road muse – an improvised trip across the US

Where oh where has road muse been?  We’ve been off the road, that’s what!    And busy settling into our new digs, with new social life (a social life, period!), job hunting, etc etc.  Almost 4 months in our newly adopted home – San Francisco – and although neither of us grew up here, and one of us is French, it does, strangely, feel like very much like home for both of us.   Home is where the art is?   Something like that.   We are in a place where aesthetics matter – very much – but that’s not the whole story.

Oh but who cares why we feel this way?….we simply do.    A long year, a lot of looking and thinking and wanting and trying – it feels nice to be ending it here, beside the Bay, with the foghorn calling and the cool wind blowing… Home – for now – home.   Peace and love to all – and here’s to finding the home within our hearts, wherever it may be, and feeling at home in the world, no matter where we are.

Yes we are!

Five days in California so far, and we have already been seduced by the land of milk and honey (and microbrew and wild mushrooms and organic goat cheese and nasturtium flowers…).    Now we are headed out to find out what riches are waiting for us in that foggy city, that pot of gold at the end of everyone’s rainbow.   But most importantly, we are going to see OUR FRIENDS!   And, honestly, what could be richer and more wonderful than that?  At the moment, I can’t think of a single thing in the whole goshdarned world!

The first time I saw Mendocino, California, I thought I’d stepped into a dream, some Brigadoon fantasy conjured up by a Hollywood producer.   Certainly no place like this on earth could exist so untouched and undiscovered, especially so close to such a wildly popular tourist destination as San Francisco?

But miraculously, it did, and still does.   Perhaps due to those narrow winding roads along the coast and through the redwoods, that keep all but the most devoted and intrepid travelers away?  (I drove those roads yesterday, coming down from Crescent City, and came very close to careening the car over a cliff on one of the hairpin turns….scaaaary, man!)

Today I woke up in a Mendocino cabin to the smoky-chlorine smell of wood stoves and hot tubs and it all felt so familiar.   Even though I’ve been here less than half a dozen times, there is something about this place that has always felt like returning to a long-ago home (my Scottish roots, perhaps?).

That dense damp fog followed by the sweetest sun and blue sky you could imagine.   Birds flying low across the headlands, swooping and chirping, making a fleeting black contrast to the bleached yellow and green and orange hues of the grasses.   Wildflowers everywhere, vines winding around the gray wood decks and fences and barns.  Anything grows here, it seems…

Anything but money, which you surely need if you are going to try to live (or even visit) Mendocino.   It may look rustic and cute and unpretentious, but the price tag is anything but.  The cheapest lodging for a night is still well over 100 bucks.  And a glass of good California wine will run you 9, 10, 11 bucks – and that’s not counting dinner and tips.

But Mendocino’s charm is undeniable, its one-of-a-kind magic irresistible to “addicts of the quaint”, of which I suppose I am one.  I keep trying not to like it – to find some fatal flaw (too many hippies!  too many wind socks!) but alas, its cuteness and charm keep winning me back.

And now, for our last day and night on the road, it feels good to be in such a peaceful, pretty place.   This will hold us over for a while, as we settle back into real life again. We needed a shot of beauty after all those ribbons of tar and concrete, all those strip malls and gas stations and swaths of man-made ugliness…(I feel a rant coming on)

America!   Your two faces I can’t seem to reconcile: the pristine, perfect beauty of Mendocino versus the shameless, almost hostile hideousness of so many of your towns and cities (and suburbs too).   It is it only a question of money and elitism that makes the difference?   Is the average American doomed to live in concrete bunkers and shop at vast, inhuman monster stores?   What’s left if so much of the landscape is paved over by mediocrity and greed?   Is it really just because the money isn’t there, or is it just that as a people we are not strict enough with our government, with our businesses, and with our priorities?   Are we just not paying attention?   It’s not that I want every place to look like or be like Mendocino – far from it.   But can’t we just make our surroundings, aesthetically, a little nicer?

(Rant over.  Time to get in the hot tub.)

Well, we made it.  To the West Coast, I mean.   And here I am, without a camera!   Stupidly (and uncharacteristically), I left it on the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island last week as we headed out to the Olympic Peninsula.  Hence, all of my potentially award-winning photos of Seattle are now either being deleted on someone else’s computer, or possibly used for a blog in a parallel universe (you never know what kind of wacky types are riding the ferry these days).   So I will just have to do without images right now, even though it feels a bit like trying to write without using nouns.   C’est la vie.    We’ve been lucky enough on this trip not to have any major mishaps, so I guess if losing a camera is the worst thing to happen, that’s fine.  (And anyway, I took tons of footage on Cedric’s video camera, and eventually will be able to pull images from that.)

Where has the last week gone?   We hit the West Coast and seemed to crash.   Two and a half days in Seattle and we were anything but sleepless.    The gentle mists and rotating pattern of rain/clouds/sun created a perfect lullaby for our odometer-weary bodies and minds.    And we had the good fortune to be hosted by long-time Seattle residents who were more than happy to share with us not only their home (and home cooking! yum!), but also their personal experiences of living in the city, giving us a window into Seattle that we would never have had if we had stayed in a hotel or other impersonal setting.  (And yes, we fell totally in love with Seattle and would consider living there!)

(photos compliments of Cedric)

Amidst the long sleeping sessions, and walks in the quiet lakeside neighborhood where we were staying, we did the requisite stuff:  walked around Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market (which I kept calling “Pike’s Peak”, no doubt chafing the ears of our hosts), took the ferry to Bainbridge Island (this first trip I managed to hold onto my camera), toured the lush gardens of the Washington Park Arboretum, and indulged ourselves with sublime sushi at Nishino.   Even fit in some cultcha while there: saw an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum about painters who wanted to destroy old concepts of painting and make it something else.   Whatever else one might think of this exhibit and some of the “art” (because some of it really does border on ridiculousness), it certainly did make you stop and think about painting, and art in general (one of my favorite pieces was Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail - which perhaps borders on ridiculous too, but in a good way, and anyway, I’m a sucker for anything hands-on in a museum).

After Seattle, we spent one night camping in a beautiful wild spot on the Olympic Peninsula – thus finally “touching” the edge of the West Coast, putting our feet into the Pacific.   (Actually we didn’t put our feet in, it was much too cold, but we walked along the beach and collected driftwood for the fire and let the salt air fill up our lungs and felt alive again in a way we hadn’t for several weeks of being inland.)

Then we booked it south to Portland – well, tried to “book it” but were caught once again in interminable road work delays, adding hours to what would have been a 3 and a half hour trip.   Of Portland, alas!  we saw very little, since we arrived in the evening and left early the next day, but we did get a chance to hang out with an enthusiastic Portland resident who told us about all sorts of wonderful things to do and places to go in Portland, and made us promise to return to do them all (especially the crazy-sounding Voodoo Donuts!).   And so we will.

And now we are at the very tippy-top of the California Coast, in Crescent City, being hosted by a true California pioneer woman in an adorably cozy, peaceful cottage within spitting’s distance from the Pacific.    There it is, now (I wish I could show you a photo!), churning and boiling across the street, framed by dark green pines and hulking rocks and strange, ethereal mists that hang down and cover everything in a gray dampness.   The rest of the world is muted, distant.   Somewhere out there exist hot, dry, dusty lands, and furiously racing cars and people, but for now we are away from all that, suspended in time and place.  Just trees, ocean, mist, fog horn.  How nice it would be to stay and soak up all the rest and repair that his place offers…but no!  It’s time to hit the road, and drive down the coast, to Mendocino and then San Francisco, our supposed destination.   Our long and winding road trip is finally almost over, time to start a new life (maybe?) far from the place where we began.  Can’t think too much about that now…there’s still a lot to see before the trail’s end.   Two more days…

This will be my last post before we reach the West Coast – we will be in Seattle today!

I still have Wyoming, Yellowstone, and many other things to post about, which I will do once I have time to sort through the mountains of photos I took.   But I wanted to give you an “up to the minute” report.

So I am feverishly writing before the maid kicks us out of our motel room in Spokane – not where we expected to be as of 5 o’clock yesterday.    You see, we tried to camp last night in Idaho – it’s a long story.   We drove to Coeur d’Alene (from Missoula, Montana) and went directly to the visitors’ center to find out about camping spots in the area.   Strangely, there were very few; mostly RV parks and boat-access-only campgrounds, and expensive-looking log cabin-ish bed and breakfasts.   We would have considered a place like La Quinta, but they were all full.   (Being in our day-to-day roadmuse haze, we had completely forgotten that it was a holiday weekend, duh!)

Anyway, we drove to Farragut State Park, north of Coeur d’Alene, hoping that at least there would be some tent sites left.   There were – 2 out of the 300 in the park – but they were both in the middle of a horse corral.   Not wanting to be woken all night by Lottie’s growls at every sigh and hoof beat the horses made, and not being crazy about the smell of horse manure mixed with our fireside meal, we declined.   We also declined to stay in the “RV Theme Park Campground” on the side of the highway on our back to town.   Call me fussy, but camping next to a giant rollercoaster with onion-ring retching adolescents isn’t really my idea of getting back to nature.

So we left Idaho for Washington State, Spokane being only 30 miles away.  Thus Idaho was a blur – we were literally there for only a couple of hours, having driven into the northern sliver of the state.   We saw some scenery, of course

and an alarming amount of these billboards depicting the decaying mouths of meth addicts

(A strange contrast to the healthy-looking silver-haired couples strolling the streets of Coeur d’Alene, wearing expensive denim and other chic Western garb.)

Once in Spokane, we checked into our Comfort Inn (free apples in the lobby!) and went straight to a park nearby so Lottie could play for a while (until we got creeped out because it was getting dark and no one else was there and those meth billboards were still haunting the dark, road-weary corners of our minds…)

OK, the maid just knocked again, these musings will have to continue from the Pacific Coast.  Westward ho!

More images from Yellowstone.   There were just too many things to look at in only two days, though we did our best to see as much as we could.

We hiked down into Hanging Valley and stood by the Yellowstone River, still amazed by the enormity and diversity of this place.

It was a steep climb back to the top, requiring moments of rest (and reflection).

The day ended and the landscape offered up yet more visual poetry .  What numbers and shapes can a tree, a car door, and a horizon line make?

What would a trip to Yellowstone be without a visit to the Old Faithful geyser?

We got there just as a smaller geyser nearby was finishing its steamy display.

Couldn’t bring the dog on the boardwalk, so found seats in the shade on fallen trees.

People lined up for the predicted 5 pm showing.

And, faithfully, at 5:05, the geyser did its thing.   (I did read the pamphlet on why this happens – something to do with pressure building up below the surface, and a whole complicated “pipe” system – but I would need to do a whole lot more reading before I could explain it to someone else.)

Anyway, after a few minutes, it was over, and we could all go back to our cars.

Sunny and hot; we found a perfect picnic spot at the lake.    (We seem to have timed our visit here well.  Most people have gone back to school or work, and the huge crowds we’d been expecting were gone.)

Drove slow to take in the scenery, and so we wouldn’t run over any wildlife.

(Which were everywhere)

No matter how many signs there were saying not to approach the animals, the temptation of man to “shoot” is simply too great.

Fire and brimstone from below.  We’re sitting on top of a giant volcano, after all.

When you look on the map, Yellowstone takes up just a tiny corner of Wyoming.   And yet the park seems endless.   We can thank Seth Bullock, of Deadwood fame, for the creation of Yellowstone; he introduced a resolution to set aside this land way back in 1872.   Imagine having that kind of foresight, back when most people were still chopping down every tree they saw (or sawed!).

Dead trees from the big fire of 1988.

And finally, the continental divide – a good metaphor for my own divided loyalties to East and West Coasts.