Bakersfield, a sprawling, fossilized industrial town, a ghostly Nowheresville. Laborers toil in the San Joaquin Valley farmbelt with non ironic trucker caps, suffocatingly hot.
Snaking North on Route 1, the Pacific punching at the base of the bluffs, flinging curtains of spray.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles of breathtaking, scarred landscapes.Through beach towns, past enclaves of the filthy rich and the hovels of dirt poor laborers, stretches of deep wilderness, farms and hot springs, military bases and railroad track, migrant farm workers lining up for water in the grape fields, Honky tonk Marine corps towns, sprawling messes of trailer parks, starter-home suburbs, Mexican drug shipments rolling ashore on lifeboats, toxic harbors and sewage lagoons, empty “communities” of suburban buildings, abandoned gated housing developments, the forlorn desert strip malls, and every one of them closing their days with a million-dollar ocean sunset.