"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