In the Spring of 2006, I drove down the Washington & Oregon coasts. When I got to California, it was already night.
From 9-11 April 2007, I decided to complete the trip I started the year before. I drove from Sammamish, WA to Crescent City, CA then took 2 days to come back home along the California coast.
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From Day 2:
Down the mountainside, amidst the redwoods and moss, with mushrooms the colour of abdominal distress. With each step my legs sank two feet into the decay, each step taking me another beat away from the unbeaten path. I remembered the hard lessons: Moss plus log plus rain equals head trauma. Never touch the underside of anything (or anyone) until you’ve had a peak. Always take a jacket, even if the cold is bearable right now: You never know how many days it will be before someone realizes you're gone. Don’t eat any mushrooms that don’t come in a plastic box. Don’t eat mushrooms that come in plastic boxes, either.
It was Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. Maybe Tuesday. I stopped to take a picture of the valley. Earlier in the day the sun had been out; I asked for it to go away. In its fashion, the sun is oppressive: You must come out to play, you must enjoy yourself. I didn’t want a must, I wanted to experience this place of beauty on its own terms. And so the gray canopy returned to envelope the green one. These trees had been adolescents when America was still just a glint in Columbus’ eye. I was setting up a wide-angle shot when a strange shimmering caught the corner of my eye. Should I leave the mystery be, or do the super-thing and climb down the mountainside to find out?
Life: Take the easy way home, get a full night of sleep. Or do the super-thing, hit the button, watch the detonation. Maybe you end up with a story to tell. At a minimum, you remove a question mark that would hang over your head. Two days ago, the super-thing was to stop for a couple of hours in Vancouver, WA. One day ago, the super-thing was to obey Google Maps against all logic. Today, the super-thing was to climb down. Crash through or crash. At least I brought my jacket.
A hidden treasure-trove? A bunker from some ill-conceived war against Sonoma County? The bridgehead of an alien invasion? No: It was a cigarette vending machine. It had probably been there since such machines were all but outlawed in 1996. Or maybe it had been a souvenir of some now-deceased tobacconist, his heirs having decided that it wasn’t worth the extra $12 to take it to the landfill. Or maybe it was a trap, a modern-day Siren to lure curious wayfarers like myself to the bottom of the mountain and go insane thinking about the rudeness of it all. You would only notice it was there if you stopped in this particular spot and got perilously close to rolling down the hill yourself, and in any case tossing a vending machine up a hill is somewhat more involved than tossing one down, so it was little wonder that it had been there for 1 or 5 or 10 years.
There is somebody who is out there that is anti-smoking, pro-litter.