"I have flying monkeys and I'm not afraid to use them"

Every place we've visited during our travels has been different, unique in its own right. But this place is—well, it's more different than most. We’re in Myers Flat, CA, Pop 200, Elev 204. It's about halfway up the "Avenue of the Giants" in the land of redwood trees. And some of the sights around here are truly breathtaking. The Eel River winds through, flowing along right behind our campsite. We spent hours this morning walking along the river skipping rocks and looking for pieces of jade. The campground is a bit rough, but with some TLC it could be a really nice place. Unfortunately, fixing it up would mean it’d no longer fit into the neighborhood. Yes, the river is on one side, but around all three other sides is a neighborhood of mostly dilapidated single-wide mobile homes decorated with rusted-out cars, junk galore, and appliances of all types, refrigerators being the most popular. (Remember the three most important things when buying real estate: Location, location, and lack of rusted-out cars, dead appliances, and trashed mobile homes.) Yesterday we especially appreciated the guy (and it had to be a guy) in the place next door to the campground who blared away at full volume several hours of the old screaming acid-rock music from the 70s and 80s with, unexplainably, Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock’s song “Picture” repeating about every 30 minutes.

A few posts ago, when we were visiting the Grand Canyon, I wrote about how much I liked the little town of Williams, AZ. As we moved along we found that Nan and I both liked San Luis Obispo, too. In part, I liked Williams because it had such a nice small-town feel. S.L.O. felt a bit bigger, but it still felt “small” in some ways. Some small towns remind me of the town of “Grady” in the movie Doc Hollywood. That movie, and towns like Williams, make small-town life seem just plain wonderful. It’s like they bring us back to the old days we’re sure must have existed—times when the world was safe and simple and people cared about one another. Well, Myers Flat, CA, ain’t Grady. The town is an easy walk from our campground, so we headed in to explore and let Nan get a cup of coffee in the coffee shop on the corner. We expected a little tourist town; what we found was…different.

Honestly, it’s kind of a grumpy little town, with maybe a dozen total buildings on main street, a little more than half of them occupied. The Laundromat is closed, there’s a former restaurant sitting vacant not far from a small post office that has limited hours during the week and literally one business hour on Saturday (9:00-10:00am). There's an inn that looks pretty nice, though we saw only one car there. There were a couple of stores selling a surprisingly eclectic set of things--one that sells unusual tie-dye clothing, does embroidery work, has a tanning salon, and carries a small handful of redwood-tree-related souvenirs. Two doors down is a store filled with antique dolls and clothes and china teacups. Next to that is a store that sells handbags and scarves, and next to that is a market with a limited supply of overpriced groceries that does what it can to spare people the ride over to Garberville. The coffee shop, our walking-trip’s destination, has a sign behind the counter that says the owner serves sarcasm for free. And we found that to be true enough. When we walked into the store he came in behind us. Turns out he was just sitting in his pickup out in front waiting for business. (When we left, he went back out again. Door open, no radio on, no phone. Just sitting out there in his truck for reasons we couldn’t see.) He made a crack about Nan’s coffee choice that would have insulted her if she had thinner skin.

All of the stores, including the coffee shop, have signs posted that say "No Public Restrooms!" …Clearly there are lots of people stopping in just to pee. There’s a trashcan outside the market that sports a big sign that says "NO CAR GARBAGE." We saw “No Whining” signs and "No Parking" signs and “No Trespassing” signs and "No Sniveling" signs (in the coffee shop, near the no-sarcasm sign--and on another wall was the flying-monkeys sign mentioned in the title). In general, there seemed to be a lot of things you’re not supposed to do in this small town and lots of warnings not to mess with the people in it. Don’t park in their spaces or ask to use their johns or whine about things you don’t like or leave your garbage in their garbage cans. Just shut up, spend your money, and go along your way seemed to be the message.

But wait—the odd observations continued. For instance, across the side-street from the coffee shop is a house with all manner of junk covering the front yard, piled all over the porch, oozing around the sides of the house...everywhere. And cats. Lots of cats. (Including one sitting on an obviously dead refrigerator on the porch.) Nan and the kids are suckers for cats, so they paused in front of the driveway to pet a friendly one. Suddenly the passenger door opened on a car sitting in the driveway and a woman scowled out saying "No picking up the cats! Someone came by and picked one up, then drove off with it! You can pet them, but no picking up the cats!" Then she shut the car door again. (What's up with people sitting in their cars?) Two doors down from her there was a dog laying on the shoulder, barely out of the traffic lane, in front of the town’s saloon/liquor store. He appeared to have been hit by a car and was looking pretty rough. I wondered if he was still alive or already a goner—and if he was a goner, why was no one doing anything about getting him away from in front of the saloon? Were they just planning to keep driving over him? As I approached the dog to see if he was alive or dead the scruffy old thing rolled over, looked at me, then went back to sleep on the warm pavement. There in the road. In front of the saloon. (I’m going to guess his name is “Lucky.” It’s obviously not “Rocket Scientist.”)

Just a few more yards down the road from the saloon is a very nice, tastefully decorated wine-tasting place for the wines of the local vineyard, adjacent to a fancy, fairly expensive restaurant. (Here?!) And next to that is one of the four drive-thru redwood trees in the area. Now we’re talking! So we walked back to the campground, got the truck, and drove through a redwood tree with no more than an inch of clearance on either side of the truck’s folded-in mirrors. After that we hiked around in one of the gorgeous redwood forests you always see in magazines, and we’re going back to do more hiking tomorrow.

Ultimately, this is a quirky, depressed place nestled among stunning forests with trees that are the largest and most beautiful in the world. As always, we chatted with a few nice people today, including a couple from Quebec who are on a year-and-a-half long bike trip around the US (making our little four-month venture seem puny by comparison—especially when the hardest thing we have to do is crank up the top on our little rolling home away from home). The locals seem unhappy with the decision by the CA government to shorten the state park season and to leave the closest park closed for the entire summer. The parks bring the tourists, and now the diminished tourist season will only be about six weeks long, starting after the weekend of the 4th and ending with Labor Day, without the most popular park. And that won’t likely be enough to keep all these shops in business. ...Maybe they have the right to be a bit grumpy, all things considered.

As we talked about the day, we found the trees brought us some perspective. We saw one that had fallen a number of years ago, and the tree had roughly 3200 growth rings. If each one equals a year, it was already over a thousand years old when Jesus walked the earth, and it’s not until you reach the outer inch or so of this giant that you get to when the thirteen colonies were being established or when the first people decided to found a little place called Myers Flat, CA—or Richmond, VA, for that matter. There are other trees around that are a thousand or even two thousand years old, and plenty more that are much smaller now but that will grow and grow over the centuries ahead, still standing long after people have forgotten what “blogging” was. The flying monkeys sign, and the people chuckling at it, will be long gone, as will the refrigerators and coffee shops and old dogs in front of saloons---yet these trees will still be standing, making someone new feel brief and small. So in that light we'll shut up, spend some of our money, enjoy the trees, and move on...to Oregon, next.

Near the Campground...


My Wife Looking Small

Sitcoms in Real Life

I wrote what I thought was a poignant post about a family event relating to marine life, but upon further review it seemed to be making fun of a helpful albeit Napoleonic park ranger, and there was some question as to whether Nan’s budding relationship with a seal might constitute a violation of the federal Marine Mammal Act, so I decided the better part of valor was to keep that one to myself. Instead, I’d like to take a few moments to apologize to writers of sitcoms everywhere. For years I’ve muttered “I’m so sure that’d happen…”and flipped off the TV during those preposterously dumb, obviously contrived scenes that seem to be inserted in sitcoms just to create opportunities to add canned laughter. I now apologize, because the last few days in California and especially San Francisco have provided an ongoing set of sitcom-esque scenes. They'll likely lose something in the translation, but just the same, here are a few examples:

- At our last campground, Kerby and I headed into the bathhouse for showers. There were three separate showers, and he and I took the back two. The hot water blasting away was making it pretty steamy in there, but I could still smell smoke drifting in from a campfire at one of the nearby sites. It smelled like they were cooking something good, and I shouted to Kerby over the shower-wall, “It smells like Bar-B-Que in here!” Without missing a beat I heard a man’s voice call out from one of the biffy-stalls, “I’m pretty sure it’s nothing I’m doing in here…”

- While I was checking into our campground here on the ocean just ten minutes from downtown San Francisco, two older guys came into the office to check in behind me. They were obviously traveling together, driving their huge RVs. The one guy said, “Did you notice coming through the toll booths at the Golden Gate Bridge that there were wide lanes and narrow lanes for paying the toll?” The other guy said he’d noticed. The first guy said, “I didn’t, and I wound up in a narrow lane. As I pulled out, a post pushed my right-side mirror flat against the window. I couldn’t see a thing!” The other guy said, “I was wondering what you were doing. You started cutting across lanes and cars were jamming on the brakes all over the place. I’d never seen you drive like that—and I don’t think anyone else had seen that kind of driving either. Well, at least you had your signal on...like always.”

- At Fisherman’s Wharf we sat and ate big bread-bowls of clam chowder, enjoying a nice lunch in a restaurant. After we finished eating, I waited at the table with our stuff while Nan and the kids headed off for a restroom break (adhering to our family traveling-motto "Never pass up an opportunity to pee"). Sitting there, I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation between an older woman with an obvious hearing problem and a younger woman who was proving why, when you look up the word “patience” in the dictionary, you find her picture. The older woman was going on like this: “Fish tacos are interesting. I think they’re interesting—do you think they’re interesting—fish tacos? I’ve heard of fish tacos lots of times. I’ve never had one, though. I’ve never even seen a fish taco. Have you ever had a fish taco? I’d like to try a fish taco sometime. Do you think they have them here? Fish tacos? I’d like to try one…” And on and on it went. I so wished I had a fish taco handy...

- It’s San Francisco, and of course you’ve got to ride a street car in San Francisco. So we figured out where to board, got our exact change ready, and waited a few minutes for one to come along. The first car that turned up had a big “Board in the rear” sign, but as we approached the rear doors we saw the car was packed with people. We decided to wait a few minutes for another one. After just a few minutes, a second pulled up, and as the doors opened Kerby and Joelle immediately jumped on at the rear. As soon as they entered, the doors shut literally right in our faces and the engine revved as though it was taking off. For a second Nan and I were on one side of the doors and the kids were on the other and we just looked at each other---our own variation of a scene that’s been played out on a thousand sitcoms. As the stunned-moment passed, Nan pounded on the door and I looked ahead wondering how many blocks I was going to have to run through traffic before it’d stop again. Fortunately for me and the nearest cardiologist, as I looked ahead planning my run to the next stop I saw that the front door was open and we were supposed to board via the front on this car. Dopey tourists. So we hopped on, paid our dough, and had a herky-jerky ride on A Streetcar Named Defibrillator down The Embarcadero.

- And finally, from some suspect reports via Nan, I’m not above filling the role of a stereotypical sitcom character myself. Nan has been telling me for weeks that I sound like a sitcom dad on vacation. According to her, as we drive along on our various adventures, I’m apparently maintaining a running monologue about things like our gas mileage, how windy it is, how bumpy it is, how long it’ll be before we get there if the traffic gets better or worse, how many road signs we’re seeing for one thing or another, how the sun always seems to be shining in on my side as we drive… An ongoing driver’s monologue that she occasionally thinks is hilarious and that occasionally annoys her into telling me to stuff a sock in it. Of course, she’s doing her own stereotypical-character thing. The kids and I are consistently making comments about how, on her behalf, we should have titled our trip “Gift Shops of the United States—Trying to Visit Them All!”

So that’s my apology to sitcom writers. We at times feel like we’re making our own sitcom as we go, but I suppose that’s normal when life is as odd as it’s gotten to be these days. Anyway, in the morning we leave San Francisco and head north to the giant redwoods. We’re living in serious denial about the approach of April, but it’s coming whether we want to admit it or not. Just the same, I think we’ll continue to enjoy every last minute of March…

Morton


Some Bridge (We rented tandem bikes and rode over, back, and around a bit just for the experience...)


My Wife and Her Crab-Legs

49er

I started to write a philosophical blog entry about turning 49, but it was sounding whiny and making it seem like I think I’m getting old rather than just having a birthday so I canned it. Suffice it to say I had my birthday a few days ago and spent the most memorable part of it on the back of a horse named “Tank.” Tank, I, and the rest of the family (mine, not his) were led around a series of trails by Kaitlyn, a kind young woman riding a whitish-colored horse and facing backwards until my neck started to hurt in sympathy for her. Obviously this wasn't the first time her horse had walked these trails, and it's a good thing. He made plenty of twists and turns while she was facing backwards talking with us, making me wonder at times if it was her or the horse leading our trip. Either way, it turned out fine and we all made it back to the stables before dark.

The kids are taking riding lessons back home, and we said we’d try and find someplace to go riding along the way on our big trip. We figured Texas would have all kinds of riding opportunities, but we couldn’t find anyplace that was reasonable and open when we were. So we kept looking, across Texas into New Mexico then into Arizona. Finally, just a couple of miles from our campground in the suburbs of San Diego, we found a place that does trail rides. We wanted the kids to have a chance to really ride, and to ride for a good long while, so we dedicated the afternoon of my 49th birthday to riding. And off we went, following a winding trail through a nature preserve, with Nan’s horse (“Stanley”) being a big pain in the oats. He kept stopping to eat and wouldn’t go again until he was good and ready no matter how bossy Nan tried to be. But the rest of us had been assigned trusty steeds who behaved themselves well and did what we asked of them—namely, they went where we wanted them to go and they went there calmly. Slowly. Casually.

It turned out Tank and I were especially well matched. On this particular day we were both happy to mosey along going nowhere fast. And I enjoyed that he’s a horse who eats as he walks, dropping his head and grabbing mouthfuls of whatever was available, stripping whole branches of their leaves or ripping out large clumps of grasses and flowers without missing a step. At times he’d have three feet of weeds complete with roots and dirt clods hanging from his hay-hole as he ambled along, chewing and walking, chewing and walking…an impressive blend of function and form. My kind of horse.

Ultimately, riding a horse named Tank was the perfect way to celebrate my birthday. Nan never knows what gift to get me, and I’m never really sure what kind of celebration I’ll be in the mood for until the big day arrives, so overall I'm usually a big birthday-pain-in-the-fanny. But this year I got to join my family in pretending to be cowboys riding the open range lands of California, riding long enough to feel like we’d been somewhere but not long enough for me to need hip surgery to straighten my legs. Perfect!

And, of course, afterward I followed Tank’s example of eating whatever’s available and horsed down a giant piece of chocolate cake. Happy birthday to me… It was a fine one! And to make it even better, we’re following it up with a few days camping on Malibu Beach, where the temps are supposed to be in the 70’s with lots of sun and sand.

Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil Earp, with Doc Holliday

Kerby: "I don't like that they call it 'Sin City'"

On our way from the Grand Canyon to San Diego we somehow found ourselves in Las Vegas. Truth is, we didn’t want to do the 8+ hours on the road to SD all in one day, so we figured we’d stay overnight someplace like Barstow, CA. As we drove across Arizona on I-40, we saw signs telling us Las Vegas was 115 miles away, then 90---and suddenly Barstow wasn’t seeming like much of a draw. We'd been thinking Vegas was further out of our way than 90 miles. So we pulled off at the intersection of I-40 and Hwy 93 and did some quick internet searching. (You’ve gotta love having the internet in your pocket these days.) The famous “Circus Circus” Casino, hilariously billed as "kid friendly," had rooms with perks for $39—cheaper than a Motel 6. It’d just be one night, it’d be an experience, and the alternative was Barstow. So we went for it.

On the way you can't miss the Hoover Dam, which was wonderfully impressive. We were surprised at what a tourist attraction it is. So many people stopping and touring and shooting pictures. Quite the chaotic scene. And then came Vegas. And Vegas is…well, Vegas.

As if this isn’t apparent to anyone within 100 feet of me, I’m a nerd in more than a few ways. My momma raised me with good, meddling morals, and to this day I struggle with being places like New Orleans’ Bourbon Street and the Vegas strip. I feel like I’m not supposed to be there—and while some people find that feeling exhilarating and it inspires them to fits of rebellious wildness that include serious drinking and tattoos and other things I won't mention on a g-rated blog, it just makes me feel guilty. I felt guilty as we checked in, I felt guilty as we hung around the hotel, I felt guilty as we checked out the casino… While walking our way down the strip, we stepped over countless small paper ads scattered for unknown reasons on the sidewalk, with each piece of paper showing a scantily (or not-at-all) clad woman advertising something, though I couldn’t tell what. With Nan and the kids present, I couldn’t bend over to examine them more carefully (to determine the product being advertised, of course), but just the same, I felt guilty for being there, with those ads.

Would the kids be corrupted forever by our short visit to Vegas? No, and neither would I. But I just can’t bring myself to let go and have fun. I’d be the perfect character for one of those movies where I’m somehow trapped in a cross-country venture with a woman of ill-repute who eventually corrupts my morals in an endearing way and we fall in love and live happily ever after (or at least until my nerdiness reasserts itself and she takes off with the bartender from “The Scurvy Dog Bar and Grill” down the street from where we’d no doubt be living. But I digress…)

We’d planned to gamble a set amount, something else that makes me feel guilty when I consider the world’s needs, but then decided we’d spend most of our intended gambling money on a gift I can’t describe here lest its recipient find out what we bought. Suffice it to say, we were left with about $20 total to use in testing our luck, and about half of that we let the kids spend in what turned out to be a pretty good lesson in losing. They put about $8 in quarters into various attempts at winning and wound up with 10 rubber balls and 11 Tootsie Pop suckers. (At the end, they wished we’d have just given them the $8 to spend at Target.) Nan and I dropped our few dollars into the slot machines, winning only enough to keep us going for a while longer than held our interest. In retrospect, we should have dropped it into something like lottery tickets that could have paid off in a big way if they hit, but it was an interesting experience just being in a big-time casino so we aren't complaining. We also enjoyed the Circus Circus circus acts (going every 15 minutes), the buffet dinner (which left us stuffed like turkeys), and the swanky room (which the kids said beat the Motel 6 and Travelodge by a mile, though to me a motel room is a motel room). We saw famous casinos while walking the strip at night (if 8pm constitutes night) and enjoyed all the excitement and people. And then we got up and made the drive to San Diego. Here, in a nice state park on a reservoir, we’re more in our element and I don’t feel like quite as big a nerd or at all guilty. We can hike and build fires and write blogs and not have to feel like we’re corrupting our kids.

I think today’s school work will have a lesson or two on honesty to try and neutralize the effects of Vegas. I mean, what’s parenting if we can’t pass on our nerdiness and guilt to our kids?

The Grand Canyon

I’m not sure how to talk about Grand Canyon. I don’t know how to convey in words something so large and beautiful and terrifying (even with the railings, we were all a bit nervous getting out toward the edge). We read about how it came to develop and we saw it from a wide range of viewing areas. We looked down and out and across, and we wondered what we’d have done a few hundred years ago if we’d have ridden up on our horse to one side of the canyon wanting to get to the other. “Jump, Trigger, Jump!” just wouldn’t cut it. And we heard people speaking languages from across Asia and Europe and New England expressing awe at what they were seeing. (How do you say, “Wow!” in Japanese or French or German or Spanish?) And we worked with the kids on earning their “Junior Ranger” badges, learning something about the canyon, the rock, the history, and the wildlife. But in the end, we’re just like everyone else who visits the Grand Canyon then is stuck trying to share what they’ve seen. “Wow! It’s amazing!” And there you have it.

It’s also clear that you can’t capture it in pictures either. But that doesn’t stop us from trying, especially in this era of digital-cameras. Everywhere Nan and I would stop (to shoot the same pictures) a dozen other people would have their cameras pointing in the same direction taking the same pictures. And so have millions of others across the years. Some have tripods under giant cameras attached to 18-inch long lenses with polarizing filters and extended hoods to block the sun’s glare. Others held up cell phones or cameras so small you could put four of them in the same pocket. Some took great time and care with each shot, while others just whipped the camera out and fired away. At one point I told Nan that we should all just skip taking our own pictures; they should have a set of pictures available at the visitor’s center and we should each pick our favorites on the way out. She said, “I think they call those ‘postcards.’” Good point. Then we agreed that we all want to take our own pictures hoping for a miracle shot—and because we want evidence that we had been there ourselves.

I’m sure Nan and I will both be posting pictures that look alike, as will everyone else who was there at the same time we were… But so it goes. WE were THERE! The weather was beautiful though a little bit hazy and the crowds were thin. We’ve heard that if you come during the summer you often have to stand and wait for a space at the best viewing areas because the crowds are so large. That was definitely not the case for us. Plenty of people, but no lines even as sunset approached. We attended an interesting ranger presentation on California condors and found only about 15-20 others there with us (rather than what I’m sure is a huge crowd on the weekend during nice weather). And the kids had a fine time tromping around in the snow and occasionally peeking or throwing snowballs over the edge. Like most parents we were afraid to let them get too close, but in truth, we’re both clumsier and dizzier than they are, so there was probably more risk that we’d stumble and clod-hop our way into the abyss than that they would.

The little town of Williams, AZ, where we’re staying is one of my favorites so far. Nan has said she would like to live in about 80% of the places we’ve visited, but I’ve only seen a few that inspired me to price the real estate—and this is one of them. We hiked the historic downtown area (this used to be a Route 66 town) yesterday, and later we visited a nice little park on a beautiful lake just a few miles outside of town. There are parades and events and four distinct seasons and horses and a train that blows through during the day and at night to remind you there’s a world out there somewhere. And I’m sure there are tourists galore during the spring, summer, and fall leaving their dollars behind to support the shops and motels and restaurants. All this right at the foot of the mountains and 50 miles from the Grand Canyon. What’s not to love?

Anyway, we were here! And now…California, here we come.