I drove over the Sierras yesterday from Reno under threatening skies, but ultimately made it with only a few swipes of the wipers.



After exiting I-80 and heading South from Auburn on the old gold country Highway 49, I soon began to encounter the kind of scenes that make me occasionally nostalgic for California .





I stopped a few times for photos and a fruit stand for fresh local cherries, then arrived in Georgetown around four in the afternoon. Arriving at my friend Dave's house, I found him standing in his driveway, smoking a cigar.

I met Dave when I was 20 years old, shortly after I arived in San Francisco in 1972. He was a Navy air traffic controller, and I found it easier to relate to him than the San Francisco guys I met as I explored the emerging liberated population of Castro, Folsom, and Polk streets. I lived at the time in a fourth floor apartment in a victorian buildind a block off Polk with a roomate who was dating Cleve Jones at the time, who later was instrumental in creating the AIDS quilt project.

I'm putting a picture in that doesn't make Dave identifiable, because I suspect he would wish to maintain a low profile in his rural town (not that anyone living there would ever visit here).


Dave surveys some of the trees covering his five acreas of a Gold Country hillside in the early morning mist from his back deck.

---