07 Aug 2017 - Graham
previously: driving up route 1, day 1
I started Sunday, my second day on the 1, in sleepy Mendocino. Rather than making coffee on the street behind the car like a crazy person, I decided to give the town another chance. It did not fare any better with the benefit of daylight. The only open coffee shop was occupied by a mix of standard retirees reading the New York Times and people of all ages in the same crusty uniform of ragged military surplus enjoying what seemed to be a nice heroin high after a night of drinking on the beach. There was much discussion of trading cigarettes and how they had personally been ripped off recently, either by other scumbags or by society at large. I was not a fan and exited after quickly downing the mediocre coffee, but not after fruitlessly waiting for at least 20 minutes for the bathroom to open.
After a discreet McDonald’s pee, I hit the road resolved to enjoy each moment. I held to my resolution and stopped after an hour at a nice seeming beach and read for a bit, while enjoying the early morning surf as background ambience. After the 1 ended and turned into the much faster 101, I stopped again by pulling into a side road that turned out to be a very long dead-end/closed road. The road was more than a smidge creepy, but I found a nice-ish place with a river view to pull over and have a snack.
(Any car can be an adventure car if you just take it weird places. Though a vehicle big enough to sleep and eat in is easier.)
I found that even with my honorable intentions and willingness to go slow, it was hard to enjoy the remainder of North Northern California (or as they sometimes prefer to be called, Jefferson).
I stopped to resupply in Eureka in Humboldt county. I intended to hit the Walmart for a cooler and a big blanket to make car camping a bit easier. But I was drawn to the Kmart by the promise of a store liquidation sale. It was horrifying. The sale was a paltry 10-20% and as I shopped I became increasingly convinced that the prices had been inflated by the liquidator. I ended up just abandoning a half filled cart in the aisle after realizing that I was way overpaying for really shitty things. I don’t want to own shitty things. I’m great with inexpensive, but I am too fancy for a $40 polyester Kmart house brand comforter. Walmart was less horrifying. Still, I encountered a good share of our country’s slimiest white dudes who have decided to move to Humboldt to shop at Walmart and grow weed.
I was very glad to be back on the road and headed out of town. To be fair, again, I did not make the best logistical choices on this excursion. If I was trying to see the best of Humboldt, I probably shouldn’t have started at the Kmart liquidation sale and ended at Walmart.
After Eureka, it was a relatively quick drive to Redwoods National and State Park. I intended to camp on the beach, but that campsite was full so the very nice visitors center staff recommend Elam, a site in the woods. The campsite was just a mile driving and then 3 miles hiking. It ended up being one of the best places I’ve camped. And on the short drive over I even got to see a whole herd of elk (or maybe moose?) getting ready to cross the road.
The hike was the perfect distance after an exhausting day of highway and box stores. Not too long, just enough to decompress and enjoy nature again. And the terrain was varied despite being almost entirely flat. There was a rocky stream crossing and maybe 3 different kinds of forest.
The trees were majestic. While driving to the park, I had been worried that I would be unimpressed because I’d already seen the biggest trees in the Sierras, but I my worry was misplaced. I know that I was impressed because I took so many dumb tree pictures. One particularly impressive tree, which had fallen across the path and been sawed, had a official looking plaque on it that claimed that tree had been 2,000 years old. That tree was a contemporary of Jesus!
The campsite was tiny, but there was only one other person there: my new friend Brian. Brian, like me, had been backpacking solo up from LA and was also feeling pretty lonely. Brian may also have been thankful for my presence because there had been a mountain lion sighting the week before. But mostly it was great just to talk with someone else over the campfire.
While falling asleep, I noticed that I am pretty good at finding something new to worry about every night. In the Sierras, I had been very concerned about being mugged by bears in the dark of night. In Mendocino, I worried about cops and crusties breaking into the car. Now in the very jungle-feeling Redwoods, I was worried about crawly or slimy and surely poisonous insects getting into my tent. These aren’t entirely irrational fears, but I’d rather not have them because they aren’t very useful.
Houses are actually more permeable than tents. A locked car door is not much less secure than a deadbolted house door. (As proof, watch any action movie in which dozens of doors are casually kicked in, but car doors survive incredible impacts.) It probably isn’t the physical vulnerability that makes me nervous at night while camping. Surely some of it has to do with inexperience; I’m just not used to sleeping outdoors or in cars. But I think there’s something deeper going on, too.
What’s going on, I think, is that there’s lot of security in convention. Being mostly alone in the woods or on the side of a road means I’m not as by protected by standard social rules. For one, bears and bugs certainly don’t care about personal property boundaries, even if they do usually try to avoid human contact. And there’s something about being in the “wild” that makes me feel like people might also behave wildly, obeying animal rules of behavior and territory and might makes right. My fear is that campgrounds are a pre-Hobbesian world where the only imperative is to survive and there are no rules to help us cooperate and to ensure mutual safety. Of course, that’s not really true. In fact, campgrounds might be more likely to have only cooperative and sociable people than the average city sidewalk.
I guess that’s all to say that sleeping in the woods still makes me anxious. And it definitely makes me thankful for civilization.
next post: camp food reviews