Catch up post-Carmel


(Sometime during yesterday’s drive from Ferndale on the northern California coast to Ashland, OR, my direction turned eastward for the first time since starting out twenty-three days ago. It’s still a long way from Philadelphia, but I’m homeward bound, even though Eugene and Portland are still ahead and northward.)

On Thursday night, I saw a production of “The Comedy of Errors” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, where my seat was the boundary between a group of thirty-eight seventh-graders from Richmond, CA and twenty-seven eighth-graders from Santa Cruz. Contrary to how you might expect this to continue -- given that opening sentence – they were very well-behaved, once seated and during the show. However, it was a different story in the ubiquitous gift-shop beforehand. There, they ran somewhere between “amok” and “unsupervised”. The few chaperones I could see confined themselves to saying: “This isn’t the only store we’ll be going to” and “You don’t have to spend all your money in one place”. The volunteer sales staff, mostly older ladies of genteel breeding (as they used to say), gave murderous looks but shed no blood. I paid for my purchase and hurried out, wondering what it would be like inside. (While selecting a T-shirt, I chatted with a goateed man who had seen Kenneth Branagh (sic) do Henry IV at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1984 AND caught caught an apple-core thrown to the pit audience during an “As You Like It” production at “The Globe” in London. He kept it as a memento. (My ticket-stub to “Taming of the Shrew” there last August hasn’t shrivelled or browned…)

The last few days, since the wedding in Monterey on Sunday, most of the drive has been on the northern stretch of the Highway 1, from Point Reyes near San Francisco to Crescent City, close to the border with Oregon, some 200+ miles. The scenery is even more spectacular than the section in southern California, as it includes old-growth redwood forests. (A video I watched at the Redwoods National Park information center showed that only 5% remains of the redwood groves that covered California before logging from the Gold Rush (1849) onwards.)

In particular, the 32 mile drive called “Avenue of the Giants” is not to be missed. It’s a two-lane road flanked by trees averaging over 200 ft. in height, some with trunks wider than the longest SUVs. (The bark alone, in the older ones that are as much as 2000 years old, is up to 18 inches thick.) Photos don’t do them justice without placing a person for scale. For long stretches, mine was the only car in sight, and riding with the top down I could feel the full effect of their majesty. The sunlight had to zig-zag such a long way through the leaves to reach ground-level that it would hard to tell the time of day by the speckled shadows. And when I stopped beside a toppled tree, whose cross-section was taller than the top of a basketball backboard, and shut the engine, the stillness, until a car went by a minute or so later, was eerie. I felt very, very small and like an intruder.

Looking at the rings of that redwood tree brought thoughts about Carlsbad Caverns, and time-scales in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. A thousand years in the formation of a staglamatite barely makes it noticeable, no more than a wet bump. For a redwood, the same amount of time produces a specimen that is the equivalent of an “emerging adult” in human terms. For us, “a thousand years” has no meaning for an individual life. It’s no wonder that I felt both very mortal yet also awed by how a creature of such limited lifespan, which is not even the longest in the animal kingdom, can disrupt and destroy the lives of all species AND the physical world. Makes me proud to be a homo sapiens….

I also noticed a different set of reactions driving through this northern hilly and forested landscape versus the open and sparsely vegetated Southwest. Both environments have many places where the scenery stretches for miles in almost every direction, and where the viewer feels the way the Devil intended Jesus to feel when he tempted Him in the desert: like a king surveying his domain. Yet, while the vistas of green hills dropping down to rivers winding through cultivated valleys did, indeed, give that feeling of awed “ownership”, the Southwest sights of canyons, mesas, red hills, and junipers and sagebrush evoked a sense of awe and futility.

Reflecting that difference, I realized that it had to do with man’s control over Nature. How I felt depended on how much I felt the environment could be controlled: forests are easier to raze than deserts are to make bloom. It was that simple. It may be that obvious to others, but it wasn’t to me, until that moment, how that kind of a Man-centered view, is not necessarily a good way to look at the world.

A road-story. On the way to Mendocino on Tuesday, I stopped to eat a sandwich at the roadside tables of a gift shop in a little widening of Highway 1 called Jenner, CA, 95450, and offered to take a photo of a young couple with a baby. We exchanged no more than a dozen words and they left me to eat my sandwich in the company of a pelican. (“Fred” – he looked like a “Fred” – liked the wheat bread, the red onion, and the turkey breast I shared with him. He also became bolder as lunch progressed.) A few hours later, as I was unloading my luggage at McElvoy’s Inn in Mendocino, the same couple emerged from the room next to mine. We exchanged another dozen words about “what a small world” and went our separate ways, though not before I did do my parlor-trick of guessing baby ages – I guessed 16 months and he was 14 months. (For those who know child development, that’s NOT too bad a guess.)

The next morning, as I was loading the car for the drive to Ferndale, I saw the young woman and the baby. In the dozen words that included asking where they were headed, she said: “To Fort Bragg to take the ‘Skunk Train’.” “What’s that?”, I asked. “Oh, it’s a steam-engine excursion train that goes into the redwoods.”, she replied. “How long is the trip?”, I asked. “It leaves at 9:30am and returns to Fort Bragg at 1 pm.”, she said. (It was now 8:50 am and Fort Bragg was about 15 minutes away.) “I never heard of it. Sound pretty neat. Thanks! Maybe I’ll see you there.”, I answered. “OK, see you!”, and she left. I did a quick review of my plans for the day (none) and calculated whether I had the time to still get to Ferndale before dark (yes). I made the train with five minutes to spare, including parking and purchasing a ticket.

The couple, whose names I never got, were taking a month to travel, having quit their jobs in Indiana to move back to the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. He was a Lutheran minister doing youth ministry and was planning to get a PhD in that area. During the ride – which was relaxing albeit not very exciting in terms of route or scenery -- we had a great conversation about “callings”, taking chances, traveling with toddlers, fundamentalism, and continuing education. They were very warm and engaging and radiated both wholesomeness and a clear delight with each other. I wouldn’t have met them or experienced “The Skunk Train” and learned a piece of local/California history, if I hadn’t offered to take their photo in Jenner. Now, they had a personal photographer…