Andrew M.H. Alexander

Trinity Alps Fishing Report

or, Hey Bear/Happy Birthday

August 2023

Tuesday. 11:42 am. J. and I are at a coffee-shop-cum-kayak-building-school. We’re in a tiny Victorian town on the Humboldt coastal plain, miles from the highway, surrounded by cows. Last night we stealth-camped on the beach.

J. is writing in her journal. She’s drinking a cappuccino and eating a blueberry muffin, contra my laptop-typing, drip coffee-drinking, and snickerdoodle-eating. She leans over. “If I were writing a story about this weekend, I would call it ‘Happy Birthday/Hey Bear.’”

We spent three nights backpacking in the Trinity Alps. My goal was to be halfway between the Sierra and the Pacific Northwest—geologically, florally, climatically. I got what I asked for. It turned out to not be what I wanted, at least not entirely.

I fished in alpine lakes and we ate miso-glazed brook trout over udon. We were visited by a hungry bear. We went skinny-dipping. The streams and lakes were clear, turquoise, amber. We saw snakes and lizards. Thousands of tiny dragonflies—an inch or two long, lapis-blue. A huge herd of black-tail deer at one of the lakes. A single bald eagle, on the drive in from Weaverville.

We saw cat poop. As in, mountain lion poop. That was our guess on the trail. It was similar in size and shape to human poop, but was 50% fur. I poked it apart with a stick to see if there were any remains: nope, it was just fur infused with poop. The hairs were all the same short length—the cat’s own hair, from grooming. I was skeptical that a secretive lion would poop in such a prominent location and not bury it, but the internet confirms that’s their typical behavior (and that their poops look just like what we saw). We saw bear poop, too. Lots. The piles were botryoidal from undigested berries. (Why do they eat the berries if they can’t digest them?)

The trailhead was desert-dry California mountains: ninety degrees, full sun, manzanita and madrone and Ponderosa pines. As we climbed it got wetter. We left California. The temperature dropped and the trees transitioned to Douglas fir and cedar. The sky became cloudier and the light more diffuse. I realized, all of a sudden, that I was in the most humid atmosphere I’d ever been in in California, outside of the coast. It rained. It hailed. It didn’t hail hard where we were, but an hour later we walked through meadows covered with so many unmelted hailstones that the ground was completely obscured. With my blurry eyesight it looked snow-covered.

The walls of the canyon were doubly-curved. There was the river, and above it a steep slope. Above that, a more gentle slope. At the top, a final, short-but-sharp ridge. Rugged and scary. A cubic Bezier curve. There were granite slabs, like in the Sierra, but even more jagged, broken, unrounded, granite. White with flecks of black.

1. Salvelinus

I caught three brook trout and made miso-glazed trout over udon! J. was excited and enthusiastic and supportive of the fishing. I was a little surprised. But grateful!

The miso-glazed trout was basically a New York Times recipe. I packed miso, mirin, sesame oil, and rice vinegar in little TSA-compliant bottles, plus some sugar, and whisked them together over heat. I mixed the glaze and the trout together in a two-gallon plastic bag, and marinated them for an hour, submerged for refrigeration a few inches into the lake and secured with a chunk of granite. I bought a 12” nonstick pizza baking pan at Walmart, shoved it into the back mesh pocket of my backpack, and that’s what we grilled the fish on, supported by rocks a few inches above the flame of my stove. I made udon—two packets of vacuum-packed fresh udon from the Japanese market in San Mateo, plus one of the two seasoning packets, some sesame seeds, more sesame oil, and shredded nori. I served the fish over the the noodles. It was really, really good.

My ratio of fish to f-bombs was way lower than two weeks ago in the Sierra with E.. I actually had some idea of what I was doing! I didn’t get as quickly frustrated with gear and knots! I killed the fish way more humanely (i.e., faster), and felt, especially by the third fish, that I actually was okay at cleaning them.

I tossed the guts back into the lake. As I was packing up I saw a snake swimming off with them in its mouth.

(Later I learned that in alpine lakes, or at least in the Trinities, you’re not supposed to toss the entrails back into the water, because they don’t decompose as readily as they would in non-alpine lakes. Whoops!)

We were at Upper Canyon Lake, and there were lots of fish jumping. Like, big fish jumping, out in the middle. Auspicious! On one of the far banks a pair of guys were fly-fishing. At the fly-fishing store in Berkeley, the staff were telling me how fishing alpine lakes is easy, because the trout are hungry and “naiive.”

I caught my first trout in just minutes! J. was surprised. And thrilled. I was fishing by the outlet to the lake, which is shallow, but drops off after 20-ish feet. That’s where I was trying to cast to. I tried wading in, but postholed into the muck.

The second trout I caught five or ten minutes later. I got a bite, but didn’t set it, which wasn’t disappointing because it demonstrated that at least there was a hungry fish there! A few casts later I got it. It didn’t fight that hard. I was almost disappointed. Don’t you have… will??

The third fish was by a big submerged rock, also by a dropoff, a little further away from the outlet. I was specifically casting to the rock, thinking there might be a fish there. I was about to give up when, untying a knot I had knotted into my leader while casting poorly (it was windy!), I saw a fish jump right by the rock. !!! So I kept casting there, and a couple casts later, got it!!!

I had sharpened both my knives—the Leatherman that Grandpa bought me in 2008, and the fancy knife G. and I had found on the trail to Mt. Conness last summer—on J.’s sharpening block before leaving. The Leatherman slit the fish’s belly way easier than it had two weeks ago.

I’m surprised how much meat there is in a single trout. This was my immediate shock when I cleaned the trout I caught in the Desolation Wilderness a few weeks ago. The viscera were way smaller than I expected, and the meat way bigger than I expected! They’re just swimming silver sheets of muscle.

The one thing that was unfortunate about the miso-glazed-trout-over-udon entree is that it wasn’t regional. My top trout fantasy for this trip had been grilled trout with a fresh trail-foraged berry compote. I found someone’s “trout with berry compote” recipe online and brought dried mint leaves from my garden and a Walla Walla onion that Grandma sent. At the bottom of the trail, there were lots of thimbleberries—but they were overripe and dried out. At the top, there were also lots of thimbleberries—but they weren’t yet ripe. Go figure. Where’s the intermediate value theorem when you need it? There was a wild raspberry bush right by our campsite—but the handful of berries on it weren’t ripe either. Next time!

Now I’m googling “alpine lake trout sashimi.” Is that a terrible idea? Two of the fish I caught were female and had egg sacks. I’m looking up recipes for trout caviar. Is that a thing? High-elevation haute cuisine? Hmm. So many backcountry trout ideas. And now I’m reading about gyotaku, a Japanese method of block-printing, but using fish rather than linocut. Ink the fish, use it as a stamp, get its shape and texture, and then maybe watercolor over it! If you use a nontoxic ink, you can still eat it! (I have vague recollections of doing this in Japanese summer camp? But with gross store-bought fish?) Oh! What about lox? One of my housemates got really into making homemade lox during covid, using slabs of salmon from Whole Foods, and I imitated him a couple of times—but what if I made homemade lox with salmonids I caught myself?? I’m already planning my birthday party this year to feature homemade bagels/lox/cream cheese—let’s take it one step further.

So: trout with a wild berry sauce, trout sashimi, trout caviar, trout lox, trout art prints.

I guess I should actually get a California fishing license now.

2. Ursus

The fish weren’t the only reason we had an after-dinner visitor. But they probably were the proximate cause.

We had been warned, repeatedly, of an aggressive bear (or two) at Canyon Creek Lakes, way too habituated to humans. At the ranger station in Weaverville, the dude who spoke to the ranger before us had been warned off camping where we did. (We didn’t get dissuaded. I guess we looked like we could handle it.) At the trailhead there was a laminated notice to that effect, with a sticky note attached saying that a bear, on August 1st, had ripped open a BearVault “like a tuna can.” The two rangers we met hiking out as we were hiking in said they had seen the aftermath. Nuts. The bears had been ripping through tents and gear looking for food. Don’t even leave your campsite to day-hike.

After the fishy dinner, I cleaned up. J. sat and read more of A River Runs Through It.

Deer came by. There was lots of deer poop by the lake, which I was surprised by, not expecting to see deer at this altitude (I always think of deer as suburban creatures, like raccoons or squirrels). Black-tailed deer. Small. A buck, but even he was only the size of a teenage white-tail. The deer were aware of our presence, but otherwise carried on with their evening routine. They munched on the bushes and went to the lake to drink. One got within a dozen feet of J. They had their eyes on each other the entire time.

I finished cleaning. J. got out a half-smoked joint. We sat in front of the tent, looking at the graying sky and granite slabs. The canyon runs north-south, and the sun had dipped below the rim an hour earlier. We were on the east shore of the lake, in front of a steep slope covered in Douglas fir and scrub brush. We watched the western cliffs and sky get darker.

On the far side of the lake, where most of the other campers were, a group started yelling “Hey bear! Hey bear!” From across the lake it was a hard to hear exactly what phonemes they were making. J. thought they were singing “Happy Birthday.” I couldn’t tell. It was loud and enthusiastic. Earlier we’d met a group of people who’d hiked in together and who certainly could have been on a camping birthday party. We could see a fire going. J. was probably right that they were singing “Happy Birthday.” I couldn’t tell exactly how they were singing—they were repeating it, or singing the chorus on a loop, at odd intervals. But probably only some of the frequencies were being transmitted across the distance and the water and whatever they were singing was a sensible version of the song.

Otherwise it was very peaceful and pleasant. The edge of the lake in the fading light. The granite cliffs and jagged ridge on the far shore. The light was nearly all gone, and we were about to go to bed, when we heard a quiet snort behind us.

The deer had been making quiet noises as they wandered through the bushes. But deer don’t snort.

That was definitely a snort.

It took us both a second to register.

We turned around. 20 feet behind us, ten feet behind the tent, right by a huge Douglas fir stump, sitting up looking at us, was a bear. A big one! We made eye contact. It raced off. Cute butt. J. shrieked and grabbed my arm, pulling me in front of her. “HEY BEAR! HEY BEAR!,” we both started yelling. I grabbed the pan I had cooked the fish on and started banging it with a chunk of granite.

I’ve seen plenty of bears in public campsites, or in the backcountry during the day, but I think this is the first time I’ve had a bear come up to my backcountry site at night? There were a few times in high school when I heard bears ravaging other people’s stuff at Lake Colden (in the Adirondack High Peaks interior), and there was the time in 1994 when the bear broke into our cabin at night, but I’ve never been explicitly propositioned, myself, at night, by one.

We yelled and banged on the pan for a while. Gradually we transitioned to putting stuff away for the night, while keeping a close watch on the bushes/slope behind the tent. J. peed. I brushed my teeth. 20 minutes went by. No more sign of the bear. We washed our hands. We were about to get into the tent. Occasionally scanning the scrub. Then, caught in my headlamp: eyes! Shining back at me, from maybe 50 feet away, in a clump of Douglas fir. Aaaaghh. We shouted and banged more. They disappeared.

A minute or two later: more eyes. A second pair. We kept shouting and banging. A third pair of eyes appeared. They’re everywhere!!! Then the eyes stepped more clearly into the beam of my headlamp. A deer. It looked quizzically at us. Oh. Okay. It’s the deer. But the first pair of eyes I had seen was definitely a bear! I had seen not just its eyes, but its bear-shape.

More eyes up above where we first saw the bear. It was… more deer. All the deer we had seen in the dusk were apparently now just chilling on a bench a little ways up the slope. Noticing us, confused, but otherwise unperturbed by all the yelling and banging. (Or by the bear who was skulking around.)

“The deer are trying to protect us!,” I said. “The deer are our friends! And we’re just harassing them! Guys, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

More rustling from the clump of Douglas fir where we had seen the bear the second time.

“HEY BEAR! HEY BEAR! SORRY DEER! SORRY DEER! HEY BEAR!!!”

We shined our headlamps back on it. The rustling stopped. A pair of eyes. The bear was still there.

“Where did you dispose of the fish heads?,” J. asked.

“Um,” I said. “Basically right there.

“I guess I should have buried them further away.

“Oops.”

I suggested we pack up the site and move a quarter-mile back to the slabs. Windier, less amenable to bears, far away from where we had cooked (and disposed of the fish), and nearer to lots of other people. We’d never be able to sleep at this site. We’d be awake and alert all night to the tiniest rustling. So we shoved everything into our packs and hiked over to the slabs. It was less of a pain than I thought. It took a while to find a spot. Lots of other people set up on the slabs. Plus the dark. We finally got in bed a little before 11.

“You’re supposed to smoke the joint after the bear encounter,” I said, “not before.”

In the morning, as we were packing up, the group that had been either singing Happy Birthday or shouting “Hey Bear!” walked by on their way out. They looked like they had responded to an open casting call for an REI ad posted on the UC Berkeley campus. They said that, yup, there had been a bear, and they had been yelling at it. It took a lot of convincing to make it go away. It kept returning.

In retrospect no one sings Happy Birthday on a loop that many times.

3. Salix

“It’s kind of poetic,” J. said, as we were hiking out of Canyon Creek Lakes, “that you got what you asked for, but not what you wanted.”

What I had asked for was to be closer to the Pacific Northwest. I’ve spent a ton of time in the Sierra; they’re hot and dry; my Lost Coast trip last fall was itself a jump-cut juxtaposition of California and Oregon; I wanted to be more north and more wet. The gloss on the Trinity Alps, like that of the Lost Coast, is that they’re halfway between the Sierra and the Pacific Northwest in all those dimensions—the rocks, the plants, the moisture.

So the sketch I came up with was:

A great plan: off-trail travel! Peak-bagging! A glacier! High alpine hiking! Four different drainages! Three different lakes to fish in! Hitchhiking! Enough excitement for me, while still being unambitious enough to give us a lot of time to chill at camp, as J. wanted. And all in a mountain range I’ve never explored!

It didn’t work out. Instead we did something like:

Our failure was foreshadowed on Friday.

Somehow, right before the final climb to Lower Canyon Lake, we lost the trail. We spent half an hour bushwhacking through thick, dense, head-high brush. We weren’t the only ones to do so—I found an ancient Coors Light can, a Nalgene, and unspooled fishing line. The monofilament line stretched on and on, and as I tried to clean it, tangled around me. The Nalgene excited me at first—it would have been my third taken-from-the-trail Nalgene—until I saw that the opposite side was punctured.

I was grouchy.

It wasn’t raining any more, but the leaves of the brush were covered in droplets. Since we were pushing straight through, that meant it was still raining—not from above but from around, raining horizontally, from all 360 degrees. My camera was mounted on my chest strap and was getting soaked. It’s already gotten majorly soaked several times this year, and several important buttons have stopped working. (It’s a decade old, so I need an excuse to replace it, but still.)

I was annoyed. J. was cheerful. “That was ridiculous!”

Saturday was worse.

In the morning we hiked from our campsite at Lower Canyon Lake the short distance to the upper lake. We found a beautiful campsite right by the lake, on the east side, unoccupied, perfect. J. said she had stayed at at her previous trip to the Trinities.

We tried to start making our way around the lake and up the canyon. There was a lot of brush. There was a lot of rock—landslide talus, steep slabs. No particularly obvious route through all of it. The brush seemed thicker by the lake, so we made our way up the canyon wall on talus. That eventually petered out, so we started trying to go through the brush. Awful idea. 10 minutes to go 100 feet to the next talus field. This wasn’t waist-high brush over flat ground; it was brush as tall (or taller) than we were, over steep, uneven ground, whose exact topography was obscured by the brush. Half the time we were just using branches themselves as footholds. Would they hold? How much would they sink when we stepped on them? How much would our feet slip when we stepped on them and they sunk?

J. had the tent poles strapped to the outside of her backpack, at the bottom. The branches were tearing at our faces and bodies and grabbing everything. It occurred to me to check to make sure her poles were still on her pack. Nope. Gone. Thankfully they were just a few feet back, with the drawstring of their stuff sack still hanging from whatever branch had pickpocketed them.

We had a brief view of the beautiful site back by the lake. We saw some other people there. A group of three guys. J. suggested we just go back and camp there.

We forced our way through more brush. Finally the brush field ended. Another landslide of talus. We hopped across. Much better! Nice and speedy and more pleasant. But then the talus ended. More brush.

I kept calling the brush “manzanita,” as a catch-all for “annoying California scrub that’s in the way.” J. clarified that it wasn’t manzanita per se. Later, using ChatGPT rather than Google to investigate, I think it was alpine willow—Salix glauca, or something like that.

I started whacking through. After a few feet I got to a cliff—still covered in brush, but too steep to descend, especially with such a heavy pack. A huge boulder on the uphill side. Ugh. We turned back and retreated to the talus landslide.

“This fucking sucks,” J. said. We decided to return to the lake.

It took just as long to get down as it did to get up. If not longer. Going down talus is way harder than going up or across.

J. didn’t even have hiking poles. “This really doesn’t feel safe,” she said.

We could hear the group of guys we had seen by the lake talking. They didn’t seem to be at the campsite any more; they seemed to be hiking somewhere, but we couldn’t figure out where.

I tweaked my left ankle on some talus. Not great.

It took just as much time to get back to the campsite by the lake as it had taken to get to our high point. An hour or two and we had only gone a few hundred feet.

Awful.

We dropped our packs. J. seemed happier and suggested we make another attempt, or set up camp and then day-hike to the pass an the glacier. “Do you want to just go for it?,” she said, encouragingly. But I had decided it was impossible. The trail ended before the scrub did. I was expecting expansive alpine hiking. Not dense bushwhacking.

I was grouchy.

It was hot and sunny and miserable.

We tried to rig up the tent fly to get some shade. But there weren’t great anchor points, and it ended up being so low that it prevented any cooling airflow, while still letting most of the horrible sunrays through.

The three guys we had seen at the site earlier, and then heard talking, came around. They said they had been trying to bushwhack up to a lake higher up in the canyon, Kalmia Lake. They had been trying to do basically the first part of exactly what we had been trying to do. Like us they had had no success. They had been beaten by the brush. Three guys, in their 20s. They looked competent. I felt vindicated.

We chatted about it. They decided to head back out for another attempt. J. kept saying that we should just go for it. I still thought it was impossible. And in any case it was way too late in the day by that point.

“We could just go for it!”

Or, she suggested, I could just go for it, as a day hike, while she stayed at the lake, since I’m faster.

It was kind and sweet and encouraging and I felt like such a wet blanket not taking her up on it. But it really was impossible. I have a high enough risk-tolerance, and enough aggression in the mountains, that if I decide I can’t do something in the mountains, it’s not from a lack of gumption or a lack of encouragement. There are other things that scare me and that I need encouragement for. But not mountains.

Even later, reading about it, I read trip reports of people somehow making it from Upper Canyon Lake up to the pass. How? How??? It’s too thick to bushwhack. The trail ended before the scrub did. How??

Vegetation too thick to traverse. Well, I had said I wanted a Pacific Northwestern experience, didn’t I?

I wrote in my diary. J. started reading A River Runs Through It. My favorite novel, which I had brought for her. We went on a short scrambling and swimming and wading expedition, around the top corner of the lake and up the inlet stream a ways. We had to scramble over a huge boulder; we had to swim for a bit; then we had to tramp through a marsh. The inlet stream was beautiful and clear and gravel-bottomed. The banks were barricaded with willow.

Eventually it got to be late enough in the afternoon that I figured it was time to start fishing. J. watched me for a bit and screamed in excitement when I caught the first one. Then she scampered away. “I don’t want to see you bash its head in!”

She joked about how, in A River Runs Through It, it’s the men who fish and the women who weave baskets for them. “I’ll weave a basket for you to put our fish in!”

4.

So there was the aborted plan, and the delicious fish, and the hungry bear.

On Sunday we slept in and started to hike out. J. thought we should take a side trail up to another lake and stay another night. I wanted to hike out and drive to Eureka and stare at the ocean. We deferred the decision and kept hiking. I realized we had probably missed the turnoff to the side trail. J. didn’t want to backtrack and had decided she wanted to hike out. I had decided I wanted to hike up the side trail and stay another night. We argued. Then we backtracked, and hiked up to Boulder Canyon Lake. The slope was thick with scrub and we never could have made it if not for the trail. It was just as thick as the scrub above Upper Canyon Lake, but here, there was a trail. The lake was in an east-opening cirque, at the top of the scrub, surrounded by granite slabs. Had we had a full day, we could have scrambled up the rock to the peak a couple thousand feet above the lake. Bummer!

Camping on the opposite shore was a threesome of girlfriends. J. was excited, because her first Trinity Alps trip, in 2018, had been a girls’ trip with two of her close friends.

The lake was pretty but warm and murky, without much of an inlet or outlet. Nothing jumping. I didn’t even try to fish. We swam. We made J.’s dehydrated three-bean quinoa chili. And quesadillas. (J. pronounced it with a hard “L”, to be silly.)

J. asked me questions about my relationship with my family. I felt defensive. J. has a very good relationship with her family; I don’t. I went on a walk by myself to go sit on a rock above the lake.

J. read the last dozen pages of A River Runs Through It. In the dark in the tent we talked about it. I recited the last page from memory. She said nothing, for a long time, and I thought she had fallen asleep. I rolled over to do the same, and she said that she was still awake, and had been silently crying.

5.

Monday we slept in. J. did my dad’s move of going swimming right before you leave, as the final act once everything is all packed away. We hiked out. We bought ice cream and Fritos from the adorably-quaint Junction City Store on the mountain highway at the end of the trailhead road. There was a faded poster-sized ad for Steve’s Trinity Guide Service. In eager run-on sentences and idiosyncratic capitalization Steve described the salmon and steelhead we’d catch from his boat (he wrote in the plural).

We tuned in to KSLG (“K-slug”), which turned out to not be a college radio station but was just as good as one, with a perfect playlist. We drove to Arcata to get food, but the downtown was too much like the Tenderloin, so we continued to Eureka. We had burgers and fish’n’chips and beers at the Lost Coast Brewery. I sent my dad a photo, reminding him of the time we went there in 2012.

I looked at satellite photos of the surroundings, trying to find us a place to sleep for the night. Humboldt Bay is guarded by two long huge natural jetties. The north one is closer to the city and developed, with a small town and a decommissioned naval station. The south one is harder to get to and way more remote. We’d have way more success illegally camping there!

We drove there. There was a big bluff, without any obvious spots to stealth camp, and then a road which, according to the map, went down onto the sandbar. From the top of the bluff we had a view north of the entire bay and Eureka and Arcata and the lights of the fishing boats off the coast. There was a gate across the road down to the sandbar. It was open. But a sign said that it was locked half an hour after sunset. No camping. No one allowed after dark.

We sat in the car and I looked at more satellite imagery. A RAV4 with a bike rack drove up, paused at the still-open gate and sign, and then turned around. Did they have the same idea as us?

I looked at more satellite imagery to try to find another site. Here’s one: 20 minutes away, somewhat further south, on the north side of the mouth of the Eel River. “Crab Park.”

It was at the very end of what was marked on the map as “Cannibal Island Road.”

We drove through darkened farmland and a dark little farming village, Loleta. And then, Cannibal Island Road. Four miles, laser-straight latitudinally, bumping up and down on gravel. Pitch-black outside the cone of our headlights.The road got narrower and narrower, eventually only one lane, until it terminated in a turn-around at the mouth of the Eel River.

Not much of a park. We got out and looked. Lots of graffiti and trash. Broken bottles. On the other side of concrete construction barriers was a sandy beach.

We saw headlights. They were a long ways away. Four miles of a straight road! We freaked out and got back in the car. Finally the other car arrived. A RAV4 with a bike rack. The same one? The same one.

They turned around. We watched their taillights get smaller for four miles. Then we got back out of the car. J. was scared to set up the tent and stealth camp. “I’m a rule-follower!”

6.

In the morning it was foggy and gray. No fly on the tent. We woke up only when we were buzzed by a helicopter, zooming down the beach just a few hundred feet overhead. We walked up and down the beach in the gray. Driftwood. Rounded rocks. A sea lion. The sound of the waves pounding.

The Eel is one of the bigger rivers draining the redwoods, but even though it flows down onto the Humboldt Plain it doesn’t go into Humboldt Bay. It takes its own exit.

We argued about where to get coffee. I wanted to go back to Eureka; J. wanted to continue south and go to some coffee shop she found on her phone. Her description it sound painfully antique-shop-kitschy. We drove to Eureka, got coffee and bagels from “Los Bagels” (the name must have been ironic, since this is not the Spanish-influenced part of California), looked at the boats in the harbor and watched a guy fish from the dock as a sea lion and a rower swam and sculled by, found a thicket of Himalayan blackberries and picked a bunch, and wandered through the Tuesday morning farmers’ market, where J. impulsively bought two prints from a painter, one of an otter and another of a skunk.

Then we drove to J.’s coffee shop. This was our compromise: first Eureka, then J.’s coffee shop. J.’s plan was way better. First of all, the town: gosh golly. “Ferndale” is a tiny town four miles off the highway, at the very southern edge of the Humboldt plain backed up against a steep hillside thickly forested with Douglas firs and redwoods. The town is all cute little Victorian houses and buildings. There were lots of bike tourers. And this coffee shop!!! What WAS that place??? It was called the “Mind’s Eye Manufactory,” and it was—I don’t know how to describe it—an Alaskan steampunk coffee shop? The front half is a coffee shop; the back half is a kayak-building workshop and school. They have classes. There was all this informational material about how the guy who runs it goes and studies traditional kayak building in Alaska. There were walrus skulls as decor.

Here’s an excerpt from the self-description on the webpage:

The Manufactory is a multi-materials workshop shared by an ever-changing collective of artists and craftspeople pursuing projects ranging from indigenous boatbuilding to bamboo bicycle building; from ceramics to casting metals to fiber arts to woodblock printmaking. It just depends on who’s in the shop at any given moment. There’s a tendency at the Manufactory for embracing craft that is “low tech and high touch”, and most of us love having opportunities to share what we know with others via hands-on classes. The schedule follows a spontaneous flow of community projects and classes, as well as personal woodworking projects in various stages of completion. …

Ferndale. Amazing.

We drove back to the Bay.

We stopped at a cafe in the redwoods. J. showed me pictures she had taken of herself, with a self-timer, on her 2018 Trinities trip. I shared the photos of the mountain lion poop with my cat-pictures groupchat.

We listened to a podcast about whaling. An economic historian was discussing American whaling in the 19th century and what a huge part of the economy it was. J. was upset that neither the host nor the guest weren’t more strident in their moral condemnation. The guest was talking about novel legal structures that enabled investment and firm creation. “They shouldn’t be calling it ‘whaling,’” J. said. “They should be calling it ‘whale killing.’ Just like no one should call it ‘hunting’ or ‘fishing;’ they should call it ‘animal killing’ and ‘fish killing.’”

J. complained that I had farted in the car. I had. She noticed right away. I hadn’t said anything. The next time (look, I had beans at the cafe), I responded by turning the blower on.

“What are you doing?!? You’re supposed to lower the windows! This just blows your fart in my face!”

20 minutes later, driving on the freeway through downtown Oakland, almost back to J.’s house, a horrible, septic smell filled the car.

“That’s not me! I swear that’s not me! I didn’t fart!”

J. erupted in laughter. “Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not you?”

“I didn’t! I didn’t!”

She doubled over in her seat laughing.

“That’s the sewage treatment plant!”