California Notes, from February
May. 29th, 2004 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanI thought I really should post my notes of the last trip before I make the next one. These are unfinished. I still hope to finish them. But at the moment, I am emulating all those diarists and journalers whose incompletions I complain about.
February 11 -- Arrived very underslept, was unexpectedly and pleasantly met by Eric well before baggage claim, and found him underslept too. Coming from the north and east, from beyond the last BART station, he had had to spend as much time travelling as I had. We collected the rental car and checked into the hotel. I had gotten the amazing rate of $25.00 a night for it, via Orbitz, and while the hotel clerk remarked that that rate was caused by a clerical error and was lower than the employee discount, since I had a printout of the confirmation notice, he would honor the rate. We didn't make use of the hotel much aside from sleeping and eating in our room. The hotel had a swimming pool, not open yet, and a number of rather pleasant plantings with benches, which were useful for Eric to inhabit while he smoked or had his coffee before I got up. There were some slightly discouraged-looking roses and a vast bush of rosemary, though I didn't discover that for several days. The hotel clerk's cousin ran some kind of service for tourists, but when I told the clerk that Eric lived there, he said we probably wouldn't be needing the cousin. He did say that there were taxes on top of the room rate, including a tourism tax whether we were really tourists or not. There were, too, but the rate still beat any other by a considerable margin. Poor hotel.
We hauled my luggage in; Eric had left his at home, since we were planning to go back there to fetch Toliman. The hotel's website said -- untruthfully, as it turned out -- that it was "pet-friendly," and Eric's father had asked if we'd take the cat for the duration of my visit in order to give Eric's father's allergies a bit of a rest.
Each of us had brought some lunch in a refrigerator dish, and we sat about in the hotel room eating. The room was well-lighted, quite good for reading in bed; and the bed, as it turned out shortly, comfortable. The window could only be opened about six inches; there was no screen. The door opened directly onto the parking lot. Eric found the room stuffy, and opened the door wide while this was possible; once we had the cat, we wouldn't be able to open either door or window. The bathroom was weird, consisting of a mirror, countertop, and sink, with suitcase rack, such closet as there was (a short clothes rod with a few hangers on it), and a dinky safe, in one room; and opening off that room a space like a triangle with one point cut off, containing the toilet and the oddly-shaped shower stall. This inner room was windowless, and you couldn't turn on the light without also activating a very noisy exhaust fan. It was a peculiar place to be in in the middle of the night. But when I was sitting across the silly round table from Eric, watching him eat pasta out of a plastic container, and eating my own salad, I was so happy to be there with twelve days before us that the room was better than a palace.
We went to the Whole Foods in San Mateo and got some groceries. We planned to get a cheap styrofoam cooler, but in the meantime we got just enough food for the evening and the next morning. We came home and put our more perishable purchases on ice in the little bucket provided. When it was late enough that we would miss rush hour in Antioch, we drove out there to fetch the cat. Eric pointed out Mount San Bruno, with its crown of radio towers; the Port of Oakland, still set about with Imperial Walkers; the Emeryville mud flats, various San Francisco neighborhoods and hills and buildings. It was a hazy, sunny day. The fringes of Highway 101 were planted with iceplant, which was flowering fairly heavily in purple and white and pink. On less tended fringes and on many slopes and grassy hillsides were nodding yellow flowers, in dozens, in hundreds. Neither of us knew what they were. I was much excited by the flowers, since there were 19 inches of snow on the ground in Minneapolis. I also noticed, both when we drove away from the airport and again now, as Eric had promised I would, the fresh greenness of the hills, which had been golden brown when I last saw them in September.
I was very glad to collect Toliman, since I miss him. He was in fine fettle, though suspicious of me. He single-mindedly investigated the hotel room for hiding places. Eric opened a lower dresser drawer a crack and put a shirt in there for him. He tried that out, but eventually decided that burrowing under the bedclothes was the way to go. After we went to bed he pursued this course with a vengeance, ultimately burrowing under both bottom sheet and mattress pad. It was like sleeping with a ferret, I thought, though probably that is worse and involves shiny objects. At some point in the remote reaches of the night, I got up and hauled him out from under the mattress pad, and he went grumbling over to Eric's side of the bed and hulked up under the bedspread.
February 12 -- An intermittently sunny day, growing cloudier later on. Eric got up well before I did, and went off to Peet's for coffee; he brought back a cup for me and a bag of ground coffee for us to use on subsequent days. Asked what I wanted to do first, I said, to return to the ocean. Seeing redwoods again ran a close second, and Eric pointed out that the geography of the area was such that we could do both things in the same day. We set out for Moss Beach, but on account of a slight failure of navigation, decided to settle for San Gregorio State Beach instead. The hotel was in South San Francisco, and Eric had said this should give us a chance to explore the Santa Cruz Mountains a bit. South of us a series of creeks ran down to the sea, one after the other, and each beach was named after its creek mouth, and most of them were public beaches. San Gregorio State Beach was all sand. We -- well, mostly Eric, though I got better with practice -- found things in and on the sand, though it appeared so smooth and featureless from a distance: smooth-worn snail shells, crab carapaces, their inner surfaces glowing with rainbow color; mussel shells in luminous purple and white, a large stranded jellyfish and some smaller ones, sand dollars, which I learned for the first time are the remains of sea urchin carapaces. I'd seen whole sea urchin exoskeletons, but had not recognized them as the origin of sand dollars.
The beach was posted with a warning about rip tides and currents. The surf was relentless, pouring itself in gray, green, and white, with the angle of the waves altering unpredictably, waves from two directions sometimes smashing into one another and tossing up white foam. After a while Eric descried birds bobbing and diving in the surf, and with the help of my bird-watching binoculars and his copy of Sibley, we discovered that they were surf scoters. The first ones we saw were quite close to shore; later we saw them much farther out. I said that the far ones in the bigger waves were brave, but Eric contended, quite correctly, that those birds were in their usual element, and the ones so close to the treacherous land were the brave ones.
After a while we tore ourselves away from the beach and drove to Portola State Park. We did this by taking Alpine Road and Page Mill Road, which were gloriously scenic and profoundly alarming. Narrower and narrower as one went up, steeper and steeper. I have in my head strong memories of driving to Wastwater in the Lake District, because Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros has a house there; David was driving and Pat and Caroline were with us. I have strong memories, of the same emotional color, of going for the first time with Raphael to the Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson. Driving from the beach into the mountains in this way was a similar but more extreme experience, as the evidence of human work shrank and the hills and their inhabitants -- beeches in the Lake District, saguaros in Arizona, and here the redwood forest -- closed and leaned in. Lichen and moss floated and thickened as we went into the forest. The progression further up and further in was interrupted periodically by vast dappled views of cliff and ocean and beach, and sometimes of the hills yet ahead, green and brooding in the sunlight. Eric couldn't really properly attend to the views, since he was driving, so I felt I could not really close my eyes, but I was tempted. I am glad I did not yield to temptation, however, because the transition between the coast and the forest was sudden, as if the trees had walked down the hills to meet us. The quality of the air shifted; it was both thicker and fresher. I wondered if I could smell more things in the land air because I was more accustomed to it.
I think this was the only sunny time we spent in a redwood forest. We parked in a campground and walked past camping and picnic sites, with a deep gorge holding a creek on our left. Everything was rich and sparkling; even the sodden leaves and needles of previous years looked as if preserved in ice. As he had done on the beach, Eric picked objects up from the dripping path: the huge tattered leaves of the bigleaf maple, the bearded cones of Douglas firs, tan oak leaves and acorns. There were far fewer bay trees than we had seen in other areas with redwoods, and more tan oaks. We turned back reluctantly as the sun got low. We had a long way down to drive. As we passed the park office on our way out, Eric stopped the car and indicated, on the smooth turf on the righthand side of the road, a covey of California quail. They fluttered a little when they noticed us, and then settled for a bit. They are not as goofy to look at as the Minnesota version.
I was sufficiently unnerved about the idea of driving those steep, narrow roads after dark that Eric said we could go down a much gentler road into Palo Alto and come back to South San Francisco on the freeway. We found a place to put the car, had a very pleasant dinner in an Italian restaurant -- the bruscheta was wonderful, and the new fashion apparently is to dip your bread not just in olive oil but in balsamic vinegar. I had a something or other primavera in red sauce, and Eric had a dish with mussels that he enjoyed exceedingly. We decided that this must be our anniversary dinner -- I had arrived on our second anniversary, on purpose, but we ate some of our groceries in the hotel room on the actual day.
There was a Borders nearby, in a converted cinema, and we browsed in it a bit. They had a copy ofThe Whim of the Dragon, and Eric in time-honored fashion moved other books and faced it out. He found a Dover book about star names, and bought it. This was a pattern throughout my visit. Both of us are effectually broke and really had no business doing this trip at all -- not that I regret it, because I don't:: matters with me would be far worse if we had not. In any case, we were very good about spending money, except for a few days when I said I must, must, have a hot meal, and also whenever we went into a bookstore. There, we were restrained -- I could have spent a hundred dollars in that Borders without having to think about it -- but I can't say that we were really good. I don't regret the books either, however. They provided the fruit for a number of lovely conversations.
February 13 -- We went to Tilden Park, in Berkeley, and climbed to the top of Mount Vollmer. It was windy and gray and drizzly, but there were some fine ancient trees and some interesting views. Eric pointed out all the geographical features to me -- Richmond Point, San Pablo Bay. At the top of the mountain, as he warned me, was just a jumble of radio towers. The wind got up tremendously and the rain started in something like earnest, so we started down by a different track. It was not the best day for bird sightings, but we did see some little brown ground feeders, very shy, poking about in the leaf litter under shrubbery.
Then we drove into Oakland and collected Eric's mother and went to the bird refuge at Lake Merritt. It was raining finely but persistently by then, and colder. But we saw canvasbacks, lesser scaups, two delightful buffleheads that dived for us once or twice and then retreated, a black-crowned night heron stalking across a tangle of bramble bushes exactly as if it were going through water, and a spotty juvenile one peering intently at the mud near the shore. There was also a bird we dubbed "the angstful gull," because it kept walking about uttering piercing cries for no apparent reason. There were some Canada geese, too, and a vast flock of pigeons that kept surrounding us and then flapping off and then returning. I got cold before either of the other two. I had forgotten to bring a warm hat or a pair of gloves when I packed. So much for being a Minnesotan. Eric's mother lent me her gloves for a while.
We went when it was late enough to a sushi restaurant called Mikado. Eric and I had eaten there in September. They will sell you individual pieces of sushi for a dollar, and have lovely miso soup and seaweed salad. We all had soup and hot tea, and shared some edamame, some seaweed salad, and some spinach salad with sesame seeds. Then we split some orders of eel, and Eric and I shared some mackerel. It was the first time I'd had raw fish in years. I'd thought it best to proceed cautiously. Jean (Eric's mother) had a tempura dinner, but ended up giving us the harder vegetables, since she was waiting for some new teeth and couldn't chew hard stuff. I really like her. She has a whimsical sense of humor and a fund of stories. His father could be described the same way, though the air of the whimsy and the stories is entirely different, transformed by a different personality. Eric is like both of them, but very much himself too. I know that none of these observations is in the least original and that any of them could be made about many, if not all, sets of parents and children. But for some reason it struck me afresh.
February 14 -- a warm, almost hot, sunny day and early afternoon. We successfully went to Moss Beach. The north end of the beach, where we had spent most of our time in September, was cordoned off because, according to the sign, a group of harbor seals had "hauled out" on the beach. So we went the other way from the mouth of the contaminated creek and poked about in the tidepools there. The beach was completely transformed by being under sunlight and blue sky. We didn't see as many creatures as we had in September. The rocks here were blacker, less veined, less spotted with pink or green or yellow. We did see a great many very small snail snells inhabited by very small hermit crabs, and an unusually large number of houseless hermit crabs, many of them also very small.
We sat on some damp black rocks, our feet near the tidepools, and ate our lunch. The big portable-food discovery of this trip, I think, was Tofu to Go, which is pre-cooked, slightly greasy tofu triangles with some seasoning in them that's coordinated with the contents of a plastic packet of sauce that you squeeze onto the triangles. The best was sesame ginger. I think we tried mango wasabi too, and Eric declined with great firmness to try pineapple something or other. In any case, it was a great whack of good protein, and there was plenty for two.
After a while we left, less reluctantly since much of the beach was off-limits to us. Eric suggested trying some other beaches, and I agreed, but very quickly we hit a traffic jam. It occurred to us, a little belatedly, that it was Saturday, sunny and warm, and Valentine's Day. Apparently the entire world and its dog wanted to go to the beach.
So we turned into the mountains again, and went to Castle Rock State Park. It was gray and drizzly, and quite dark under the trees.
Friday, February 20th. A gray overcast day, with rain forecast. We thought we would go to the Botanic Garden in Tilden park and see how the weather sorted itself out. After a brief and benignly irate collision with the golf course and its environs, because Eric thought the native-plant nursery ought to be where the Botanic Garden was, he consulted the map more closely and got us there without any trouble. The parking lot had the bathrooms in it, and was surrounded by some excellent bay trees. You crossed a roaring narrow creek on a little bridge, and then the road, to get to the entrance to the garden. Between the garden and the Visitor Center were some fantastical desert plants, looking a little startled and put out in their lush green surround. We went into the Visitor Center, and were promptly entranced by a fine hands-on display of different types of serpentine, pine cones, and, I think, feathers. We played with thos for some time and read the information available. Eric picked up a map of the garden and asked me where I wanted to go, but the answer was really pretty much "Everywhere."
This was one of my favorite parts of the trip, but it's hard to describe properly. There were some open areas of lawn, full of blooming manzanitas, with their complement of golden-crowned sparrows, which we had also seen in the California section of the garden in Golden Gate Park on a day as yet unchronicled here. There was a miniature redwood forest with both redwood sorrel, blooming intermittently, and elk clover, which looks like redwood sorrel on steroids, minus the blossoms. Also under the redwoods I kept seeing signs for something called a slink pod, and finally found the gorgeously peculiar flower itself. I should remember to put in a link to it.
The garden is built in a hollow around part of Wildcat Creek, so there were some fairly steep descents and switchbacks down to the roaring water. Along the water were glorious bay trees patched and hung with moss and lichen. It started raining at some point, and I suggested that we sit on a bench under a bay tree. This did in fact keep us quite dry, and we were able to watch the rain catch the light between us and the slopes of Pacific-Coast wildflowers. Mostly at this remove I remember the manzanita blossoms, and the rain making the smooth ruddy branches of the madrone glow as if they were the embers of some huge diffuse fire. Oh, yes, and the Sierra redwoods! We'd seen quite a lot of coastal redwoods by this time, so it was very exciting to come to a small damp grove of tall pleased-looking mountain ones. Eric picked out at once the differences in growth habit, cones, bark, and needles. In an odd way it was like meeting long-lost cousins.
I'm hoping that we can go back to this garden in June, and I should have a more coherent description of its layout then.
Sunday, February 22. My last full day in California. Eric asked me what I wanted to do. I said I supposed we really couldn't stay in bed all day. He said that we could if I wanted to. If it had been raining, that would have decided the matter, but although the forecast called for rain as it mostly had, the sky was only partly overcast. We had been running at full speed, driving long distances and walking about all day, or at least all of the day there was between the time I hauled my reluctant carcase out of bed and the time the winter sun set. And yet the experiences we had were so splendid and so refreshing to our sense of intimacy, that it seemed better to try to have a few more of them. We decided to make one more visit to Moss Beach and then take in yet another redwood state park, Butano this time. Eric had been trying to ascertain from the map which of them were more remote, and he thought Butano was a good bet for that.
But first, Moss Beach. The contaminated stream was so full and ferocious after Tuesday's storm that it was difficult to cross on either the easy or the slippery rocks. I suggested going down the slope on the other side of the little ridge that comes down from the road, and crossing the stream nearer the ocean., where it was flatter. This climb was steeper than I'd realized, but Eric gave me a hand. The northern part of the beach was no longer cordoned off for haul-out, so we crossed the stream handily and headed for the far end. The tide was quite high when we started, and frisky, too; we had to jump back from adventurous waves several times. The rocks that the harbor seals had basked on during our first visit were visible only as a roil of white water and leaping foam. The water between those rocks and the shore was still calmer even when the rocks were covered, and Eric said to me very soon, "Look, seal noses!" We looked at rocks and shells; Eric was especially interested in finding things that looked like serpentine, after our happy perusal of the exhibit at the Botanic Garden. He kept picking up small wet beautiful things and handing them to me. When I had five or six I would lay them in a row on a convenient rock and take a picture of them. He found several different green rocks, veined or spotted or almost plain.
As the tide went out we began to see birds, walking about in the shallow water pver the rocks from which the ocean was withdrawing. An oyster-catcher, and another; [I can't recall all the birds we saw that day; I can see them but I can't remember their names]
Then we went up Gazos Creek Road to Butano State Park. There were signs saying, if I recall correctly, "Slow, Newt Crossing." We drove very slowly, keeping an eye out for newts, somewhat handicapped by not knowing how large they were. Eric spotted one making its way in a very leisurely fashion across the road. We stopped and admired it; it was maybe five or six inches long and pleasingly marked in red. It was not in a hurry. A great huge SUV behind us was; it roared past us and swerved back into its own lane, obliterating the sight of the newt. We drove cautiously forward and saw to our relief that the newt had gained the side of the road in time and was now moving far more expeditiously through the grass, lifting its legs very high as if it were dancing. We admired it and went on. We drove past the empty park office, noticing a sign that said the park closed at sunset, and drove a little along a rapidly narrowing road, over a self-proclaimed narrow bridge. The light was fading, but even before we got out of the car, the forest looked profoundly rich. It had the same plants in it as the other redwood forests we had visited: sword fern, redwood sorrel, bigleaf maple, huckleberry, bay, and the redwoods. Everything dripped and glistened. I kept thinking that I saw a blossom, and realizing that it was the dim light glancing off a drop or pool of water on a leaf or stem. I got increasingly nervous about the narrowness and the muddiness of the road, so Eric turned back. There was a broad space in the road with a car parked in it, and room for four or five more, but I said it looked muddy to me, we'd get stuck. I offered to get out, but Eric said we'd just go park closer to the park office building, where there was obviously pavement. We did this, and got out. By this time I knew from Eric's reminding me on four or five previous occasions that it was worth stopping to smell the air in a redwood forest, but even if I had not recalled this, I would have noticed this cold, fresh, spicy, growing scent.
We walked up the road, past the parked car, which turned out to be situated on perfectly solid asphalt overlaid with needles, leaves, and a thin scrim of water. The creek was on our left, roaring away. We crossed the narrow bridge again, on foot this time, pausing to look down into the water. A huge bay tree had fallen across the creek, but its roots were still in the soil and it had sent up a series of young live branches from its new orientation. We found a trail and turned up it. The light was dim but rich; there seemed to be more of everything, and it all seemed larger and greener and more profuse. I mentioned this, and Eric said that this forest was closer to the coast than the others we had seen. The trail went up and up, and turned away from the creek. As the voice of the water faded, no other sound supervened but the small noises we made climbing, and our voices. We stopped talking and stood listening to the silence, looking at rocks, moss, redwoods, the colorless sky, one another's faces. Very faint and far, I heard a few bird calls, but Eric couldn't hear them; for him the silence was complete.
Pamela
February 11 -- Arrived very underslept, was unexpectedly and pleasantly met by Eric well before baggage claim, and found him underslept too. Coming from the north and east, from beyond the last BART station, he had had to spend as much time travelling as I had. We collected the rental car and checked into the hotel. I had gotten the amazing rate of $25.00 a night for it, via Orbitz, and while the hotel clerk remarked that that rate was caused by a clerical error and was lower than the employee discount, since I had a printout of the confirmation notice, he would honor the rate. We didn't make use of the hotel much aside from sleeping and eating in our room. The hotel had a swimming pool, not open yet, and a number of rather pleasant plantings with benches, which were useful for Eric to inhabit while he smoked or had his coffee before I got up. There were some slightly discouraged-looking roses and a vast bush of rosemary, though I didn't discover that for several days. The hotel clerk's cousin ran some kind of service for tourists, but when I told the clerk that Eric lived there, he said we probably wouldn't be needing the cousin. He did say that there were taxes on top of the room rate, including a tourism tax whether we were really tourists or not. There were, too, but the rate still beat any other by a considerable margin. Poor hotel.
We hauled my luggage in; Eric had left his at home, since we were planning to go back there to fetch Toliman. The hotel's website said -- untruthfully, as it turned out -- that it was "pet-friendly," and Eric's father had asked if we'd take the cat for the duration of my visit in order to give Eric's father's allergies a bit of a rest.
Each of us had brought some lunch in a refrigerator dish, and we sat about in the hotel room eating. The room was well-lighted, quite good for reading in bed; and the bed, as it turned out shortly, comfortable. The window could only be opened about six inches; there was no screen. The door opened directly onto the parking lot. Eric found the room stuffy, and opened the door wide while this was possible; once we had the cat, we wouldn't be able to open either door or window. The bathroom was weird, consisting of a mirror, countertop, and sink, with suitcase rack, such closet as there was (a short clothes rod with a few hangers on it), and a dinky safe, in one room; and opening off that room a space like a triangle with one point cut off, containing the toilet and the oddly-shaped shower stall. This inner room was windowless, and you couldn't turn on the light without also activating a very noisy exhaust fan. It was a peculiar place to be in in the middle of the night. But when I was sitting across the silly round table from Eric, watching him eat pasta out of a plastic container, and eating my own salad, I was so happy to be there with twelve days before us that the room was better than a palace.
We went to the Whole Foods in San Mateo and got some groceries. We planned to get a cheap styrofoam cooler, but in the meantime we got just enough food for the evening and the next morning. We came home and put our more perishable purchases on ice in the little bucket provided. When it was late enough that we would miss rush hour in Antioch, we drove out there to fetch the cat. Eric pointed out Mount San Bruno, with its crown of radio towers; the Port of Oakland, still set about with Imperial Walkers; the Emeryville mud flats, various San Francisco neighborhoods and hills and buildings. It was a hazy, sunny day. The fringes of Highway 101 were planted with iceplant, which was flowering fairly heavily in purple and white and pink. On less tended fringes and on many slopes and grassy hillsides were nodding yellow flowers, in dozens, in hundreds. Neither of us knew what they were. I was much excited by the flowers, since there were 19 inches of snow on the ground in Minneapolis. I also noticed, both when we drove away from the airport and again now, as Eric had promised I would, the fresh greenness of the hills, which had been golden brown when I last saw them in September.
I was very glad to collect Toliman, since I miss him. He was in fine fettle, though suspicious of me. He single-mindedly investigated the hotel room for hiding places. Eric opened a lower dresser drawer a crack and put a shirt in there for him. He tried that out, but eventually decided that burrowing under the bedclothes was the way to go. After we went to bed he pursued this course with a vengeance, ultimately burrowing under both bottom sheet and mattress pad. It was like sleeping with a ferret, I thought, though probably that is worse and involves shiny objects. At some point in the remote reaches of the night, I got up and hauled him out from under the mattress pad, and he went grumbling over to Eric's side of the bed and hulked up under the bedspread.
February 12 -- An intermittently sunny day, growing cloudier later on. Eric got up well before I did, and went off to Peet's for coffee; he brought back a cup for me and a bag of ground coffee for us to use on subsequent days. Asked what I wanted to do first, I said, to return to the ocean. Seeing redwoods again ran a close second, and Eric pointed out that the geography of the area was such that we could do both things in the same day. We set out for Moss Beach, but on account of a slight failure of navigation, decided to settle for San Gregorio State Beach instead. The hotel was in South San Francisco, and Eric had said this should give us a chance to explore the Santa Cruz Mountains a bit. South of us a series of creeks ran down to the sea, one after the other, and each beach was named after its creek mouth, and most of them were public beaches. San Gregorio State Beach was all sand. We -- well, mostly Eric, though I got better with practice -- found things in and on the sand, though it appeared so smooth and featureless from a distance: smooth-worn snail shells, crab carapaces, their inner surfaces glowing with rainbow color; mussel shells in luminous purple and white, a large stranded jellyfish and some smaller ones, sand dollars, which I learned for the first time are the remains of sea urchin carapaces. I'd seen whole sea urchin exoskeletons, but had not recognized them as the origin of sand dollars.
The beach was posted with a warning about rip tides and currents. The surf was relentless, pouring itself in gray, green, and white, with the angle of the waves altering unpredictably, waves from two directions sometimes smashing into one another and tossing up white foam. After a while Eric descried birds bobbing and diving in the surf, and with the help of my bird-watching binoculars and his copy of Sibley, we discovered that they were surf scoters. The first ones we saw were quite close to shore; later we saw them much farther out. I said that the far ones in the bigger waves were brave, but Eric contended, quite correctly, that those birds were in their usual element, and the ones so close to the treacherous land were the brave ones.
After a while we tore ourselves away from the beach and drove to Portola State Park. We did this by taking Alpine Road and Page Mill Road, which were gloriously scenic and profoundly alarming. Narrower and narrower as one went up, steeper and steeper. I have in my head strong memories of driving to Wastwater in the Lake District, because Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros has a house there; David was driving and Pat and Caroline were with us. I have strong memories, of the same emotional color, of going for the first time with Raphael to the Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson. Driving from the beach into the mountains in this way was a similar but more extreme experience, as the evidence of human work shrank and the hills and their inhabitants -- beeches in the Lake District, saguaros in Arizona, and here the redwood forest -- closed and leaned in. Lichen and moss floated and thickened as we went into the forest. The progression further up and further in was interrupted periodically by vast dappled views of cliff and ocean and beach, and sometimes of the hills yet ahead, green and brooding in the sunlight. Eric couldn't really properly attend to the views, since he was driving, so I felt I could not really close my eyes, but I was tempted. I am glad I did not yield to temptation, however, because the transition between the coast and the forest was sudden, as if the trees had walked down the hills to meet us. The quality of the air shifted; it was both thicker and fresher. I wondered if I could smell more things in the land air because I was more accustomed to it.
I think this was the only sunny time we spent in a redwood forest. We parked in a campground and walked past camping and picnic sites, with a deep gorge holding a creek on our left. Everything was rich and sparkling; even the sodden leaves and needles of previous years looked as if preserved in ice. As he had done on the beach, Eric picked objects up from the dripping path: the huge tattered leaves of the bigleaf maple, the bearded cones of Douglas firs, tan oak leaves and acorns. There were far fewer bay trees than we had seen in other areas with redwoods, and more tan oaks. We turned back reluctantly as the sun got low. We had a long way down to drive. As we passed the park office on our way out, Eric stopped the car and indicated, on the smooth turf on the righthand side of the road, a covey of California quail. They fluttered a little when they noticed us, and then settled for a bit. They are not as goofy to look at as the Minnesota version.
I was sufficiently unnerved about the idea of driving those steep, narrow roads after dark that Eric said we could go down a much gentler road into Palo Alto and come back to South San Francisco on the freeway. We found a place to put the car, had a very pleasant dinner in an Italian restaurant -- the bruscheta was wonderful, and the new fashion apparently is to dip your bread not just in olive oil but in balsamic vinegar. I had a something or other primavera in red sauce, and Eric had a dish with mussels that he enjoyed exceedingly. We decided that this must be our anniversary dinner -- I had arrived on our second anniversary, on purpose, but we ate some of our groceries in the hotel room on the actual day.
There was a Borders nearby, in a converted cinema, and we browsed in it a bit. They had a copy ofThe Whim of the Dragon, and Eric in time-honored fashion moved other books and faced it out. He found a Dover book about star names, and bought it. This was a pattern throughout my visit. Both of us are effectually broke and really had no business doing this trip at all -- not that I regret it, because I don't:: matters with me would be far worse if we had not. In any case, we were very good about spending money, except for a few days when I said I must, must, have a hot meal, and also whenever we went into a bookstore. There, we were restrained -- I could have spent a hundred dollars in that Borders without having to think about it -- but I can't say that we were really good. I don't regret the books either, however. They provided the fruit for a number of lovely conversations.
February 13 -- We went to Tilden Park, in Berkeley, and climbed to the top of Mount Vollmer. It was windy and gray and drizzly, but there were some fine ancient trees and some interesting views. Eric pointed out all the geographical features to me -- Richmond Point, San Pablo Bay. At the top of the mountain, as he warned me, was just a jumble of radio towers. The wind got up tremendously and the rain started in something like earnest, so we started down by a different track. It was not the best day for bird sightings, but we did see some little brown ground feeders, very shy, poking about in the leaf litter under shrubbery.
Then we drove into Oakland and collected Eric's mother and went to the bird refuge at Lake Merritt. It was raining finely but persistently by then, and colder. But we saw canvasbacks, lesser scaups, two delightful buffleheads that dived for us once or twice and then retreated, a black-crowned night heron stalking across a tangle of bramble bushes exactly as if it were going through water, and a spotty juvenile one peering intently at the mud near the shore. There was also a bird we dubbed "the angstful gull," because it kept walking about uttering piercing cries for no apparent reason. There were some Canada geese, too, and a vast flock of pigeons that kept surrounding us and then flapping off and then returning. I got cold before either of the other two. I had forgotten to bring a warm hat or a pair of gloves when I packed. So much for being a Minnesotan. Eric's mother lent me her gloves for a while.
We went when it was late enough to a sushi restaurant called Mikado. Eric and I had eaten there in September. They will sell you individual pieces of sushi for a dollar, and have lovely miso soup and seaweed salad. We all had soup and hot tea, and shared some edamame, some seaweed salad, and some spinach salad with sesame seeds. Then we split some orders of eel, and Eric and I shared some mackerel. It was the first time I'd had raw fish in years. I'd thought it best to proceed cautiously. Jean (Eric's mother) had a tempura dinner, but ended up giving us the harder vegetables, since she was waiting for some new teeth and couldn't chew hard stuff. I really like her. She has a whimsical sense of humor and a fund of stories. His father could be described the same way, though the air of the whimsy and the stories is entirely different, transformed by a different personality. Eric is like both of them, but very much himself too. I know that none of these observations is in the least original and that any of them could be made about many, if not all, sets of parents and children. But for some reason it struck me afresh.
February 14 -- a warm, almost hot, sunny day and early afternoon. We successfully went to Moss Beach. The north end of the beach, where we had spent most of our time in September, was cordoned off because, according to the sign, a group of harbor seals had "hauled out" on the beach. So we went the other way from the mouth of the contaminated creek and poked about in the tidepools there. The beach was completely transformed by being under sunlight and blue sky. We didn't see as many creatures as we had in September. The rocks here were blacker, less veined, less spotted with pink or green or yellow. We did see a great many very small snail snells inhabited by very small hermit crabs, and an unusually large number of houseless hermit crabs, many of them also very small.
We sat on some damp black rocks, our feet near the tidepools, and ate our lunch. The big portable-food discovery of this trip, I think, was Tofu to Go, which is pre-cooked, slightly greasy tofu triangles with some seasoning in them that's coordinated with the contents of a plastic packet of sauce that you squeeze onto the triangles. The best was sesame ginger. I think we tried mango wasabi too, and Eric declined with great firmness to try pineapple something or other. In any case, it was a great whack of good protein, and there was plenty for two.
After a while we left, less reluctantly since much of the beach was off-limits to us. Eric suggested trying some other beaches, and I agreed, but very quickly we hit a traffic jam. It occurred to us, a little belatedly, that it was Saturday, sunny and warm, and Valentine's Day. Apparently the entire world and its dog wanted to go to the beach.
So we turned into the mountains again, and went to Castle Rock State Park. It was gray and drizzly, and quite dark under the trees.
Friday, February 20th. A gray overcast day, with rain forecast. We thought we would go to the Botanic Garden in Tilden park and see how the weather sorted itself out. After a brief and benignly irate collision with the golf course and its environs, because Eric thought the native-plant nursery ought to be where the Botanic Garden was, he consulted the map more closely and got us there without any trouble. The parking lot had the bathrooms in it, and was surrounded by some excellent bay trees. You crossed a roaring narrow creek on a little bridge, and then the road, to get to the entrance to the garden. Between the garden and the Visitor Center were some fantastical desert plants, looking a little startled and put out in their lush green surround. We went into the Visitor Center, and were promptly entranced by a fine hands-on display of different types of serpentine, pine cones, and, I think, feathers. We played with thos for some time and read the information available. Eric picked up a map of the garden and asked me where I wanted to go, but the answer was really pretty much "Everywhere."
This was one of my favorite parts of the trip, but it's hard to describe properly. There were some open areas of lawn, full of blooming manzanitas, with their complement of golden-crowned sparrows, which we had also seen in the California section of the garden in Golden Gate Park on a day as yet unchronicled here. There was a miniature redwood forest with both redwood sorrel, blooming intermittently, and elk clover, which looks like redwood sorrel on steroids, minus the blossoms. Also under the redwoods I kept seeing signs for something called a slink pod, and finally found the gorgeously peculiar flower itself. I should remember to put in a link to it.
The garden is built in a hollow around part of Wildcat Creek, so there were some fairly steep descents and switchbacks down to the roaring water. Along the water were glorious bay trees patched and hung with moss and lichen. It started raining at some point, and I suggested that we sit on a bench under a bay tree. This did in fact keep us quite dry, and we were able to watch the rain catch the light between us and the slopes of Pacific-Coast wildflowers. Mostly at this remove I remember the manzanita blossoms, and the rain making the smooth ruddy branches of the madrone glow as if they were the embers of some huge diffuse fire. Oh, yes, and the Sierra redwoods! We'd seen quite a lot of coastal redwoods by this time, so it was very exciting to come to a small damp grove of tall pleased-looking mountain ones. Eric picked out at once the differences in growth habit, cones, bark, and needles. In an odd way it was like meeting long-lost cousins.
I'm hoping that we can go back to this garden in June, and I should have a more coherent description of its layout then.
Sunday, February 22. My last full day in California. Eric asked me what I wanted to do. I said I supposed we really couldn't stay in bed all day. He said that we could if I wanted to. If it had been raining, that would have decided the matter, but although the forecast called for rain as it mostly had, the sky was only partly overcast. We had been running at full speed, driving long distances and walking about all day, or at least all of the day there was between the time I hauled my reluctant carcase out of bed and the time the winter sun set. And yet the experiences we had were so splendid and so refreshing to our sense of intimacy, that it seemed better to try to have a few more of them. We decided to make one more visit to Moss Beach and then take in yet another redwood state park, Butano this time. Eric had been trying to ascertain from the map which of them were more remote, and he thought Butano was a good bet for that.
But first, Moss Beach. The contaminated stream was so full and ferocious after Tuesday's storm that it was difficult to cross on either the easy or the slippery rocks. I suggested going down the slope on the other side of the little ridge that comes down from the road, and crossing the stream nearer the ocean., where it was flatter. This climb was steeper than I'd realized, but Eric gave me a hand. The northern part of the beach was no longer cordoned off for haul-out, so we crossed the stream handily and headed for the far end. The tide was quite high when we started, and frisky, too; we had to jump back from adventurous waves several times. The rocks that the harbor seals had basked on during our first visit were visible only as a roil of white water and leaping foam. The water between those rocks and the shore was still calmer even when the rocks were covered, and Eric said to me very soon, "Look, seal noses!" We looked at rocks and shells; Eric was especially interested in finding things that looked like serpentine, after our happy perusal of the exhibit at the Botanic Garden. He kept picking up small wet beautiful things and handing them to me. When I had five or six I would lay them in a row on a convenient rock and take a picture of them. He found several different green rocks, veined or spotted or almost plain.
As the tide went out we began to see birds, walking about in the shallow water pver the rocks from which the ocean was withdrawing. An oyster-catcher, and another; [I can't recall all the birds we saw that day; I can see them but I can't remember their names]
Then we went up Gazos Creek Road to Butano State Park. There were signs saying, if I recall correctly, "Slow, Newt Crossing." We drove very slowly, keeping an eye out for newts, somewhat handicapped by not knowing how large they were. Eric spotted one making its way in a very leisurely fashion across the road. We stopped and admired it; it was maybe five or six inches long and pleasingly marked in red. It was not in a hurry. A great huge SUV behind us was; it roared past us and swerved back into its own lane, obliterating the sight of the newt. We drove cautiously forward and saw to our relief that the newt had gained the side of the road in time and was now moving far more expeditiously through the grass, lifting its legs very high as if it were dancing. We admired it and went on. We drove past the empty park office, noticing a sign that said the park closed at sunset, and drove a little along a rapidly narrowing road, over a self-proclaimed narrow bridge. The light was fading, but even before we got out of the car, the forest looked profoundly rich. It had the same plants in it as the other redwood forests we had visited: sword fern, redwood sorrel, bigleaf maple, huckleberry, bay, and the redwoods. Everything dripped and glistened. I kept thinking that I saw a blossom, and realizing that it was the dim light glancing off a drop or pool of water on a leaf or stem. I got increasingly nervous about the narrowness and the muddiness of the road, so Eric turned back. There was a broad space in the road with a car parked in it, and room for four or five more, but I said it looked muddy to me, we'd get stuck. I offered to get out, but Eric said we'd just go park closer to the park office building, where there was obviously pavement. We did this, and got out. By this time I knew from Eric's reminding me on four or five previous occasions that it was worth stopping to smell the air in a redwood forest, but even if I had not recalled this, I would have noticed this cold, fresh, spicy, growing scent.
We walked up the road, past the parked car, which turned out to be situated on perfectly solid asphalt overlaid with needles, leaves, and a thin scrim of water. The creek was on our left, roaring away. We crossed the narrow bridge again, on foot this time, pausing to look down into the water. A huge bay tree had fallen across the creek, but its roots were still in the soil and it had sent up a series of young live branches from its new orientation. We found a trail and turned up it. The light was dim but rich; there seemed to be more of everything, and it all seemed larger and greener and more profuse. I mentioned this, and Eric said that this forest was closer to the coast than the others we had seen. The trail went up and up, and turned away from the creek. As the voice of the water faded, no other sound supervened but the small noises we made climbing, and our voices. We stopped talking and stood listening to the silence, looking at rocks, moss, redwoods, the colorless sky, one another's faces. Very faint and far, I heard a few bird calls, but Eric couldn't hear them; for him the silence was complete.
Pamela
