Sad Beauty of Abandonment: Bodie and Mono Lake


Day 4.2

Bodie Historic Place
By the time the rented grey Ford Focus turned onto CA 170/Bodie Road in Mono County, California, the family’s plastic salad cartons, hotdog trays and fruit and drink cups were empty, and it was good thing. Bodie Road was as pot-holed, rugged, dirty and unpleasant as the history of Bodie, the town. Over the few miles of road that led to the historic place, every joint, bone, organ, body and item in the car was jolted and jiggled as the vehicle climbed the dusty, washboard road. 
Bodie is a ghost town. The mining settlement grew up around William S. Bodey’s discovery of gold there in 1859, was deserted in the 1970s, then turned into a State Park. It’s like a town one might see in a Western movie, where the word “lawless”, its synonym, and consequences make up most of the inhabitants’ descriptions. 

“We’ll need more water bottles,” AJ said when the little car came to a welcomed stop in the paved parking lot overlooking the town. “And I’m only putting one in my bag!” They all heard her, she thought.  

Near the parking lot amid rusted pieces of cumbersome mine equipment, was a monument with an informative plaque, and new bathrooms. 


The family filtered into the town, wandered down the deserted, but very much peopled streets, stopping to peep in windows and doors. Many of the buildings–houses, stores, a post office, a museum–still stand strong, with steps set under the windows so visitors can visually feed on the dregs of once-lived-in homes. Some doorways were open, with  wire barring admittance, giving a better view of the broken and sun scorched households. 

Through the dusty glass windows and doorways, AJ, One, Two and B saw old furniture, tables, chairs, beds; wallpaper peeling off the ceilings, walls and shelves. The buildings were littered with ornaments and pieces of lives judged not valuable enough to encumber the fleeing inhabitants. 

A big, multi-shed stamping milll sits on the hillside overlooking the whole town, like a murderer gloating over the body of a victim.  

As AJ walked along the dry and dusty streets of the town, she began to better understand the Foley tracts of Westerns; every step was a fine, dry gravelly crunch, loud and ominous in her ears, exactly how it sounded in the movies. The air was sweet with fragrant artemesia. She squinted in the relentless sun.

 “Where’s Dad?” One asked from the shade of a nearby building. B had wandered out of sight, lured ever deeper into the skeletal town by the aging artifacts and dead scenery. 

“Around somewhere,” AJ said, then lead the boys off to look for him, interrupted by the draw of some interesting building, or stopping to appease Two’s complaints and lack of interest. 


They caught up with B in an empty lot. He was taking pictures of the yellow flowers. 
AJ found a rock along a dry, sage-brush lined road in Bodie and sat eyeing the famed ghost town, now milling with lots of people and a fair amount of leashed dogs. As she sat, she imagined the scene had transformed into a pensively cerebral western movie. Except for the stamping mill behind her, most of the buildings are built of cedar, destined to last a while more, sunburnt and dark gold. She looked at the water bottle in her bag, a few swallows filled the bottom. They were half a mile away from the parking lot.

The desperate, dry imagery was enhanced by the fact that though she warned One and Two to take water bottles with them, neither wanted to play camel that day or had too much faith that Mom would provide the water. But she didn’t. So in the hot dry sun, they moseyed around, throats parched, the heat trying hard to bake them, while B and Tripod took pictures of rusted-out autos and beautifully decrepit houses.

AJ pulled out the brochure. It warned, “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING. Leave every rock and rusty can in place for our grandchildren to see.” They want every stick, stone and building to stand until time eternal, for what? A monument to a town built on greed and the lust for fortune and just plain bad behavior, thought AJ. A cautionary tale?

“By 1879 Bodie boasted a population of about 10,000 and was second to none for wickedness, badmen and the ‘worst climate out of doors’. One little girl, whose family was taking her to the remote and infamous town, wrote in her diary: ‘Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.’ The phrase came to be known throughout the West.”

Eventually the heat, 8000 foot elevation and repetition of abandoned houses lost its charm. After passing up the opportunity to tour the gold mill, the family headed to the parking lot. Fatigue, thirst and heat had wrenched the words from them, they were quiet as they trudged up the small incline. 

Back down the agitating road, in the nearby town, they filled a booth in an out-of-fashion diner where the only fresh vegetable was iceberg lettuce. AJ ordered the salmon. “I’m not sure what this fish was before it hit my plate, but I don’t think it was salmon. It’s as white as this dried up baked potato.” Shrugs all around the table. She ate it all.
Mono Lake

Mono Lake is filled with weird, weird, water. It is a lake with rampant kidney stones, piles of them, called tufa, mineral carbonate precipitates left in mounds and towers when the water receded from bubbling springs. 

The tufa are the result of the water abandoning its place, drawing back from its shores because a few decades ago, when Los Angeles needed more water, they diverted the streams that fed Mono Lake to the city’s water supply. The tufa would never have formed if the lake was left alone. A few decades, legal fights and environmental consciences later, they are trying to put things right again. In the early 1990s, Mono Lake won back its tributaries, but with the drought it will be a long time until it reclaims its former borders. 

“I’m going to put my feet in. The visitors center said you can swim in it,”AJ said as they walked down the path to the shore line. “Will you come with me?” she asked the boys. 

A mix of noncommittal grunts and sighs and possibly a “maybe” was the answer. 

As B and One, who carried the camera bag and Tripod, searched for the best place to catch the sun sinking into the lake, AJ and Two explored the area. 

Excited and curious, AJ walked up to the water’s edge. A dark cloud wafted at her foot falls. They were flies. Millions of little black flies swarmed the shores, their larvae wriggled and squirmed in shallow, oozing algae puddles, with a brine shrimp here and there. Two hopped from rock to dry spot to rock, asking questions and making comments. 

“Ewww. Just, ewww, she said as she watched the flies and larvae swarm over the algae and salt-encrusted rocks. “I guess I’m not going in.”  

“Why are the rocks white? What are those things? Why is the ground green in places? Why is the water dark and moving like that?” he asked as he watched her, carefully stepping rock by rock further from the shore. 

“Well, do you remember in Yosemite, at Soda Springs where there were white rings around the rocks …” the process of explaining scientific phenomena was a learning experience in itself. She had to think of the process and put it into words an 8 year old would understand. “ … when water that has a lot of minerals and salt in it evaporates, or becomes particles, like steam–but you can’t see it, it’s slower–the water goes off and leaves the minerals, and the minerals appear white … kinda like salt. This is salt, actually …” 

She bent down and dipped her hand in the water. It was slippery to the touch, like watered down dishwashing liquid.

AJ and Two spent the next hour reading about all the strange phenomena from the informative placards along the shore. Her impromptu science tutoring (with the help of the placards) went on to cover the explanation of the life cycle of alkali flies and brine shrimp, the formation of tufa and an explanation of tributaries and water rights. 


Along with birds, flies and Big City water hogs, Mono Lake attracts photographers. It’s probably the colors: unique beige, chalky white, salmon pink edges to the grey-blue whale sky that frames a pale blue, grayish rippling lake. On her way through the maze of towering tufa to find B and One, she had to artfully avoid the ire and and camera lens of half a dozen photographers. She and Two found pieces of tufa to sit on as they watched the sun go down. It was calm but not peaceful with the chatter of the clicksters and their entourages. 

After a quarter mile walk to the bathroom with Two, AJ came back to the lake, dim with dusk, to find tiny, flighty, thin-winged, flirty bird-like animals careening over the lake surface, too spastic and agile to be birds. “Bats! They’re bats, Two, look at them!” she said as she approached the water, cringing when the curious little mammals came too close. Two hung back. They dived and dipped along the water, enjoying a meal of alkali flies, turning in sharp jerks, fluttering this way and that.  

It was a long, dark drive through the woods back to their cabin at Yosemite. On the boulder-lined cliff-edged road, they crept past nonchalant deer, slowed for courageous chipmunks and coyotes. Mice skittered on the road in front of the car like bread crumbs blown across a table top.  

Between the natural destinations and man-made sites that day, AJ couldn’t decide which she liked best. The natural sites–the bald rock mountains of Olmstead Point, the clear watery beauty of Tenaya Lake, the wonderfully strange Soda Springs–were captivating because they just were, no one made them, the stories of their creations were hidden in the ancient churnings of an infant world. The mystery of their stories leant, in part, to the strong aura of wonder in their appeal. 

The man-made destinations of that day–bad, bad, Bodie the deserted gold mining town, and the weird concentrated water, fauna and tufa of neglected Mono Lake–had very human, apparent stories to their inceptions. Both were based on greed, one which man was trying to preserve, the other which man was trying to undo, to restore to nature. There was something hauntingly sad about the man-made sites as monuments to abandonment. The things left behind after abandonment draws visitors, as a train wreck captivates onlookers. Something bad or injurious had happened at these places and that thread of sadness, of desertion and scars, tipped the scales for AJ. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”*, but humanity may not be much better, only more subtle and elegant in its savagery.


*Alfred Lord Tennyson\’s In Memoriam A. H. H., 1850, Canto 56 





AJ and April

\”That last blog wasn\’t very good,\” she said. 

\”I know, it could have been more … better,\” AJ replied. \”I was a character in it and even I was bored.\” 

\”This is hard. I hate having bad writing spells.\”


\”I know, but you\’re the one who wanted to do it like this. Just keep trying to picture yourself in a frame, and then describe what goes on in that frame. Use more dialogue, so the reader doesn\’t have to live in that cramped little mind of yours, forced to eavesdrop on your boring thoughts,\” AJ suggested. 

\”Right.\” A long, protracted sigh seeped from her lips. \”Three and a half more days to write, and two of them were at Disneyland, so that will be easy.\”

\”Try not to downplay Disney. I know you would have rather gone hiking those days, but your family enjoyed it, and it wasn\’t a horrible time,\” AJ said. 

\”I like when my family enjoys themselves …\”




Distractions Along the Road


Day 4.1

That morning, B was ecstatic. His late-night drive up to Tunnel View, a turnout affording panoramic vistas of the Yosmite Valley, had given him and Tripod a soul-shaking opportunity to catch the heavens in their glory. 


“I’ve already been to church and had my spiritual experience … last night I got some great shots of the night sky …” he said. AJ smiled, thankful and happy to see his wonder. 


The family breakfasted in the car as they drove to their first destination of the day. AJ ate leftover salad, sunflower seeds and half an apple while B and the boys munched on Pop Tarts. In a satisfying instance of ultimate preparedness and justification of suitcase space, she used her fork/spoon/knife utility thingy by cutting the apple and eating her salad without the use of plastic utensils. 


As she watched the forested hills whiz by along the winding road, her mind went back to the trees. Always the trees. What do trees see? Are humans like quarks to them? Going to and fro so fast that humans can’t be seen by their slow, patient eyes? 


All the splendor in wood, rock, water and flora … could it ever be owned? Even the 1/3 acre of her yard couldn’t really be called hers, it was much older and would go on living much longer. How can a person own something so near timeless? It’s like a mosquito having the deed to your neck. He gets a deed to the fleshy property to keep other skeeters away, but it doesn’t matter to the human except for the annoying bug bite the insect leaves in the landscape. 


Olmstead Point was their first stop, which included the bare faces of mountains of white-with-black-specks granite. The turn-off was dotted with cars and a few RVs, and a curiously high proportion of visitors who spoke German. 


 \”This is steep, but I\’m glad it\’s not a Lake Michigan dune,\” AJ said. It was a challenging and steep climb, but easier than walking up a giant pile of sand. 


A few small, hardy trees grew where decades earlier they had landed as a seed, doing the best they could where they were: between a rock and a harder rock. AJ sat on an affording boulder and looked over the land. It was too much grandeur to take in and comprehend what she was seeing. 

Lying before AJ in the distance was a valley of granite slabs sprinkled with trees, a scene whose far reaches were hazy and undefined by morning fog. With her phone, she snapped a few pictures of things closer and slightly more comprehensible, like the bark of a beautifully struggling conifer. 


B and One had taken Tripod down the proper trail for pictures, but had soon joined AJ and Two on their rocky mountain where B properly photographed the tough, clinging trees. 

When they had their sensory fill of the stoney setting, they headed down the smooth mountain of rock. AJ cautioned the youngest, “Don’t run! Like at the swimming pool, don’t run ‘cause when you fall, you’ll get really hurt. You’ll get a bucketful of boo-boos.”


“I’m not running!” Two said, denying his obvious trot down the granite. “And anyhow, it’s more like you’ll get a pail full of boo-boos.”


Two chimed in, “No, a shovel-full.”


The brothers One (16) and Two (9) never full-on, no-holds-barred fought, probably because of the seven-year-age difference and their corresponding body sizes. But they argued, nit-picked and debated logical fallacies, and as AJ was reminded at that moment, they could even find points to argue within her hyperbolical metaphors.


A short drive up the road was Tenaya Lake, where the family parked and stepped down to the water’s edge. As AJ sat trying to translate the sights into words, the repetition of substance stood out to her. God worked like Taco Bell (well, really vice versa), taking a few ingredients– rock, water, trees, plants (or C, N, P, etc)–and put them into different combinations for significantly varying outcomes. AJ’s Michigan landscape contained water, rocks, trees and plants, but it looked nothing like the Sierra Nevadas, nothing like what she saw when she looked up from her notebook as she sat on a huge lake-side boulder. 


Two looked longingly at the clear rippling water of the lake. “I really hope there are no pennies in the lake,” he said. A strange sentiment, unless you knew him. 

“Oh, look, Two! A penny,” One exclaimed, pointing into the water. 


“Whaaa? Awwww,” Two whines, “I wanted to find it!” A found penny was the best thing for Two, but he had to set eyes on it first to make it really count as luck. These seemingly inconsequential treasures always lit up his day. It was like winning, like winning a penny and the prestige of finding it first. 


“No, just kidding. I put it there. It’s the one I found in Muir Woods,” One revealed the trick. 


Everyone knows the adage, “You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Everyone who lives around large bodies of water and has kids know this one: “You can’t take kids to water without them getting wet. Doesn’t matter how cold it is, or why you’re there, they will not stay dry.” With this adage in mind, B and AJ acquiesced when Two asked to take off his shoes and wade in the water, especially since he clinched his request with, “I’ll just end up getting wet anyway, might as well keep my socks and shoes dry …” 


Damp feet and a bunch of lake photographs later, they were on the road again, slowly making their way out of Yosemite, stop by stop. Indecisions about whether to eat lunch at the small lunch stand was solved by the fact that they weren’t serving lunch yet. They moved down the road as the boys snacked on 1/2 a Power Bar, searching for signs of their next destination. 


Because of trail construction, they couldn’t park where B had planned, so they parked by the horse stables, and wandered along a rocky, sandy, sparsely treed trail before coming to Soda Springs, a very honestly titled spot. 


Weird little springs bubbled from the ground amid coppery pools, where all the rocks wore a halo of white minerals left behind by evaporation. As they approached the site, a guide was explaining the area to a tour group. These people were decked out in camp-hefty backpacks adorned with water bottles swaying from carabiners, carrying walking sticks, wearing trail-type hats and made-for-hiking boots. The tour guide explained the mystery of the springs, and how geologists don’t understand why they are there and about a guy who at one time built a little cabin over them and planned on selling the water. 


After the tour group left, AJ, Two and One sat on the little bench nearby, taking in the surroundings and waiting while B and Tripod were done documenting the spot. 


Soon, Soda Springs enticed a single hiker who came by and joined AJ and Two on the bench. He took out a glass mason jar and filled it with the bubbling water, then sat back with a sigh as he gulped it down.


“Best water on earth,” he said. B had always said that people are more friendly on the hiking trail. Whether it was the water or the setting, the man seemed relaxed and happy. He enjoyed his libation, then moved up to the visitors center, leaving his backpack behind. The visitor’s center is housed in a building that is more than 100 years old, build of sturdy timber and rocks, and seemed under-utilized for holding a few books, tables, chairs and maps. 

The family retraced the trail back to their car, bought a lunch of salads, hamburgers and hotdogs, and ate on the road. Their next stop lay outside of Yosemite, at a marvel of more human origins than natural, nestled in the bare ragged hills at 8,000 feet above sea level. 

Thanks for reading!

Among Giants, The Muir Woods Hat Contract, and E is for Enervating


Day 3

After gleaning a quick breakfast from the hotel’s free offerings, the family packed into the car and retraced the steep, winding road to Muir Woods National Monument1, this time to stay for a while. 

Muir Woods consists of never-logged forest, with the star attractions being Coastal Redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, which thrive in ancient herds upon the slopes of a valley in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

The dim light accentuated the quiet as AJ walked with B and the boys up to the entrance of the main trail. At the visitor’s center, a board was set over the ticket window that read, “Admission: Free”: there was no one there to collect their fee, it was too early. 

A low plank trail led the way through first part of the park. A few yards past the visitor’s center lay a smaller, fire-scarred tree, with a cross-section of it’s life on display. The sign said it was 500 years old when it fell. It had been a seedling when Christopher Columbus landed in America. 

One look down the trail told AJ that time moved slowly in that place despite the noisy, buzzing busyness of the human visitors. The trees were giants of endurance and patience, as well as height; content to sip and sun themselves as the world outside their valley destroyed itself. These trees were going nowhere, and in the quiet of that morning, they seemed glad to see her. 


In addition to being the oldest organisms on earth, Coastal Redwoods are the tallest on earth, striving toward the heavens at about 380 feet. The bark is reddish brown and coarse, with thick, deep striations. It sounded hollow and airy when AJ knocked on it. Some of the giants had been kissed by fire, but they didn’t seem to mind, they bore their scorch marks proudly, like battle scars. 

As the family wandered deeper into the valley, the air became dense with a rich, cedar smell and the plank trail turned to worn dirt. The towering trees crowded and pushed their way closer to the hikers.

There was something about these trees that AJ so desperately wanted to understand, but she knew it was forever elusive. It was as if she were eavesdropping on the giants as they whispered a tree-song to the Creator. The sensation, barely perceptible in her mind, and nonexistent to her physical senses, was maddeningly beautiful but inaccessible. 

Even if science were to put all her fantastical musings aside, and describe these trees in physical measurements or chemicals or time there still would be, when seen through very human eyes, something significant at which to marvel. 


If the reader senses a grasping, or a struggling to relay sentiment in these passages, they are right in their perceptions. In trying to recreate the experience of walking among these giants, the author is aware of something just out of her reach, something at which she’s throwing many words in hopes of bringing the reader the authenticity of the experience, but feeling she is failing miserably.2 

Just as the family grew more comfortable with the giant trees’ looming presence, the real work began. Midway through the valley, they followed a dirt trail up the mountainside as it narrowed and and clung to steep precipices. Next came stony, uneven steps. After panting and straining thigh muscles to the top of the mountain, the family stopped for some water.

As AJ rested, she tried to capture what was around her. Although the experience was far from jaded, she realized that the sight of the sylvan behemoths no longer held the same magnitude of awe as when she beheld the first one, and there was something sad in that. But maybe, that was supposed to happen, so that when she walked out of the cathedral of trees and into less stately world, the difference, or gradient, of her experience would leave a deeper mark on her memories.
As the miles began to add up, AJ detected an imminent whining fit from Two. 

“When are we going to get to the end?” he asked, his feet dragging along the dusty trail. 

“Think about accomplishing difficult things. This is a challenging hike for you, but when you’re done, it will make you feel good that you did it. You will have accomplished something difficult,” she said. It was reminder for her, too.

The path down to the bottom of the valley circled gulches, weaved through stands of trees and over webs of roots. As they coasted down the slope, they encountered many more hikers who had preferred to sleep late and were just starting their hike. 


When the bottom of the valley became visible, AJ began to understand, that she couldn’t take it with her. The undecipherable song of the behemoths would stay there. A faint outline might remain in pictures or memory or words, but they all would be bad pencil sketches, one dimensional, and shallow compared to their experience of walking among the giants that day.  

~~~

On their way out, they stopped in the gift shop, where Two found a wide-brimmed ranger-like hat. After much debate, AJ and B decided to buy it for him, on condition that he agree to the Muir Woods Hat Contract of 2014, which was successfully referenced and enforced many times in the days following. The contract  states: 

The owner and wearer of this hat, Two, in return for his parents buying the hat for him, is contractually obligated to :

a) wear the hat in all or most situations when hiking on trails or walking in Disneyland for the purpose of sun protection for the face and neck, and 

b) be willingly photographed by his father for the duration of the vacation, while displaying a pleasant demeanor, unless otherwise informed.  
~~~
After implementation of the Hat Contract, the family said goodbye to the dear giant trees, driving past miles of cars parked along the road, around curves and up hills. They passed an intersection where a dozen mailboxes clung to an aging rail, and a dozen people stood, holding protest signs that read, “No Bus Stops!”


The Pelican Inn was building that looked like it had been transplanted from the English countryside, with white stucco and a thatch-like roof. An English garden bordered the place, carving out small spots of green lawn. Inside was dim, with low ceilings and exposed beams. For lunch, they were seated at the end of a long wooden table with another party at the other end. AJ had the liver and onions. 

The drive out of SanFrancisco to Yosemite was flanked by brown hills, tired landscapes, farms and orchards of mystery fruits and nuts, craggy orange-lichened pointy rocks, wind turbines, a few cows, a giant hillside cross dug into the ground, pistachio groves and tiny “food and gas and cigarette” stores with bars on the windows. They went from overcast and 70 degrees in SF to sunny and 97 through Merced.

Soon the dusty, dry hills and orchards fell behind, the landscape was filled in with trees now,  moved closer to the road and turned green. Houses and businesses scattered farther apart. The gas tank gauge hovered just above E. 

“I’m looking for a sign that says, ‘last chance for gas, no gas in Yosemite Valley,’” B said as they passed a little gas station nestled along the woodsy road. 

Fear and worry immediately gripped AJ’s mind. She let an exaggerated sigh escape, as she struggled with visions of strandedness. 

It wouldn’t be the end of the world … highly inconvenient … no house or sign of civilization for miles … and miles. The war of outcomes–between imminent doom of being stranded, and the relaxed, confident joy of knowing they’d be safe–raged in her mind. 

As she fought panic and anger, the road kept going, weaving and winding into profound unknown, smoothly hugging the feet of tall, rocky mountains, running alongside boulder- strewn streams. The beauty and grandeur of the route were on display, begging her attention and wonder, but she couldn’t see past the premonition that they would soon be in trouble.

Every tiny dwelling, mousehole, shed or building that appeared on the road was scoured for any sign of selling gas. While waiting to pass through a one-lane portion of the road, B turned off the engine. AJ growled, then forced herself to lean back in the seat and close her eyes. 

Finally, relief of many kinds came when they drove up to a self-serve, un-manned gas station with bathrooms. Doom avoided. She could breath again, but was not untouched by the needless worry that had escaped her control; it left her weary and tired. 
~~~
Driving into Yosemite was not like driving into any other national park she’d ever visited. Before and after the official gate, the road went on for dozens of miles through wooded, steep hills, barren of civilization. It hinted at a park void of humans, but that impression was soon broken when they passed scenic turn-offs and expansive meadows, squeezed between lofty peaks and enormous mounts of rock, all of them dotted with people, posing for or taking pictures. 

Nearer to the lodging area, at a busy intersection, a small, beige, beautiful deer strolled, grazing and searching, as cars slowed behind it. It didn’t run, it wasn’t afraid of the humans and their cars, it had no reason to be. Somehow it knew that it’s god, the National Park Service, was watching over it, and with a faith that seemed naive, believed that it didn’t matter how many people were around, it would be safe. 

Their home for the next three nights was at Yosemite Lodge at the Falls, Hemlock Building, room 3434.

The building had a woodsy feel to it, like cabins at summer camp, but much nicer. It was clean, neat … adequate, with firm door knobs, no mold around the sinks, tub or faucets; mustard walls, nice brushed-bronze faucets and nondescript carpet. There was no AC, but it wasn’t needed.

After a quick dinner in the food court, AJ, One and Two went back to the room while B took Tripod for a ride around the valley. 

As the boys tried out their bunk bed of rough-hewn pine, AJ stepped out onto the small but sturdy balcony. It gave a nice woodsy view, but when she sat down in the metal chair and put her feet up, her eyes were drawn skyward to the splendor of Sentinel Dome, blazing with the tired rays of the sinking sun. In too short a time the show was over, dimmed by an interfering peak on the other side of the valley. 

As she recalled her day, AJ noticed that her mental landscape had been as varied as the physical landscape through which she moved. From hiking under the protection and stateliness of tall, mysterious trees, to driving through hot, empty and arid lands, to watching the gas tank gauge sink into empty, to seeing faith-strong deer wade through traffic, to the towering slabs of granite shining in the sun: she had gone from contentment and bittersweet awe, to enervating worry, and ended the day sweetly exhausted, with Yosemite\’s faith-strong deer and great hedges of granite promising adventure when the sun rose again. 


Thanks for reading!


Foot notes
1 Muir Woods National Monument is not called a national park because at it\’s inception, the powers that be could protect the area faster by giving it the monument status, rather than wait for national park status, which required legislative action (while other powers that had been salivated over the logging profits and plans to dam up the valley and fill it with water).

2And she isn’t the only one to feel this way. 

 \”The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It\’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.\”[12]

 Steinbeck, John (1961) Travels with Charley: In Search of America.Viking: New York. Page 182.

AND


“We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” 


“For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. … We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. … But we pine.\”

 C S Lewis The Weight of Glory, Harper SanFrancisco, pgs 40 – 42.



The First Raven, Battered Batteries, and Gradients


{The Longest} Day 2.2

 
The robotic voice of Google Maps directed them away from San Francisco Airport toward the city by way of a wide, undistinguished highway. After a dozen quick miles, it led them to an inefficient scenic route that took them through neighborhoods of narrow, high houses standing like books on a shelf. Sprawling trees lined the undulating streets, and the Golden Gate Bridge peeked in and out of the fog in the distance as the car ascended and descended the hills.
 
“You would think they would have a faster route through San Francisco, since they have offices here,” B said as he slowed for yet another four-way stop. 
 
“Who?”
 
“Google. They have offices in San Francisco.” 
 
“Oh.” AJ was secretly glad of the picturesque route, rapt in the “life as usual in the outskirts of the city” scene they were passing through. The nouns that whirred by out her window–schools, houses, restaurants, professional buildings–were the same as she might see in her hometown, but the adjectives set them apart and held her attention. 

“I wish I knew what those huge trees were,” AJ muttered, pressing close to the window to see to the very tops of the expansive, grayish beige trunks.

Then onto the more sensible, faster highway again. 
 
“That was weird,” she muttered. “But interesting.”
 
“Where do you want to eat?” B asked. The question was on all their minds, and had been  bubbling up from their empty stomachs since getting off the plane. It was an odd thing to ask, wandering down a strange highway, in an unfamiliar land, as if she knew where the restaurants were. B pointed to the phone. There was an app for that.
 
“There’s not much around,” she mumbled as she stared into the little screen. “Grocery stores … fast food …” Glancing up from the screen, she spotted a burger joint, “there’s one,” she said, pointing to a little plaza along the highway. 
 
The In and Out Burgers were the best burgers they had tasted in a long time, since it had been a long time since they had eaten. Luck put a Safeway grocery store close, where they loaded the car up with bottled water and quick breakfast food. 

Highway 101 north took them over the Golden Gate Bridge, to where the \”getting there” part of the vacation stopped and the “being there” started. They left the highway behind and followed a winding road into a wooded and hilly landscape. 

 
In the few navigation challenges up to that point, technology had demonstrated itself to be so useful, possibly deserving the title of \”Can\’t Live Without\”, so when the phone reception started to wax and wane (more waning), AJ and B\’s sense of power over the strange environment dwindled; the GPS had let them down. 
 
In the back seat, One and Two were restless, their “Where are we going?” queries answered with vague images of big trees or beaches, or both. In the front seat, a vile creeping, motion sickness started to diminish AJ’s ability to think strait or even navigate a paper map, which lead to B. passing the visitor center of Muir Woods National Monument, the first maybe destination. 
 
“Was that the place we’re trying to get to?” B asked, as the family turned around to read the sign as it moved farther away. 
 
“I guess, I don’t know … maybe,” AJ said, reluctant to look at the map. “There’s Muir everything around here, I can’t tell if that’s the one …” 
 
As her hatred for the twisting route grew, the sickness moved from her head down to her stomach which started to mimic the writhing, indecisive roads. 
She breathed deeply to stem the growing malaise. 
 
“You need me to stop?” B asked, sensitive to the signs. 
“Not yet.” Two slope-hugging hairpin turns. “Now, please,” she said. She got out, breathing in the cool, fresh air, the sick retreating a little from her limbs and arms, head and stomach. “It smells sweet,” she said as she looked past the guard rail, down the steep incline below. 
 
The mountain side was dotted with a yellow-flowered, silver leafed plant, one she recognized as a relative of wormwood, probably from the genus Artemisia. After a few minutes of fresh-air therapy, she resumed her place in the front seat, gladly succumbing to a dose of motion sickness medicine. 
 
The car and green-faced passenger managed to find its way to Rodeo Beach and Lagoon, part of the Marin Headlands in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, where the cool, moist wind whipped hair, clothing and skin as the family tried to walk on the course brown sand. 
“Our hotel is five minutes away. We could check in and drop off luggage,” B. said as they dove for shelter in the little grey Ford. “We’ll come back here when the sun goes down.”
“Yes, please,” said AJ, a little less green, but still unstable. 
 
In the hotel parking lot, while B went in to get room keys, AJ and the boys looked the place over. Planters of neatly trimmed horsetail (Equisetum) lined the sidewalk. Two custodians cleaned the glass plates that fenced in the patio. 
“It’s really nice inside,” B. said as he parked the car. “They have a s’mores pit.”
“And they have really clean glass,” AJ added. 
 
After a short rest, the family drove back up the winding road and stopped at an impressive, but relatively inconsequential scenic overlook where AJ was graced with her first raven sighting. 
 
Ravens were a relatively new side-interest, and she wasn’t certain if she’d ever seen a real one. It was so easy to call a crow a raven. This lone bird’s beak was thick and black, it’s neck feathers fluffed out, ruffled and disheveled, as it tilted its head in curiosity at the human tourists. It wasn’t like the flighty, slight and sleek, caw-caw crows that haunted her neighborhood in bunches. The difference was subtle, but it was there.
 
It was windy and cold at the spot, the sky was grey and wafts of mist were moving fast over the mountain tops down into the valley below: perfect raven weather. 


A battery, other than being an electrical storage device, is a place where military artillery is kept, and they are located all around the hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay. These places were placed to ballistically intercept invading forces, but now they provided tourists with great opportunities to shoot panoramic photos of the bay. 

 
They stopped at Battery Spencer was first. It is an abandoned and still-abused military look-out that used to have big guns pointing out to the ocean. AJ wandered the abandoned, and over-built buildings trying to imagine what it looked like when uniformed military sat vigilant on the wind-whipped site. 
 
After becoming sufficiently chilled and windblown, the family descended to a lower, warmer altitude, where they stopped for salad and pizza at a little Italian restaurant called The Aurora. The food was good, but the the most impressive thing they experienced was the eerie quietude of a Tesla car driving by. 
 
On the east side of the bridge, they stopped at the Batteries Cavallo and Yates and admired the bay view, noting the strange Lost-like (the TV show) feel of the metal reinforced doors to the mountain-side buildings. Nearby, cyclists coasted down from a mountainous bike trail to take pictures of the bridge and bay. 
 
When the sun hinted at sinking, they drove back to Rodeo Beach so B and Tripod could get some giant-rocks-in-the-water-at-sundown pictures. As the family followed the amateur photographer out to the perfect spot, the wind blew chill through their bones; the ocean waves growled, obliterating the subtleties of any other sound. B waded out into shallow waters, biding his time before the sun sunk into its most beautiful pose. 
 
As B clicked away, AJ and the boys explored the beach, nosing into cozy alcoves in the wall of rock, poking seagull carcasses with sticks, collecting pieces of crabs’ shells, chucking colored stones and kicking seaweed. 
 
There was a woman picking up trash on the beach in return for the cans she took from the recycling bin. Some bottles got her .05$ a piece. She looked like she needed it.

 

When the last bit of light dissolved into the deepening dark, the ocean-deaf, wet, chilled-through and tired family went back to the hotel. They had been up for 22 hours before turning down the hotel beds. 
 
The day had been interesting, the sights beautiful and strange, but what AJ liked the most was the hot shower at the end of the day. The warm water slowly thawed her body and mind, moving her from cold and dirty to warm and clean. The transition was comforting and somehow reassuring. 
 
She often surmised that gradients, or the distance and slope between different personal states or perceptions, made a person’s world go around. The day’s gradients came to mind as she wiggled her thawing toes on the heated tile floor of the bathroom while she dressed for bed.
 

Mountaintop or valley, carsick or feeling fine, driving serpentine roads outside San Francisco or darting down straight stretches in Michigan, the fine-grained sand of Lake MI beaches or the course, brown stone of Rodeo Beach: gradients made AJ’s mind light up in awe, they made things interesting and new, they begged her attention and exploration, even if the difference was as small as a raven instead of a crow. 

More Than Flying


{The Longest} Day 2.1

AJ sat in a hard plastic shell of a chair at gate 8 in the United terminal at O’Hare Airport, reluctant to peer into the world around her. It was 6:30 a. m. in her mind and the atmosphere was still a brick wall of sensory overload. B and the boys had run off to find breakfast. She sat by the luggage as the previous few hours caught up to her in foggy, groggy fragments.

It started with the early morning darkness of a hotel that wasn’t ready for life, loosing themselves from the tangle of bed and blankets … brushing, dressing. The family yawned during  a crowded shuttle ride to the airport, then lugged rolling, tipping, falling suitcases through check-in, followed signs, flashed IDs, stuffed shoes, bags and jackets into bins and slid them through the security x-ray machines.

Everywhere, somber people filled the landscape, arriving only to leave again in airplanes, taxis, shuttles, trains or busses. Everyone, employees and flyers, gave off an anxious, sad and worried mood. 

With a volume a little louder than the TV behind her, a furry voice over the loudspeaker brought AJ her presence of mind with a call for some passenger on a waiting list. Little by little, her immediate surroundings came into focus. Just a few feet away, outside the gate, luggage-laden people moved like traffic on a highway. Real voices floated like specters in the crowded audio forest. The blaring beep warning of a trolley pushed everything and everyone aside.

When the time and airplane came rolling into the gate, the family joined the mass of passengers gathered around the door, trying to be polite through a weird, panicked urgency. 

In the plane, settled in her seat, AJ watched as passengers walked down the aisle, eyes raised to the numbers above. They stuffed carry-ons and settled in, some faster than others. 

The people who stood out to her … didn’t. It wasn\’t the man\’s clothes, size, appearance or voice that drew her attention this time. The young man in unremarkable clothes settled in front of her, across the aisle. He had brought a salad on board, but that wasn’t what made him different. It was the light he carried; he had a cheerful demeanor, a genuine smile on his face despite the funereal atmosphere of the airport. He had survived the miasma, you could see his contentment and subtle joy. He was happy to be there, and wasn’t ashamed to show it.

AJ smiled and silently thanked him. She put in her earbuds and turned on her tiny iPod shuffle.  

John Muir
The problem came when she realized that the narrative of her audio book was slipping by without comprehension. John Muir was making The Yosemite come to life in his beautiful experience-backed narrative, but the words were dead and sterile, nothing made a mark. It was as if she had passed through the actual Yosemite Valley without a reaction, without looking up from the back of the seat in front of her. 
On the backs of all the seats were little television screens less than 20” from passengers’ eyes, funneling messages to flyers whether they liked it or not. Since stepping out the door of the hotel room that morning, her senses were bathed in messages: along the highway, in the airport, on shirts, hats, bags, on the TVs in every gate. Always messages, everywhere advertisements, rhetoric clothed in news or “announcements”.  

The happy young man had shut off his screen. 

“How much am I missing when I’m entranced in the world’s messages, when they scream so loud I can’t think, hear or see the real world?” she wondered.

AJ had to make an effort to shut them out. On the chair arm there was a panel to control the little message dispensers: channel, volume, back, guide. A person had to search for the off button. It was hidden underneath the brightness button. You had to hold it down. 

There was something sinister, yet innocent in the endless, omnipresent messages that blared randomly in hopes of hitting someone.  “I hate them,” was her immediate reaction, but was without a reasonable argument against them in a dog-eat-dog world. 

The screaming hush in the cabin permeated the short silences between words pouring into her ears. When she paused the audio, the noise engulfed her, grew insider her head, penetrating to the very marrow of her bones. Human voices pierced the aural fog like bird calls in a windy wood, the sound was clear, but indecipherable.

She paused her verbal audio trip through Yosemite and dug The Itinerary out of her bag. B, who sat across the aisle flanked by One and Two, had painstakingly printed and collated it a few days before. In so many ways, the trip would not be possible without him. 

The impetus for traveling to photogenic vacation spots might have started decades before, when B had inherited his grandfather\’s 35mm camera, but exploring the Sierra Nevadas was an idea sparked a few years earlier when AJ and B were watching a History Channel program on the national parks. 

The program featured John Muir, the man who played a large part in the preservation of Yosemite as a national park. His love for the parks and whole-life, consuming passion for the natural beauty of the place infected them with the desire to experience the same.  

Since then, B would sometimes stay up late researching and exploring the possibilities. The trip was the outcome of hours of dedication and planning, of which AJ had little comprehension, but much admiration. 

All the years of ideas and dreams had built up to a reality that was printed out in a day-by-day fashion, with destinations and hotels, reservation receipts, times and alternate activities. Minute by minute, word by word, that plan was coming to fruition, as the plane hurtled through the air.

AJ leaned her head to the side and dozed off to sleep for what she thought was hours, but upon waking discovered that mere minutes had passed. The flight was supposed to be about 3 hours long, but because of the brief dip into slumber, it lasted somewhere between 5 hours and eternity.

In that eternity, she counted the times a man with either a bladder, bowel, musculoskeletal, vapor-cigarette, alcohol or drug problem walked past her to the bathroom. Five times.  

When the couple sitting next to her apologetically excused themselves to the bathroom, she welcomed the chance to uncrimp her legs, swaying in the aisle as they pushed past her. 

Back in her seat, John Muir’s Yosemite was interesting, and picturesque but long, and didn’t fit inside the airplane cabin, so she turned to the written word, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, a collection of essays by Robert Louis Stevenson saved on the Kindle app on her phone. 
The plane landed in San Francisco Airport without incident. There was more waiting, then more rushing, and more of the same weirdly tense airport atmosphere that saturated the air and employees and flyers. The family arrived at the terminal, picked up their luggage, then promptly left in a small, grey rental car. 




Driving to Fly




Day 1

As AJ washed the dinner dishes from a meal of leftovers and refrigerator scraps, her mind wasn’t too far away, just through the door to where her packed suitcase stood. She mentally riffled through the items she had just gathered, bundled and stuffed into the luggage. “Hat? Sunblock? Do I have enough socks? What if it rains? It\’s not supposed to rain. I forgot pajamas.”


AJ, B and their boys, One and Two, were almost ready to almost start their vacation. 


When her soggy task was done, AJ hurriedly pulled on a long skirt and tee-shirt and joined her family as they roamed the house looking for potential cat hazards. After giving furry goodbyes to their feline queens, they got into the suitcase-laden car. 


“Garage door is down,” AJ said as they drove away. The sentiment was echoed a few times from the back seat. In a few days, when they were hundreds of miles away, they wouldn’t have to wonder. 


Highway I-94, south of St Joseph was busy and drenched. The sky was a sick grey, with rain falling as best it could on the rush of traffic, the drops being blown into streams before hitting the road. For a long time the only sound heard inside the car was the muffled whirring of wheels on the road, as if the family were all busy thinking a big sigh of relief. “Finally, we’re on vacation. Now what?” 


B turned on the music to fill the void, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove. In the front seat, AJ unconsciously mimicked him. The car weaved through the lanes, around giants on 18 wheels, passing more leisurely drivers, then was forced to slow down at a bottleneck of road construction. 


Traffic crawled and paused, one by one, filling the small asphalt gaps between bumpers. 


AJ broke the silence. “I don’t know why, but the blinker on the car in front of us really bothers me. There are worse driving mistakes a person can make, and I’m guilty of them, but he’s not executing his intentions … he’s kinda unintentionally lying … by mistake,” AJ said. The black Prius’s right turn signal had been misfiring for a few slow miles. 


The big rig beside them growled impatiently as it made room for the Prius that never followed its turn signal. 


“That truck keeps giving the car room to get over, but it never does …” B murmured in agreement. The big rig\’s impatience slowly spread into their car. “Could you get on the phone and see … take a look at the map and …” B said and attempted to pick up a nearby cell phone. AJ grabbed it from his reach. “ … see if this is the best way?” 


Her fingers glided and poked the screen for a few minutes. \”The southern route says it’s twenty-four minutes faster. There’s a car wreck the other way.”

The south route, I-294 to Chicago, it was. 


After an hour of silence punctuated by a few lone comments, Two, the youngest, piped up from the back seat, “I see an airport.” They were close, but not ready to fly yet. 


The hotel was a country-fried version of any typical hotel, with spackled, cream-colored walls accented with burgundy and dark green wall paper, and natural-wood-colored everything else. It was a place to lay their heads before a cross-country flight and a place to park the car while they were away. 


Within minutes of setting their suitcases down in the room, Two was in his swimming trunks, ready for the hotel pool, intent on practicing the swimming moves he had been learning at the YMCA. He came back an hour later with B, smelling of chlorine and with bluish, shivering lips.


“How did you get all this water on the floor?” AJ chided as she stepped into the bathroom after Two had rinsed off. “It’s almost out the door!” 


Two just shrugged. In his young life, he had never had to clean a bathroom.  


As AJ mopped up the deluge with a blue-striped pool towel, she noticed signs that told her that Two’s watery mishap was not the first in that room. Behind the bathroom faucets scrubbed mercilessly with inappropriately abrasive cleaner, a line of dark, damp growth highlighted the seam in the counter. Nothing in the room said, “new and improved.” The door had rounded corners where they should have been sharp, there were awkward additions and repairs, missing towel hooks and, as she discovered later that night when she tried to use it, a shower head that made sense to the water-worn room. The shower curtain didn’t shut all the way, allowing a wayward spray of water to trickle onto the floor.

That night, when the lights were out, AJ tried to push her mind down lower into the oblivion of sleep while all around her the walls and ceiling thumped with people walking, talking. Sleep was reluctant to visit her in the unfamiliar atmosphere. The AC blared billowing cold air into the room at awkward intervals. Sighs and the constant rustling of bed linens came from the bed next to hers. 

“Lie down and go to sleep!” she yell-whispered to a shadow that tossed and turned. She repeated the command two more times in the next hour and a half, before adding gently, “… and lie still. Don’t move and you’ll fall asleep faster.” 


With a sigh, the small shadow obeyed. Within an hour, the dark had coaxed the family to sleep. 


And in the dark, 5 a.m. came early the next morning, heralded in with electronic alarms. 


Painting a Deck with Robert Louis Stevenson and a Donkey

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. 
Stevenson, Robert Louis (2011-03-30). Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (Kindle Locations 432-435).  


She was ready: garden clogs, old jeans, paint-spattered, long-sleeved shirt, sunglasses, broad-rimmed straw hat, iPod Shuffle, and headphones. 


With careful dexterity, she opened a can of deck stain, stirred it, poured some into an old popcorn bucket, then grabbed a small paintbrush. Carefully shoving plants aside, she positioned herself in the back of the garden bed between over-grown kale plants and the deck, dipped her brush into the slurry of stain, and sighed. 


170 deck rail spindles waited, sanded smooth and thirsty for her brush. Only when she had coated the first tired spindle, did she realize that she had somewhere to go. She pressed play on her iPod and a pleasant British voice spoke to her through the headphones. “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain …”


AJ and most of the world knew Robert Louis Stevenson chiefly for his fiction, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and maybe a children’s poem here and there, but until coming across the selection in Librivox (check it out), she didn’t know that he was also a travel writer. His travel writing made sense to what she knew of his early life. How better to cultivate a lust for travel than to spend one’s childhood bedridden and sickly like he did? 


In the past, she had dabbled in the great Jack Kerouac’s writing, but it didn’t pull at her enough to get through one book. Travel writing wasn’t to her taste, so she thought, but she was willing to give it another try.


Mr. Stevenson started the journey by describing his traveling equipment. He went into curiously deep detail about his new-fangled bed-like apparatus (our modern day sleeping bag) and took pains to describe his purchase of a donkey (our modern day rental car). He named the donkey Modestine.  


It was September 1878. AJ walked along with Mr. Stevenson as he prodded and poked poor Modestine through the Cevennes, a mountain range in South Central France. Infinitely more knowledgeable in French and history than AJ, Mr. Stevenson did all the talking. They stopped at a Trappist monastery, Our Lady of the Snows, for a few nights’ lodging and some fascinating conversations with argumentative visitors, but his observations of the broad, lonely road were what caused AJ to sigh and shake her head in admiration. 


They went slowly and thoughtfully through villages, valleys and over mountains whose stories he told. Many of his reflections and histories were interesting and picturesque, but she marked only a few for reference. 


That evening she took a break from painting and pulled weeds in the garden while Mr. Stevenson slept outside on a dry, rocky hill, watching the night sky and napping between nocturnal rustlings of nature. He described his contentment and serenity so well that it infected her with the desire to come out of her sterile walls of blindness that night and sleep under the bare sky, too. But she didn’t and it was a good thing, because it rained. 


Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to this who dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet. (Kindle Locations 726-737.)

She could see Mr. Stevenson, mustachioed and possibly bearded, with his long, dark hair and eyes, his thin limbs, like straw sticks at angles as he sat, a cigarette burning in his long fingers, glowing bright as he indulged. In photographs and portraits (the painting by Sargent is one of her favorites), he presents a curious, but strong visage. He died in 1894 at the age of 44.


The next dry day, as she sloshed paint onto the monotonous spindles, she moved with Mr. Stevenson through a region whose history was bloody with religious rebellion, “The Country of the Camisards.” As they traveled through the area, he recounted the bloody violence that took place in years past, all in the name of religion. Through amiable talk with the natives, he discovered that the Catholics and Protestants didn’t mind each other so much anymore, unless they married across religions, then other people minded. 


In all, AJ spent 12 days and 120 miles with Mr. Stevenson, trekking over mountains, sleeping mostly under the stars with Modestine chomping grass nearby, drinking chocolate for breakfast, smoking like it wasn’t unhealthy, and falling into passing friendships that AJ only dreamed of cultivating in real life. From the women who sat outside their cottages crocheting lace and gossip, to the monks at the monastery, to the young women who served him his dinners in small cottage inns, he made friends wherever he went. 


In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome even partial intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God. (Kindle Locations 1979-1081.) 

There was a reason the title of his book included “… a Donkey,” because the dear beast of burden, Modestine, played such a big part in their journey, by not only carrying (and subsequently dropping) his luggage, but by keeping him company during dark starry nights and giving him ample opportunity to practice patience and persistence. In the end, Mr. Stevenson honors her with this beautiful conclusion: 


She loved to eat out of my hand.  She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small.  Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own.  Farewell, and if for ever— Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion. (Kindle Locations 1303-1308).

“I want to write like that,” she whispered between slopping paint on a spindle and wiping the excess splatters off the deck with her shirt. She’d prayed the sentiment many times while reading different authors, but this time there was a twinkle of opportunity on the horizon. In two months, she and her family would be taking a late-summer trip to California. 


In the weeks ahead, she took time to pick out just the right notebook for the job. It couldn’t be too big, shouldn\’t have spiral binding (the metal spirals get crushed, then the pages don’t open right), should be unlined, but with dots (or grids) for guidance so she could write horizontal or vertical if she wanted, and it should have a ribbon page marker. She had gotten a journal of just this description for her birthday from a group of friends.


And what would she do with the travel writing she collected in this journal? Make it into a travel blog, of course.  Though, on no account could she say it would be as interesting or well-written as Mr. Stevenson’s travel journal; he had a donkey.