It’s a blessing and a curse to have a family as far-flung as mine. Not only do we occupy remote and disparate corners of the continent, our geographic history is all over the place: my dad grew up in Nevada, my mom in Ohio. They met in California, then moved to Virginia and later Iowa. Growing up, visiting the grandparents meant at least one full day in the car (sometimes three or more, if we were going to Grandpa’s).
Fortunately, a good portion of my extended family has at least managed to occupy the same time zone. Starting at my dad’s place down at the Southern tip of Baja, we could drive North in a more or less straight line and find my brother, uncle, and grandma in California, and eventually my aunt in Vancouver Island.
My grandma and uncle live in Chico, California, which is actually reasonably close to a halfway point between my family’s Mexican and Canadian outposts. When Sean and I arrived in Chico after visiting San Francisco, Grandma surprised me with some old photos of her own roadtrip to San Francisco back in the 50’s.
Grandma Carolyn taking in the Painted Desert on the way from Indiana to California.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to share photos of my youth with any future generations that might be interested. Will I just direct them to my Facebook page? Will they be able to view my entire life story in photographs just by scanning my face with their brain chips? Quite possibly — but I think these generations will miss out on the satisfaction of holding real photographs (by the edges!) in their hands, turning the crackling pages of a leather-bound album inscribed with dates and names in tidy cursive.
Great-grandpa Carl entertaining my aunt Holly and uncle Joel with his juggling skills.
We also went through some more recent photos, including a few shots of my childhood home that sent me on a visceral nostalgia trip. That house was bulldozed to make room for a hog farm several years ago (because, Iowa), but that obliteration is perhaps no less strange than having to see someone else living in the house you grew up in.
Decorating Easter cookies at the kitchen table. (Also, the last recorded instance of me being able to pull off overalls.)
Besides the trip down memory lane, Sean and I had a sweet visit full of good food and great weather. While my uncle and grandma were occupied during the day, we explored downtown Chico and lazed about at the local (literal) watering hole, One Mile.
After Chico, we’ll head up towards the Northern extreme of my familial diaspora — my aunt Holly in Vancouver Island — and hit some fun spots in the Northwest along the way. Stay tuned for Portland, Bend, Olympia, and Seattle!
When I asked Sean how he wanted to celebrate his 32nd birthday, he had only one wish: to eat a salami sandwich in Little Italy.
Fortunately, we were staying with my friend Konner, who proved to be not only a generous host but a fearless leader in our quest to find the perfect sammie. Konner has lived in the city for over ten years, and has the remarkable skill of knowing how to get to multiple neighborhoods and destinations without even looking at her phone. (I, on the other hand, frequently get lost finding our car in the parking lot — and you’ve seen our car.)
Since we had the whole day to meet our sandwich destiny, we decided to walk to Little Italy from Konner’s house in Bernal Heights. The morning was misty and cool,and the fog — whose name, we learned, is Carl — hung low over the hills as we wandered the many-colored streets.
We meandered through the city, stopping occasionally for sustenance in bars and cafes. (These were few and far between, as you can imagine, but we made do.) We wandered in and out of bookstores and thrift shops, making a couple furry friends along the way.
Just kidding, this guy did not want to be our friend. Guarding books is serious business.
We made it to Chinatown, where we kept passing half-dressed lion dancers who seemed to be late for something. By this time the weather was perfect, Carl having long ago disappeared in his afternoon retreat.
At long last, the moment came: we stepped into Alimento’s Market in Little Italy, stood for several stunned moments gaping at the menu board, then placed our orders. Sean saw his salami dream to fruition; I went for the veggie sandwich, which comes laden with roasted eggplants, artichoke hearts, avocado, and olive tapenade, and could, I am convinced, make the most zealous of carnivores rethink their life choices.
This amazing picture was taken by Konner. My hands were too slippery with drool.
After that (well, that and an affogato — we’re in Little Italy, come on), it was all we could do to stumble into a cab. We all agreed that Sean’s birthday had been a success — so much so that we might just have to make it an annual thing.
I could tell you a lot of things about the central California coast. I could tell you that it’s a desolate and ethereal fairyland, or that the sky peeking through the ubiquitous fog is impossibly blue.
I could tell you that the long, thin pines look like castle spires rising from the hills, or that the waves seem to break slower here, sweeping the shore with a luxurious melancholy. I could tell you that the air seems to ache with a tragic romance.
What I really want to tell you about, though, is elephant seals.
About 5 miles North of San Simeon, there’s a stretch of beach where, at certain times of year, you can witness large numbers of elephant seals doing what they do best: sleeping.
Actually, sleeping really doesn’t begin to cover it. These creatures, which look more or less like giant blubber burritos that started growing limbs and then thought better of it, are capable of a level of passed-outness I have never seen in any other life form. (The only thing I can think of that comes close is maybe a toddler, if someone gave them a Four Loko and set them loose in a bouncy castle for three hours.) Their giant bodies are flopped on the beach in such devout agreement with gravity that you almost don’t register them as living creatures at first.
At first you’re like, “who left like 20 giant sandbags on the beach and then drove over them with a truck?” But then one of them rolls over to scratch its chin with a stubby flipper, or lifts its eponymously oversized snout to emit a sound that’s not unlike someone starting up a weedwhacker.
What little energy they possess during this time seems to be used hauling their 5,000-pound bodies into battle with one another, which mostly entails a lot of aggressive chest-bumping. Occasionally it looks as if they might be trying to bite each other, but haven’t quite figured out how to do so without swallowing their own noses.
In short: my heart
has found a new keeper, and it is the elephant seal. I highly
recommend getting yourself to a place where you can observe them in
the wild — and then taking a long nap afterwards, because believe
me, no one can make sleeping look so good.
After Santa Barbara, we had about a week to make it up to San Francisco, where we’d be celebrating Sean’s birthday. We decided to make our way North via the Sequoia National Forest, since neither of us had ever been. On our first night, we landed in a little campground called Sandy Flats.
This campground was perched right on the Kern River, and while it was blissfully free of chipmunks, we did discover one rodent friend:
This was very exciting, but not as exciting as when I thought I saw an otter swimming next to the beaver. (Turns out it was just a second, smaller beaver. My zoology game is not what it could be.)
The next day we woke up early to hike to Miracle Hot Springs, a lovely little collection of stone pools fed by a natural spring that sits right by the river. We couldn’t find the proper route on the way in, but we managed to reach it through a combination of intuition and willingness to pretty much just slide down a hill on our butts. Fortunately, the long soak must have cleared our heads a little, because we found an established path on our way out with no trouble.
After the springs, we drove to a sequoia grove called Trail of 100 Giants. The grove itself isn’t very large, but what it lacks in area it makes up for in height.
Almost all of the mature trees had long, black gashes in the center, scars from forest fires that must have happened before the younger trees sprouted. Some of them you could even climb into; I circled one of the larger sequoias at least three times looking for Sean before I finally heard his voice coming from inside.
How DOES one get hired as a Keebler elf?
At first glance, the trees seemed to be all more or less the same; the more you explored, however, the more their differences became apparent. Some trees were conjoined with their neighbors, trunks fused together in their soft youth. One had a great knobby plateau growing out of its base to make a perfect natural bench. Here and there you could see a fallen tree, its root system exposed, a gaping crater left where it used to grow.
Once we’d filled our eyes and exhausted our necks, we popped into the gift store, where we asked the clerk for her favorite local spots. She recommended a nearby trail that led to a waterfall, “just past the three boulders and the pile of sawdust.” Her directions proved to be accurate.
We’d now experienced both a natural bath and a natural shower — neither of which made us anything close to clean, but we’re learning that sometimes adventurers just don’t get to smell good. (You should still let us visit you and sleep on your couch, though.)
Camping life has also meant sporadic Internet access, but we’re back in wifi-land now, and will be catching up with ourselves before long. Stay tuned, good people!
After the natural beauty and punishing temperatures of Joshua Tree, we moseyed towards the coast to stay with some family friends who’ve known me since I was in cloth diapers. About twenty years ago, Lisa and David left the small town I grew up in and moved to Santa Barbara, California.
Why they chose this place over rural Iowa is anyone’s guess.
Since then, a string
of relatives and family friends have moved to the West coast: my aunt
helps run a permaculture school in Cuyama Valley, my uncle and
grandma now live up in Chico, my brother went to UCSB — I even lived
in Santa Barbara for a couple short stints, working for some local
beekeepers and struggling to acclimate to the perfect weather. (In
the Midwest, one becomes accustomed to spending half the year in a
pre-emptive cower.)
After almost two months of camping, couch-surfing, and venturing through strange territory, Lisa and David’s place was like an oasis of familiarity. I mean, look at this fridge map and tell me you don’t feel comforted:
We spent our days in Santa Barbara roaming the city, wandering State Street and playing with strangers’ dogs at the beach. In the evenings we hung out with Lisa and David and my brother, Van, who had recently made the wise decision to move back to Santa Barbara from Colorado Springs.
In retrospect, Sean was definitely plotting something in this picture.
Santa Barbara is nestled between the mountains and the Pacific, with red tile roofs and palm trees as far as the eye can see. It’s where famous people go when they’re old and just want to chill in their mansions and use the word “terroir” a lot, but it’s also much more than that.
But I mean really, does it NEED to be more than that? Look at that view.
We were also lucky enough to catch a show at Soho featuring Jan Smith, a phenomenal local musician who also happens to be my aunt.
A few days later we
went to visit Jan at the eco-village where she lives, out in the
desert a couple hours from Santa Barbara. Usually teeming with
visiting groups and students, the property was quiet in the summer
heat. We stayed in a sweet little cob house that was constructed by a
teenage girl during one of the eco-village’s natural building
courses. (In my teenage years, I could barely construct a clean
outfit — but hey, we all walk our own paths, okay?)
Being back in Santa
Barbara reminds me of coming here as a beach-dazzled teenager, back
when anywhere outside of Iowa seemed boundless and exotic. I feel
fortunate to have had a rural childhood that was quiet but immensely
full, and also to have had the opportunity to roam and explore so
much as an adult. From here we’ll be venturing into more of the
unknown, but I’m happy to know our way will be blessed with plenty of
familiar faces.
We were sad to say goodbye to La Paz last week, but the homeland was calling, and we knew if we stayed much longer Sean would descend even further into his Mexican Coca-Cola addiction. We said our farewells and hit the road, heading back the way we came.
Adios, Baja!
Well, more or less the same way — I confess there was one instance where I neglected my navigational duties and took us down a country road that soon turned to gravel. By the time we realized my mistake, we’d gone too far to backtrack, and before long the gravel turned to large rocks — some of them menacing enough that I had to jump out of the car and hurl them out of the way to ensure that Watermelon’s dainty underbelly could proceed unscathed. It wasn’t that close to sunset and we weren’t that low on gas, and we did end up making it to our hotel with plenty of time to spare, but let’s just say we both spent a lot of time thinking about how we’d survive in the desert if it came down to it.
If only we could eat breathtaking vistas.
Other than that, the drive up was fairly uneventful, although we did discover that military checkpoints are considerably less nonchalant when you’re driving towards the States. It was a true test of our Spanish skills trying to explain to Mexican officials what all the weird crap in our car was. (Things like antihistamines and tarot cards and odor-eating charcoal bags just don’t come up very often in Duolingo lessons.)
Just shy of Tijuana, we hit an exciting milestone:
That’s right, Watermelon is now a ripe 100,000 miles old. Gifts aren’t necessary, but she’d love to get a card. Ziggy is always nice. A check would be fine too.
After spending the night in Tijuana, we made our slow way back across the border and drove to our next stop: Joshua Tree.
Even in the dead of summer, Joshua Tree was by far the most crowded park we’ve been to, but somehow it felt more remote and pristine than anywhere we’d camped so far. Maybe it was the quiet: whereas the other campgrounds were filled with bird chatter or insect songs, in Joshua Tree we barely heard a wing flutter.
We did, however, have some uninvited guests.
In fact, much of our time at Joshua Tree was spent waging a rodent war of Caddyshack proportions. Every time we turned around, these disturbingly brazen creatures were infiltrating our food, water, beer and coffee supplies. They managed to devour an entire bag of guacamole chips, which I was hoping would at least cause them some mild intestinal discomfort, but it seemed only to cement their conviction that we wanted desperately to feed them and needed only to be shown how.
Nevertheless, after securing our comestibles, we managed to get in some very scenic hikes. I don’t know anything about rocks, but the ones in Joshua Tree look like giant pebbles stacked by a daydreaming child, piled in such improbable configurations that you can’t help but see whimsical shapes in them. It’s not unlike staring at a bunch of clouds.
When you’re just trying to get a cool rock picture and a tree totally photo-bombs.
The trees themselves are equally tempting to the imagination — they seem to be frozen midway through some frantic gesture, like hands grasping at the sky. They also have surprisingly shallow roots, so you frequently see them listing at precarious angles or collapsed entirely in the sand, like a desert traveler crawling towards water.
We kept these hikes short, however, because as soon as the shadows receded under the scorching mid-day sun, we were like ants under a magnifying glass. On our first day I made the mistake of trying to prepare lunch at noon and nearly burned myself on the silverware I’d set on the picnic table just seconds before.
For those particularly punishing hours, Sean and I ventured into town to explore. On the main drag we found a little gathering of weird galleries and shops, and we happened across a loosely defined outdoor art space that featured a spaceship-like construction with revolving disco boulders.
All the people we talked to (except the mannequins) was friendly and helpful, giving us suggestions for coffee-shops, bars, galleries, and tourist attractions. Following one tip, we drove out to a little Old West village called Pioneertown, which has served as a film set for famous westerns over the years such as, I kid you not, “The Gay Amigo.” The town is also home to a famous bar called Pappy and Harriet’s, which, in spite of its remote location, boasts such big names as Paul McCartney and Lorde in its roster. (We didn’t see any superstars, but their nachos were divine.)
After Joshua Tree, our trajectory will take us steadily Northward, which will bring a welcome change in climate. I love the desert, but we only have so many layers of skin left between the two of us.
Next we’ll be heading to Santa Barbara for a little dose of perfect weather (and to see some dear friends and family). Will we stop in L.A. and get famous real quick along the way? Probably. Stay tuned.
The Good Ship Watermelon 