Margaret Hastings gets her photo taken with a tribal child after a plane crash in the New Guinea wilderness in 1945.

That’s about all I’m going to say about one of the most interesting and eccentric tales of the Pacific War. On a personal note, my father was stationed on the western coast of New Guinea, an island known for its incredible natural beauty and, as Zuckoff writes, “a gift-box assortment of inhospitable environments,” for five months in 1944. Like many stationed there, he left after conracting malaria in August, several months before this incident happened, but most surely he was aware of the rumors of the hidden valley GIs called Shangri-La, and he must have read or heard news reports about this incident while recovering back in the States.

What I found as interesting as the book itself was how the author came across and pieced together the whole story, which happened sixty-seven years ago. Zuckoff’s interest was piqued after finding a newspaper story about the incident, which, mostly because of Margaret Hastings, the Women’s Army Corps survivor, got lots of contemporary press in the waning days of WWII, while researching something else. He found one living survivor, who had kept a diary and his memories, which in turn led him to the families of the other survivors, many who had journals, documents, photographs, letters and personal details about the strange story. Using these first-hand materials, Zuckoff was able to bring the very human story to life and render it in a way that it almost reads almost like a novel.

Dozens of black-and-white photos throughout the book really help advance the story, and Zuckoff posted a contemporary documentary film of the event on his website, which I’m not going to link to here because you need to read the book before you watch the film. Great page-turner for a vacation or to snuggle up with for a weekend.

That’s kind of how I feel about John Lennon after reading Tim Riley’s Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music – The Definitive Life (Hyperion 2011). After 661 pages and almost 100 pages of footnotes, Lennon comes off like Uncle Jack, insecure, deeply flawed and seemingly incapable of controlling his worst instincts. Except that Lennon created music that has become part of my own soundtrack.

Lennon and the other Beatles were heroes of my youth whose music, style and attitude helped shape my own thinking and life. His murder devastated me, enough that it took years to be able to listen or appreciate his music again. Trying to separate the myths from the reality of Lennon’s complicated life is a formidable task, and Riley has given considerable time and energy to the project. Just using “The Definitive Life” in the title sounds, well, definitive.

Most biographies spend little time on childhood, but Lennon’s is worth looking into, and Riley does a great job of tracing his early life in Liverpool: his incredibly dysfunctional family, his fortuitous early hookup with Paul McCartney and George Harrison, the formation of the band, the three trips to Hamburg and their residency at the Cavern Club.

This is easily the best historical narrative of the Beatles’ rise, success and dissolution that I’ve read (and I’m looking over at about three dozen Beatles books on my shelf here in my office). Listening to the recordings that survive of their last Hamburg trip (packaged now as Live From the Star Club), it’s easy to understand Riley’s persuasive case that the Beatles created themselves on those scuzzy stages, both the music they engineered out of the riffs, rhythms and harmonies of American proto-rock/soul and the smiling, smirking, smart-alecky attitude that made me to want to adopt a new lifestyle paradigm at age 15.

Riley is at his best when he’s writing about the music itself. Author of Tell Me Why: The Beatles Album by Album, Song by Song, The Sixties and After, he spends a breathtaking chapter weaving the Beatles and George Martin’s production skills into the rich patchwork of innovation that characterized 1960s rock. His interpretations of Lennon’s songs, though subjective, are always provocative. Though he obviously believes that Lennon was the more serious creative force in the partnership, he is generous in recognizing the special relationship between Lennon and Paul McCartney, McCartney’s many contributions to Lennon’s material, and vice versa, and how even during the band’s dissolution, Lennon and McCartney remained committed to each other’s music.

But back to Uncle Jack and Lennon. “Do as I say, not as I do” pretty much sums up Lennon’s life. Blame it on his childhood or his insecurities (both of which Riley makes a case for), but too often Lennon just doesn’t come off as a very nice guy. Riley doesn’t try to cover over the warts, showing us time and again that what Lennon said and what he did were in complete contradiction, whether it was preaching peace and love but treating even his friends and associates with callousness, or preaching family and fidelity while cheating on the “love of his life.” Riley makes a somewhat persuasive case that Lennon was growing up in his last five years, but not enough to make you believe he really was, as he put it, starting over. And I found myself scratching my head in a few places where he interprets, sometimes without attribution, Lennon’s thought process, and I kept thinking that the word “perhaps” could have been used a bit more often when ascribing motivation.

That’s a minor quibble. Making John Lennon human didn’t change my view of his musical contributions or impact on my own life. If you’re a Beatles/Lennon fan, you really have to read this one and judge for yourself.

They only met briefly, long, long ago. But Johnny Otis hasn’t forgotten Mr. Charlie or his dogs.

"Mr. Charlie's Dogs" (click to embiggen.)

“It was on one of our trips down South in Mississippi. We pulled into a rural gas station/restaurant. It’s 1950, and here’s a big bus painted with all kinds of carnival things – Johnny Otis’ Rhythm and Blues Caravan, Little Esther, all that stuff in bright red colors.

“A young guy was running the gas station. It shook him up – all he saw was a bunch of black people getting off the bus. I saw him run in and make a call on the phone. I don’t know what he thought this was – the invasion of the rhythm and blues creatures,” Otis is saying during a phone interview in between bites of the leopard shark he’s munching at his Sebastapol, California, home.

“Right quick here comes this big honky with two terrible looking dogs,” he continues, emphasizing the word terrible. “We got back in the bus, and he just looked at us, and we froze. He just walked around us. The dogs looked at us and growled and growled. Oh, he loved the way he was terrorizing the black folks. I had a P-38 under my belt, and I thought, ‘If Charlie gonna start any shit, I’m going to take him with me’.”

“I remember him standing looking at us with a grin, then he pulled out a cigarette and struck a match. It’s that image that’s in my mind. We got our gas, and we left. That was it. We always referred to that as ‘Mr. Charlie’s Dogs’.”

It is a story worth retelling, but you won’t find it in the Johnny Otis songbook. He rather chose to remember Mr. Charlie’s Dogs in a 1986 acrylic-on-canvas painting. It’s in Colors and Chords (Pomegranate Artbooks), a new book on Otis’ art. “Mr. Charlie’s Dogs” is on the cover of this issue.

To his considerable achievements over the last half century – as bandleader, musician, hit songwriter, community activist, organic grocer, occasional preacher – be sure and add visual artist.  Otis’ talent has manifested itself, especially during the last 10-13 years, in paintings, lithographs and sculpture detailing contemporary black lifestyles, his music milieu and socio-political themes.

“Painting was something I just did, mostly as therapy in between gigs,” he explains. “What are you going to do when you’re off for a month? That happens in the music business. Can’t go fishing all the time.”

His active art life dates back to 1945, when he began sketching cartoons of band life for fun. “As we would be riding along in the bus, I would just sketch a little something funny, and everybody would laugh. And it turned into a request program about what happened the night before, something naughty or something sexy or something ridiculous. Most of them have bit the dust by now except for the ones in the book.”

Colors and Chords offers a couple of works, including the brooding, moody “Nat Turner” oil painting, from the early 1960s. Then Otis didn’t paint for a long time. “The only time I feel really emotionally inspired to do any artwork is when I’m in music,” he admits. “When I’m out of music, shit, I’m miserable.”

The late 1960s and early 1970s were lean years for the Johnny Otis Band. “That was when the British Invasion occurred, and we couldn’t get a goddam job. We weren’t working with the band for a stretch of years. As I think back, coincidentally, I didn’t do any art work to speak of, either.”

It wasn’t until 1979 that we went back to art in earnest. “We were working again,” he says. “We were playing all the time.” And Otis went on a tear, creating in many media, echoing Picasso and cubist painters and native African styles in his brightly colored, primitive, plastic and wood sculptures. Being immersed in music also stimulated his visually creative style.

“I went into an art store to buy a little pad of paper, pencils and pens, and I see all these colors, all these paints, and I said, ‘Shit.’ They were a magnet. It just happened like that.”

Otis believes that music and painting and sculpture have much in common. As a major chord is made up of the tonic, third and fifth notes, he sees the same triad in the three primary colors. And as you find out in music, there are new, interesting shading possible by mixing the colors or the chords.

That thinking can be readily seen in a whimsical oil painting of a band called “Olive and the Primaries.” “These are not true-to-life characters,” Otis says. “These are composites of musicians I’ve seen and heard. Olive’s breasts are shaped like olives, and the members of the band have faces in the primary colors – red, yellow and blue.”

Some other Otis paintings – Boogie Stompers,” “The Blues,” “Little Esther” and “Silas Green” – capture the immediacy and intimacy of the Otis band itinerary: fairgrounds, juke joints and clubs of the chitlin’ circuit. Otis rarely focuses on the star, instead weaving a wealth of detail, from the Super Dog stand in “The Blues” to the long, gold watch fob dangling from the waist of the dancer in “Little Esther.” That comes from the unique perspective he gets as bandleader; while we’re watching the band, they’re checking us out, too. “From my vantage point at the piano and up on the bandstand, I see a panoramic view, left to right – the bar, bartenders, dancers, waitresses, patrons, hangers-on.”

Like any artist, Otis doesn’t want to talk much about what motivates such work. “How do I know what I’m going to do tomorrow? I do whatever strikes me. I don’t have any boundaries about style. I just like to throw that shit around on the canvas and paint.”

Still, he’s giggling with anticipation at his next work. “The cartoon I’m going to do tonight is for my fishing buddies. One of us was charged with fixing the bait, and he fucked up, and we were so mad.” He laughed again.

Besides his current fishing jones, Otis is particularly proud of his band, which is working regularly on weekends at a local supper club called Lena’s and choosing assorted dates elsewhere. “The band is so strong,” he enthuses. “Every instrument has an exceptional person, and the singer is great.”

That he’s so excited about music should mean that he’s painting or sculpting again, but during the hot summer of 1995 Otis chose fishing. He prefers cooler weather so he can fire up a little wood stove in his home studio, where he’s working on a couple of large-scale paintings “If I can keep the pot belly full of wood and coals, I can paint for a long time.”

We received a letter from Otis soon afterwards and published it in the magazine:

I really like Blues Access a lot. Thanks for the article on my art. The bright colors on your covers is a good format. It makes the publication stand out against other magazines.

I hope the page-after-page of ads means you’re enjoying commercial success. And if you’re that successful, I think we should arrange a loan. Two or three hundred thousands dollars should be about right. Let’s do it in small bills — in cash, OK? And no IOUs please, because I’m allergic to paperwork.

If you ever get up to the California boondocks, let me know and we’ll hook up.

Johnny Otis

Sebastapol, CA.

The Star House's red roof is lower left center, not far from the railroad tracks and behind the amusement park. Only in America. (Click to bigginate.)

That’s why I want to go to Cache, Oklahoma. Yeah. Really. I just finished S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (Scribner), which traces the story of the fearsome, decentralized Indian nation that once commanded huge swaths of Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico until its leaders surrendered to U.S. forces in 1875.

As with all books about the European/American extermination of Indian tribes from the Great Plains in the late 19^th century, Empire of the Summer Moon tells a sad story about a miserable, irredeemable period in U.S. history. I realized how little I knew about the Comanches or the Indian wars in Texas and Oklahoma as Gwynne masterfully points out the pros and cons of both sides.

The book drops you into the Texas frontier in the early 19^th century as whites sweeping westward begin tangling with those tribes and their lifestyle on the Southern Great Plains. Gwynne’s descriptions of the tribes’ nomadic life are as breathtaking as his exploration of how the Spanish, during their ill-fated attempt at conquest of the Comanches, among their many mistakes, unwittingly gave the Comanches the very thing – horses — which the Indians would then use to drive out the Europeans and stave off, at least for a while, their own extinction.

But the magic of Empire of the Summer Moon is how all this history weaves into and around the stories of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son, Quanah Parker, the last of the great Comanche chiefs. Apparently, if you grew up in Texas, you know the story of how Cynthia Ann was captured by the Comanches in 1836 at age nine in a brutal massacre against her family’s compound – she witnessed the torture and murder of her grandfather and gang-rape of other women during the incident.

Click on this to get a close-up of the immediate area.

Cynthia Ann was spared, eventually married Chief Peta Necona, had three children and was completely assimilated into the tribe for 24 years before being recaptured by famous Texas rancher Charles Goodnight and returned to her white family. Incomprehensible as it seemed to everyone at the time,  Parker rejected white society and tried to escape many times as she was shunted through a miserable life among her relatives. She never saw Quanah or her children again and finally starved herself to death in 1870.

Her first son with Peta Necona was Quanah. Six feet tall, with long hair, a stately mien and steely stare, Quanah Parker was a highly regarded, especially fearless and murderous chief of the notorious Quahadi Comanche band. Parker fought ferociously and killed and tortured many who chased the Quahadi before finally surrendering at Ft. Sill in Oklahoma in 1875.

For the last thirty years of his life, he lived out the life his mother could never accept. Perhaps more than any other Native American chief, Parker had moderate success living within the constraints of reservation life.  Though uneducated, he had great persuasive skills, and he traveled to Washington to lobby Congress on the behalf of his tribe. He was a founder of the Native American Church Movement peyote religion.

Perhaps the best expression of his desire to live in the white man’s world was the house he built near Cache, Oklahoma. It was a ten-room, two-story structure, a place where the great and the unknown came to pay their respects to the old chief. President Theodore Roosevelt dined at Parker’s house, and his table was always filled with people who wanted to meet the great chief.

Quanah Parker

There is an old photo of the house surrounded by a white picket fence in the book, and near the end, Gwynne says that he found Parker’s Star House, behind an abandoned amusement park near Cache. Beyond the peculiarly American irony of its location, this got me very excited. I quickly went to Google Maps and typed: Cache, OK. I moved down to the local level and began scanning, found a park northwest of town, and there it was, right behind what looks from the air like an old amusement park.

But what guided me to it so quickly were the stars on the red roof. You see, one story says that old Chief Parker, perhaps in a religious vision, had stars embedded in the roof of his home like those he supposedly admired on uniforms. The Star House. So I like to think that Parker himself helped guide me, lo these many years later, right to the spot.  I have to see this.

I feel a lot like Kay in that I did an honest search of 9/11 theories. After reading the Truth material and the official Commission Report and many books, including The Looming Tower, and watching, ad infinitum, the videos of the event, like Kay, I concluded that it was much more likely that al Qaeda operatives hijacked four jets, of which three hit their targets than it is to believe that American neo-cons used passenger jets to hit three iconic, already explosive-rigged buildings, attacked the Pentagon with a missile and made several hundred people go away, presumably under hidden identities, never to be seen by their families again.

And like Kay, I don’t consider “truthers” to be, as he puts it, nutbags. If al Qaeda committed the crime, why do so many people believe that Cheney did it?

If you’re looking for more on thermite in WTC debris, or analyses of how Building 7 collapsed or what flying object hit the Pentagon, you won’t find it here. But if you want to better understand why so many people believe in things like this, it’s good background. Kay devotes chapters to conspiracism’s history and mythology, its psychological and religious roots and its advancement through media and academic and activist networks. Especially interesting are the sections on earlier alleged conspiracy plots – Ku Klux Klan, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Holocaust revisionism JFK etc. Kay does a great job of showing how many of the old themes and mythologies are woven into many of today’s conspiracy theories.

He also makes a good point that, though conspiracy theories have always been with us, it is the Internet that has accelerated and advanced the 9/11 Truthers’ cause and conspiracy theory in general. Virtually anyone with web access is free to check any of this out in the privacy of your own home. Gotta love it.

(More of my thoughts about 9/11 Truth.)

From the cover of The Windup Girl, a megadont walks the streets of Bangkok. Imagine the smell.

I just finished a couple of science-fiction/supernatural books that I highly recommend to fans of either genre.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (Nightshade Books 2009) is set about 250 years in the future in Bangkok. The world has long ago experienced both climate change (lotsa sweat) and the end of oil (or the Great Contraction, as it’s called).

Even worse, tinkering genetic bioengineering corporations have created food-borne plagues that have swept across continents, and bio-gen corps called “calorie companies” located in the U.S. are ever in search of the remaining germinating seed banks so they can destroy them and control food.

One of those banks is in Thailand, and that’s about all you need to know. There are genetically modified elephants called megadonts that help generate a kind of spring energy. There are genetically altered people (the windup girl is one) who serve mankind in ways both wonderful and twisted, all working in a cityscape so deliciously rendered and alluring that I went back and reread descriptive passages.

At the time I was reading this, Boulder County is seemingly split over whether to allow genetically modified crops on its land. (Hint: If you read this book, you will probably come down on the side of not allowing bio-gen crops anywhere.) And while reading, much of the supercity of Bangkok and its twelve million inhabitants, which in the novel has built even more elaborate walls to keep out the sea, were under water. Creepy when sci-fi slips into reality.

Somehow I get the feeling that Pacigalupi will create more stories and novels for this futureworld. In its scope and ambition, this world reminded me of how I felt when I first read Dune. Good as it is, I’d hate to see it go to waste on just this one tale.

John Connally’s The Infernals (Atria Books 2011) continues the story of Samuel Johnson, the twelve-year-old English boy who again winds up, thanks to a devil’s assistant and some laxity on the part of the scientists running the Hadron Collider, sucked into another dimension. We were introduced to Sam and his dog (of course he’s named Boswell) in The Book of Lost Things.

This time Mrs. Abernathy, a demon who has morphed into a middle-aged woman (albeit a particularly execrable and nasty one), having been thwarted in her bid to enter the real world in the earlier novel by Samuel, is trying to nab him to take back to her boss, the Great Malevolence, to gain back what self-respect she feels she has lost after Samuel and Boswell dashed her hopes for world dominance.

Connally writes with a professor’s delightful glee, using many assorted snotty asides and footnotes, as he leads Samuel and Boswell through the ever-changing, kaleidoscopic landscape of Hell, including a look into the Great Void itself, and a bewildering scourge of smelly, loathsome demons, dwarfs, elves, trees with claws, wraiths and rams, some of help to Samuel and some not so much, and a herbaceous beverage known to produce temporary blindness, an occasional inability to remember your name and explosive burping.

My favorites were the four dwarfs, and I laughed out loud while reading passages on the bus ride commute more than once. All I could think of while reading it was that, in the right hands, this would make an incredible animated film.

Home

Boulder CO

Joss House, Weaverville, CA.

We got up early Sunday morning, had breakfast with the sea lions one more time and drove down 101 to Arcata, where we turned east on state 299 to Redding. It was another great drive, 299 parallels 36, the snaky road we drove over to the coast, generally about thirty miles north. It goes up and down through winding, spiraling mountain passes and deep river valleys. The Trinity River Valley was as scenic as the road was circuitious. It’s a big rafting and fishing area. In Weaverville, a historic old mining community, we stopped at Joss House Historic  Park, centered around Joss House, the oldest continuously used Chinese temple in California. We also read that at the end of 2012, the state will no longer be able to keep up this park.

The clouds were racing past the crater area that blew in 1914-15 when I took this shot.

Redding is in the Sacramento Valley, but soon we were back on the road heading toward the north entrance to Mt. Lassen National Park, which we had passed on because of some bad weather on our way over to the coast. The park takes in a dormant volcano that last blew in 1914 and 1915, and you get to see exactly what happened at the first major stop. A short trail offers up boulders shot from the crater three miles away and panoramic views of the blown top. The road circles the mountain and goes through some geothermal areas with the familiar smell of sulphur reminiscent of Yellowstone. Nice 30-mile drive.

The back side of the crater area. There is a walking trail that winds up to the top there.

We stopped in Chester for what turned out to be the last broasted chicken order at a fast-food place closing this afternoon for the season, and we were in Susanville by about six pm. Stayed at the River’s Edge Motel there. Nice place, fifty bucks with the cash discount, andWe got up early, had breakfast at the place across the parking lot from the motel and drove leisurely down to Reno, about an hour and a half drive through the high desert, where we caught our plane and were home by seven.

The mountain, though it has been quiet for awhile, is monitored for earthquake activity.

Our mission had been to make The Wild Trees come alive.

Mission accomplished.

Curley’s Motel

Crescent City CA

This is the intersection I write about. It's hard to capture the immensity of the trees at this junction. Click to enlarge.

Well, once again we didn’t quite know where we going once we started this. We had another hearty breakfast at the Golden Harvest, and we drove back down not far from Fern Canyon to walk this trail in Prairie Creek Redwoods Park that began at the Big Tree and then took us through an almost surreal atmosphere.

For a photo album I made for Facebook, with many more pictures of this walk, click here.

After admiring the Big Tree itself, another one of those that lives up to its name, we walked a short bit to a place that I can only describe as Middle-Earthian. Today, it’s a place where two trails divide, but over the centuries, it was a place where a great cataclysm, or a series of cataclysms, occurred. Giant trees fell in some kind of succession, creating a place where, years later, we can only stand in awe.

Sometimes you can only just stare dumbfounded at these goddam trees. Try and take in their enormity. Their age. Their wisdom.  Oh, the stories they could tell. Some of the trees seem like Ents, and we climbed up inside one of them there at the crossroads. There was plenty of room for both of us. Like in Fern Canyon, this was one of those places where I got completely lost in time and place, even though we were less than a hundred yards from the parking lot.

Taking the Catheral trail, we climbed higher along the trail, farther from the parking lot, and for awhile it was like we were walking in a theme park, with tableau, in this case, tree scenes, scattered along the way. We marveled at two fallen giants, side by side, both ripped from the roots at the side of the trail and fallen downward into a maze of ferns. Who knows how tall they were? Their roots are twenty feet high.

Gnarly, twisted roots. Redwood root systems are generally more horizontal than vertical.

The trail sometimes ran along fallen trees that, even on their sides, towered above us as we passed, at other times through patches of gnarly root systems that looked positively medieval or science-fiction film. As we climbed higher, I could use the binocs to see the tops of the highest trees, but you couldn’t see exactly which trees they were because you couldn’t see the bottoms. We had to watch our footing in place where the roots, like giant gnarly bony knuckles, had been exposed by erosion along the trail. They seemed like they might grab us at any time, and they hurt when you had to walk on them.

The trees here seem to be taller than any others we have seen, but honestly, it’s hard to tell. We finally dropped into a deciduous forest thick and deep, with giant leaves coating the entire path a foot or more thick in places. We stopped beneath this majestic tree at the edge of one forested area, sat on a bench looking at the tops of another grove across the meadow topped with some neat clouds. A unigue chance to look at the tops of trees and the canopy created by intertwining crowns.

We didn’t take one turn we probably should have and wound up walking the last half mile along the Parkway. It took a bit longer than we expected, but like Fern Canyon, for that much pleasure a little extra walking doesn’t hurt, and the scenery along the park way was incredible.

These volunteers have rescued a couple of seals and taking them back to their rehabilitation facility.

Later, near sunset, we drove back out to the beach north of town. It’s part of the Castle Rock Wildlife Refuge, and we pass the impressive Castle Rock as we head toward the parking lot. There are about twenty people coming up from the beach, some of them toting a large cage. As it turns out, it’s the rescue group that we visited in town yesterday, and they have two seals, abandoned or lost by parent seals, which they’re crating up and taking back to the rehabilitation facility. The one seal now there will no doubt be grateful for the company.

Then we walk out to the beach, and it’s worth the walk, the last part over a literal sea of small pieces of beached wood, and we spend a half hour watching the sun go down and the waves pressing relentlessly across the beach.

Dinner with the seals.

Dinner once again at the Chart House with the seals. My shrimp alfredo dish was fine, but my only reget of the trip is that I didn’t have the fish and chips a third night in a row. Damn, those were good.

Next: Mt. Lassen Volcanic National Park

Curley’s Motel

Crescent City CA

Lighthouse, Crescent City CA. Click on photo and you can see the "walking bridge" has already been taken by the tide, so to speak.

Today was a slower day. Had breakfast at the Chart House with the seals, and then headed downtown to the Northcoast Marine Mammal Center, a volunteer organization that rescues seals and other sea creatures. And we got a better look at the lighthouse that has been on the horizon since we got here. You can only visit it at low tide, and we are already too late. We also drive out to another point out by the airport north of town up the coast and decide to return before we leave.

Crescent City’s east side backs right up to Jedediah Smith State Park. We took Howland Road east from 101 and were deep in the redwood forest pretty quickly. We got out at one of the many trails along Mill Creek and walked for awhile before turning back. It was great; we met nobody during an hour walk.

Once again, you really have to click on this one to see how immense the Stout Tree is. I can't explain the notch.

Then we hit the Stout Grove, a short stroll through a small but very impressive grove of reds not far from of the South Fork of the Smith River. Though it wasn’t marked, we’re pretty sure we found the Stout Tree itself, one of the most impressive redwoods we have seen, with one of the widest girths we saw on the trip. Then we had coffee and pie in the Hiouchi Café in the fishing village of Hiouchi. They were getting ready to close for the afternoon, but they made a fresh pot of coffee anyway.

Curley's Lodge was built in the 1950s, and all wood came from one redwood tree. Even the bathroom door.

We caught a late afternoon showing of Moneyball (Brad Pitt is fantastic), and I had fish and chips and Alaskan Amber again with the seals at the Chart House. The slaw was fantastic and the portions large. Woo hoo.

Next: Cathedral Trees Trail the Big Tree, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

Curley’s Motel

Crescent City CA

Here’s a photo album of our walk in Fern Canyon.

One of our best days ever. The waiter yesterday at the Japanese restaurant in Arcata mentioned that Fern Canyon was one of the best-kept secrets we had to visit. So we decided to do it this morning, not knowing much about it except that he suggested it, and a quick Google search said it was a location for the second Jurassic Park film.

By this time, we were euphoric as we descended into Fern Canyon.

We began with breakfast at some place not far down the road, the Good Harvest Café, where I had an actual chicken-fried steak and eggs. I have pretty much given up on reminding restaurants that deep-fried steaks aren’t chicken-fried steaks, so this time I just ordered without asking, and was surprised to get the first good chicken-fried steak I’ve had in years. A good omen, perhaps?

It was about a thirty minute drive to Davison Road, which took us on a slow, winding road through a wild redwood forest, much wilder than any we have seen so far. The forest floor was quite irregular, with deep gorges and hills and dales intersecting, the kind of area that Michael Taylor and Steve Sillett had bushwhacked to find the world’s tallest redwoods. Then we dropped down along the coast, paid the seven dollar parking fee and headed down along the coast past Gulf Beach for a few miles before we dead-end at the parking lot. We make the best decision of the day to change into our high-top hiking boots and wool socks.

Then we’re climbing into this dense, humid, wet jungle forest. A couple coming back looked at our boots and said we “should be all right” just before we finally have to cross the stream. It’s not too bad, but we wind up taking the coastal trail instead of the Fern Canyon loop, and we walked more than a mile out of our way before realizing that it was the wrong trail. So we walked back this muddy trail and began climbing awhile along another trail to a point near the top of the canyon in a redwood forest before finally finding the loop trail that dropped us down into the best part of the walk. All told, it probably took us about an hour and a half before we dropped into Fern Canyon proper.

These lush ferns covered the wall for much of Fern Canyon's length.

It was worth the wait and the walk. The next forty minutes we lost all sense of time as we moved along down through the stream, over logs and around fallen trees and debris. It was obvious from the start that there was no real trail. We must have crossed the stream twenty times. At first we tried to find the best place to cross to keep our feet dry. But after awhile, we realized that it really didn’t matter, and soon we just didn’t care, crossing back and forth with reckless abandon.

This became quite intoxicating. I felt like a little kid again, moving through a world that was equal parts Jurassic Park and Tarzan of the Apes. Any minute I expected a velociraptor to come into view. Or a half man/half ape with a chimpanzee at his side.

It was difficult to find a path through at several junctures. At one point, we ran into a fellow in his fifties who was trying to find a way around a particularly dense debris field created when an enormous redwood dropped into the valley. Knowing he was ahead of us working his way through helped a lot. The trip down was as exasperating as it was exhilarating.

Here’s the link to a photo album of our walk in Fern Canyon.

On the way home, I stopped for coffee at a little shop on 101. The woman there, when I told her we were going to Crescent City, said that when she was a child living there, they would go to the “north end of town,” where they would play among tree stumps that were enormous. After we got into town, I drove to the north end before realizing she had been talking about something that happened decades ago and that the directions were far too vague. But worth a try.

Finished off things with dinner at the Chart House, a short drive from Curley’s. It was close to the motel, and as we got out of the car and walked toward the restaurant, it looked like one of the docks in the marina was alive and moving. A close look turned up about thirty or more seals lying on the dock. Taking it over, in point of fact. Probably two or three dozen. They were also on other rocks in the harbor. Grunting, squealing, making noise. Like seals do.

Our dining companions in Crescent City. Click to enlarge and you can see construction in the harbor behind, where they're repairing damage from the Japanese tsunami earlier this year that hit Crescent City.

The seals – there are three species — have become quite an attraction at the Chart House. Noisy, smell and rude they are, but everybody loves them! All the seats with a view of the seals are already taken. Still, dinner was outrageously wonderful. I had fish and chips and a couple bottles of Alaskan Amber, first I’ve had in years. We drove over to get a look at the old lighthouse at the end of the downtown area and drove up the coast a bit, too. After extending our reservation for one more night with an old hippie dressed in black and silver, we fall asleep to a symphony of seals grunting and squealing.

One of the best days we’ve ever spent on the road — or off.

Next: Jedediah Redwoods State Park, Hiouchi