June 12th, 2016
Zero Day in Independence
It’s nice waking up in a bed. It’s easy to forget this simple pleasure when you sleep in one all the time, but when you don’t, you really appreciate how great of an invention the bed actually is.
I walked outside the motel room and saw bright white snow in the mountains, along with meloncholy black and grey clouds swirling over the eastern range obscuring anything over 8k feet.
We spent the morning lounging in bed watching a veterinarian show on Animal Planet. It was hard to break free from the glowing screen, but we finally did, and then walked down to the Eastern California Museum in town.
The museum was neat with displays of area Native American artifacts like beads and baskets, as well as set pieces from the cowboy and early 1900s mountaineering era of the Sierra and surrounding desert.
We grabbed some pizza at the local COOP and both agreed it was the best so far on trail. Independence is a very small community with a few gas stations, the COOP and a Subway. It’s small but has everything we could ever want in a town stop (excluding a grocery store but we got that out of the way in Lone Pine).
We saw several large trucks filled with thousands of pounds of onions driving north. Jim, the eclectic and very friendly proprietor of the Inn says they are grown in Mexico and then driven 500 miles north for processing. The trucks go back and forth all day long, rumbling and banging against the uneven road that lays in the shadows of the Sierra and stretches for miles and miles through the valley.
The world does not stop when you mostly remove yourself from it. Like the trucks that transport onions, it spins around and around, like a Ferris wheel in constant motion, the ebbing and flowing of some kind of manmade organism that tries to seperate itself from the natural one hiding directly in front of us.
