Tahoe at last

I dialed the number of a small hostel in Tahoe. It’s a business that doesn’t accept credit cards to save on fees, so to reserve a room you need to be there. I explained to the kind woman that I was in Sacramento and would not be able to get there before 7 PM when they close the office. That was not a problem. She left the door open with the key of my room at the front desk, and we would talk about money the next day. I thought to myself “are there still places like that in this world?”

I arrived in North Tahoe Lake at night. I looked around and found the little hostel. The door was open indeed. There was a cozy fireplace with couches and cushions; a bookshelf with used books and a guitar leaned in the base.  The front desk was a little wood fitment. Over it, a note with my name and the keys. Next morning the young woman welcomed me and showed a big loaf of bread that she just baked to share. I had not seen the lake yet, but I was already in love with the place.

I have been dreaming on Lake Tahoe almost all my life. There was a documentary that hooked me up, so many years ago that I can’t remember. But since then I had this obsession of touching the lake. I did it finally at the point of Sand Harbor. No calendar picture can prepare you for the heavenly beauty of the water twisting the shape of rocks on the surface and blowing little flakes of copper between them. It’s so transparent that you can submerge to the neck and still see the nails on your feet.  You can also swim between rocks that form natural pools beside the pines. Some brave fishes will come tickling if you stand still.   

The water is so blue that it looks like the eyes of the world. Regardless of your theological convictions, this is for itself a religious experience.

The spark of the sun over the waves, the shadow of the sailboats and the crest of the mountains are almost too much beauty to assimilate in a single view.

The effect of this landscape on people is amazing. Everybody is smiling and greeting strangers as they pass by. I can’t find ugly people here, maybe because my mood has been elevated to a state of contemplation.

At night I went to the local bar and I was treated as if I was a member of the family coming back from a long trip. How you leave a place like this?

Conservationism - No more "cat" events

I’m enjoying the marvelous views of Yosemite. If sequoias make me feel like an insect, those granite mountains make me feel like bacteria. I had no idea how the park was distributed, and that was a good thing because it took me by surprise. All the sudden I was in this small valley surrounded by huge columns of granite. The river is like the central pin of a continental necklace. No picture can make justice to the sensation of insignificance that you feel looking up to those solid gray masses.  On this era of Photoshop, when you are trained to suspect even from beauty, these landscapes prove my cynicism wrong once again. This is wonderful.

It looks like we are actually moving forward in this conservationist movement. When the last hotel burned to the ground for itself at Glacier Point, it wasn’t reconstructed again. The chance was taken to stop developing in areas where people come to enjoy nature, not infrastructure.

Yosemite Village is actually in better condition now that it was 80 years ago, way better. You have to be careful while driving, not because of rules but because of creatures crossing the road. I stop for squirrels, deer, raccoons and even bears.

Some signs remind you not to feed these animals and explain that we should leave them wild. Immediately I tried to picture a group of conservationists Egyptians keeping people from feeding felines five thousand years ago. We wouldn’t have domestic cats today. We can use the same mind exercise for dogs, horses, mules and other kinds of animals that are tied irreversibly to our history. The point is that we are part of nature and the impact we have on it is also “natural”. But at some point, we decided that “human will” and “nature” are antonyms. 

So, what is nature? Is it just a series of random events? Why this “nature” keeps doings things way better than we? So far we suspect these random events to be self-selective, so just the best processes survive. But even after we understand the processes and try to reproduce them, something is missing. We comprehend the endocrine system (so we say), but by trying to fix one part, we break another. So, what is nature? Is it whatever is happening now that we don’t completely understand, so we better leave it alone?

I think humans are creating a second nature for themselves. That’s why we go to see Nature as a tourist because we feel already separated from her, so we come to pay mother a visit. And that can be easily proved by sitting a civilized person in the middle of the woods and see if that individual is even able to make clothes before winter.  

So we created this second nature on which we depend, but keep the first one intact because we never fully understood why it works so well. I agree with that.

Hugging a Giant

Talking about religion, just by the time Jesus was born, there was a tall sequoia tree no too far from what we call Fresno today. It had been raising to the sun for about two hundred years by then. Now it’s 2200 years old and still alive. That’s just natural for his species and it has another thousand years to go.  I went to pay him a visit and there it was, surrounded by a solid shield of silence that absorbs even the sound of dry leaves creaking under my steps.  Besides him, a huge branch that just felt some years ago, heavy as a truck, full of lovers' signatures. The air is chilly, but not cold. The light of the sun reflects as artificial flames burning statically in one of his sides.

Under this giant, I hear the word "beautiful" in many languages. One kind Swiss guy made me the favor to trigger the camera while I was standing at the base for size reference. In the middle of a small conversation, I told him what I love most of such enormous and old creatures: the fact that they make my problems look like grains of sand. He stood silent and turned his head towards the top of the tree as if he was looking at it for the first time.

This is not even the tallest tree is the world, it’s the one with the biggest volume. But then again, the volume is a concept that is important for us, humans. We like to put things on lists and keep records. In the same forest, you can find the tree that has the record of the biggest base area. It’s all geometry games we play in our heads. The tree itself is hardly an individual; it’s more like a constant flow of life that runs from the floor to the sky until it’s so tall that it falls and starts all over again.  

I found revealing the fact that sequoias NEED wildfires to survive. As the humans were protecting them, they were interrupting their natural cycle of reproduction and actually killing the trees out of love. Now there are controlled fires around the base to allow for the acorns to actually be fertile, among other more complicated process we are now aware of. 

Human medicine needs to reach the same point where we understand destruction as part of construction and death as part of life. Death is not a sad debt to be pay, it’s actually necessary to sustain the progress of the most formidable forms of life.

Getting out of LA

You don’t arrive at Los Angeles, you penetrate the traffic.  I had plenty of time to contemplate the skyscrapers from the slow motion 101 highway in a beautiful sunset. Once you get there, you wonder if this city realizes how much it overgrew itself. 

At night, the neighbors park on both sides of the road while the streets have still traffic in both directions, making you feel like you are about to lose a rearview mirror at any moment.   

During the day I walked through Hollywood Boulevard and had that obligatory shot with the big sign on my back, but there was nothing in that city to hold me for another night, so I’m heading north.

My appetite is not for places where big things happened to other people. Those landmarks are just unanimated echoes of someone else’s dreams. My thirst is for contact with humans, and there are so many in LA that I found none.

Three Pictures

I left San Diego and keep traveling north in quest of images, stimulus and trouble. Before going further, I want to post three curious pictures I have on my camera.

Even by getting into a 7-Eleven you still sense the proximity with Mexico.  There is a brand of ice cream called Mexico, and they even have one flavor of cucumber with chili.  I bought one, thinking “yeah, right, it must be one of those artificial flavors that they approach by… Ahhh!!!!”  The freaking thing was actually spacy; to the point that I needed to go back to the store and buy some milk to dissipate the burn. That was terrible. The rest of the flavors are very good.

I also the spotted a pawn shop called “Monte De Piedad: (Mount of Mercy)”.  I picture immediately the customers crying over the counter to get their furniture back from the merciful pawn owner.

And the third picture was taken at a dollar store in downtown San Diego. At It turns out, Jesus is now a collectible plastic superhero. I found it ironic to see Christianity, that grew so vast and strong since the antiquity, to be reduced to another icon of urban mythology. 

Old Town - New Fantasy

I'm in Old Town, San Diego. This was the original downtown of the city. According to historians, since it was admitted into the United States in 1850, the investors felt the need to break with the established Mexican culture and built an American San Diego closer to navigable waters. What happened then was that the original distribution of the first center remained undisturbed and a very nice tourist project grew around the old plaza.

Of course, the town never looked as charming as it's today. I went into a tiny store where I bought a cup of coffee. They have the products displayed on jars and the attendants are dressed as if it was the beginning of the 1800s. It’s like buying in the Oleson store from the Little House on the Prairie. Outside, the house has a plate that reads:

• 1830 - Single-story adobe home built by Francisco Maria Alvarado and his wife, Tomasa Pico

I have seen pictures of the place at that time. None of the inhabitants were as handsome as the employees in customs now attending the stores. Also, the place is now perfectly clean. A thin path of sand has been put in front of the porch to simulate the dust that was part of the real scenery. But above all, the current house is made of wood and cement, not adobe. I know that because I grew up in an adobe house and there is no way you can punch a wall without taking down a piece of dry sludge. If you try the trick with this one, you can get a fractured phalange.

I’m not criticizing. My point is that reality and memory are always two separate things. The old town was displaced for economic reasons, and now, economic reasons bring it to life again. Most buildings have been reconstructed at a millionaire cost and the setting is so beautiful that it looks like the best place for dining in San Diego for my taste.

In the past, this was a harsh and dry town with horse manure in the streets where people lost their molars before 30 and had no the luxury of taking a bath every day. 

At night I was walking down a street full of cheerfully illuminated bars when, in a bad turn, I ended up walking over the old cemetery. Some historians recovered the exact spot of some burials and you can read the complete list of people under your feet. Most were just months old. I bet if they were given the choice of living in our time or theirs, they'd be with us.  

Someday people will take the fuselage of an old Boeing 747, charge tickets to sit at first class and have a dummy robot dressed as fly attendant explaining how we were able to put that thing on the air when there was enough oil to burn. Today is when paradise happens. Even yesterday's hell seems heaven when we reconstruct it for tourists.

I live the habit of been nostalgic about events at the very moment they occur.

Pacific Beach

Today I drove to Pacific Beach and La Jolla, also part of San Diego County.

I don’t know how South Beach keeps its popularity.  If you are looking for nice restaurants with tables at the open air, fountains, cafes and romantic hotels in an attractive beach setting and you live on the West coast, there is no need to go East.

This place is excellent for 30 something people ready to deliver that engagement ring. Everybody is walking in couples. There is a Hotel of small wood cabins built over a docket. You can even park your car in it.  That’s the place you want to be if you are a dead-hard photographer and want to capture a big tsunami coming directly from the open sea. But such a spectacular end is just for the few. Most will live on and complete the damage by getting married and have a set of wedding pictures in Balboa Park.

The city is not as clean as San Diego downtown, though.  There is a lot of money in the buildings but modest investment on the streets.  

After seen so many miles of restaurants, bars and nice hotels, you end up with the impression of having an economy that runs on oil and alcohol.

In the same city, I found a library of “Christian Science”. They’ll be very aggravated if you ask them for Tom Cruise, that’s “Scientology”. They have a whole article explaining the differences.  I also found a coalition of associations of atheists just for the San Diego Area. There are more than eighteen, including “San Diego Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers ”, “San Diego New Atheists and Agnostics” and “San Diego Skeptics”. I’ve never been in a city where religious and non-religious people were so well organized.

I'm not surprised to find people of different believes getting organized. What always strike me is to keep finding people that think they can persuade others. If religion was nothing but a collection of theological reasons, that might be possible, but in reality, people use religion for social purposes; logic has nothing to do with their affiliation. So, I'm not trying to convert people to Zeus.