Repentance and Compassion

It had to happen.  We had to turn south again and today was the day.  Most gloomy we were too as this has been a great trip.  Marvellous scenery and lovely people too.  So it was with regret we headed out of Eureka back along 101 – I think retracing steps is the gloomy part.  Things start becoming familiar instead of creating that squiggly feeling in your belly about the new things that you are about to experience.

We stopped briefly in Ferndale largely because we’d watched a Food TV programme called Diners, Drive Ins and Dives which had featured this small town.  Located 15 miles out of Eureka it is definitely off the beaten track but we found a healthy sprinkling of tourists like us with cameras at the ready. 

Annoyingly the reason we’d come was closed today!  This was a bakery making bacon and cheese scones that appealed to Viv so our stay was brief.  Cute town though with lots of Victorian style buildings.

Our trip to the next destination Ukiah (the county capital of Mendocino County incidentally with a county topping population of 36,000) took us through the Avenue of the Giants again, and this time we stopped and bimbled (see website here).

Fires cause this hollowing out effect in the tree trunks.  The tree remains in perfectly good health otherwise, this one being a monster.

The redwoods were just as large and lovely as elsewhere on the road trip and of course we had our daily hug again – this will be something we’ll miss when we leave California.  Simply walking through the trees and finding absolute silence is priceless.

Roosevelt Elk in the forest

We’d targeted Ukiah as I’d spotted in some brochure a comment about the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas being located there -- see website here.  It intrigued us for sure and having visited I still wonder why they located it there.  Perhaps when they started out in the 1970’s, the closure of the old county hospital gave them a start in infrastructure that they could readily use.

The man who started it all, Hsuan Hua, came originally from Manchuria via various parts of China.  There he met a 109 year old Buddhist patriarch who prophesied that the young man would be one of the most important leaders of the faith. In 1948 possibly co-terminous with the ending of the civil war in China, he left for Hong Kong which he left in the late 1960’s again possibly co-terminous with the Cultural Revolution on the mainland which threatened Hong Kong’s existence at the time.  Arriving in the US to spread the word he established the city as a place of teaching, reflection and worship.

The city is a regular school as well as everything else with children from all backgrounds studying there all with an overlay of the religious principles of Buddhism which appear to my superficial gaze to be the third way; namely neither materialistic/anarchist nor religious ascetic.  Just do the right thing and achieve an internal state of peace.  Very similar to the early precepts of Christianity really.

One thing I couldn’t answer was why or how the religion has been taken over by the Chinese for the original Buddha was an Indian prince born in 563 BC who gave up the material world at age 28 to teach inner peace and the third way as he traveled through that part of Asia.  He clearly did a great job as there are lots of Bhuddists globally today.  But when did the Chinese take over? 

Siddartha Guatama, the original 'awakened one' with his 5 companions that comprised the first 'Sangha' (from a painting in a Laotian temple) 

Not sure.  A question to answer to be sure.

We’d come to join in the ceremony of Repentance and Compassion, a daily ritual much like a mass in the Catholic church, held daily at 12.30 pm.  There weren’t many attendees, mainly monks and students by the look of them – the former wore sandals, the latter sneakers under their robes – who were on the right hand side of the hall.  We lay people were on the left hand side, women at the back, men at the front. 

Fortunately Viv and I were helped in our respective places by kind, patient and generous folk who pointed out in the book that accompanied the service where we are.  Viv thinks it was Mandarin, but the book was interesting in that it laid out the service first in English, next in characters and then finally in phonetic Chinese.  This was what they chanted in, very fast too so it was tough to read the English and follow the ritual despite my friend’s help.

The overall tone of the ritual was inner peace, seeking forgiveness for past transgressions and looking forward to a life of learning, compassion and repentance.  Again not much different from much of the Catholic and other Christian rituals.

This was a good experience.

The rest of the day was a madcap rush down the highway to San Francisco airport but as we’d chosen the no freeway option on our GPS much was over mountains again with more chicanes and windy bends than I could count and along the very high cliff top highway 1 – I had a death grip on the wheel of the car for much of it! 

But we got there in the end, staying at Pacifica just down the road from the airport and an early start tomorrow.

Thanks California and using the words of ex-Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar, “We’ll be back!”

Working Class Hero

The guide book I used to chart some of the things we wanted to do on this trip suggested that Fort Bragg was the blue collar cousin of chic Mendocino, some 10 miles further down the rugged west coast of California.  It is an old logging and fishing town, a place Steinbeck was intimately familiar with and as it was bigger and had more lodging options than Mendocino, so we ended up there.

We hadn't intended to.  We'd meant to leave Deerfield at a reasonable hour and head up 101 to Eureka, our furthest northern point on this trip, and then bimble down the coast at a reasonable pace.

However a late morning induced by poor discipline attached to some of Deerfield's finest meant that our departure time was delayed to the point where we'd be reaching Eureka at a late hour rather than mid-afternoon so we decided on the hoof to change direction and stop about half way up and as Fort Bragg had the Skunk Train, a rail line into the redwoods following the old logging trail, that was where we chose to stay.

The last 20 or so miles from Willitts on the freeway to Fort Bragg were uphill and then downhill through a redwood forest with the road clinging onto the hillsides for dear life in some places, or so it felt.

However Fort Bragg was the first place we witnessed the famous fog from these parts.  It was brown.  I've never seen brown fog before!  However it burned off around 4 pm so made for a gloriously sunny evening that enabled Viv and I to go out for a long walk along the seashore and through a small redwood grove on the outskirts of town.

Fog rolling in

Our daily redwood fix

We also had the chance to have a beer at the North Coast Brewery where we met a very friendly family from Crescent City (to the far north) who were on their bi-annual trip to the big city (San Francisco) to get their big city fix.

The train ride was the focal point of the day being a 4 hour round trip to a place called North Spur, a siding in the middle of the forest about another 2 or 3 hours from Willets, some 50 miles away.  The rolling stock ranged from 150 years old to just about 50 or 60, ours on the day was 70 years old.  Too tired, according to the genial conductor, to make the full trip to Willetts with such a load as the final bit was all through the really high mountains.

It was a wonderful trip through the forest, not a government owned park but owned by the California Lumber Company who still log the forest... but with far more regulation now than in the past.  The lumber company had sold the railway to the current owners 40 years ago because they didn't want to run a railroad any longer -- the company owns 12 feet from the centre of the railway line in both directions along the track.  Fortunately the weather has been benign for years now so the track hasn't worn as much as it could have ... in many parts it looks to be on the verge of falling down a cliff!  The conductor said rains would wash out large tracts regularly but this hasn't been the case lately.

Not much stopping the track being washed away!

The trip itself was enriched by the conductor's stories and another guy dressed in train uniform who sang railway songs to the travelers.  Both were locals and had some great stories of the old days.

The logging companies had upwards of 300 men out in the woods at any point in time at camps all along the railway.  When they went further, they added more line occasionally putting in camps in the midst of the forest (like North Spur).  The forest was widely denuded only twice in the last 100 years though; once being after the 1906 fire when San Francisco needed to be rebuilt.  The other time was during World War II when the forest was sacrificed for the war effort.  After the first time, the lumber company offered people the chance to buy 100 acres of denuded forest for $1 per acre with conditions: farm don't log, don't sub-let.  Several parcels remain who are apple farmers.  The others were bought back during the Depression by the logging company at $2 per acre.

One of the old remaining log cabins in the woods

The actual logging process was a massive enterprise encompassing not only the chopping down process itself but also its transshipment from the forest to a place where the logs could be shipped out -- this was largely before roads in the area, so shipping out of often small ports was often the only way.  Trouble was redwood logs are so water saturated and therefore heavy that they could not be carried out by ox cart or river (they would sink), hence railway.

Additionally the first 10-20 feet of the tree were particularly heavy so loggers would climb up 10 or so feet and attach a sort of platform where 2 of them would saw and hack 12 hours each day for 7-8 days per tree (with a trunk diameter of 7-8 feet, a 200 year old tree as they couldn't cut down the really big ones!) not knowing when the tree would actually fall so they were still up there on their platforms when these huge trees would fall.  Dangerous work indeed -- but they were paid $4 per day to do it.  A big payday back then!

Now its all over like the fishing.  Regulation, environmentalists and over zealous husbandry in earlier times are the collective reasons -- i.e. few fish.  So I asked the conductor what the young people do and he told me:

"One of two things.  They leave or grow marijuana.  There's 100,000 acres of marijuana out there in the forest.  Young fellers can earn upwards of $100,000 a year just by growing a few plants".

I can believe it as marijuana smells are everywhere.  Apparently there's a license that can be obtained, a 2-15 license someone told me, that enables people to grow marijuana for their own personal use.  But that definition is often/always abused so there are endless numbers of 'Herb' shops around, even in the smallest villages.  It really does seem endemic these days.

Regulation and other well meaning initiatives often have unintended consequences.  As a finance person I do wonder what will become of the banking and finance industry with the ever growing list of capital restrictions.  The immediate reaction has been the curtailment of retail and small business lending.  Where will those people go for their finance needs?

After the Skunk Train, we headed off to the Mendocino Botanical Gardens (see website here) to stroll among the rhododendron gardens.  They were just coming into bloom, in a few weeks they will be even more magnificent.

They were actually pretty magnificent anyway!

I was disappointed with Mendocino, in retrospect possibly unfairly.  First of all it is tiny (but then again so many other named towns are tiny too) and the weather had started to grey and get chilly.  We'd experienced fantastic weather to this point so this may have stained my impression.  It looked to be 2 streets down to the water and 3 across all with artsy enterprises selling I'm not sure what.  The place certainly didn't leave a good impression with me anyway.

Our final decision was dinner and Noyo Harbour back in Fort Bragg where we saw some otters swim up the river competing no doubt for the fish we were eating.  Sorry guys, today you lost!

Tomorrow we head north…again!