In which the family travels to places where the trees are taller than the buildings

A week or two ago, one of my friends posted a picture on Facebook of a beach full of sea glass, and I sort of got a bee in my bonnet that I needed to see it in person.  So this Saturday, we headed north toward the Mendocino coast, stopping along the way to show Shay the big redwoods at Hendy Woods.

There were exactly two other cars in the park when we were there, and so while we did say brief hellos to other hikers on the loop we walked, it was mainly silent, and mossy, and wet-smelling, and dark, with big shafts of light streaming at an angle through the trees.  It's funny: I teach on a campus that has forests of redwood trees, and I have certainly always supported the cause of saving old-growth trees, intellectually, but I think this is the first time that I really understood the majesty of that kind of forest, and understood why people will sit in those trees to save them.

Then, we went to see the sea glass.

It's on a beach in Fort Bragg, north of Mendocino; apparently, the beach was once the town dump and was filled with all kinds of junk, including lots of glass.  Dumping was eventually prohibited, and the waves have ground down the once-dumped glass into little rainbow pebbles.  It's a surprisingly beautiful moment of man-made destruction meeting nature.  Beautiful, that is, until you remember that you have a toddler whose main mode of discovery is to stick everything into his mouth.  

We stayed at a very clean-but-no-frills motel, the main selling point of which was that we had a kitchenette that was actually a separate room, so we could put the baby to bed at 7 and still watch a movie and read books.  Since you seem to want to know everything, we watched The Secret of Kells, a beautiful little animated movie that borrows from Celtic legend, which you should totally see if you haven't yet, and I worked on Last Call, a very long but interesting history of Prohibition.

This feels much more like a diary entry than I had intended it to be.  I wish I had a point -- I think my main point is that it was nice to be in quiet places and to see some different parts of the natural world than we see on a day-to-day basis.  I have some friends who live in the suburbs who tell me that they make a point to bring their children into the city so that they can experience the urban feel; I think I am starting to feel the draw in the other direction -- the need to bring my child away from the city.  Patrick and I kept remarking about how spread out the little towns up north felt.  We always want a little bit of what we don't have, I guess.  One day I will write a post about how I would give my left arm to live near a Trader Joe's where I could park without losing my mind.