GOODBYE OL' PAL
After 3,400 miles, lots of memories and a continent of man-to-metal bonding, our little Geo Metro died this week in (appropriately) Death Valley - just a couple of hundred miles short of our goal.
 We put down our modern-day horse in Beatty, CQ Nevada. It was a sad day, but we were grateful to the tiny orange car that people said would never make it to California. Well, Ol' Metro fooled them. We crossed the California line last week and rejoiced, not knowing that Metro was on its last legs, or wheels.
When we reached the official end of Route 6 in Bishop, there were just two more goals - a side trip to Death Valley and a jaunt down old Route 6 to Long Beach.
As we neared the top of the Argus Range in Death Valley National Park, Metro's brakes gave out. The pedal was down to the floor and barely stopped the car.
Maybe we should have turned back. I was beginning to realize how easy it was for the early pioneers to make foolhardy choices. Sometimes one decision puts you on path where the options just get worse and worse.
We went forward, not knowing we were about to head down a nasty eight-mile grade filled with switchbacks. We survived, thanks to first gear.
At the bottom of the Argus Mountains, folks at Panamint Springs told us there were two more ranges between us and the town of Beatty - on the eastern side of the park. But the Argus range was the worst of the three, so we continued east.
We were hoping that break fluid would solve Metro's problems. We found some at Stovepipe Wells village in the heart of Death Valley.
It didn't work.
With dwindling options, we headed east, hoping a mechanic would be able to fix Metro's brakes. But in Beatty they told us there were no mechanics in town. And even if there were, we'd have to go to Las Vegas (120 miles) or Tonopah (90 miles) to get parts, they said.
There was no time to heal Ol' Metro. So we accepted my niece's offer to loan us a camper and got a ride to pick it up. We lost two days of walking, but they were on our side trip, not Route 6.
Then we found out there was a mechanic in Beatty. He didn't have a repair shop yet, but he looked at Metro and said the problem would be fairly easy to solve - if we had the parts. It would take two more days to get the parts from Las Vegas.
We couldn't afford two more days and we would have to return the camper to Los Angeles, costing us another day or two. If we had waited, we would not make Long Beach on time.
So we left Ol' Metro, sitting there on a jack with it's right rear tire bleeding. The mechanic said he'd fix Metro and give it to an elderly woman who needs a car for grocery shopping. That made me feel good.
The camper is nearly new. It has air conditioning, a heater that works, a radio and lots of other things that Ol' Metro doesn't.
But Metro had something no fancy new car will ever have. A shared-life. It carried us across a nation when people said we - people and car - wouldn't make it. It was a gutsy little car.
Goodbye Ol' Metro. You have been a good and faithful servant. You have been a friend. Thank you.
HERITAGE
Mary Jhonnies' birth certificate says she's 96, but no one believes that. Birth certificates for Native American girls weren't very reliable a century ago. Some folks say Mary's over 110 - that she's lived in three centuries.
 No one knows the exact age of Mary Jhonnie (sitting Lt), but she will admit to being at least 97 years old, some friends say she could be up to 110 years old. Mary grew up on a ranch in rural Nevada at the turn of the 19th century. Now she lives on the Western Shoshone Reservation in Duckwater, NV. Standing next to her is her son Harry Jhonnie who also lives on the reservation.
In any case, she's been around long enough to have sons in their 70s and to know more than a little about life. But if she has any big secrets to longevity, she's not sharing them.
She'd rather talk about the old days when she grew up on a ranch in Fish Lake, Nevada and rode horses for fun. That was long, long before she moved to the Western Shoshone Reservation at Duckwater in the Nevada, maybe 100 miles east of Fish Lake.
Once upon a time, this was all Shoshone territory. They were a migratory tribe that survived by moving over large areas, making the most of sparse food sources.
Now Mary is one of about 350 people on the reservation. She has a small house next to her son, Harry, and she has friends here.
 Pedro Indocochea from Paris, CA (rt. baseball cap) along with hired hands round up about 1,600 head of lambs into a truck to be transferred to a new grazing field. Having been grazing up in high country all summer, they eventually come down to lower elevation to graze when temperatures drop. These lambs are already sheared for their wool and once they reach a certain weight they will be purchased at market.
But she'd rather be on that ranch in Fish Lake, where it's remote and quiet.
Bill Kama, the Duckwater doctor, introduced us to Mary. He was one of many folks from the reservation who offered me a ride on the 150-mile stretch between Ely and Tonopah.
A decade ago, Bill was making far more money in private medicine, but he and his wife, Rose, chose to return to reservation work, where they had spent time earlier.
'It seemed like the more money we had, the unhappier we were," said Rose, a Lakota Sioux.
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Now, Bill likes the challenge of providing care far from the nearest hospital. It's 20 miles from the reservation to the main road and another 25 to Ely.
"They call this frontier medicine. It's more rural than rural medicine," said Bill, a native Hawaiian. "Here there was a need. That's what being a doctor is all about, I think."
Bill tries to mesh native ways and modern medicine. He's used the influence of older women, the traditional matriarchs, to convince younger women not to drink when they're pregnant.
"We incorporate the traditional native American model where there's an emphasis on wellness, on the spiritual, on family and on he whole body, not just its parts," he said.
 A corral sits on the vegetative valley fed by natural springs, as the White Mountains rise from the background. There are springs all throughout Benton Hot Springs, CA which provide vegetation for cattle and attract visitors to the hot spring bathes provided at the Inn at Benton Springs.
We passed many reservations since Duckwater. In California, it seemed as though there was one in every town. In Benton, the local tribe, the Benton Painter, more or less own the town.
The main store, restaurant and gas stop there is called Benton Station, which the tribe purchased 20 years ago. It's not a big money-maker, but it's an asset.
"What this does is provide jobs for the people here," said manager Tommy Race, who's been working a the station since the tribe bought it.
Althea Rambeau, one of the restaurant's regular customers, said she came to Benton for a simple life.
"In summer there are a lot of tourists, but mostly it's quiet. There are a lot of good people here," she said.
Kathie Kortering built a house in Benton six years ago after tiring of the bustle in the ski center of Mammoth Lake.
In Benton kids can ride their bikes on the street, they can have animals and the schools are good," she said.
Kathie and her daughter joined us for 15 miles of our journey as we entered California. It made the day pass easily.
OWENS VALLEY
The Owens Valley is beautiful, of course. How could it be anything else, sitting in the high desert at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas.
When we entered the valley, the Sierras had a shawl of puffy clouds wrapped around their shoulders, below their white peaks. There was a mirror image to the east, where the tall White Mountains frame the other side the narrow valley near the tourist town of Bishop, 270 miles north of LA.
When California discontinued most of its portion of Route 6 in the 1960s, Bishop became the western end of the highway. There's a sign just north of town that says Provincetown, Mass. 3,205 miles. (I think that number is low.)
Frankly, that sign was the best thing we found in Bishop. It was a lot friendlier than the people we met, who seemed more interested in customers than visitors. Even the tourism bureau didn't return our phone calls. That's unusual.
The towns down the valley were a lot friendlier. In Lone Pine, the desk clerk at Trail's Motel chatted with me for more than a half-hour. Nothing big. Just a friendly conversation.
In Independence, Michael Patron and his wife Malika Adjaoud wouldn;t let us go until they treated us to dinner at their restaurant, Still Life.
Yes, it was a wonderful dinner and Malika is a terrific Mediterranean cook. But we were more interested in their story. Michael came here from French wine country and worked as a house painter decades ago.
 Malika Patron prepares meals for her customers in the Still Life Cafe restaurant in Independence, CA. With Malika's Algerian background and her husbands French influence, the Still Life Cafe has a French, Mediterranean, American cuisine that is unique to the surrounding area. Starting out as just a love for cooking, Malika and her husband Michel decided to turn it into a business.
After Michael and Malkia met in Los Angeles, they moved to Darwin a town of about 40 residents near Death Valley.
"Darwin is on a dead-end road," Michael said. "People drive down to see what's there. There's nothing to see, so they turn around and go back."
But for Malika, an Algerian, Darwin felt like home.
"The desert was the only place I felt really peaceful. We had no TV, no radio," she said. "The first morning I was there, I woke up and saw snow on the mountain tops. I had the impression of being in North Africa," she said.
If you're in the Owens Valley, stop at the brand new Welcome Center at the Manzanar National Historic Site. Manzanar was the first Japanese internment camp opened during World War II.
You can take a short driving tour of the old camp site. Inside the visitor's center, audio, video and visual displays tell the story of Japanese Americans from the turn of the century through the war. You'll learn what it was like to be live in one of the camps, where most of the prisoners were under 18 and people shared barracks with strangers.
Mostly, you'll walk out with a sense of the fear that gripped Americans after Pearl Harbor. Apparently, the nation's emotions ran far higher than they did after the Sept. 11 attacks. The exhibits portray a people closer to paranoia than fear.
A single shelling of a west coast site by a Japanese sub was portrayed as the "Battle of Los Angeles" in newspapers. Soon, soldiers fired at balloons thinking they were Japanese planes. The shells fell over Los Angeles sending the city into panic.
That atmosphere, along with long-standing prejudice against Asians, had people on the west coast demanding the removal of Japanese.
They got their wish, even though it turned out the Japanese never posed a threat.
Joe Hurley (Lt) and Travis Lindhorst (Rt) stand beneath the Route 6 Road Sign which marks the beginning of Route 6 from the west coast near Bishop, CA. It also marks the total distance to the end of the route on the east coast in Provincetown, MA.
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