Cali: 2-24 Santa Rosa

US 101 south of Arcata is among the prettier drives in the U.S. – and also the goofiest. Whether it’s Confusion Hill where balls roll uphill and so on, or the Tree House, or the Drive-Thru Tree, Trees of Mystery, every sort of Bigfoot thing, and so on. And there’s also the headwaters of the Russian River, and a winding road through tree-covered hills, and the little town of Garberville that’s like dropping into a little eden of redwoods and cabins and smoke coming from chimneys. That’s where they have a thing alled Reggae on the River every year, and I always wonder what they locals must think when thousands of naked, stoned hippies and Rastafarians descend on their little patch of paradise.

As we dropped out of the mountains, the big trees and fishing holes and bigfoot statues gave way to oaks and pastures—and vineyards. We were getting into northern Sonoma County, aka Wine Country. Vineyards, wineries, winery supply places, tasting rooms, the whole thing.

As we rolled into Santa Rosa, I was thinking what a totally generic town it looked like, how all I wanted was a hotel room, some food, and the meeting, and that it offered me nothing else in the world – then I saw, on a sign, the words “Charles Shulz Museum.” It was one of those “no way!” moments where suddenly your whole perspective, and schedule, shifts. I knew I would go to that museum, and I did—more on that later.

The hotel had some funny quirks, like they asked me if I was okay with being on the second floor, then put me way in the back, and then there were like seven cars in the parking lot. Why am I in the back and on the second floor? They also had all these animal-themed signs around, like re-use the towels to help this snow owl, and turn off the lights when you leave to help this gorilla. My favorite was the toilet. They had a thing on there that explained it was a low-flow toilet, because of California water restrictions, and low-flow toilets are more susceptible to plugging, so please flush it more often. Again: please flush our low-flow toilet more often than you normally would. Only in America.

I did the classic Luggage Dump on the bed, hooked up the computer, walked next door to the Starbucks (Starbucks! Next door!) and sat down with my triple grande vanilla soy latte and went to work. I posted a trip photo gallery to my Club Photo site, wrote a lot of emails, and cranked out a Flyer travel column about the redwoods. I’ll post a link to it when it runs, but if you’ve read this blog, it will be quite familiar to you.

I also balanced my checkbook and looked at my budget, and soon thereafter got depressed. I’m spending a lot more money on this trip than I realized, or than I can really afford. Same old story: I’m much better at having fun than staying on budget. The $17 cab ride from the Santa Rosa bus station to the hotel didn’t help. From now on, it’s walking, public transit, and $5 meals. Well, this is California. $10 meals.

Eventually I set out for the meeting, and decided to find something cheaper and quicker than the Applebee’s across from the hotel. Then I just saw two fast-food places, and I had eaten Taco Bell during the lunch break on the bus. So then I decided to walk over to where the meeting was and find something there. Across the expressway I went, up the hill, and into—an office park. Now it’s 7, the meeting is at 8, and I don’t feel like walking back down the hill and across the expressway to choke down a Wendy’s. So I sit. Then I get halfway to a HALT situation: I’m hungry and lonely. So I call J, who’s back in Portland, and I call Mom, and I call my sponsor, who wasn’t around. It was nice talking to J.

The Santa Rosa meeting had 35 people! That’s more than all the other meetings I’ve been to put together. They did some things differently, too: no thanks after sharing, claps for newcomers, a short statement from a member about sponsoring (and then practically nobody, including the statement-maker, raised his hands to sponsor). There were lots of teenagers, some squirming, definitely a feel of the older people knowing each other; there was also a homecoming for a guy who moved off to Bend; I heard him say a few times, “Yeah, I got sober, and I finally got the wherewithal to make it happen.” He still participates in the email discussion about where to eat dinner before the meeting, though.

The size of the meeting, the location, the lack of pre-meeting contact with any members, the lack of dinner beforehand – all this made me feel more like an outsider than before. This is nobody’s fault but mine, and I’m not complaining, just noticing the difference. It’s probably a good transition for me, getting used to bigger meetings and bigger towns where my arrival is hardly noticed, much less an anticipated event. Poor ego!

I also wrote this, back at the hotel:

“Well, let’s see. I have felt tonight, for the first time this trip, the slipping of my writing compulsion. On every trip there’s a tendency to fall behind on the journals, and this one is no exception. I’m not behind yet, but tonight I felt the first twinges of “Well, I’ll do that tomorrow” – which is fine, but tomorrow I also have to write a travel article, make some phone calls for two or three other articles, and hopefully post some pictures to the Club Photo page, which for some reason I wasn’t able to do tonight.”

So you can see that every trip goes through ups and downs, and Thursday was a slight down. It was a good meeting, though—we read the “For the Newcomer” packet—and I had some nice talks with people afterwards. Then the guy who moved to Bend gave me a ride to the hotel, and I walked over to the Applebee’s, where I exercised my new Fiscal Restraint by having a half-size salad and no dessert.

Thursday I wrote the article for Memphis, made some calls for a Willamette Week sports piece, piled on a the continental breakfast while President Bush blathered on about Freedom being On The March (why do they even show this speech on TV?), then used the city bus system, thank you very much, to reach the Shulz Museum, and then the bus station, for $2. Not $17 like on the cab, but $2. The bus system in Santa Rosa runs until 8 p.m.; apparently, after that everybody is home? Also, the town is totally designed for cars. To get from the hotel to Starbucks, which is next door, there was no sidewalk, and I had to scramble over a grass embankment and cut through drive-through lane. Same for getting to Applebee’s – through a parking lot, dodge the Taco Bell drive-through.

The city bus, though, is always the same. You pay your fare, get a transfer, there’s somebody running to catch it, somebody else talking to himself, and so on. I arrived at an ice rink, which seemed odd for a while, since I was looking for the Shulz Museum. But it turns out he built the ice rink, then ate breakfast and lunch there every day. It was known as “Snoopy’s Home Ice,” and it was all done up in a Peanuts/Swiss Village theme with murals of frozen ponds, a Woodstock room, a Snoopy room in the Warm Puppy Cafe, and stained glass of snoopy playing hockey.

And my was meal was less than $8! Good job, Paul.

So, at this point, as I sit at the Broken Drum in San Rafael, sipping tea and making use of the WiFi, my battery is low, and I want to get some real dinner before the meeting. So I think what I’ll do right now is just post the notes I made at the somewhat chaotic Santa Rosa bus depot this afternoon. It was an odd scene, and the bus was so crowded it felt claustrophobic. Anyway, here you go, “live” from the Santa Rosa, California bus depot:

shulz museum: what a career! a whole world, thousands of pictures and observations. a simple, pure genius, like the human tendency to draw and make little observations found its purest form in one guy, along with a basic ability for observation of humanity – a guy who happened to live in Santa Rosa. Who knew? man of routine, sat at the same desk every day and said you need to be in the same place to let the creativity flow. I happen to feel the opposite, but hey. He wasn’t a man of the road. He had breakfast and lunch in the same place every day – they still reserve the table for him – which is in an ice rink which he designed and built, and which spurred a skating community in town. famous skaters came and signed their name in concrete, among them Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill. also, while I was in the warm puppy (as in, happiness is) cafe, i overheard a staffer saying “I don’t mean to be against America, but Sasha Cohen shouldn’t have won the Silver. I mean, she fell down twice, even though she landed all her other stuff.” Another woman, in a group at a table, I heard saying she looked forward to the “next evolution” of scoring in figure skating because of some objection she had. She said she liked what Scott Hamilton said about something this morning, the day after the ladies’ figure skating was handed out. All the media I saw was about how marketable Cohen and Tanith/Ben would be without the golds, but in this crowd it was about the skating.

apparently Schulz was also a golfer and hockey player. also built a baseball field. hosted hockey players, 1,000 sometimes, at big barbecues. said when he shot a bad round and came home feeling low, he'd "really give it to poor Charlie Brown. he'd feel low, too, because I did." a lifelong companion.

lady in the station is great. My bus is full (got the last seat—whew) and she’s been trying to help four people buy tickets for Corvallis for tomorrow. They have a (Spanish) translator who also helped an older couple. bus lady keeps saying somebody owes somebody some money, and when one guy left, she said, “Be here early—it’s better for you to wait for the driver than for him to wait for you, because he won’t.” Assured a northbounder that there’s not as many stops as there used to be, because “we don’t have a milk run anymore.” asked another, who asked for Long Beach, “California, right – not Florida?”

more Schulz: the American dream, in a way. He had a gift that reached its fullest potential. Wrote every day for 50 years! the drawing was so simple, so elegant, so humble and powerful. the writing so clean. his sketches (saved and ironed flat by a secretary) showed him changing words, making slight adjustments to a character’s facial expression. There was a video playing (in his reconstructed studio) showing his hands and pencil making drawings. so magical to watch those familiar forms emerge from emptiness! So easy looking, so clean. i can dig that, in a sense. writing is the same for me. I don’t even think about it – just get out of the way and let it happen. Some idea what I’m gonna do and how it’s gonna come out, but not in a way that I can state or explain. he was probably the same way, and that’s probably the one thing we had in common.

also interesting that on his timeline, it just said 1972 divorced, 1973 remarried. No explanation of that, of course. old-time polite history and journalism, like it’s none of our business. which it isn’t. whole town of Santa Rosa is sort of classic Americana town, with a lot of Spanish being spoken. everybody has a car, it’s sunny, lots of malls and nice parks. A town utterly without character, it seems. Purely, generically American, except it’s close to the wine country, and even then, I bet nobody who comes to the wine scene stays here, unless they have to. but a good sense of community, at least in the warm puppy.

now the bus lady is standing outside, smoking a cigarette, saying “You’re the pregnant one, right? How many bags ya got there, pregnant lady?” And everybody who walks up, she tells them, “Where ya goin’, honey?” Since most say San Francisco or thereabouts, she says, “Full today. Come back tomorrow right at 2 p.m. (or “a los dos”), when I get off lunch. It fills up early on the weekends.” And there’s this huge, freaky pile of boxes and luggage in the middle of the “station,” such as it is – a kiosk, really, in the parking lot of an auto shop and a taqueria. Lots of people chilling in the shade, smoking cigs, looking at their watches. The sounds of Frampton’s “I love your way” drifting out of the shop. Bus lady just told somebody that “this driver is real grouchy.”

trip is starting to feel crowded, hot and stressful. It was so easy up north, cool temps and half-full buses and people waiting for me. Right now I have work to catch up on in San Rafael, no idea where I’m staying tonight, don’t want to do the hotel thing and am uncomfortable bringing it up in the meeting. And the money thing. So it’s not as chilled as it was. But once I get into Oakland and hook up with people I know, I think it’ll chill again.

Now she’s berating somebody for showing up at 3, wanting to get on the bus. What’s interesting is that some people she offers to sell a ticket for tomorrow, some she doesn’t, one she referred to Golden Gate Transit for a bus to the SF Greyhound station ... so there’s no real consistency. Life on the bus!

And speaking of the bus, yonder it comes ...