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DAY 18 – Wednesday, March 31 (33 Weeks Pregnant)
START: Fort Bragg, CA
END: Gold Beach, OR
MILEAGE: 279 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Chandelier Drive-Through Tree, More Lighthouses, Fast-talking Oregonians

On a road trip such as this, there are just certain places you simply must stop at.  Whether they were pre-planned or not, in your schedule or not, no matter that you only have a week and a half left to make it up the Pacific Coast and then all the way across the country… there are just certain places that, should you come within a fifty mile radius, you must take the time and the detour to see.  The World’s Largest Ball of Twine for one.  The Four Corners for another.  Today, our only planned stops were a couple of lighthouses at the northern end of California.  We were desperately trying to make up time and mileage, knowing we had to be back in New Jersey by next Saturday.  But when we passed a sign in the town of Leggett that read “Drive-Through Tree”, we had no choice but to take the side road and pay our due respects to good roadside kitsch.  

The Chandelier Drive-Through Tree isn’t part of a bigger amusement park with other livelier attractions.  It isn’t housed in a major roadside town with its own share of tourist-based commerce and nightlife.  It isn’t even all that unique in its cheesy tourist appeal.  Between here and the Oregon border there are two other trees boasting car-sized holes. But at a mere three dollars per carload, you truly can’t go wrong, no matter what the diversion.  Named for the unique look of its limb structure, the Chandelier Tree is merely the focal point of a two-hundred-acre redwood grove.  If one had the time, and a surprisingly earnest preoccupation with trees, one could spend several hours walking the grounds in wood-muffled silence, with only the crisp smell of pine and timber to keep you company.  We didn’t have several hours, in fact we were rapidly running out of hours with every unscheduled stop, but we still devoted a good forty-five minutes to absorbing as much of our redwood surroundings as possible.

Through the gate, our first stop was of course the drive-through tree itself.  Standing three hundred fifteen feet tall (that's taller than the Statue of Liberty) and twenty-one feet wide at its base, the Chandelier Tree boasts a manmade hole cut tall enough and wide enough to accommodate all but the most obnoxious SUV’s.  I had no trouble easing the Mazda into the mini-tunnel with plenty of space left over to hang out the sunroof while Lauren took pictures. 

Giant hole aside, the grove’s signature tree is a sight to behold in and of itself… you know, once you pull your car out from underneath the thing, stand back and take a good look at it.  Even from a good fifty feet away, we still had to crane our necks to see the top.  Each of the 2400-year-old tree’s branches was thicker than most fully-grown pines.  It really is a true testament to American short-sightedness that somebody looked at this natural wonder over sixty years ago and could think of nothing more noble than to bore a hole in it and charge people to drive through.  But let’s not turn this into a weepy Green Peace vigil.  After all, we paid to drive through it too.  And really, this tree was cut during a less-enlightened time.  Conservationists have made quite certain that a stunt like this will never be pulled again.  With that in mind, I say we don’t think too deeply on the issue and just enjoy California’s three token drive-through trees for the more-or-less harmless entertainment they provide. 

The Chandelier Tree's gift shop was actually quite large for such a small operation.  Playing up the fact that this area is the starting point of the Great Redwood Forest, these guys were selling just about anything they could build, whittle or accessorize with redwood wood.  Or at least, they said it was redwood.  I’m no arborist, but I don’t imagine there’s much aesthetic difference between redwood and any other kind of wood once you chop it down.  Still we bought a magnet and a tree ornament made out of (supposedly) the area’s most famous lumber.  I’m not sure if the paper stock for our postcards originated from redwood, but the shotglass I managed to find was definitely made of glass.

Back outside, we had the place mostly to ourselves.  Every five minutes or so, another car would come in off of the main road, drive through the tree and maybe stop at the gift shop.  But they almost all drove right back out again as quickly as they came.  Lauren and I walked around the perimeter of where the clearing ended and the woods began.  There’s just something about the look of a redwood.  It’s not just that these things are impossibly big.  With trunks that truly do look red and branches that don’t begin until as high as fifty feet off the ground, the American redwood is yet another indelible icon of the Old West.  Whenever Walt Disney or Warner Brothers decided to situate one of their cartoons on the western frontier, they drew one of two settings: Monument Valley or the Redwood Forest.  Three-hundred-foot hollowed-out tree notwithstanding, there was a palpable sense of pristine purity to this whole area.  Not only in the trees, but in the air as well.  Beyond the fact that there wasn’t a major urban area for over a hundred miles in any direction, the noticeable, but not overpowering, scent of wood had a cleansing effect on our nasal passages.  With a slight chill even at twelve o’clock in the afternoon, the air simply smelled… clean.  I can think of no other word to describe it. 

Off to the side, there was another large section of hollowed-out trunk laying on its side, maybe ten feet wide and thirty feet long – large enough for several people to stand inside.  We went over and of course took several pictures, but I found myself getting more and more annoyed at the constant graffiti I was seeing.  Not just on this big trunk either, but on the drive-through tree itself.  In fact, it seemed like every thousands-year-old gigantic piece of wood within walking distance had something… no lots of things carved into it.  By “things”, of course, I mean double sets of initials inside of hearts, years of graduation bookended by the words “Class of” and “Rules!” and of course, countless people's names followed by the statement "was here."  Most of the graffiti was carved into the wood, though some of it was even written in pen. 

Believe me, I’m no bleeding heart tree-hugger (again, I just paid three bucks to drive through a tree with a hole cut in it), but I don’t think I will ever understand the uncontrollable human need to carve one’s initials into pieces of wood and stone.  Is it just some latent piss-to-mark-your-territory instinct that’s been rendered obsolete by thousands of years of evolution?  Or do people really think that there are others out there who care that CF (hearts) SK.  It would be one thing if you carved something like that into a tree in your own back yard.  At least then you’d always be able to look at it and remember the day you carved it – maybe even remember back to a time when you still loved that sadistic bitch you sleep next to every night.  But I daresay ninety-nine percent of the people who come to this tree are from out of town.  And most of that ninety-nine percent will never come back again.  Once you’ve driven your car through the big hole, the charm of such a thing wears off almost immediately.  So why carve your initials into something you’ll likely never see again?  What possible benefit could this provide to a person beyond five minutes of mindless entertainment that it’s worth defacing something so big and beautiful?  This isn’t just some little oak tree.  It’s a freakin’ GIANT REDWOOD for crying out loud!  Show some respect!

What troubled me most of all was the fact that redwood strikes me as a particularly solid type of wood.  Rather difficult to carve anything into.  I’m fairly certain a small child, or even a teenager, who is too young to know any better, wouldn’t have had the strength, patience or manual dexterity to complete a job even as simple as a set of initials.  No, most of these carvings were done by adults, authority figures apparently, people we’re supposed to look up to.  Anybody who wants to blame big business or evil Republicans for single-handedly destroying the environment need look no further than the big trees in Leggett to realize that defacing nature in the name of vanity is simply and depressingly the inherent nature of our species.

(Oh, did I forget to mention that the gift shop was selling redwood soapboxes as well?)

Tree carvings aside, the public restroom at the Chandelier Drive-Through Tree had its own share of artwork.  Some creative visitor had written a disgustingly enchanting poem about “little balls of shit”, to which another witty squatter had responded: “I paid three dollars to use this bathroom and all I got was this stupid poem.”

Back on the main road, we met up with U.S. Route 101 and were finally able to pick up some speed, driving mostly freeway on our way ever northward.  We could have taken the slower and more scenic “Avenue of the Giants” and gotten some more up-close-and-personal looks at the giant redwoods, but we were evermore reminded of our time – or lack thereof.  Already we were going to have to forget about the day-long visits we’d had planned for Portland and Seattle, as well as several stops we’d wanted to make during the trip back east.  While a scenic drive through the redwood forest would have been nice, we had to start selectively cutting things from our schedule.  Besides, we’d gotten our fill of trees back in Leggett. 

We stopped briefly in Eureka, the first town written in bold on our map since San Francisco, and had our digital pictures transferred over to CD’s.  Our memory sticks were nearly full and we’d been getting paranoid about losing them or erasing them by mistake. 

About an hour north of Eureka, U.S. 101 became a rural two-lane road as it traced along the border of Redwood National Park. Along this stretch, we came to the town of Orick, which if ever there was a town that embodied that sense of “Backroad, America” I was looking for, this was it.  The general store we stopped at to buy a much-needed Coca-Cola was something straight out of the heydays of Route 66. 

Hand-painted signs advertised everything from ice to jerky to self-serve gas.  A wooden Indian chief (presumably carved from redwood), stood guard at the front door in awesomely un-politically-correct fashion.  Flyers, streamers and potted plants adorned the exterior and an old toilet was being utilized as an ashtray.  Above another toilet in the bathroom was a sign that said, “We aim to please.  You aim too… please.”  An old tow-along camper straight out of the Beat Generation sat rusting in a field out back.  Next door a gift shop was selling redwood carvings of just about every animal imaginable.  Across the street, sheep grazed on some of the greenest grass I’ve seen anywhere in this country beneath a modest-sized mountain clothed in pine.  It seemed unbelievable that a town like this existed in 2004, much less in the same state that claimed Los Angeles and San Francisco as its children. 

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We’d wanted to say at the Redwood Hostel in Klamath off the suggestion of the hostel manager at Montara Point as well as the book HOSTELS USA, which proclaimed, “This hostel has more location in its little finger than most hostels can muster up in their whole body.”   But it was only four-thirty or so when we approached Klamath and we simply couldn’t justify stopping that early in the day.  Not anymore.  So we pressed onward to Crescent City, the site of not one, but two lighthouses.  The first, Battery Point Light was placed in 1856 to guide redwood haulers into and out of the city’s harbor.  The second, St. George Reef Light, as its name indicates, was placed to warn mariners against the offshore reef upon which it stands – and, at a cost of $704,663, was the most expensive lighthouse ever built.

The directions to each light were a bit vague in our book, but we finally managed to spot Battery Point from a distance.  We drove back and forth across what seemed like an easily navigable town, but never managed to find a close enough vantage point from which to take pictures, much less access the light itself.  So we settled for a few faraway shots and called it good.  The Saint George Reef Light was an offshore light that you had to be in a very specific place to see, so after all that driving around, we just said to hell with it, and continued north. 

Driving around town, we’d noticed several signs warning “Tsunami Hazard Zone” with a rather scary-looking drawing of a tiny man desperately (and hopelessly I might add) running away from a huge tidal wave – which had the personality of a tentacled B-movie monster.  This area is no stranger to tsunamis.  On March 27, 1964, a 9.2 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Alaska sent five tidal waves rocketing toward California at five hundred miles per hour.  When the waves came ashore in Crescent City, twenty-nine city blocks and eleven people were washed out to sea.  The keepers of the Battery Point Lighthouse saw the waves coming but could do little else but pray.  They, and the lighthouse, were spared only because of the extreme angle at which the tsunamis hit. 

According to oceanographers, underwater topography between here and Alaska will almost always channel a tidal wave in such a way that it will inevitably wash up in or around Crescent City.  So the people here take their tsunami warnings very seriously.

We made it into Oregon just before dusk and settled into the Sand Dollar Inn in Gold Beach for an incredibly reasonable thirty-five dollars a night.  After nothing but oatmeal, peanut butter and really bad California pizza for the last couple days, we went in search of a nice sit-down restaurant.  Gold Beach must attract some fairly wealthy clientele, because the first couple restaurants we checked out boasted menus with an average price of over twenty-five dollars per plate.  We finally settled for the reasonably-priced Spada’s Restaurant, which boasts “American, Italian and Chinese food.” 

One review I’ve since read of Spada’s declares, “This is a fine example of a restaurant that tries to please all tastes, and in doing so becomes mediocre.”  I suppose I’d have to agree with that appraisal.  The food was forgettable and I don’t think either of us finished what was in front of us.  Still, as the cliché goes, what Spada’s lacked in quality, it made up for in character.  Which character exactly is open for debate.  Remember that episode of Friends where Joey decorates his apartment with everything from ceramic dogs to fake-rain windows?  Spada’s kind of had that same motif going for it.  The place was adorned with everything from gaudy Chinese art to gaudy maritime art, and the recessed lighting cast a not-quite sickening orange glow across the entire room.  Yet despite all that, the place was cozy and inviting, and the older Chinese lady who greeted us was incredibly – some might say overly – friendly and cordial.

As we ate, the couple at the booth behind us must have overheard our conversation because the woman turned around and asked me where I was from, saying she’d noticed my accent.  Funny, I always figured in my nearly ten years away from home that I’d all but lost any remnant of a Maine accent.  I was surprised that anybody would notice.  Turns out I was right because the eavesdropping woman had apparently noticed my English accent.  Ooookie-dokie.  From there though, we had a delightful conversation with her and her husband… well, mostly with her.  She told us that tonight was their anniversary and they were vacationing for a few days.  She told us about her childhood, her adoptive parents, and growing up in Oregon.  She told us about the time she’d spent in Europe and how she’d met her husband, the other places they’d gone on vacation, the bed and breakfast they’d discovered somewhere in Italy, the Oriental rug they’d bought that they couldn’t decide whether to put in the foyer or the sun room, and something about how her dog had gotten food poisoning the year before… 

Actually, come to think of it, we didn’t have a conversation so much as give her jumping-off points to talk about other things.  I swear every time Lauren or I started to talk about ourselves or the road trip, this lady would cut us off with, “Oh I remember a time…” after which she wouldn’t pause to take a breath for another five minutes or so.  People who know Lauren and me constantly comment on how fast the two of us talk, but even we had trouble keeping up with this lady as she rambled seamlessly from one topic to the next, never slowing down for an instant to gather her thoughts or allow for a natural beat in the conversation.  Ironically though, for whatever reason, her manners never struck either of us as particularly rude or disrespectful.  She didn’t seem self-centered or narcissistic or even uninterested in what Lauren and I had to say.  She was, in fact, incredibly friendly and engaging, but just had a lot to say and apparently not a lot of time to say it.  For the better part of the conversation, Lauren and I weren’t rolling our eyes at each other so much as constantly trying to stifle our laughter every time we got lost in this woman’s rapid fire speech. 

When we went up to the register to pay, we had a similar conversation with the Chinese lady in charge.  Except this conversation began with the woman feeling Lauren’s belly and predicting that we would have a boy, then telling us all about her children, the differences between boys and girls, the joys of parenthood, the things she learned from her mother and her grandmother and from traditional Chinese teachings…  Once again, whenever Lauren and I tried to interject, we got lost in the sheer velocity of her speech.  But once again, none of this struck us as overly rude… or even a little bit rude.  We started wondering if this was just the nature of dialogue for people in this area. 

We got back to the hotel where we had an amazing view of the sun setting over the ocean. After our obligatory journaling and post-carding, and wearied from the intense concentration needed to keep up with Oregonian dialect, we turned in early, knowing we had a long day of light-bagging in store for us tomorrow. 

ONTO DAY 19