CALIFORNIA WATER

I recently returned from a lengthy West Coast road trip — sunburned, tired and geographically enlightened. California is big.

Duh.

But it's one thing to know it's big and another to feel it by spending hours getting from Point A to Point B. Especially if you are moving east to west over mountain ranges or wandering down the coast, where the roads are serpentine, sometimes circular, and seemingly endless. Signs like this aren't uncommon. Rick did all the driving and I did all the panicking (mostly internal) that he was going to roll the van. We thought eventually we'd see a sign that said "0" and directed one to just get out of the car and stand still or perhaps walk in figure-eights. On calmer stretches, I did less panicking and more snacking — on roadside cherries (only $2 a pound!) and coffee.

Even just the northern part of California is vast — and overwhelmingly varied. Snow-topped mountains, ridiculously hot valleys, craggy shoreline dotted with sandy beaches. Pine woods that smell of wild rosemary and lilac (my nose still lusts for this). Dusky groves of ferns and ancient redwoods. Rivers and creeks and waterfalls. Wildflowers everywhere — on the roadside, on sand dunes, on granite cliffs, in marshes, on the beach. In the most likely and unlikely places. Food crops everywhere — untold acres of peaches, almonds, tomatoes, olives. Everything. Rice paddies with neon green shoots piercing the sun-dappled water (I found these especially mesmerizing). Garlic and onion fields that reek for miles. Grapevines to the horizon.

Vast cultivation next to vast wilderness: the perfect lover, in my mind — although I consider California to be already taken, by about 37 million others.

I've been mulling my photos for a week, and today it occurred to me that virtually all of them are of water (in some form) or plants. The others are of rocks, but we'll get to those later since they involve a story that doesn't reflect well on me. Also, there's this: a Pacific banana slug.



Come to think of it, a slug is mostly water and slime, so maybe it does fit the first category. Wikipedia says it's the second-largest species of terrestrial slug in the world. This one, which we saw on a hike through a coastal redwood forest, was about the length of my hand — and gooey. Rick informed me that the banana slug is the mascot for UC-Santa Cruz. How formidable.

So, first, the water.

Yosemite in springtime is all about water. The melting snow creates falling water everywhere you look. Yosemite Valley has some of the highest falls in the world and the largest concentration of big falls. From a distance they're unbelievably scenic and serene, but up close they're scary as hell — and thrilling. They are incredibly loud. They sound more like boulders crashing to the earth than anything you'd normally associate with falling water. If you are anywhere in the vicinity — like even 50 yards away — you feel their icy spray, and if you get really close you need a raincoat. I took a million photos of waterfalls. (Sorry, Rick). Every one seemed like the first one. I don’t know how long you’d have to live there before you stopped saying, “Jesus, look at that waterfall!” every time you went outside. I don't think I'd ever stop.



See me in the picture above? Where I'm standing is in front of the "little" waterfall at the bottom left of this picture:



That's Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls, and this is Bridal Veil.



The falls fill up the Merced River, which roars through the valley. This river, like the falls, was just a trickle when I was there in the autumn, but in the spring it’s a monster. The river’s bed is lined with gargantuan boulders and its banks with white and purple wildflowers. It’s loud and crazy and wonderful.



Elsewhere in the park there are streams and creeks with slower moving — and deliciously cold — water. These lend themselves more to contemplation than to slack-jawed wonder, but they are beautiful nonetheless.



Sorry for the yucky feet. Just focus on how this feels — not how it looks — after a hot, dusty hike.

After Yosemite we headed up to Lassen Volcanic, a national park a few hours north. We got there the day after the park roads opened, but there was still so much snow — despite being about 90 degrees — that all the road signs were buried.



Lassen gets, on average, 60 feet of snow a year. Within 50 miles of the park, there are fields and fields of volcanic debris from where Lassen Peak blew its top in May 1915. It was cool to be there in the same month that the volcano erupted. It made it easy to imagine how the lava melted the snow and added the devastation of a flood to the devastation of the explosion. The bluest sky I have ever seen was in this park.



Lassen has clear cold lakes but also, because it's a volcanic area, geothermal features like these bubbling, belching mud pots. I took a dozen pictures of this and still couldn't capture the little geyser of boiling goop. I should have thought to use the video feature on my camera; then I could have captured the goop as well as the sinister sounding bloop, bloop, bloop.



We couldn’t camp here because of the snow, so we decided to head for the coast. This was our first view of the Pacific after a long, long day in the van — somewhere not too far south of Eureka. There's not really a bad view of the Pacific Ocean, but this one, on that day, was damn near made to order, as my grandpa would have said.



We spent the night at a seaside state park called MacKerricher, and this is where I got my first real taste of the changing California weather. When we arrived, the beach looked like this. Wildflowers, blue sky.



Down closer to the water it looked like this (Since seeing this pair my idea of heaven has become being a naked toddler on a sunny beach holding a lovely woman's hand):



Just a few hours later the fog rolled in and the same beach looked like this:



We huddled on a big piece of driftwood wishing for hot cocoa instead of cold beer.

The farther south we got, the southernmost being San Francisco, the more fog we saw. Point Reyes, just north of San Fran, is the foggiest and windiest point on the Pacific Coast:



The fog helps explain why sailors of yore went up and down the coast without discovering San Francisco Bay. Francis Drake made it to Point Reyes in 1579, claimed it for Queen Elizabeth, dubbed it "New England" and set sail. It's amazing to me that someone who knew Shakespeare was traipsing up and down the California coast — and lived to tell about it, considering how many ships, even modern ones, wrecked in those waters, even after the lighthouse was built. It's also cool to think that Point Reyes, being a national seashore, hasn't been developed and so must look remarkably the same as when Drake visited.

(Interlude: Thank God for preservationists and environmentalists and liberal tree-hugging hippies of every kind. They are the reason we have national parks and wilderness and natural beauty. Honestly. When we were at the Muir Woods near San Fran — a remarkably pristine redwood forest — we read that some nimrod came damn close to building a dam and flooding the whole thing with a reservoir. It's just astonishing.)

At Point Bonita, which is just to the west of the Golden Gate Bridge — here enshrouded in fog — there's another lighthouse, but it was closed when we were there. We did, however, get to see some seals basking on rocks:





The seals have their pups in the spring, and signs all down the coast warn people not to mess with them. (Who would mess with a seal? OK, maybe I would, but is a sign really necessary?). Apparently, it's common for people to find unattended pups and become concerned about the mothers' whereabouts, so silly sounding reminders of "Don't pick up seals" are posted and signs like this:



One of the most bizarre things we saw was Glass Beach, which is in Fort Bragg, just north of Mendocino. The beach was used as a dump — yes, a dump — beginning in the late 1940s. A few decades later some brilliant soul pointed out that maybe one of the most gorgeous places on earth is not an ideal spot to store a crapload of garbage. So they stopped dumping and let the ocean take its toll on the trash. All the glass that had been thrown in the dump became tumbled by the waves. And now the whole area is a beach of tons and tons of broken glass smooth enough to walk on barefoot.





It's really remarkable in a man-we-screwed-up-but-now-we-have-this kind of way.

And that concludes the water portion of my summer vacation.