Last week
Linda and I were in the mountains for several days. I was fishing for trout,
she was reading a mystery for pleasure, and we were both scouting locations to
get local color for future Quill Gordon mysteries.
This has
been a terrible season for wildfires in California. On Monday, the valley where
we were staying was choked with smoke from one of them ( I don’t know which),
coming from more than a hundred miles away. Some wind came up in the afternoon
and blew it away, but my throat felt the effects well into the following day.
On
Wednesday, we drove home and ended up going through the smoke from the King
Fire near Sacramento. We were driving 50 miles to the north of it, but the
smoke was drifting in that direction. It was so dense you could barely make out
mountain ranges a couple of miles away, and the air quality … Well, let’s just
say it made a smoke-filled Vegas casino look like a medical office by
comparison.
We Deserved a Break
The
original plan was to stop at Colfax in the Sierra foothills for ice cream, but
the smoke was still awful there, so we kept going. Several miles down the road,
we suddenly came out of it into clean air and blue skies. At that point, the
search for ice cream began anew.
One of the
great things about the small mountain towns we were visiting is that they have
great locally owned frosty stands that look as if they came straight from the
1950s or earlier. Coming out of the mountains, we had a craving for that sort
of place, but in more metropolitan areas they’ve all but vanished.
Nevertheless,
hope springs eternal. When we stopped for gas in the town of Rocklin, I asked
the young lady at the cashier in the convenience store where we might be able
to get a frosty locally. Her first response was Wendy’s or McDonald’s.
I kept
pressing, saying we were looking for some place local, and she mentioned an
establishment called Taylors, about a mile and a half down the road in the
nearby town of Loomis. Armed with her directions and no GPS, we set out to find
it.
Going Back to 1947
We almost
didn’t because it’s surrounded by trees and the only signage was on the
building itself. It was a white wood building with red trim and a shake roof;
it looked as if it had been built in 1947 and maintained well, but otherwise
left unchanged.
School must
have let out early because there were a number of junior high school-aged kids
at the tables outside. Inside were hand-painted signs advertising the
offerings, which included a milkshake made from any available flavor of ice
cream. I didn’t count them all, but it looked as if there were about 200
flavors of ice cream. The smell of fried burgers wafted from the kitchen into
the interior of the stand.
When I was
a kid, going on trips with my parents in the fifties and sixties, we stopped at
places like Taylors for a treat. They were everywhere, and it’s jarring now to
think how few of them are left. Linda had a loganberry shake and I had a large
frosty. We took our goodies outside and ate them at a round shaded table. For a
quarter of an hour we were transported back in time, in a positive way. It was
the gastronomic highlight of the trip.
