“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” is apparently an accurate, though famously misattributed quote to Mark Twain. Twain supposedly actually said something closer to “you can never go without a coat in the summer in the city of San Francisco,” being that when he was in San Francisco, he apparently suffered a case of hypothermia.
It was a little chillier than I expected.
I did NOT pay the $23 to take the tour of the Winchester Mansion. Like a saavy consumer content for the moment to say I’d BEEN there, I walked around the outside of the place and went to the gift shop, which was of course free to enter. This was when I realized something troubling about America.
As I flipped through the books that detailed the amazing features of the house, which range from the bizarre and completely impractical to the genuinely innovative (the brass implants to all the corners of the steps to keep dust from collecting and making them easier to clean, the card-and-tube messaging system for the servants), I thought that the keychains I would find there for my brother (who collects them) would be quite neat.
All of the souvenirs were completely generic … and in some instances barely made sense. Stuffed animals for the kiddies … Winchester House keychains with lucky pennies inside from 2003 …
I get it … it’s easier and cheaper to mass produce something generic, but I would think if people are willing to pay $23 to see the place, and you have so many details to work with … wouldn’t it be cool to use some of that to make appropriate, legitimately keep-sake-worthy souvenirs? Say … maybe keychains modeled on the famous winchester rifle or the roller skates he made. Or little plastic versions of the stained glass windows with the Shakespeare quotes that no one is quite sure why they were so important to Mrs. Winchester …. If you’ve got something just brimming with details to draw from … you don’t even really have to be all that creative to make something cool.
A delightful exception to this trend of boring and inappropriate souvenirs was the Muir Forest just outside the city. For $3, I spent a few hours in the presence of hundreds of the world’s tallest living creatures, some so old they predate Christ. And they were magnificent. And the park had a certain style to it as well. The fallen trees were incorporated into the design of the paths and fencework, and a path here or there was led into hollowed out trees visitors were allowed to stand inside. This is great because, having been to the Petrified Forest National Park and Muir Woods now, it is parks like these that have to strike a difficult balance between letting people be hands on with nature and connect to these incredible things, and making sure they don’t slowly destroy that environment with their affection for it. You can’t go running around on the saplings or take home the ironically small pine cones, but you can walk across one sturdy and smoothed redwood that bridges a creek on one of the trails, and a chipmunk damn near came up and sat on my boot. It’s a park that shows a lot of thought, and I liked seeing that, but not being overwhelmed by it.
The logo for the park is even a really slick art deco sort of poster design, which I would later see interpreted very smartly into plastic stained glass keychains at the gift shop.
Where Muir also improves on the Petrified Forest National Park is that the souvenirs are truly special and indigenous TO Muir. At Petrified Forest, I was hoping to get my brother a petrified wood keychain, but was bummed to find that none of the materials had actually come from the park in Arizona, and they just looked like tumbled stones on ugly, blingly-gold-toned findings. At Muir, there were leaves from the forest, redwood pine cones and other indigenous flora, coated in precious metals and made into earrings, keychains and ornaments. There were redwood beads made into jewelry, and carved boxes. The sweet, light smell of the pine, different from familiar one I grew up with on the east coast, was distilled into small vials you could use to make your house smell like Muir.
BUT the coolest souvenir (which distance and time would not let me take home with me) I discovered as I was at the register paying for Justin’s carved rosewood keychain with the Muir logo and two slim cedar post cards that you can actually mail. I saw a small photo album. When I opened it, a card explained that you could purchase sequoia and redwood saplings for about $7, and if you did the park encouraged you to grow them in your hometown and send them pictures and updates. One of the pictures in the album was of a redwood, already 100ft tall, that Muir visitors had left with as a sapling and planted in 1976. Others showed small children growing up alongside their giant pines. I turned around and held in my hands a little tube with a small, bright-green sapling in it and couldn’t believe I was allowed to grow a monster like that, who’s root structures would one day cover more area underground than the floorspace of any apartment I am likely to ever call home.
So I was impressed, not only with the park itself, but with the artistic and appropriate use of its resources and attributes to provide truly memorable souvenirs, which I think is a considerable problem with a lot of the tourist destinations of America nowadays.
Coming back from Muir into the city, I paid the $5 toll to drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, noting Alcatraz in the distance, continued down to Lombard and tested my stick shift skills on that most serpentine of roads (rob says I graduate to expert), ate in Chinatown, went to the City Lights Bookstore (which was part of the impetus for the writing of “Matador” and where I was delighted to finally purchase a copy of rob’s friend Zak Smith’s art book that we had seen in the making on his New York apartment wall held up with tacks only a couple years ago) … all for maybe about the same money I would have paid to tour the Winchester House, with the exception of the book.
So I figure that works out.
We went to Reno, and after that it was on to Oregon. We stopped in Ashland, OR, to play an open mic and see if we could make enough money for gas the rest of the way. We made more than twice what we needed AND found $2.89 gas in the land-of-more-than-$3-gas to boot. Note: Oregon, like Jersey, has attendants pump your gas.
When we got finished playing, a strange, slightly-Bjork-looking girl at the bar told me she was in love with me, and that she would take me to Spain with her if I wanted (in my head, I swiftly filled in the conversation we must have had in her head, where I’d been telling the audience about my ticket in Texas and she must have been thinking that I could leave the country as opposed to paying it). Then she extended a closed hand to me and told me that she had something for me. I held out a skeptical palm, primed for spiders or whatever manner of small unpleasantness someone could imprison in a fist, and she dropped a small, white shard.
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s a piece of my tooth. It fractured and I don’t need it anymore. It will bring you luck.”
Stunned, I could think of nothing to do but to put it in the small pocket of my jeans to ensure I wouldn’t lose it, and the funny thing is … I think Oregon Alison (who this month decided she was going by Jasmine) and her bizarre gesture might have ended my writer’s block, and so the shard of stranger’s tooth might have been lucky after all. I finally finished a song yesterday.
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