The Strive to Survive
About 8 months after arriving on the central coast of California from the eastern US, we decided on a day-trip to Parkfield, California, the self-labeled “Earthquake Capitol of the World” (though bragging about that sounds weird in view of the earthquake tragedy of Japan in 2011). Parkfield asks you to “be here when it happens”.
Parkfield is a tiny “town” of 18 people in a remote and isolated corner of Monterey County far from the touristy Monterey coast and littered with seismic sensors due to the area’s proclivity for earthquakes. How we ultimately found Parkfield that first time, despite some secondary roads being blocked by wild turkeys and others lacking any type of signage, remains an unsolved mystery.
Vineyard Canyon Road, from San Miguel, California (the nearest civilization – adjacent US 101), turns right at a T, turning right towards Parkfield and the San Andreas Fault. As we turned right onto Vineyard Canyon, we saw some people standing in the road beside a truck. We thought that they were broken down and we did something we would never have done in New York City; offer help. They did not need help. Rather, they were watching a snake and not just any snake; a rattlesnake. We made a u-turn and parked our truck behind the stopped truck, anxious to take a look. We never saw a rattlesnake in the wild, and to-date, would never see one again.
Though I have no photographs to document what we saw, it certainly left a tragic image in my mind. The neck of the snake, just below the head, was virtually flattened from being rolled over by a car. The head appeared completely unharmed and was darting from side to side trying to get the unharmed body to move. The strive to survive was playing out right in front of us.
None of us knew what to do, especially me and Joanie, only just slightly long enough in California to consider ourselves Californians. As I tried to take a few pictures, out of no where, a speeding car came towards us. We signaled him to slow down, pointing down at the road; a common sign that an injured animal is present. Regardless of our signal, this speeding car drove right over the head; crushing the last of the life from this tough animal. Though we remember taking pictures, they cannot be found and may have been lost in transfers from hard-drive to hard-drive.
As we all cleared out from the intersection, we made yet another u-turn and continued on to Parkfield, crossing the San Andreas Fault on Parkfield’s famous earthquake twisted white bridge spanning the fault and the Little Chalome Creek. It was while eating lunch at the Parkfield Inn under the hundred or so branding irons they have hanging and dangling from the rafters that I experienced heaven; the heaven known as the bbq tri-tip sandwich.
You can read and see more about Parkfield and other exotic inland Monterey County locations, such as Lonoak, Bradley, Pinnacles, Shirttail Gulch Road, and Jolon, by purchasing our Travel Guide to Inland Monterey County, CA.