I don't think my embedded links worked last time to view my pictures on facebook, so here are the ugly ones you'll have to past into your browser, all the way from Portland to Big sur because I wan't sure where I left off in the last blog:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=7638&l=24cad&id=708372808
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http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=8485&l=73eb5&id=708372808
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=8492&l=e29f3&id=708372808
It seems that I have half the trip to blog about, so I'll try a different format (I always say that and never do, I know)
Arcata: We arrived at Arcata on a Saturday and got to check out the farmers market which had a really special atmosphere as I think I described in the last blog. While we were there, two people suggested that we go into the redwood forest and camp out where all the hippies and vagrants live. So we trekked up into the Arcata Community Forest in the beautiful dusk light and were totally blown away by the size of the ancient old growth redwood stumps that had been logged in the 1800s, and as we drifted along the trail, totally in awe, violin music came to our ears. We expected the music to be coming from a hippie encampment, but turning a corner we found that it was being played by a strange character we had seen earlier at the farmers' market. We had watched him awkwardly corner a couple people and monologue to them at the farmers market, talking about how California is falling apart and how Arcata is a cess pool. He was an odd looking middle aged man, an awkward character, but in the dusk with a violin he looked a lot more in his element and as we passed he apologized to us that he had started playing so late and that he wouldn't be playing for quite so long today.
We continued into the forest and then left the path. There was no trail but we kept on coming across little camping spots with a tarp or plastic bag stuffed away under a root for later use. I think I showed one of these in a picture. It was well camouflaged and rain-proofed with garbage bags. We soon bumped into another pair of young travelers and made a couple of trades of strange items including honey and a doctor's mallet. We then decided to exchange stories over dinner and camp near by one another.
The next day we came out of the forest and met a few of the hippies and vagrants who were hanging around in the park. Everyone was quite friendly and accepting even though they might have been sketchy or intimidating in other situations, in the park everyone was friends, there was a sense of community in a very real and immediate way, people shared food and advice and beer and marijuana freely and it was quite an eclectic group. Everyone was taken aback that we were from Canada and each had their own advice about how to get to Mexico and what the best routs and modes of travel were for us. But first let me
step back and give a bigger picture that we slowly pieced together about how and why these people lived in the forest near Arcata.
Arcata is in Humbolt County and Humbolt County is apparently a renowned exporter of weed within the USA, much like Nelson or Salt Spring Island in Canada. A large part of the economy in Northern California is driven by the marijuana industry during certain parts of the year, so much so that migrant workers from across the country flock there during harvest season for what are called cutting jobs. We were explained that the frequent question 'are you here for work?' means: are you here to snap up one of the $25 to $30/hour marijuana cutting jobs? That was according to one person. Another guy said that they aren't paid in
money, but rather in nuggets of weed which I guess they then have to sell off… or smoke… I don't know how many dollars a nugget of weed goes for, but we were told by a lot of people that weed is worth a lot less during harvest time when the markets are flooded. While I'm on the topic I might as well talk about this rainbow community we stopped in on (later in the story) who said that weed is so common and there is so little enforcement that at the local general store they had more nuggets than dollars in the till. We also had a few people tell us that pot has almost been legalized in California because if you have one of any number of ailments and you know the right doctor you can get a prescription which allows you to legally grow up to 25 plants(... if you want less sketchy information, look it up for yourself, this is all word of mouth stuff), but apparently the prescription thing is getting out of hand and they are planning to limit the amount of prescriptions in the future.
Some of the sad consequences of the marijuana industry in northern California are that larger illegal operations are obviously not government regulated and with all of the chemical fertilizers that the large operations use the rivers are dying, poisoned with toxic algae blooms.
Anyway many of the people living in the forest were members of the work force congregating for the start of the pot harvesting season, but not all of them by any means. Some people were working on local organic farms or communities, many were travelers like ourselves who had heard about the neat vibe, the friends we had met in the forest were an example of this as were a van load full of hippies on a road trip from Texas (of all places) and a few drunks and bums who enjoyed the friendliness and company that this community afforded them.
On the weekend different people came up from the town and there was an impromptu jam session, people juggling and making jewelry and a festive atmosphere. You would be invited to play football, then offered a drum in the circle, invited to a party on the beach later on and included in a conversation with a total stranger. It was a really cool place to be.
So they slept in the forest with blankets, sleeping bags and tarps… but where did this community get its food? Most of the people we met there lived off food stamps, but those who weren't eligible would go to the food bank, free food at the church, cast off food discarded by local businesses or reclaimed by organization like Food Not Bombs, failing that people were always willing to share their food stamp food.
We bought our food at the Arcata Coop and farmer's market and then shared what we had with the communal food and supplemented ours with theirs to be part of the community.
It was easy to see how a homeless person, worn out by life on the streets of various big cities, who had discovered the Forest community in Arcata would see no reason to leave. The living was easy, the people were friendly, food plentiful, the park ranger was lenient, the scenery was beautiful, drugs were plentiful and their minimal existence was more or less unbegrudgingly supported by the real society's charity, waste and excess.
One interesting character that we met one evening at the park was the father of two boys who had been taken away from him because he was such a wreck. He was prematurely aged from years of hard drinking and drugs and he said with a raspy laugh that his profession was- making moonshine. He told us how with minimal equipment and a couple of people's food stamp cards he could make wine by distilling mashed banana and strawberry. The only thing that would require cash would be the super-yeast. Its apparently tough to find somewhere that sells this stuff, but he had found a shop selling it for a decent price: a brewing store nearby. His plan to cover the capital of buying the yeast was to sell the wine dirt cheap then give any excess away to friends living in the forest. His real motivation wasn't to make cheep strawberry banana wine though, it was for the moonshine at the bottom of the bucket at the end of the process. He wasn't offering that to anybody. Fascinating that he was so creative and passionate about something so self-destructive.
He told us that he had a still hidden in the forest, but that he was worried it was too close to the path. We talked about his family and he told us that even though his kids weren't allowed to see him his eldest son had snuck away and gone on an adventure with him. Unfortunately this adventure had landed them both in jail. He said although being in jail with his son was sad, it was also kind of cool in a father-son kind of way. He had a similar plan for a trip with his younger son (not the jail part), because this son was soon going to be through with high school. We asked him what his kids did and he said that his eldest was a cowboy (he worked on a ranch) and his youngest had no interests outside of being a pothead.
This friendly old man's world was a strange and dysfunctional one, but it outlined for me a common humanity across an absurd world. I feel like I could easily have read a book by a middle class author about a father and son who went on an adventure and got in a dangerous situation but had each other, and the book could also have talked about the trials and tribulations of the father's entrepreneurial startup buisness. It could have touched on the same human issued as our friend had mentioned to us but without him being a bum and without all of the relationships having more than just a standard amount of dysfunction and substance abuse.
Arcata was a great place to hang out for a few days, read some books, meet some different people and lifestyles and bask in the sun, but beyond that it was quite depressing for those who gave it any thought. This was no alternative to society, this was an offshoot of western society's excesses, completely dependent on society for everything from food to sanitation, and there was no groundbreaking thought or art coming out of this social glitch, just languid stupor and disoriented paranoia. It was inspiring in that we recognized the same humanity there as anywhere but depressing in that it was a dead end as far as alternative lifestyles go.
Enough about Arcata… even talking about it seems to suck you in…
Our ride from Arcata to Eurica picked us up before we had even started looking for a ride. I think hitchhiking is more reliable and punctual than the greyhound in Arcata.
His occupation: Masters student at Humbolt State University
Quest: to find an internet connection for his research as all of the internet connections were down in Arcata. It turned out that the internet failures went as far south as Mendecino, beyond Humbolt County,which was bad news for our intended reply to our couchsurfing.com hosts)
In Eurica: We tried to find an internet café but found the internet was down here too. Something about a wind storm knocking out the wires. We bought some produce at a farmers market, bumped into not one but two of our friends from Arcata Community Forest aka 'the park', then walked and walked and walked until we were out of town.
Hitchhiking from Eurica: This was unexpectedly long and tedious, we thought it wouldn't have been a problem because Eurica has very much the same vibe as Arcata.
Our ride eventually came in the shape of an elderly man dying of cancer.
His reason for picking us up: He hitchhiked all over the US and Canada in the 60s. We told him about couchsurfing.com and he said: "in my day you didn't need anything like that, people would almost always offer you a place to stay at the end of your hitchhiking ride."
Most memorable: He had turned down chemotherapy to treat his cancer and was planning a trip to Brazil that he could barely afford, so that he could visit a healer who could
supposedly cure cancer… imagine being so disillusioned about conventional medicine and so hopeful about mystical healing abilities as to put your life on the line in that way!
He dropped us in a down called Garbourville
In Garbourville: We got out of the rain and into an internet café, again no connection but the lady let us draw out our hitchhiking signs, use the bathroom, eat our own food and study the map of California in the warm and dry when all we had bought from the cafe was one large coffee and split it.
Funniest thing: two hitchhikers heading north (probably to Eurica or Arcata doing a silly dance.
Most memorable incident: A bum started talking to us and so we stopped to listen to his story since we had nowhere much better to be and are interested in eclectic stories. He was telling us about how his shoes were all worn out and he was wet and cold and had just lost everything that he owned except for about fifty cents in small change.
He wasn't complaining directly though, he was just expressing himself, then at the end of each thought he would qualify it with a fatalistic religious comment like: that is just God's way of testing me, or: this is just part of the bumpy road that I am destined to follow according to the holy God. It wasn't his point of view that interested me so much as the way in which he presented it. He talked in a sort of pleading-hopefully-but-despairing way. It was as though he felt that if he could convince us that his life was part of a big beautiful plan of the universe then he might start to believe it himself. His tone was despairing but his words were hopeful. Another thing that set him apart from the average beggar was that although he asked us for spare change he didn't want to take our coffee refill as a donation, he instead insisted on us sharing it with him and he wouldn't take the last bit. He said that it is important to share like brothers because we are all the same in god's eyes or something to that effect.
This was a unique enough incident but while the three of us were standing there talking, a van full of student-looking young people pulled up and gave us each a bar of Dagoba organic ginger-lemon flavored dark chocolate, the really good stuff. We were taken totally off guard and before the event had registered the van had pulled away with a smile and nod from the driver.
Hitchhiking out of Garberville: We were in full rain gear, in the wet for ages but we had a good conversation and danced so ridiculously that we stayed warm and probably put the other hitchhikers to shame.
Lots of smiles and waves, but no rides until…
A puke-green micro buss pulled over into a parking lot nearby and a sweet-looking punk got out. He was quite tall and had a big beard with emphasis on the chops. He had one thick central nose ring and a lower lip piercing below each end of his mouth. His head was shaved to about an inch long, but he had four ratty dreadlocks coming off the back of his head. He was wearing a beaten up sweatshirt and waterproof camouflage army pants. Across his knuckles was tattooed f-r-e-e r-i-d-e and he had a few other simple tattoos like '211' (the brand name of a beer). He looked hard core but he was quite soft spoken. He asked us if we were interested in a ride with them given that they were just about to pull over for the evening, but would continue tomorrow morning, and that they were "a bunch of drunk hippies."
I asked if the driver was drunk and he said "nah the driver's ok."
We got in and it was definitely the strangest ride yet. Inside the van there were no seats or bed or anything, just a low lying floor covered with hay and grime and then the two front seats. In the back there were two men in their early 50s and a girl who could have been anything from 17 to 30 and two dogs. The driver's name was Bryce and the two men were introduced as Hippie and Hippie Dave.
Hippie was not a hippie at all. He looked like your stereotypical bum wearing a baseball cap and a dirty weathered windbreaker. Behind him there was a cardboard sign that said 'Need Food VERY Sick'. He had a light build and was missing some of his yellow teeth, but despite all of this he was smiling broadly and welcomed us in.
Hippie Dave was not a hippie either except that he was wearing a tie die shirt, had long
curly oily disgusting black hair and corduroys. He reminded me a lot of the attorney from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He was belligerent and immature, but quite friendly.
The girl introduced herself as Smiles. She was gaunt and skinny, but definitely not old. She didn't smile much but when she did it was quite powerful. Her hair was a matted mess, but despite her somewhat haggard appearance she was still somehow elegant and pretty.
Bryce's dog was a nine month old boxer and was really playful and happy and cooperative. The other dog was random, suspicious and nervous. I was under the initial impression that it was Smiles' dog, but it was clear that Smiles wouldn't be one to own a dog, she seemed
to barely be able to support herself. Chris was told that this dog belonged to Hippie, but when he told me this I was surprised, I never saw any indication that the two of them were emotionally linked in any way. I think it is more likely that it was a stray dog that Hippie
had lead into the van.
The reason that all of these characters found themselves in this van had to do with Bryce. He has done a lot of traveling in his day. He has cycled across a few states and said that he walked across a whole state without being picked up once as a hitchhiker (probably the fact that he is big, tough and scary at first glance). After these and a few other experiences he promised himself that he would never leave anybody by the side of the road no matter what they looked like. Bryce had been given this van in exchange for a few days of work and after a fix-up he had set out on this road trip. I don't think that I will be able to convey Bryce's stories in a logical order so I'll just listthem off:
He seemed to be quite handy with mechanics
He enjoys the sport of skydiving
He has the first step in a piloting certificate
He has lived in many squats around the country
He got a tumor when he was 20 years old filled with tooth, toe nails, hair and other fast growing human tissue. He was discovered in a desperate state under a bridge and brought to the hospital where the tumor was operated on and now he is almost back to full physical
capability.
He can juggle well
He had driven a converted school bus across the country as a motor home and had run it as a makeshift soup kitchen for a while but had ultimately been charged by the police for imitating a school bus driver. Apparently the police were worried that children might climb
onto the buss not realizing what it was. I'm sure the situation got worse when they found that he had no insurance too.
As we drove off to find a spot where we could spend the night undisturbed camping in the van, Hippie Dave started complaining "come on man, we just got some hitchhikers, we can't stop driving now, it's still light out, we've got to put some miles on the road, come on…" Bryce said no I'm too tired, I've been driving forever. I offered to drive and he asked if I had a license. I told him that I did and he said: "good because I don't." I took the wheel and we turned around and headed back to the highway. Once again I found myself at the wheel of an ultra-low performance hippie van.
We wound our way south down the highway 101 until Smiles told us that there was a rainbow community nearby and that they would take us in for the night. I think I mentioned about rainbow gatherings in the last blog, but there is apparently a database of communities and people who consider themselves to be part of the rainbow family who offer up hospitality to other rainbow people. At any rate no sooner had we knocked on the door than we were offered dinner and a place to sleep. Chris and I took them up on this but the rest of the crew preferred to crash in the van after eating even though it was raining torrentially and the van wasn't quite watertight. The other guys wanted to smoke up
and drink beer, but Chris and I wanted to engage with the founders of the community and learn about the way the community worked and the founding philosophy etc.
The community turned out to be religious; they called themselves a Jesus community- not catholic or protestant or seventh day adventists etc, just followers of the bible. When we asked one of the main guys how he had gotten into the community, he ended up telling us about his philosophical odyssey which had lead him from curiosity to existentialism, Buddhism and some other isms with no real click. Then he decided to give the bible a fair go with his own histological interpretations and he said that when you take the bible for what says and what it claims to be and read it in the context that that it was written and try to take away ideas and philosophies for living your life, it is a really positive text. He had to try to ignore all of the hierarchy and assumptions and smearing that the bible has received in the last 2000 years, but it ended up really making sense to him. In his mind the strongest criticisms of the bible come from areas in which it doesn't claim to have any authority. I guess he is saying that you can draw some incorrect conclusions from the bible but if you study it well, you don't run into troubles in areas that it claims to be the authority.
I'm not really doing his explanation justice, but I will say that it was the best philosophical defense of the bible that I have ever heard. I actually understood why he would be
compelled to take it as truth (this is a comment I don't often make).
The reason his interpretations didn't sway my understandings of existence is that the tales in the bible sound too inconsistent with my experience of reality for hundreds of eyewitnesses to persuade me that it is true. From my experience large crowds of people who don't think critically are easily deceived and the power politics involved in assembling the text also make me skeptical as to it's historical accuracy. To be fair I haven't yet put the time in to read the bible as a philosophical text, so my criticisms are vague and unfounded, but I have lots more philosophical reading material from other great minds before I get to the bible. (sorry for that personal segue)
At any rate we had an excellent philosophical debate, then talked about he logistics of running a community and the logistics of living in a community and raising a family in a community and making a community a relevant way of life rather than a reclusive utopia. They are planning to close down this community soon and move to India and start a new one with humanitarian goals. Then we talked about insane India travel stories and soon it was late at night.
The next morning we exchanged email addresses and got back in the dirty van. At 9:30 am Hippie Dave started howling for beer: "We need to get to a beer store now!" So Bryce pulled over and Hippie and Hippie Dave got out and went into the store. Hippie Dave came back whining about the price: "Five dollars for two tall cans! And its cheerleader beer!" Bryce commented that he didn't HAVE to buy it, but Hippie Dave replied: "We got to have beer man!"
Along the way we stopped at a pull off that Bryce remembered as a really special place. We went for a short hike and got to a river that went through a natural land bridge in the form of a fifty foot cliff. It was really cool, but Bryce commented that he remembered it
being much prettier, there used to be moss growing all the way down the face of the cliff, but he admitted that he had failed to find this place a few times so it had been building and building in his mind in anticipation. We hiked to the top of the cliff for the view and saw
some really cool moss and some trees that if I had seen in the lord of the rings I would have thought were made out of plaster… see the photo gallery.
We continued on our way but not before Smiles had picked up a bunch of garbage from around the parking lot. Chris initially figured she was just cleaning the place up, but it turned out that she was looking for things of value. The trouble was that she also kept the things that were purely garbage, so every stop, Smiles would get out and come back
into the van with more garbage: some bottles for recycling, a new pair of pants, a broken plastic covered weight that she figured we could trade for something, an old pair of shoes, a sprout she had found growing in a stream, some money she had panhandled, a half-eaten
bag of chips, etc. and thats the stuff I wasn't referring to as garbage. The trouble with her tendency to float towards the nearest dumpster whenever we stopped was that we couldn't find her when we wanted to get going again and she didn't answer to the name Smiles.
Every now and then Hippie and Hippie Dave would complain that they needed to go to the bathroom because they had been drinking. Bryce would say no and then eventually pull over, the two old guys would get out and the two dogs too and they would all pee and then we would wait for Hippie who probably had a urinary disorder because he took forever. Then we would heard everyone back into the buss and get on the move again. On one of these occasions Smiles suggested that Hippie Dave chew on a bit of moss then stick it on the muddy gross scrape he had gotten when he fell on the hike to the land bridge. The response was "F—k no, I'm not putting no moss in my, mouth."
Soon enough Bryce wanted to start drinking too, so I took over the driving. The next stop however our discomforts with the situation started to increase. The van was out of gas and while nobody seemed to have any problem finding money for alcohol, everyone drew a blank when it came to money for gas. So we pulled over and started to pan handle and take bottles back to the depot. This might have been a long process if it weren't for some
strange lady who said she had money for gas and "lets get out of here."
What I didn't understand about these characters is that there was no apparent goal in mind. Hippie and Hippie Dave I think were just in the van because it was a safe warm place to drink, they didn't really want to get anywhere... I think Hippie Dave was just being a goon when he had hastles Bryce to keep on driving. It wasn't clear what Smiles was trying to accomplish, it is concievable that she really did live purely and totally in the moment. She had a burn on her finger that (we were suggested upon retelling this story) might have come from a crack pipe, which would be consistent with her frail junkie frame, but while she would drink and smoke up given the chance, she didn't seem like an addictive personality, she was really mellow and unconcerned, and in this state of mind for too long for it to have been intoxication, I think.
Bryce was trying to get around the country and I believe had an end goal in mind on the east coast, but this new lady wouldn't tell us what her name was, why she wanted to pay for gas, where she wanted to go or what she was interested in... beyond "Ilike drugs, I'm going to San Francisco to buy drugs," so she inspired absolutely no trust…and she didn't look the parteither.
She looked like she was dressed up for a cheesy nightclub, and was wearing some makeup, so presumable she had woken up in a bed near a bathroom with toiletries... she didn't look prepared (us) or unprepared (Smiles) enough for an indefinite aimless road trip.
Between her, Smiles the two older bums men and the two dogs, Chris was starting to have a shitty time in the back and a goofy situation was turning into an ugly one for him. For me, driving the van, the situation also started to get dire. As I talked to Bryce I slowly established that this van had not been properly sold to him, and that he had the papers but that it was not insured. He said that it wouldn't be a very big fine if we got pulled over. I glanced into the back and thought about Hippie Dave's tactlessness and how much illegal stuff was most likely in the van and I made it clear to Chris that we needed to be out of this situation at the next possible opportunity.
So we pulled over for lunch and Chris and I said 'so long' to that chaotic train wreck of a hippie van. Once back on the Hwy 1 with out hitching signs we got picked up very quickly. The puke green hippie van was out of gas again, but we were perpetually afraid that they
would catch back up with us and we would have to go through the awkward situation of explaining that although we were begging for rides, theirs didn't quite cut it.
Fortunately because I was at the wheel I had chosen to drive the scenic root down the coast. We got three quick rides down to and beyond Mendocino and then were picked up by a Mexican lady with her 7ish year old son, so Chris and her conversed in Spanish in the front (Chris got a bit of a shock at how extreme her accent was) and I played with the kid
in the back. He had just gotten a plastic toy dragon and knight and he repeatedly asked me which one I wanted to be and then said that he wanted to be the dragon and then he knocked over my knight, smiled and we started the game again….and again… it fas funny and cute until it became clear that this kid had a much higher car sickness tolerance than I do. The boy didn't speak much English at all so I couldn't explain that I didn't feel well and I really didn't want to hurt his feelings. So I was woozy and nautious on the windy road and this kid kept on knocking over the knight with the dragon and showing me which action figures he has at home and which ones he has left to collect and I was only just hanging in.
Eventually we get dropped off and I am so glad to be out of the car that I forget to grab my sign... the one I had carried with me on the whole Tofino trip two years ago and that had gotten us this far. Ah well, its just a thing.
We went to the grocery store to stock up and then were cornered by a lonely middle aged man on a bicycle trip down the coast. He was smoking like a pipe because he was really nervous that there was no town for the next 40 miles and he really wanted to talk to us about it. We humored him for a while and then got in trouble for being behind the grocery store and finally trudged out of town to a park. We trudged to the beach, warn out by a long day and set up camp on the beach. There were lots of sand mites but the park was gorgeous, the waves shook the ground with thunderous power and it was a good night.
the sunrise was also breathtaking. The beach was littered with some spectacular driftwood including a redwood trunk that was five feet in diameter and super long too. It was hard to imagine a storm that could toss that thing around enough for it to have all of those driftwood scars and be so far up on the beach. We also snapped some pictures of vultures. I think that vulture was the first bird that I have encountered whose first reaction upon observing my approach was to spread its wings and look big so as to scare me off rather than just to fly away.
The next morning we started hitchhiking… and kept hitching and made up some silly time-passing games to keep ourselves occupied but the simple problem was that we were not getting picked up. Four hours rolled painfully by and then someone pulled over, but instead of picking us up they dropped another hitchhiker off. The driver asked if she could
hitchhike with us and in good spirits we said sure (Its always better to have a girl with you when you're hitchhiking- well she proved to be the exception).
She was high out of her mind, poorly clothed, had a small bag of personal effects which were mostly drugs and makeup, she was really annoying when she spoke and was clearly at a crisis point in her life. But not in the way that we could help her out (not that we had anything much to offer) because she was still being so self destructive. We asked her
where she was going and she said that she didn't know. She refused to make any plans. We asked her where she had come from: she said that she had been taken in by a few people on her travels and that they had helped her get high. She said that she had just broken up with her husband and that she had a daughter somewhere. She kept repeating "It's really hard when you are without a car" I think that she truly believed the lack of a car to be the root cause of all of her problems. She wouldn't brainstorm with us about how she was going to find a place to sleep, and she kept on yelling at cars as they passed and standing too close to the side of the road. Eventually we wished her luck and started walking, we followed a path through the woods and she walked down the road, but ten minutes later we found ourselves with her again at the next rural intersection. It was looking ugly because few people would be willing to take three people especially if one of them looked so out of control. We were thinking of hiking onwards when finally someone pulled over for us. He was able to take all three of us.
She sat in the front seat and started the conversation. "Its really hard when you are without a car. I hate hitchhiking. The way the cars come at you seems really hostile. Its really hard when you are without a car."
The driver sort of humored her and then we weighed in: "Actually we really like hitchhiking, you get a really good opportunity to meet all sorts of people and you get an idea for the type of people in the lands you travel through and you develop a respect for the distance that you are actually covering." Our driver agreed and told us a story of how he used to hitchhike and told us about a yurt that he had built off the grid in a redwood forest with
compost toilets and a gray water retrieval system. We were talking about the logistics of alternative lifestyles when she found a joint in his car. "Can I light this?" She said. Sure… he said uncomfortably. He turned it down when she passed it to him and we both turned it down too. So she went to put it out on the plastic on the cup holder but he caught her before she finished the cigarette burn. He started telling us about how he had a license for medical marijuana and how this stuff was organic and local. We asked him about how he installed his solar electricity system and where he bought his land. He told us that the solar companies do most of the work and that he bought the land of a guy who had been busted for having a Crystal Meth lab there in the forest.
As we talked we were winding our way though some beautiful scenery of rolling arid seaside cliffs and never ending ocean. The lady started giggling uncontrollably at a completely illogical part of the conversation ... it turned out that she was scared shit less of the cliff edge roads and hairpin bends, she was just expressing it though nervous laughter. She asked if many people had died on these roads. He answered that they probably had and that up ahead there was a front wheel of a crotch rocket stuck underneath the guard rail of the side of the road. It had been shoved in there so hard that when they cleaned up the crash they couldn't pry it loose so they just left it. Sure enough we saw it, but passed it too fast to take a picture.
Our driver was headed inland now so he dropped us off on the intersection so that we could continue down the coastal highway. Fortunately the high lady was more interested in getting to a town than following the coast so she stayed with him, but not before asking: "ja got any money?" To which he replied not much and none to spare. It was embarasing just being near her.
No sooner had we been dropped off and exchanged comments about what a good place this was then we were picked up by a girl in her mid twenties on her first paid vacation. She was staying with a friend in San Francisco who had lent her this car to go and explore the coast. Beside her bill paying job she was a writer and was working towards a masterts in creative writing. She didn't feel the need to get a masters but found that she was much more productive with deadlines and vague topic guidelines for her writing.
She was a lot of fun, a really cool girl and she drove us all the rest of the way into San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge.
We headed for the nearest internet cafe trying to grapple with the concept that we were IN San Francisco and that we had gotten there by hitchhiking. We made contact with our couchsurfing hosts in Berkely and I uploaded some pictures (I'm super scared of losing them completely when (not if) this camera breaks or is lost or stolen).
It was quite a long public transit commute to Berkely using San Francisco buses and the BART, but when we got to the Station in Berkely our Couchsurfing hosts came to meet us.
Renata and Jaimie are super super cool cats. She designs museum exhibits and he was starting a job with a startup IT company Monday and it was Wednesday night.
Berkeley: The first day it was a downpour again, but we were well prepared in rain gear and were driven to see the town and campus. The campus was huge and exciting. Chris and I both feel more at home on campuses than any other type of place and Berkely was a cool campus. They have a cafe dedicated to free speech with a monument describing the student body's civil disobedience in the early 60s in response to restrictions on freedom of expression. Outside the cafe they have a whole bunch of billboards with the front page of national newspapers from ALL around the world (in English). We found the philosophy department and and I cursed to myself that it wasn't the 14th (~?) because there was an open invitation discussion with a philosopher who Chris had heard of and who had some work in a textbook he had studied.
Then Chris saw the poster and asked me what date it was. I said "ya too bad its not the 14th, its the.... shit it is the 14th, that means the it started 7 minutes ago...." "and its right here in this room across the hall." So totally at random we got to sit in on an open discussion with a brilliant mind and some of his super bright students. The conversations was absolutely insane though. The subject seemed to flow seamlessly through metaphysics to science to math to statistics to linguistics to the war on Iraq, to democracy to relativity and back to metaphysics. Every now and then Chris and I recognized a subject that we had a bit of background in and could suddenly understand a little bit, but in general we were totally lost and blown away. Hilary Putnam (putting on the talk) had apparently met with Einstein before his death and asked him about his opinion of quantum mechanics. Einstein replied sarcastically that he doesn't think that his bed waits for the moment before he enters the room to suddenly appear and snap into place. Dr. Putnam was throwing around the idea that although particles only have a 1 in 10 000 000 (?) chance of ever being in a definite place at a given time, if the definite presence of one particle promotes the definite presence of it's neighbors then in gigantic molecular structures like a table there is almost always one of the many particles that is being in a definite place at any given time, so larger structures actually do have a definite place at any given time.
So that is one example of what he was talking about, then in the next breath he was talking about how over his career Noam Chompski had gradually changed his assertions about how language is conceived of, how it develops and how it is used in the brain and that this other linguist who cited Chompski as an influence had put emphasis on the wrong part of Chompski's theory. They were all interesting ideas (the ones we could grasp) but it was also super cool to think that we were making eye contact and sitting next to a guy who calls Noam Chompski 'Noam' and who had the linguistic and philosophical background to criticize him.
We left the discussion when it ended to meet up with Jaimie who had invited us to a restaurant called Cafe Gratitude. This cafe was not only completely vegetarian, not only completely vegan, but all but a couple of it's dishes were raw-foodist. One of the theories behind raw foodism is that over a certain temperature certain proteins in many foods are denatured and so it is a bit healthier to prepare dishes that have not been scorched. I have also heard that when oil is heated above it's smoke point some mild toxins are formed and it is better to do without these too.
Because being raw foodist isn't unique enough- cafe gratitude's dished all have names like 'I am wonderful' or 'I am lucky' or 'I am appreciated' or 'I am reborn' and you are supposed to say "....lets see I am celebrating and I am cherished" (or they'll say you are energetic and...) then they say "Would you like that with coconut milk sauce or avocado?" Or something like that. It was supposedly all part of a self discovery board game. IT was a bit cheesy, but the cooler thing was that at the beginning of the meal the waitress or waiter gives you the question of the day that the management had thought up that morning. That day it was "what has been your greatest accomplishment in your life so far." So the waitress told us hers and we each had to think of ours.
That evening we went to an exhibition on alternative building, gardening, plumbing and basically low impact living. Afterwards we went to a coffee shop with free refills and read our books. Chris showed me a riddle from the book he was reading:
On one side of the paper he wrote 'the statement on the other side of this paper is false'
Then on the other side of the paper he wrote 'the statement on the other side of this paper is true' and then he handed it to me and said read this.
Sensing a trick I read 'the statement on the other side of this paper is false' and said "ok." We both waited for something to happen and then Chris said "turn it over!"
I turned it over. It said 'the statement on the other side of the paper is true', but if this second statement was false then I could deduce that the statement on the first side was actually false, which in turn would change the truth value of the second statement.
So every time you re evaluated the truth value based on what you knew from the last comment the truth value changed.
Chris told me that Bertrand Russel had this dilemma come to him in a dream with the question "what information is contained in this note?" or something like that. Chris passed the question on to me saying "Is there no information on this paper?" That didn't seem right to me. There was information on the paper but it was neither true nor false in the context within which it had been presented. I wanted to call it a third type of truth value, that of invalid. We agreed that the information on the paper was neither true nor false, it was invalid. This excited both of us and we each started writing down loads of ideas in our diaries.
I thought it must have been similar to the discovery of negative numbers: 2 - 4 = ...well nothing. If you only have two you can't take away four... but if you do it anyway then 1-4 = an even bigger invalid number than the one that came from 2 - 4... lets call these numbers negative numbers.
Or the discovery of imaginary (complex) numbers: the square root of negative one: sqrt(-1) =... well nothing, you can't find two identical number that when multiplied together make -1... but if you could then the answer to 'sqrt(-1) = ?' would be half of the answer to 'sqrt(-4) =?'...so lets say sqrt(-1) = i (the number 'i' where i times i = -1) so then sqrt(-4) = 2i because 2i times 2i written as 2i*2i = 2*i*2*i =2*2*i*i = 4*i*i and we established that i*i = -1 so 4*i*i =4*(-1) which we know is -4.
We wondered if without our mathematical backgrounds in engineering and astrophys whether we would have been able to quickly be able to identify this other invalid type truth value.
We tried another combination, writing 'the statement on the other side of this paper is true' on both sides and didn't learn anything...then we tried writing 'the statement on the other side of this paper is false' on both sides and found that the truth value of the statements depended on which side of the paper we looked at first... which made us question our underlying assumptions... what if, as we had walked in and sat down, someone trustworthy had mentioned "oh by the way don't believe whats written on top of that paper over there." We would have come to the opposite conclusions about the truth value of each side. Questioning the initial assumptions later came up again when we showed the riddle to Jaimie (IT background) without stating how we had approached the problem. He started with different assumptions than us and took the two statements simultaneously and said... "well if they both say the other side is false then they are both false." A different yet correct conclusion than that achieved though the progressive approach Chris and I had taken.
That should have been the end of it but I wanted to throw in the possibility that a comment on the side of a paper could be 'the statement on the other side of this paper is invalid' or 'valid'. That threw in some new permutations, including the possibility that a side could be valid but of unknown further truth value... unless you have assumptions of truth or falsehood. Like a true nerd, starved for mathematical quandaries I made a whole matrix of the possible statements and results. don't worry though I didn't introduce a 3 or 4 sided pieces of paper, that would be ridiculous...
Renata and Jamie were full of really interesting thoughts and it is always excellent to meet people who think as much as you, but about different things... lots to talk about...discovery of new points of view....
I have been struggling with the problem that one of my dreams: touring high level regattas in North America or Europe in a van with a coach, some team mates, a few lasers and maybe a coach boat; is unsustainable in a carbon emissions way and it doesn't afford me much opportunity to make up for all of the passive violence that is involved in being part of our western society. I still haven't come to terms with that but Jaimie had a thought which I like... that watching people do things that they are truly passionate about increases ones lust for life and that that is a positive contribution to the world. That is the world contribution of an elite athlete, or any other specialist who is so inspired that they are totally caught up in their world in a creative, passionate way. Maybe it isn't a super practical contribution to our society, but it does make my desire to follow that path seem less selfis: any thoughts?
The next day we went to the farmers market and then explored San Francisco with Renata and Jaimie. We dined at a restaurant called Squat and Gobble and checked out a hill park, downtown and the Haight district. Birthplace of the hippie movement.
Renata and Jaimie were going to a Renaissances Fare quite a way south(to all you Family Guy Junkies: "The road to nobility is paved with righteousness and honor, not LSD and sideburns"-The Black Knight..."Of course now I know it wasn't a hamburger, but back then, I was willing to believe anything..."-Peter) so we rode with them most of the way there and then started hitchhiking in a very wealthy area. This was the beginnings of luxury homes in the desert and over-irrigated lawns.
When we finally got a ride, it was with a guy who liked dirt bikes and wasn't willing to date a girl if she didn't like riding dirt bikes. "If they don't ride they stay at home and have too much fun without you if you know what I mean." Unfortunately he hadn't found anyone yet, but he was firm that he loved riding more than anything else. He gave us some money at the end of the trip and when we said that it really wasn't necessary, he told us to spread the word that not everyone around here is a stuck up snob.
Not everyone just south of San Jose is a stuck up snob. (we actually didn't positively ID any stuck up snobs).
Our next ride came form a guy who owned a high performance bicycle store, so Chris had a few relevant things to discuss with him because as many of you know Rich, Chris's father owns Cycle Logic a couple of avenues north of Whyte on 109th street.
We were driving through this town with this laid back yet self assured character when apparently, this supped up beater car accelerated to our right and swerved into his truck us and then started yelling at us.
Both cars pulled over and then the driver of the other car (overweight, middle aged, wearing a wife beater) got out and started gesticulating wildly and kept on yelling. Our driver calmly mused: "We don't need any of that, if he's going to be like that, I'll call the police." He got out his cell phone and called the police. We sat inside the car for what must have been 15 minutes and the other guy kept his scowl but gradually stopped yelling. Upon closer observation there was a sharp lane adjustment painted one the middle of the intersection that our driver had not seen. When the other driver had swerved into us he was actually following the lane. We watched the intersection for a few minutes and saw the same accident almost happen again 3 times! the thing was that there was still room in the right lane for both cars to be parallel so the collision had been purely because of the other driver's aggressiveness. In the Racing Rules of Sailing if that had happened I would have been pretty sure that the aggressive driver would have been found at fault and depending on his presentation of the case and the stories of his whitenesses our driver might have gotten off scot free. But as it was the police officer did not have a racing rules of sailing interpretation of the traffic rules and he said that our driver would be found completely at fault and so he counceled him not to file a police report. Our driver reluctantly followed the officer's advice and he continued on his way dropping us at an on ramp to the highway 1.
Again we waited for quite a while before getting a ride but in the end were picked up by a strange Mexican fellow. Chris had a lot of difficulty understanding his accent in Spanish and said that he seemed quite incoherent. His driving was fine but we speculated that he might have been drunk, though it wasn't clear what a working man with a family was doing drunk in the middle of the day. We only stayed with him for about ten minutes and then were dropped right in the middle of apocalyptic cabbage fields. There was nothing but vegetables as far as the eye could see in every direction except for a town in the distance. Debris and garbage were blowing earily around. The air felt thick and smelt strongly of chemical fertilizers and it was disturbing to think that most of the vegetables in North America (the healthy stuff remember) comes from places like that.
We were picked up by a small car with the sticker "impeach Richard Nixon" in the back window. He said it was a nostalgia item and asked us how we had endedup 'way out here'. He had been to Calgary before because he works for a large natural gas utilities company that sells natural gas to California. He had a rather uncommon question: "Have you ever heard of my son?"
His son's name is John Walker Lynn.
It rang a bell for me but I couldn't have said why. Apparently Jhon Walker Lynn had become one of the big scapegoats for 911 and was now serving a life sentence at Guantanamo prison. His father wanted to know if his son's infamy had spread outside of the USA. Jhon's story was that he had left home without telling his parents: our driver or his wife, and had for some reason joined a Muslim extremest group in Afganistan well before september 2001... even though his upbringing was liberal and moderate, his parents a Catholic and a Buddhist. He had joined a militia and when Afganistan was invaded he had been captured and sent to prison.
Now their son was a national scapegoat serving a life sentence. What do you say to that. Thanks for the ride... I'm sorry about your son, I'm even more sorry that you don't know why he did it... it doesn't quite cut it somehow.
We were dropped off in another perfect hitchhiking spot. We did wait for a while however and our ride was much more interested in a conversation and a photo opportunity that driving us anywhere... which was fine. He only drove us a couple of minutes up the road, but then gave us another ten bucks a piece and again told us to spread the work that people around here aren't all self centered jerks.
People 100 miles north of Big Sur are not all self-centered pricks. (Again we didn't even meet any at all.)
We hiked for a long time to try to find a good sleeping spot and eventually found one. It wasn't in anyone's way and so we took the opportunity to sleep in. When we did hit the road we were quickly picked up by an older lady who had also hitchhiked around in the 60s. She drove us all the way to the Big Sur Bakery. Its hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about Big Sur that makes it sweet. Sur is south in Spanish...Jack Kerouak wrote a book named Big Sur about the beat generation... Big Sur is more of a feeling (freeling was my Froidian typo), the sort of California West coast trendiness meets care freeness. It was definitely a well discovered touristy place, but it seemed to be able to cope with that aspect of it's identity and still be cool. At our first stop: the Big Sur Bakery, we met a very friendly worker who ended up giving us tasty sandwiches and some old pastry for free, as a gift. We sat outside and someone came and sat down with a beautiful bongo drum and started thumping intricate rhythms. We were studying our possible paths to head inland for the Grand Canyon and chatting on and of with the Bakery guy when a couple adventure cyclists pulled up. We befriended them immediately and found out that they too were Canadians. the guy had been on the road for three months, but was in no hurry at all and had some cool stories about being taken in for a week in Santa Cruz by a surfer with spare gear and a hot tub for afterward and how he had bought a second hand guitar and more than paid for it in busking money and how he had worked in a hostel and then the other cyclist, his girlfriend who was doing a similar trip on the east coast had taken the train across the country to meet up with him and now they were together.
This isn't a particularly good break in the story but it marks the end of a day of writing so here is where I will pause.
To Be Continued...
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