
The valley is the valley, and most of I-5 remains a bleak blur in my memory, but I paid close attention when we got to Bakersfield, hometown of my high school Spanish and social studies teacher and one of the biggest all-around jerks I have ever met. Our quick trip through the city turned my prejudice against Bakersfield into confirmation that this was, indeed, an ugly place, but soon we were climbing out of the stench into the hills to the southeast of the city.
The Trooper has a four-cylinder engine and almost no acceleration up slopes, but we didn’t mind slogging up Highway 58 because the scenery offered a welcome change from the flat brownness of the valley. From the road, I remember seeing emerald hills peppered with hundreds of white, three-pronged windmills and a train rumbling by the quaint town of Tehachapi.
From there we descended into desert, ending up at Saddleback Butte State Park, about 17 miles east of Lancaster in the western fringes of the Mojave Desert. My sister and I had never seen the desert before either, and while Dad concentrated on driving to the campground, we leaned out the windows, exclaiming over the Joshua trees and yuccas and, best of all, a giant tumbleweed reeling down the side of the road.
Although night temperatures plummeted and we thought the tent might blow away in the wind, the desert was awesome. The next morning we went for a trek in the sand and saw a shrike—a bird that sometimes impales the insects and mice it kills on thorns to save for later—and roadrunner tracks, but no roadrunner.
Another fantastic place in that area is the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve, about 15 miles west of Lancaster. The reserve consists of nearly 2,000 acres and more poppies than the scene from “The Wizard of Oz” when the witch tries to put Dorothy and her friends to sleep. The land is literally orange.
Unfortunately, we had to leave the wonders of the desert and enter “L.A.” — a maze of cars, smog, buildings, concrete and more cars.
I felt sorry for my dad, who had to maneuver through hordes of vehicles while searching for the right exit. My sister and I tried to help, but we were just two girls who had grown up on dirt roads and country streets where people routinely stopped their cars on the yellow line to chat. To us, the overpasses, underpasses and what seemed like 1,000 different highways were more than a little overwhelming, and even Dad was disoriented, not having been to the area for several years. In one hour we discovered the wonders of the car pool lane and took the wrong turn more than once.
Grandma’s tidy house and backyard were like a refuge from the traffic, despite meeting three cousins and five second cousins we didn’t know. Outside, the smog obliterated any hope of seeing the San Gabriel Mountains that supposedly loomed to the north.
After a day at Grandma’s, we set off on what my sister and I anticipated as the most exciting part of the trip — a visit to the San Diego Zoo.
The San Diego Zoo is world-famous, and even I had heard about it in rinky-dink Mendocino County.
 The zoo, founded in 1916, is located in San Diego’s Balboa Park and houses about 4,000 animals. The zoo hosts about 800 different species of animals from around the globe, ranging from Borneo sun bears to Galapagos tortoises to bighorn sheep to giant pandas.
The Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, a research branch of the zoological society, has scientists working to conserve threatened plants, animals and ecosystems. The center is also home to the planet’s biggest collection of reproductive and genetic material from endangered animals.
A self-proclaimed “animal nut,” I was looking forward to seeing some exotic species of animals and willing to temporarily ignore the issue of caging wild creatures.
We arrived in San Diego in the waning afternoon, too late to thoroughly visit the zoo, so we “camped” in a KOA squeezed between the buildings and streets of the city.
The next morning we thankfully left the fake campground and made our way to the zoo.
The zoo is huge — about 100 acres. I’ve heard that you can’t see it all in a day, and we didn’t quite make it to everything, but we were close. I stupidly wore jeans because the sky was cloudy, which would have meant cool weather in Northern California, but I was sweating by noon. I didn’t let this bother me, though; there were animals to see.
One of my favorite exhibits was the Polar Bear Plunge, where a slab of glass separates visitors from a tank of water that’s presumably close to Arctic temperatures. We could have put a penny in a machine outside that would flatten the copper and stamp a bear on it, but watching the polar bears was the fun part. One bear decided to put on a show, tumbling in the water with his plastic toy, ducking his massive white body under only to come up spluttering.
At the gorilla exhibit a large male aggressively ran up to the glass, causing the weaker-hearted tourists to squeal and jump back.
Of course the panda bears were cool — how could you not like a black-and-white animal that sits up like a person and chews on bamboo?
I liked the gigantic lumbering Galapagos tortoises and the blue-crested bird who tried to follow us out the aviary door.
But the most unforgettable animal for me was the Guam rail, a brown bird about the size of a small chicken that paced nervously up and down along the walls of his cage. The sign said the Guam rail no longer existed in the wild and this bird was one of the few remaining members of the species. Brown snakes, introduced to Guam in the 1940s, fed on the native birds, reptiles and mammals and decimated populations of many of the island’s wildlife species, including the rail.
Three years later, the image of that little bird walking back and forth is the most vivid memory I have of the zoo.
Another lasting impression of the zoo was its international atmosphere. We were just in San Diego, California, but there were people (and animals) from all over the world. I heard visitors speaking Spanish, French, Japanese, German and many languages I did not recognize.
Then there were the boorish Americans, like the group of elementary-school children who jumped up and down near the Tasmanian devil exhibit, chanting “Petting zoo! Petting zoo!” in shrill voices.
The Tasmanian devil never came out of his cave, so we didn’t get to see the furry marsupial that, in reality, looks nothing like Taz from “Looney Toons.”
We also missed the Komodo dragons — gargantuan lizards from some tiny islands in Indonesia — that were off-exhibit because their cage was being remodeled.
After staggering down the sloping path to the tiger exhibit for the third time, we finally spotted the magnificent flame-colored cat lurking at the top of his make-believe jungle.
He was probably waiting to be fed, since closing time was approaching, and it was time for us to go. We plodded out the gates, still ignoring the myriad of gift shops that lay in wait around the zoo, and traversed the rows of now-empty parking spaces to reach the Trooper.
We had seen little glimpses of the world, both caged up in pseudo-wild habitat and strolling around the grounds of the zoo, and now it was time to return to the smog, concrete, and congested streets of Southern California.
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