Eulogy for Grandpa Jerry

As most readers of this blog already know, my very dearly beloved grandfather, Gerald Lesonsky, died last Friday night. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in December 2005 and, after a few years of relatively little change, suffered another few years of severe physical and mental deterioration. My reaction to the news was equal parts sadness and relief.

Grandpa Jerry in 2008 or 2009, when Grandma was in the hospital for surgery.

Brahna and I were in a supermarket parking lot in Bozeman, Montana, when we got the call. Since we had been on this trip, I had been dreading "the call" every time I saw my home number pop up on caller ID. There wasn't a question in my mind as to whether we would fly home. How could I not? What else would I do on Monday afternoon while everyone else was at the funeral? I needed to be there.

At a last-minute cost amounting to nothing less than extortion, my parents were able to find us a flight leaving early Sunday from Jackson Hole, at the southern edge of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Directly between Bozeman and the airport was Yellowstone National Park, which our original plan had us exploring for three or four days before heading east towards South Dakota. We decided to compress Yellowstone into the one day it would take to drive down to Jackson. We'll cover all that in a future post.

I'm not going to write about every minute detail of this detour-from-the-detour the way I have about the rest of the trip. Nor do I want to write all about my feelings or about how I have or have not fully absorbed the loss. I trust nobody will take this choice as callousness or unnecessary secrecy. The plain truth is that the funeral service and the two days I sat shiva were exactly as cathartic and comforting as they could be. From the eulogies at the funeral, the warm comments of relatives and friends, and the tears on the faces of those nurses and assistants who cared for him in his final months, I know that Grandpa has left us all with only fond memories and joyful thoughts, and that despite the terrible illness that stole his final years he lived a long, full, and happy life. The spirit and joy he contributed to this world cannot be measured and will not be forgotten.

***

We will return this blog to its normally scheduled progamming in the next day or two, picking up where we left off in Portland, Oregon. For now, for those who did not attend the funeral, here is the text of the eulogy I delivered on Monday:

Grandpa Jerry was born a grandpa. You may not have known that. I’m sure that surprises some of you who could’ve sworn you knew him as a brother, as a husband, as a father, or as a friend. But as far as I know, as far as I remember, he was born with a bushy moustache and a round, hard belly. He was always chewing on a tooth pick, and he worked at “the store.” 

I loved to sleep over with him and Grandma. He would come home from the store at around 6 o’clock, would take off his belt, and would spend the next few hours absolutely crushing me at Monopoly. Even for a while after he was sick, he would crush me. I remember my confusion and sadness when I finally did beat him, a year or so after his diagnosis; we didn’t play again. As bedtime approached, I’d lie with him in his and Grandma’s ridiculously hard bed and watch one of the only two shows Grandpa seemed to know existed on television: one was called “the hockey game,” and the other was called “the stocks.” I’d curl up into his arm and fall asleep.

There are a few things I remember fondly about Grandpa that I just want to share with you, in case nobody else mentions them:

Grandpa always carried a lot of coins in his pocket. He said it was for good luck. He often broke out into nonsensical jibberish song, a cross between Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof and an off-key white Louis Armstrong doing scat. He made up words like “geetchegoomie” that had us kids in stitches. I used to tickle the soft underside of his double chin. He was always a good sport about it. Grandpa had this smell about him that was basically just the smell equivalent of the word “grandpa.” Depending on who you believe, he quit smoking either the day Cassie was born or the day she, a small child, told him he should quit. He had chicken legs. He would switch his answer every single time one of his grandkids asked whether he ever smoked pot. He had one rule in Monopoly: no trades until all the properties had been bought. Utilizes excluded. He loved Frank Sinatra.

In October 2008, almost three years after he was diagnosed, we all went apple-picking. It such a beautiful, sunny day—Grandpa’s favorite. While everyone else was out in the orchard, I sat with Grandpa and interviewed him about his life, using Cassie’s tape recorder. His short term memory was pretty limited, but his long term memory was still pretty sharp. He told me everything he could remember: about his quiet, super-intelligent father—Happy Jack—who commuted from Brooklyn every day to the post office on 8^th Avenue, before borrowing some money from his brothers to open a haberdashery store in Floral Park, just a few miles from here. Grandpa agreed that he inherited from his father that calm, subdued demeanor which we all loved about him. He told me about his mother, who lost nearly her entire family in pogroms in Poland before fleeing to the U.S. She never talked about her past, and was always satisfied with what she had. The family was poor, Grandpa told me, but they were close with one another and were never deprived of the important things in life, the ties that bind. Time and again, Grandpa circled back to his mother and the cancer that took her life when she was still in her 40s and he was around my age. Choking back tears, he told me about going to visit her, how he would walk outside and look up at the sky, and say to the man upstairs, “take her, take her, instead of letting her suffer in that way.”

I soon understood exactly what Grandpa meant. As things got worse, I would end all my visits by hugging him super tight and whispering that I loved him. I wanted to be ready for the end and told myself I was. After all, Grandpa was no longer his old self. That seemed to make it easier for me to let go.

But the more and more I said goodbye, the more difficult it was to ignore the bright flashes of his personality that would shine through on those visits or even over the phone. To yet another of my dad’s questions about 50s baseball players or big band-era swing, he’d say, “Oh c’mon Al who remembers?” He’d call me “kiddo” and say “heyyyy how ya doin!” He’d call my girlfriend “honey” and remember a trip he took to Jerusalem in 1995. Just hearing him like that would make my day. There’s no doubt: Grandpa was himself to the end. His last words, from what I hear, were said to a nurse, who had just given him his medicine: “So long, baby,” he said. It really couldn’t be more perfect than that.

I have this theory that you carry some of your ancestors with you, literally in your head. You see the world a little bit through their eyes. You are them. In a small way, they are always in there with you.

Shortly after I found out that Grandpa died, I had a brief moment to myself. I wanted to say goodbye for real this time, to tell Grandpa I would always love him. I closed my eyes and tried to tell him. He was there with me. Somehow I know that he knew.

My apple-picking interview with Grandpa abruptly ends when I spot the Cohens’ old red minivan coming down the hill. I probably didn’t want anyone else interfering with our conversation, so I tell Grandpa we’ll finish another time. And then, right before I turn off the recorder, pretty much out of the blue, he says this: “It wasn’t a bad life, I’ll be honest with ya. I guess I bitched and complained at the time, but it wasn’t a bad life.”

Grandpa Jerry on May 1st, 1949, his 17th birthday.

Yosemite to the Canadian Border, Part 1

Yosemite is basically the holy grail of America’s National Parks. Though Yellowstone was technically founded earlier—formed by legislation in 1873, it was the first national park in the world—the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees were set aside for preservation by Abraham Lincoln in 1864.  It is also the last in what Brahna and I have dubbed “Tier A” of the country’s national parks that I had not yet visited (the only other members of Tier A, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, having been first graced with my presence in the years of 2000 and 2005, respectively). What’s more, while the draw in Yellowstone is the interesting geological phenomena caused by its location over a volcanic "hot spot," and the draw of the Grand Canyon is, of course, the canyon itself, the unique feature of Yosemite is nothing more than its outstanding beauty. It’s really as simple, and as complicated, as that. For all these reasons, at some point in February I reserved three nights at the Wawona Campground, intent on making our time in Yosemite truly count.

 

Generally, when I think about camping, the image in my mind is of a cool morning among the trees, the early light filtered through damp spring leaves, a cup of coffee in hand, a cool clear stream moseying by. I rarely have time for considering those other images—cooking bad food by lamplight, staying awake at night for fear of bears, staring into the campfire many hours (many weeks, rather) since this activity actually seemed meaningful, enjoyable, or fun. These deceitful visions of mine, and their corresponding blindnesses, tend to get us into trouble. Yosemite, despite its promise, despite our plans, turned out to be the absolute low point of our trip so far. It also ended up being a turning point, the end of a chapter, as Brahna and I have started to say.

Using the bear-proof garbage bins at Yosemite. For paranoiacs like myself, it can often seem that the Parks Service is more concerned about saving bears than about saving us. The words on the dumpster read: "USE CLIP. SAVE A BEAR."

In my haste to reserve a site somewhere in the park, I hadn’t noticed that the Wawona Campground happens to be at the far southern end of the park, near the sequoia trees but about an hour’s drive from the Yosemite Valley, which is really what everyone comes to the park to see. This was a mixed blessing: while the words “commute” and “nature” don’t exactly complement one another, the week from April 21^st through April 28^th was the officially anointed National Parks Week, guaranteeing free admission to all and sundry, and we were pleased to have guaranteed ourselves at least forty miles distance from the awful circus that would presumably be the campgrounds in the valley. Anyway, for the two nights we camped before the first day of Parks Week, the campground was mostly empty. The site I had reserved months earlier ended up being in a little bottleneck of the campground road between the second and third loops. No other site was reserved anywhere nearby for the first two nights, which was probably why I chose the site in the first place. The gap is large, let me tell you, between the impressive courage I have while picking the most remote site in the campground when the sites are simply little icons on a bright green map on my computer screen and the helplessness I felt in that tent at night, wondering whether we ended up remembering to move all our food from the car to the metal bear box, whether bears might be attracted to sweaty, unshowered body odor, whether some crumbs might have gotten on my clothes from dinner, and whether bear claws can fight through a mesh tent.

 

That theme should probably be familiar if you have read our post on backcountry camping in Big Bend: I am constantly urging Brahna towards more exposure to the elements, and then I spend most of the night lamenting that same exposure (while Brahna sleeps soundly) and hoping that we live to see the morning. 

But our Yosemite blues cannot be attributed only to this weird nocturnal fear of mine: every day we were there, a few hours before sundown, we both got notably depressed. It wasn’t so much the fear of what would happen after retiring to the tent that had us feeling bad, but even more so the thought of those hours between sundown and bedtime, the hours of staring into the fire, cooking s’mores yet again, and listening closely to every rustling in the leaves, that had us longing for a bed, for a ceiling, for walls. Every afternoon I began to dread those long silent dark hours whose praise I am always singing in the bright comfort of beds and ceilings and walls.

Since we did, of course, survive, the most unfortunate thing is that our memories of Yosemite will 

forever be marred by those cold, fearsome nights. The days were awesome. Yosemite Valley unquestionably lived up to its Tier A reputation.

The Merced River downstream from Vernal Falls.

I have a lot of ground to cover in this post, so I’ll refrain from discussing all the waterfalls we saw in Yosemite, all the wonderful angles of sunlight through the mist, the resulting rainbows, et cetera. We did go on one long-ish noteworthy hike up the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls. Brahna described it as the perfect hike: the initial ascent exposes you directly to the sun, then a lush forest cools you off before unloading you onto a bridge over the Merced River, where you can view the waterfall up ahead. The ascent up to the base of the falls heats you up again, but then the massive clouds of mist and soothing shots of wind wash over and cool you. The hike up a few switchbacks to the top of the falls makes you hot again, but there is plenty of relaxation to be had at the top, where you can lie down right next to the lip and watch as comet after comet of white water shoots out and into the air. The mist on the way back down is perfectly refreshing.

Three of the record-breaking 30-something people who died at Yosemite National Park last year lost their lives at Vernal Falls. Apparently, the deceased were members of a church group who climbed over the metal fence separating visitors from the Merced River just a few feet before it drops 317 feet into a big pool filled with truck-size boulders. One slipped into the river and was swept away. Another tried to save her, and also slipped. A third tried to save the second, and was swept away. All three were presumed dead, their bodies never found. A fourth person died last year on the Mist Trail, slipping and falling into the raging river. A few months later, the Mist Trail claimed a fifth life.

This was a gruesome, if beautiful, trail to climb.

A rainbow at the base of Vernal Falls.

The absolute low point of this trip so far happened on our second night in the park. Tortured equally by the thought of cooking by flashlight and the boredom that follows nightfall, we brought our laptops to the nearby Wawona Hotel, a massive structure built for the high-class visitors to Yosemite in the early 20^th century and still used by rich visitors today. We just wanted to have something to do after it got dark, and thought that if we bought a drink from the bar we could sit in the lobby for a while. We made comically ineffectual efforts to conceal our steerage-class appearance: I brushed my beard and put on a collared shirt, Brahna changed out of her slippers. We ordered tea from a member of the hotel staff who pretended not to know what we were up to, asking if we wanted to pay cash or charge it to our room. We wanted to pay cash. An older man playing classical music on the lobby piano asked for requests. I wanted to hear Chopin’s “Winter Wind Etude”—reflecting, I guess, the winter in my soul—but thought it better not to make ourselves any more conspicuous than we already were. Brahna and I craned our necks to look at the ornate appetizers ordered by dress- and jacket-bedecked hotelgoers. The Wawona Hotel was making us feel worse, not better. As hungry guests began to fill the lobby outside the hotel’s restaurant, we felt our wildness grow into sharper distinction from the affluent surroundings. We fled the hotel and returned to the campground, made a fire, and went to bed without dinner, knowing it wasn’t even our last night there.

Miserable, at the Wawona Hotel.

One afternoon in the park we were walking back to the car from Yosemite Falls when we heard people mention that they had seen a bear about a half mile up the road and in some trees. Having had bears so much on our mind—in Fresno, Brahna bought a small book called Bear Aware and we picked up a can of bear spray—we were eager to actually get a glimpse of one in the park. Privately, I wanted to see the bear in the same way that I like to go down the  nuts aisle in the grocery store to look at brazil nuts, to which I am seriously allergic, sitting so harmlessly in their little plastic containers. I wanted to stare into the abyss.

It was a mature black bear, though colored brown, which, according to Bear Aware, is not unusual. We waited with a few other tourists, binoculars in hand, for a few minutes on a boardwalk in the marsh. Suddenly, the bear poked its head and massive shoulders out of the brush, and walked tentatively towards our little group before heading back into the marsh. We continued across the marsh and towards another, larger group standing next to the park road. When the bear emerged from the trees and walked towards this new group, a young female park ranger, armed only with her walkie-talkie, started to run towards it. The bear started running in the opposite direction as if a huge monster was after it. The ranger chased it west across the meadow, towards the opening of the valley. Brahna and I walked in that direction for a little while, just wanting to get a few more looks, but we eventually lost it. I felt better, though, having seen the park ranger’s size and the bear’s obvious fear. Lying awake in the tent that night, I thought of the bear running through the meadow, and imagined myself as the one giving chase.

 

Looking for the bear before the bear looks for me.

Finally, we were on our way to San Francisco. Brahna had made a connection with a McGill friend and reserved for us a place in what she had long heard was essentially a unofficial youth hostel run by his family. The force of our emotional and physical despair, post-Yosemite, was met, as in Newtown’s law, with the equal and opposite force that was the softness of the mattress the family gave us, and we recuperated surprisingly quickly from what had seemed just a few days earlier like an irredeemable slump. It also helped that we were in the process of making a few resolutions regarding the rest of the trip, which we hoped would help bring us back to the same feeling of excitement that accompanied us as we drove down the East Coast, across the South and the Southwest, and up through California, around 10,000 miles of very circuitous road from New Jersey to San Francisco.

 

Those reforms basically came out of just a few realizations:

1)      You actually can camp too much. Brahna seems to have known this before the Yosemite misadventure; indeed, somewhat mysteriously to me, she seems to have been born with this knowledge. On the phone, my dad compared it to eating hot dogs. They’re fun to eat occasionally, but somewhat less so when that’s all you have the money for. 

2)      Driving across the country can be pretty isolating. We embarked on this trip not only to see the natural beauties of America, but also to meet a few members of that species known to some of us only by rumor as the “real Americans.” Such interactions rarely happen when by day you’re driving five hours a day, connected only to the world via NPR and the radio preachers, and then camp deep in the woods as far from other people as possible.

3)      Motels are not the best indoor-sleeping bet. On those rare occasions when the call of the wild falls silent and we allow ourselves the pleasures of the aforementioned bed, ceiling, and walls, we usually stop at the ugliest, tackiest, oldest motels we could find. Even on days when we have other sleeping arrangements, “real Americans” can see us passing through their logging towns ranking motels according to their aptitude on precisely those marks. “That one looks good,” I said, pointing, as we passed through Lompoc, California. Brahna, noting the boarded-up windows and doors, suggested it may have recently caught fire and closed—or perhaps not so recently. When the bed bugs found us in the Squaw Valley Motel room, I was actually surprised we had lasted even that long. Why shouldn’t the Shelby Motor Lodge in Alabaster, Alabama have bed bugs? Besides all this, we meet nobody. We can’t cook. And WiFi? One time in Mississippi, Brahna was calling a bunch of motels 50 miles down the road and asking the usual questions. “How much for two people one bed one night non-smoking with AAA discount and do you have Internet WiFi?” The woman answered: “No ma’am, we’re way out in the boonies.”

We decided that more Couchsurfing would replace the hole of camping and motels, which were not out of the question now, but just not the default plan. Instead, we decided it would be worth it to put more work—what turns out to be a lot more work—into sending out “couch requests” for places all around the country and seeing who replied. Thus, while the first half of the trip had us finding housing near the places we wanted to visit, the second half of the trip would reverse things: now, we would find places to visit near our hosts’ houses. Beggars can’t be choosers, and by the time we hit the San Francisco Bay, we certainly felt like beggars.

   

We left the San Francisco family’s house on April 24^th, Brahna’s birthday. Since, quite frankly, people don’t like to be poor on their birthdays, we allowed ourselves to accept a room in a nice hotel—that’s with a genuine, fancy-schmancy “h”—and an amazing dinner on one of the docks in Sausalito, our corner table surrounded by a nearly 360-degree views of the San Francisco Bay, courtesy of her and my parents respectively. Word on the street is that Brahna may also have enjoyed the hot-stone massage, a discount on which her thoughtful boyfriend found for a pretty good price on Groupon the day before.

 

The next morning, we borrowed bikes for free from the hotel and cruised through the marsh near the hotel and checked out some house-boat communities. We commented on our micro-sized experience of the truth that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer: cheap motels get you bed bugs, while expensive hotels give you a bike for the day. As we have learned so many times on this trip, you get what you pay for. Except, in a situation like Couchsurfing, when that truth seems quite limited.

Biking in Sausalito.

By that point it began to feel that we would never actually leave the Bay Area. There were so many interesting places we wanted to explore in Marin County, so many different ways we wanted to explore them, that we could easily have spent another week there just hitting all the spots. As a balance of nature and culture, I’m not sure the Bay Area—counting everything from San Francisco to Martinez, Oakland and Berkeley, Marin County, and down south—has any rivals in North America. Eventually, we decided to cut out a few things—Napa Valley, Sonoma County, John Muir’s house in Martinez—and only explored Muir Woods National Monument and Point Reyes National Seashore. Muir Woods, of course, has the coastal redwood trees, which are the taller, thinner (though often still massively wide) cousin of the Sequoia trees we saw in the Sierra Nevadas. Its grove is relatively small compared to redwoods and sequoia groves elsewhere. We did the basic trail around and above the grove, and gaped, for neither the first nor the last time that week, at the still-incomprehensible scale of the trees.

 

We continued north on Highway 1, as we had begun doing almost three weeks earlier in Los Angeles and Malibu, though the highway seemingly points in all directions at once as it twists around the hills of Marin County. We arrived at Point Reyes—the only National Seashore on the West Coast—just as the visitor’s center was closing. We still didn’t know where we were staying for the night—the motels along the Northern coast are insanely priced, and, despite the hotel room and comfortable mattress in San Francisco, we were not feeling ready to camp again. Fortunately, we saw a brochure for a hostel that was actually inside Point Reyes, and decided to try that out. We got dorm beds for $24, though unfortunately the dorm rooms were not mixed. After driving down to the beach and lying for a while on the sand, we returned to the hostel and made some of Brahna’s famous tofu and sweet potato mush. We shared it with a bike-touring engineer from New Jersey, who charmed us with a story that his bread had been stolen by seagulls on the beach after he spotted a whale spout and ran to notify some people up the shore. It was pretty weird to fall asleep that night alone, as I’m rarely apart from Brahna longer than the time it takes one of us to shower or do our business. I’ve gotten so used to needing headphones in hostels to block out the snores of heavy older men (male snorers in hostels are disproportionately Australian), that, even without good reason, I fell asleep with music in my ears. Of course, it was Bob Dylan. This is what he was saying:

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I'm seeing a new world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that's coming along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born.

The beach at Point Reyes.

The next morning we drove down the park road to check out the famous Point Reyes lighthouse. It is set on a large bluff over the ocean, a small peninsula jutting out from the main Point Reyes peninsula, which is itself large enough to be seen in the outline of any self-respectingly detailed California map. This gives the lighthouse an incredibly expansive view of the ocean and the long shoreline heading north. To the south, you can still see the opening of the Golden Gate into San Francisco Bay. We stopped briefly in the museum devoted to the lighthouse, which told us that the keepers of the light routinely sought refuge in alcohol to help them get through the cold, windy days and the dark, lonely nights. They still had an old desk from 150 years ago or something, where the keepers recorded all the important events of their days. Many miles from their nearest neighbors, and stuck alone in an often blinding fog, Point Reyes felt like its own world, and the men often lost their minds.

Point Reyes National Seashore.

By this point, it had been exactly four weeks since we entered California in Death Valley. Despite the great diversity and size of the state, we were ready to leave. For weeks we had criss-crossed the state, driving north one day and south the next, heading east to Sequoia and Yosemite and back west to San Francisco, giving little if any thought to actually getting anywhere outside California anytime soon. We had also spent a good amount of time on the coast in the past four weeks, and felt like there was a whole country not living in incredibly picturesque oceanside locations like Big Sur that we also wanted to see. So, after taking Highway 1 to its conclusion near the town of Eureka, we stopped for a few short hikes in Redwoods National Park and for a picnic in the coastal town of Crescent City, where we tried and failed yet again to distinguish the spouts of migrating grey whales from the ordinary distant foam of prematurely crashing waves.

The northern terminus of California's famous Highway 1.

Shortly after we finally veered off the coast and started driving northeast, I began to notice that same state-to-state transition I had gotten used to noticing earlier in the trip, when we were crossing state lines with about the same frequency as we stopped to pump gas, and had kind of missed for the whole month we had been in California. As we drive from one state into another, I’ve noticed that the natural landscape begins to effect a transition that mirrors, or might even be caused by, the conceptual transition that is occurring at the same time in my mind. Just as I begin to lose the sense of being “in Mississippi” and begin to feel myself "in Louisiana," the natural landscape sheds those vague elements that make it conform to my mental image of what Mississippi looks like, and it begins to dress itself in those equally vague elements that conform to my image of Louisiana. So Louisiana blended into East Texas, West Texas blended into New Mexico, and, this time, northern California blended into Oregon. The woods grow wilder, the trees more uniform and dense—the forests, basically, turn into a kind of forest that makes me ashamed to have ever used the term before. The streams and rivers assume a kind of icy green color that reminds me not quite of the glacier-fed waters in Alaska nor of the putrid, polluted rivers back east, but somehow perfectly encompasses the color that comes to mind when I think of the word “sea."

As if to notarize this theory of mine in a way perfectly suited to my interests, we happened to suddenly find a covered bridge in this far northern section of California, just miles from the border with Oregon, a state I had been particularly looking forward to visiting if only for its status as the only Western state with a noteworthy population of my beloved covered bridges.

The Perfect Review

A few weeks ago, we stayed at the Bayside Inn, the cheapest motel that we could find in the shi shi coastal town of Monterey. After the manager told us that he would “give it” to us for 39—a very reasonable price as compared to the other motels in the area—we somehow ended up with a receipt for over fifty dollars. Granted, Ricky should have asked him how it ended up being so high before he signed the receipt, but I don’t think either of us expected him to slip in what he later told us was  a “service fee” on top of the tax. We felt swindled. Isn’t providing us with a room and taking our credit card the one and only service of this motel? What chutzpah!

Aside from the dishonest owner, the place was dirty and there was no hot water. Outraged by all this, we decided that the only way to regain control of the situation, since we had already paid for the room, was to post a negative review of the place on Google.

Despite the fact that we have stayed in a million shitty motels, and the question of whether to review has come up before, I have generally veered in the direction of ‘If you have nothing nice to say, then don’t say it.’ I have never been comfortable with the idea of potentially compromising someone’s livelihood.

But this incident made me think: if they’re going to be dishonest, then they’re compromising their business—not me. We have appreciated whenever we’ve known the truth about a place before going there, so we might as well use our massive wealth of expertise in shitty motels to the benefit of other unwitting travelers.

The Bayside Inn in Monterey, CA. 

A few days later, we left Big Sur, for the second time, and spent most of the day driving away from the coast and toward Squaw Valley, a small town that we chose only because of its proximity to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National parks. As with all towns right outside national parks, Squaw Valley mostly offered accommodations that were way out of our price range. There was one motel, however, the Squaw Valley Motel—we’ve learned that the hotels that are generally the cheapest are the ones that name themselves after the town in which they are located—that was more or less affordable. Camping, in this case, was out of the question since the parks were way up in the mountains, and besides, we had reservations for three nights at Yosemite starting a few days later. As Ricky put it, “We might as well save what desire we have for camping in a bear-infested campground in the freezing cold for Yosemite.” So on we went to a night of relative luxury at the Squaw Valley Motel.

Or so we thought. After showering and making ourselves comfortable in the bed, I noticed a small bug crawling on the headboard out of the corner of my eye. It was very flat, reddish-brown, and it had little clippers at its head. I jumped backward, and said “Oh shit! Is that a bed bug?”

“Relax,” Ricky said. “Let’s check it out on the iPhone.” A practical plan it was. He Googled bed bugs and pulled up a picture to compare. And there was a picture of a flat, reddish-brownish bug with clippers on its head.

We decided not to lose hope. “Ask Google whether bed bugs are very flat,” I said hopefully. “We can’t really tell exactly how flat that bug is from the picture.”

“Bed bugs are reddish-brown and very flat,” he read from some website about bed bugs. 

Okay, so it’s a bed bug. But maybe he’s just a lone soldier, and if we kill him, we won’t have to worry about any others. We did, after all, as we do with all of motels, check the sheets for evidence of bug sheddings and red blotches from bug bites. After spraying it, and the surrounding area, with OFF!, we decided to put the episode behind us and do our best to sleep through the night.

But a little while later, I noticed yet another bug, the same type, crawling up the wall. At this point, we decided that it was time to do something about it. Ricky woke up the manager, showed him the two dead intruders, and insisted that we be moved to a different room, in the other building, as far away from this room as possible.

The question of whether to review the shitty motel again came up. The owners seemed really nice—a small husband-and-wife team. But do we just sit silently and let other unwitting customers get bitten by bed bugs? We decided to put off the question for another night.

This is what a bed bug looks like, in case you're ever unfortunate to come across one or two. 

Meanwhile, traumatized from the incident, we realized that there was really nowhere for us to stay in the area—since we weren’t staying here again, the other hotels were too expensive, and camping was out of the question. So we turned to our trusty friend: couch surfing. After sending several urgent couch requests to hosts in Fresno, the nearest big city, we did our best to sleep through the night with the hopes that we would be staying in a warm, bed-bug free room the following night.

Sure enough, we got a call the next morning. “Hello, this is Sharon.” It was an older woman with a British accent who Ricky had sent a couch request to the previous night. (Full disclosure: Ricky and I have been interested in couch surfing with an older person, since we determined that older people meant better accommodations and a higher likelihood of free meals). “I have to tell you that I actually declined your request, because I have another surfer coming to stay with me in a few days, and I thought it would be too much to have you guys stay, and for her to come right after. But then I decided, you know what? You guys seemed really nice from all your reviews on couch surfing, and I wanted to meet you, so I said: what the hell!”

We were looking forward to meeting the very verbose Sharon, and her husband Ron, later that day. But first, we had some very big trees to see. 

Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks are comprised of two contiguous regions—Kings Canyon, which is known mostly for a large canyon just below the Sierra Nevada backcountry, and Sequoia, which houses the most giant of the Giant Sequoia trees in the world. Although, the divisions are not actually that clean: while Sequoia houses the largest mountain in the Sierra Nevada and the continental U.S., Mount Whitney, Kings Canyon houses the widest tree in the world, the General Grant. 

As we drove up into the mountains of Kings Canyon—8000 feet up—we noticed that the ground was covered in snow. We quickly learned that the General Grant’s Highway, the main road connecting the two parks, was closed due to the snow. Although our original plan was to soak up the two parks over the course of three days, between the closing of the highway and the lack of a place to sleep, we realized that our bout in the park would have to be compressed into a single afternoon.

And since the drive into the canyon was also closed for winter, the only activity left on the agenda was to see the General Grant Grove of Sequoia trees in Kings Canyon. The path was covered in snow, and we were not wearing the right equipment to traverse through it. But, along with the other few visitors, we trudged through to see what we all came for. The General Grant Tree—which is only the third largest tree in the world (not the tallest or the densest)—is known for being the fattest. At forty feet in diameter, the tree was a pretty sublime sight to behold. Remnants of a time of giants, Sequoia trees, which are a type of Redwood, covered the planet when dinosaurs walked the earth. So roaming among them is actually a kind of spiritual experience, rendering the person so incredibly small in the face of this magnificent piece of nature.

The General Grant Tree, partially covered in snow.

A couple hours later, as we were ready to concede to having only seen one tree grove out of two enormous national parks, we noticed that the barrier in front of the General Grant’s Highway was suddenly gone. As luck would have it, it was the first day of the season they were opening up the road. We were now able to peek out onto some beautiful vistas overlooking the Sierras, as well see the largest tree in the world—the General Sherman. The Sherman Tree is not the widest, nor the tallest, nor even the oldest tree. But it is considered the largest tree because it is wide enough and tall enough to have the most wood of any tree in the world. Actually, that makes it the single largest living thing in the entire universe as we know it. At nearly 2,000 years old, the tree was living during the reign of Cleopatra! As you might imagine, though, these trees were not officially named until the time of the Civil War.

The Sierra Nevada Mountain Range--Mount Whitney is somewhere in the background.

As you can see, it's a very, very large tree.

Thrilled that we managed to see the essentials of both parks, we were looking forward to heading into the comforts of a real home before heading into the wilderness of Yosemite a few days later. When we finally arrived in Fresno, at a modest house on a quiet block, Sharon, a heavy-set woman, greeted us both with big hugs, and bowls of ice cream. She talked our ears off with tales of her youthful adventures traveling across the world, her experiences on couchsurfing—and all the difficulties of surfing as an older woman—, her children, her hometown of Durham, England, and her regret for having settled down in one of the most boring cities she’s ever been to—Fresno. Meanwhile, Ron, a small, white-haired Fresno native, just sat there in silence and occasionally nodded his head. Once in a while, he interjected to talk about his experiences hitchhiking across the country as a teenager. Ricky and I later determined that he had had a bad trip about forty years ago that he has yet to entirely recover from.

After finally being allowed to go to sleep—as Patricia Marx noted in her recent New Yorker article, with couch surfing, “incessant sociability” is your fee—Ricky and I spent the next day trying to find what to do in Fresno. We couldn’t find anything. We stopped briefly at a café, perused a pretty sizable book barn, and drove around the “historic” downtown district.

Arguable...

We finally capitulated and went back to the Shroud residence—even if that meant more incessant sociability. That night, we cooked them dinner and played a game called “Quidler,” a Scrabble-like card game.

It was a pretty hilarious endeavor. Sharon whipped out a surprisingly competitive streak, as she sat there with her laptop to help her come up with words while the rest of us had no such help. Meanwhile, the laptop only seemed to help her come up with words that I’m pretty sure are not words at all. When Ricky and I asked her, “What’s ‘Wi’?” she said that the computer confirmed the word. Schon joked that it was “half of kiwi.”

Different though they were, to say the least, our nights with the Shrouds were ultimately interesting and enjoyable. In Marx’s article, she winks an eye to her fellow New Yorkers as she enumerates all the various eccentrics one meets on couchsurfing. And it is true, in our experience, that the people who choose to host are not run-of-the mill.

But the reality is that these are the people who choose to let strangers feel at home in their home. Marx intellectualizes about it, asking, “Has our relation with machines made us feel so deprived of human contact that we befriend anyone and shack up with whoever has a mattress?” But while the rest of us are busy antagonizing—throwing in made-up service fees, or making fun of the eccentrics on couch surfing—these people are opening up the world just a little more.

I think that if there’s anything that computers have really changed, it’s just transparency—that there are consequences to being dishonest, and rewards for being gracious. Sharon wanted to host us on account of an extremely flattering review we received from Peter in Santa Fe. He wrote: “What a bright, sweet couple. What a great trip they're making. By the end they'll know more about the USA than most of us because they're smart and curious and are going everywhere. If they want to stay with you, say yes right away before someone else does." 

We've learned that it always pays to be honest and friendly, because just as a bad review can screw you over, a good review might provide you with free lodging all across America. 

***

Near the end of the Quidler game, Sharon announced, “It’s anybody’s game…except Ron’s!” This came after several instances of telling him that he wasn’t using his brain. He didn't seem too fazed by her commentary. 

Later, Sharon put down the word ‘ki.’

“What’s’’ki?’” Ricky and I asked incredulously.

“It’s half of Kiwi,” said Ron.

Photos From The Road: Desert Edition

Just posted more pictures from the road. This second album goes from March 5th through April 2nd, from Louisiana's Cajun Country all the way through Death Valley National Park in southern California. Hope you enjoy!

Two teasers:

Waking up at the campground in Monument Valley, Utah.

Going out to watch the sunset from the sand dunes in Death Valley.

 Again, click here to see the album. You don't need to have a Facebook account or know how to use it in order to see the photos.

Photos From The First Few Weeks

While you and the rest of the world anxiously await Brahna's next blog post, here's something to while away the time at work. I just posted an album on Facebook with some pictures from the first few weeks of our trip, from Wayne through New Orleans, from February 14th through March 4th. Many, many more pictures than we've been able to put up on the blog. These represent about 1/4 of the pictures we took during that time, but they're a good, manageable, curated selection. You don't need to have Facebook or know how to use it in order to see the pictures. Click on the link here for things like the following:

Stretching at Myrtle Beach.

Brahna running down an Indian ceremonial mound off the Natchez Trace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Again, you can click here to see the album.

Returning to Big Sur, and Then Returning Again

Henry Miller once wrote that it was in Big Sur, the wild central coast of California, where he first learned to say “amen.” I had the same experience about two years ago when I accidentally stumbled upon Big Sur’s lush mountains and rocky coastline and intense blue waters, its unrivaled meeting of land and sea.

The Big Sur coastline.

 In August 2010, I left New York on my third transcontinental train trip, my second one alone after being shown the ropes on a weeklong trip with my father in 2005. The final stop on my itinerary, after a few days in Denver and San Francisco, was Monterey, which I really had no other incentive to visit other than the fact that it was there. About 100 miles south of San Francisco, Monterey is a relatively small town of 30,000, which owes its outsized renown to its celebrated aquarium and its designated mascot, John Steinbeck.

 

I took a train and a few buses into town and stayed at the international hostel a few blocks from Cannery Row. In the morning, I rented a bike—the kind of luxury these shorter trips allowed me that, on a four-month trip, are no longer available—and started out along the bike path around the peninsula towards the 17-mile drive. In Carmel, I heard that there was a Monterey-Salinas Transit bus running south into Big Sur, and that it allowed you to store bikes for the ride. I bought a few sandwiches and hitched my bike to the front of the bus. On the way down, while struggling to peer down every canyon, to watch the waves crash on the craggy shore, occasionally pushing my eyeballs back into my head, I spoke at length with the bus driver, who told me about his kids and his ambitions, and gave me recommendations about what to see in Big Sur. Mostly, he just endorsed the advice of a newsletter I had picked up: the best thing to do in Big Sur is to “do nothing.”

He dropped me at the picture-perfect Bixby Canyon Bridge, and told me to bike up the old coastal road, which fell into disuse and disrepair since being replaced by Highway 1 in the 1930s. It winds in and out of the canyons and over and around the mountains which the new road bypasses with its lovely newfangled bridges. The scenery was stunning: the canyon opening up, the road ascending, redwoods lording over all. The road proved too rough, though, and soon my ogling was interrupted by a final rupture somewhere in my bicycle. Sweaty, dirty, and dehydrated, I had to lift the lifeless bike almost three miles down the mountains and wait on a ledge overlooking the Bixby Bridge while my friend the bus driver finished his route further south. Back in Monterey, I somehow skirted the bike store clerk’s admonitions that I wasn’t supposed to bring the bike into the mountains, and convinced him to give me a free bike the next day.

 

I was more prepared this time, and picked up the bus in downtown Monterey. Following the driver’s new advice, I finally took the bus past the Bixby Bridge—around the curve in the road that I had seen hundreds of cars and RVs take the day before as I sat helpless at the bridge, hoping someday to make it past that curve and into the promised land. I picked up a sandwich again at the deli in the town of Big Sur and biked downhill to Andrew Molera State Park, where the Big Sur river flows into the Pacific. I spent that day frolicking on the beach and on a little cliff extending into the ocean. There was a large rock sticking straight out of the ocean in front of the cliff, and on it was a group of tiny grey birds, one by one lifting themselves into the strong winds and landing back on the rock. They seemed to be learning how to fly.

Eventually, I lifted myself off that cliff and reconciled myself with leaving Big Sur only by promising that I’d eventually return. Though I slept in Monterey all three nights, I had basically commuted to Big Sur both days. The next morning I took a bus to Salinas, explored the excellent museum at the National Steinbeck Center, and then a final train to L.A. 

I thought a lot about Big Sur after that trip, and Brahna was basically right in her last post that I have been chewing her ear off about it since the beginning. The day after taping Jeopardy in L.A., my parents and I retreated to Sequoia National Park to decompress. I flew from Fresno, where I’m writing this now, to Montreal, and the next night participated in my first meeting as an editor for the McGill Tribune. Brahna, who was also an editor, had just arrived in Montreal from New York, and the rest, of course, is history. Anyway, Big Sur remained in my mind as nothing less than the place where I first learned to say “amen.”

Waiting at the Bixby Canyon Bridge, August 2010.

It rained sporadically but extremely hard during our first night in Big Sur. It seemed to have stopped just before we opened our eyes saw the orange rainfly of our tent brightened with at least a little light. We intended to use this momentary pause to dress, make breakfast, and maybe even enjoy a quick hike before it inevitably started raining again. We emerged from the tent, and beheld the view.
 

The Kirk Creek Campground was built in the 1930s to house prisoners from San Quentin who were 
hired to build Highway 1 for 35 cents per day. The fact that it is part of Los Padres National Forest and also on a 100-foot bluff directly over the Pacific Ocean tells you all you need to know about the amazing land-and-sea combination of the Big Sur coastline. The view from our site, across the little campground road from those directly on the edge of the cliff, was of the highway hugging the rugged coastline for miles to the south, and of the ocean reaching to the horizon in the west.

We wanted to go on a nice hike in the mountains or along the coast, but, needing lunch supplies, decided first to drive down Highway 1 to that Big Sur deli of my memories. Then, driving back north, we stopped at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, or, rather, in a small pull-out beyond the park entrance, so as to skip the absurd $10 entry fee. The draw there is McWay Falls, billed somewhat falsely as the only waterfall in the U.S. that flows directly into the ocean. It actually used to flow directly in the ocean, until a 1983 landslide a few hundred feet up the coast brought tons of sediment into the cove, creating the pristine beach onto which the waterfall now falls 80-something feet before then running into the sea. For what it’s worth, the massive scar from the landslide, which cut through Highway 1, is visible from a spot in the park which has the remains of a cabin built by Julia Pfeiffer Burns and her husband, whose respective families were some of the first white inhabitants of Big Sur in the early 20^th century. Of course, I found the idea of having a house right there on the coast, especially before all the modern traps and conveniences, absolutely tantalizing.

McWay Falls at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park.

We continued driving back south, intending to spend the afternoon hiking some trails which led into the mountains across the road from our campground. Before leaving, thanks to the advice of Brahna’s extremely outdoors-minded brother-in-law, Asher, we had bought rainproof clothing so as to stay relatively dry while hiking. We had to reconsider these plans, however, as the buckets of rain suddenly turned into sheets of sleet and then pellets of hail pummeling our car. Instead, after pulling into the campsite, we sat in the car and watched, appropriately enough, a classic noir film called, “Detour.” It is one of several noir movies included in a box set my father was given awhile ago and never particularly liked. I don’t really know why, but I brought the box along as the only DVDs we’d have for this trip. Brahna and I have intended to watch “Detour” since the beginning of our trip, but had to continually postpone our plans after one or the other of us protested out of fear. The plot description on the box said it was about a hitchhiker whose benefactor-du-jour suddenly dies on the road. The hitchhiker, knowing he’ll be accused of murder, disposes of the body and takes the man’s clothes and car, assuming his identity. Later, down the road, he picks up a female hitchhiker who suddenly turns to him and says, “What did you do with the body?” I had repeated that line, in a hushed voice, to Brahna so incessantly that neither of us, whether in a motel or a campground, thought we could handle it. We decided to watch it that day in Big Sur only because it was daytime and because we presumed no shady characters would dare to be outside in such dreadful weather. “Detour” turned out not to be scary at all, but, like all noirs, comically overwrought and nonsensical. As the film entered its final scenes, the rain stopped slapping at our windows, and we got anxious to start hiking. 

We found the trail surprisingly sunny, and cached our rain gear and fleeces in a bush. As we climbed higher and higher, our view of the coast widened to include many series of crags and promontories to the north and south. When we finally turned back due to lack of water, we actually ran part of the way down the trail, luxuriating in the cool sea breeze and the clean air. Back in the campground, we decided to relax and read for the rest of the afternoon, instead of investigating a road heading east into the mountains that seemed to promise great scenery. That choice seemed ratified when our neighbors across the street—it’s funny how campgrounds often mimic civilized society—invited us to bring our chairs to their campsite, one of those abutting the cliff’s edge, to watch the sunset. Gale and Deanne Sandholm of Helena, Montana, were excellent hosts, lending us their binoculars to spot the distant spouts of grey whales migrating north. The sun set too quickly, as always, and Brahna and I excused ourselves to make a fire to save ourselves from the sudden cold. The Sandholms, who seemed to be in their 60s, retired to their mini-RV. Rather, they went “inside,” as Deanne put it, and as Brahna and I repeated to each other throughout the cold, and then rainy, night.

Brahan, the morning we left Kirk Creek campground.

 We took advantage of another brief dry window the next morning to disassemble the tent and pack up the car. We drove back up Highway 1 and into the same Andrew Molera State Park which I biked into almost two years ago. We hiked out to the cliff extending into the ocean, in front of the rock that still had birds on it, and ate our lunch and braved the wind, and I resolved for the second time on that spot, though now certainly with more truth and feeling and companionship, that I couldn’t possibly be happier.

Molera Point, April 2012.

The Big Sur River was flooded with spring rains, so we couldn’t cross it to get to the beach. Instead, we drove north on Highway 1 towards Monterey, leaving Big Sur with heads turned around and promises to return, not knowing then how soon that return would be.

We stopped in Carmel, the artists-colony-turned-BoBo-heaven just below Monterey, to explore the Point Lobos State Preserve. At the beginning of a trail down to the ocean, I passed a sign warning hikers to avoid poison oak. It had a picture of the shiny leaves. Just a short way down the trail, I accidentally brushed my leg against precisely those shiny leaves, and a few yards later did it again. I told Brahna, “I just brushed against poison oak, I’m going to break out in a rash.” Sure enough, later that night, my left forearm developed a seven-inch long bubbly, blistery rash, so swollen it prevented the entire arm from bending properly. It has since opened and cracked several times, but seems to finally be on its way out.

 Our home for the night was one of our characteristically awful motels, though we did enjoy our first showers in quite a while. We decamped the next morning to a café on Cannery Row, to do some careers and trip research, and then drove out to the ocean to watch the massive waves that came after the storm earlier in the week. The next day in Salinas I worked in a café while Brahna explored the Steinbeck museum, which I still remembered from my last trip. We spent the afternoon driving south through the Salinas Valley, stopping for lunch in Soledad, which, like most towns in the area, is almost entirely populated by Mexicans. After another stop at a grocery in King City, a town that features prominently Steinbeck’s East of Eden, we headed west on a small road into the mountains. We were going back to Big Sur, our exile having lasted all of two days.

 

Sometime in the course of the research I’d done in Monterey and Salinas, I discovered that there are two remote National Forest campgrounds in the mountains above Big Sur, accessible only by driving 10 miles east from Highway 1 or 30 miles west from King City on the Nacimiento-Ferguson Road, itself the only road, besides Highway 1, out of Big Sur. That road, coincidentally, is the same road into the mountains that Brahna and I nearly explored the day we watched “Detour” in the car and went on a hike once the rain cleared up. Driving into the mountains, through a massive military base, we enjoyed the idea of having made a complete loop in the last few days. We set up camp not ten miles from the Kirk Creek campground above the ocean, and even drove nearly all the way back there, through a thick redwood grove and along the unguarded edge of some pretty serious coastal canyons, for a glorious sunset. Our view of the coast this time was even wider than it had been on our hike. We saw our old campsite occupied by a new tent, the site of our friends, the Sandholms, occupied by yet another mobile home.

Our site in the mountains was one of only two in the eight-site campground occupied that night. The creek rambling and murmuring just a few feet away was a pleasing lullaby, but it also obstructed my usual paranoid observations of the sounds of the night. That uncertainty, plus the cool mountain air and my mangled left arm, made it a difficult night. We broke camp later than expected the next morning and finally did leave Big Sur, with heads turned around and promises to return.