Into the Redwoods: A Journey of Self

‘...to escape is the greatest of pleasures ... the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self ... sheltered and enclosed.’ - Virginia Woolf

Or is it?

~

As I pulled away from the box-like greyhound bus station in Eugene, Oregon, I thoroughly enjoyed the sight of Matthew disappearing in my rear-view mirror. I felt a weight lift. My irritating companion successfully off loaded, I could now enjoy the 650-mile journey back to Santa Cruz, where I was living in California, and stop wherever I damn well wanted.


When I tell people about my road trip with Matthew, in August 2002, they generally mention such likely examples as, “Ah, yes, ‘A Walk in the Woods’!” But Bill Bryson’s story of taking on the Appalachian Trail and (almost as a by-product) re-awakening a long-neglected friendship, is quite a different story. Bryson’s book is about the walk, as indicated in the opening paragraphs where he describes the trail itself: the length, the states passed through, the names of the various hills, listed almost as old friends: ‘Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Catskills’ and so on. A book about the walk and the companionship. Yet this memoir is not about the journey, nor even Matthew – it’s about me. It is about what happened inside me, on that way back, and has something to do with why I question Woolf in the opening epigraph: the idea that who we are at home is not who we are when we travel.


It came about when Matthew had contacted me and asked if he could stop by and say hello on his way up the West Coast of the USA. I was eager to see him again and suggested we make a road trip of it together. I had been living in Santa Cruz for a few months and was keen to see more of the country that was currently my home. So I borrowed some camping gear, and loaded it along with his into my 1986 Honda Accord and we headed off, driving up to through San Francisco, over the Golden Gate bridge (a car related thrill even greater for me than getting my Californian Driving licence), and headed up Highway 101, the coastal road that leads passed some of the most beautiful coastline in the world. Six hundred and fifty miles later however, I was more than pleased to see the back of him.

I had met Matthew two years before, when we were both in an Indian ashram during the millennium. He was the newish partner of a lady with two children, who was a friend of my then wife, Ocean, and we were there with her son, Elijah. Together we formed a party of seven, and got along well. In both cases, it was the women who were keener to be there, to discover the spirituality of the ashram, so Matthew and I shared a bemusement that bonded us. The ashram in question (Sai Baba’s) could hold up to 50,000 people and during the two months we spent there it went from a few thousand up to about twenty and then back down again, as the new millennium passed. Making that scale of gathering work took a phenomenal amount of organisation, and the army of devoted helpers, known as Savas, were both impressive and formidable. Consequently, for Matthew and I, the intense spiritual and devotional goings-on was at times challenging, and we found solace in shared humour: one day, for instance, Matthew had wondered out loud why they kept putting little red dots between our eyebrows, and I’d replied it was probably to give God something to aim at. It was a reflection of my stress at the time (Ocean – not a natural mother – had volunteered herself as part of the Christmas celebrations, leaving me alone with a sick child). But Matthew appreciated that kind of humour, and to me he was a sense of support.


One could say that since then he had moved on, while I had not. But whichever explanation you want to give it, since our last meeting he had been ‘studying’ under a guru himself, and developed a spiritual zealousness I was unprepared for. As we travelled north, I came to see he had adopted the infamous spiritual practice of being utterly honest in every moment – known as ‘being authentic’. It works well when everybody is doing it by mutual consent, but it clashes badly with normal, everyday manners and customs. This was the kind of ‘spiritual makeover’ I discovered had taken place within Matthew since our last meeting, and I was stuck in a small car with it. As we travelled, he shared his new enlightenment freely: he passed judgement on everything we encountered; refused to stop anywhere that had a sniff of tourism about it; insisted on telling the people we met exactly what he thought of them, and above all, made it his mission to critique any part of my personality he felt needed spiritual cleansing. The aim of this last part was intended to force me to be equally ‘authentic in every moment’ – otherwise known as, getting a reaction. But since I am – or used to be –too meek to do that, he became increasingly determined and thus unpleasant until, when we had stopped for a swim in a creek near our camp site, he jumped me in a mock attack. No maliciousness was intended; he had simply decided to use a physical assault as a way to force me to be ‘authentic’. In a sense, it worked: the next day I informed him, authentically, that I was not enjoying the trip with him; and would authentically take him to the nearest greyhound bus station and authentically bid him an authentic farewell. I then refused, to his utter frustration, to discuss it, saying it was simply something I was going to do. I won’t pretend I didn’t rather enjoy doing it though, and felt no guilt about it whatsoever. And that was the end of that. So no, not really ‘a walk in the woods’ friendship bonding adventure, and once having said goodbye, albeit with a hug, I joyfully turned my car around and headed home, my way.

 

Although I had been to America a few times in the past, and had now come to live there, I am by nature quite nervous of the world. This is partly a side effect of boarding school, which does tend to teach that the world is fundamentally unsafe. Ironically though, it also leaves you with a sense of not belonging anywhere, which can evolve into a tendency to drift. Consequently, I had left home almost immediately upon leaving school, and moved through numerous places across the south of England, before confronting my fear of travelling abroad by going to work in Spain. Indeed, this pattern of wandering had continued throughout my 20s and 30s to such an extent that by the time I reached 40, I could work out that the length of time I had stayed in any one dwelling averaged out to only 7 months. Given this, it seemed incongruous to me that I still found leaving home made me nervous, even though once I had, I seem to enjoy the change and feel a powerful sense of freedom, and peace. Yet it was not until this trip, that I started to have a sense of why.

 

Travelling with Matthew had been a buffer against the unexpected, I had used him as an excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway: to go for a wander. But now that I was on my own, and some distance from home, I had been bridged from safe-at-homeness into that wonderful state where there is nothing familiar around me and nowhere in particular to have to go or be. Moreover, I started to get a sense that being alone, with hundreds of miles of Northern California between me and where I called home, mirrored my own inner world. I was in my mid 30s: old enough to know something of myself, but young enough to still be confused by much of it. That sense of not belonging anywhere, of not having a true hometown or even family home (my own family had long since scattered), was like a bereavement for something I’d never had. It hung over me as a gentle sadness, and no doubt was partly responsible for inspiring Matthew to be so irritatingly provocative towards my less-than-delighted-with-the-world perspectives. However, those of us who have lived a significant amount of time in that state of mind, have a lot of experience of our own company, and depending on the degree of self-awareness that goes with it, we can be at peace with that. It isn’t realistic to think we should be happy all the time, after all. If we were, there would be no incentive to look within and learn more about ourselves. This truth seems to become even greater when experiencing a journey through foreign lands — foreign to oneself that is — because travel has the unique effect of making us more conscious of each moment. When we spend almost every day in the same place, doing the same thing, we don’t notice time go by, and although my own experience, being based on having lived in so many places, meant my life had already seemed a lot longer to me than the sum of its years, travel still greatly intensified it.

To make the most of this phenomenon, I decided to once again stick to the smaller roads going back. I could have zoomed the whole way on Interstate 5 at the exciting maximum speed of 65mph. But I already knew Highway 101 to be more diverse and changing in scenery. It was also the road that would lead back to one of the places I had wanted to stop at on the way up, which Matthew had been so against. Highway 101 (as can be seen by the 3d map above) goes through the north Californian Redwood Forests, and that was what I most wanted to see. 

So, I let the I5 take me 140miles down to Grants Pass, then slipped across via Highway 199, to settle back onto the coast road from Crescent City onwards. I will admit, that this memoire isn’t allowing for every adventure or stop I made, for I did also cross to visit Mount Shasta around this point, a diversion of 300 miles (because who wouldn’t want to boast they’d climbed 9000 feet up a mountain without getting out of their car), but for the most part I stuck to the 101, the coast, and the Redwoods.

I adore Redwoods, and among the many forest trails, which visitors could follow, was a stop called Trees of Mystery. This one has a cable car option, to take visitors high into the forest mountains. Unfortunately, in the car park entrance was a giant statue of an American folklore hero, known as Paul Bunyan, along with his pet ox, Babe. This highly colourful example of American tourist art had made Matthew – authentically and forcefully – refuse to stop, so for me it was a must do visit on my way back. I almost rushed to get there – probably my rebellion against Matthew’s ‘spiritual purity’. Whatever the motivation, it proved to be a powerful and significant experience for me.


The well-prepared, laid pathway wound slowly and peacefully among the redwoods, gently sloping upwards. If you’ve never been around Redwood trees, it’s difficult to imagine. Even photos don’t really do it justice. It’s not just that they go so far upwards that you cannot see the tops, its more how enormously wide they are. It could take a large family to be able to hold hands around a single tree, and in some cases, it would require several generations of that family. A poignant thought if one thinks of ones like the Grandfather Tree, near the Richardson Grove State park: 265 feet high with a circumference of 55 feet and a life span reaching back 1800 years). There are many such ‘tree destinations’ along this Highway and if I’m honest some broke my heart. It is the norm of these amazing beings to hollow out during forest fires yet continue to live and grow, but it cannot be normal for them to find themselves turned into human experiments – like tree houses and drive throughs. I visited many of these places, and felt both wonder and sadness – certainly when I saw the drive thru tree, I instantly decided that there was no way on earth I was going to drive through a living tree. Instead I parked, walked into it, touched it, and mumbled a sort of sorry for my fellow men. 

For these reasons the Trees of Mystery and its SkyTrail was my favourite. For the most part, the path was the only interference and being narrow and at times steep, sparser of people – the less fit did not venture so far. So I was soon alone and, as far as my own senses were concerned, lost. Lost in thought, lost in mind, lost (almost) in place. Truly on my own.

There is something that happens when travelling alone: a feeling you get when you see a site and cannot share it with someone. It makes the experience curiously more intense. Your thoughts become louder, your feelings more impressing. And without the opportunity to release those pressures through conversation, you become very aware of yourself in a way that does not happen when you have the distraction of companions around you. Yet, this time, that intensity was increased exponentially because, as I wandered through the trees, I was conscious of a couple trailing me. I don’t mean to suggest that they were following me, or even very aware of me, they were far too much in love with each other to be aware of anything else bar the trees and themselves. But having this example of human joy close enough to taste (yet significant by its absence in my own life), added to my own feelings. For half an hour or so, we moved with each other at a consistent distance, but once we arrived at the top, the viewing platform that lies at the top of the cable car ride, we were finally forced together. Here we met, when I was asked to take some photos for them, and I took the opportunity to seek answers to some of the questions that had been nagging my mind, as I’d jealously watched their obvious deep happiness.





“If you don’t mind me saying,” I said as I took at their pictures. “You guys seem very in love, have you been together long?”

 

They looked at each other and smiled, then giggled. “About 18 months,” said the woman who I later learned (and admit, with snobby British disappointment), was named Brandi. I didn’t intrude further and after a while, they headed on their way, returning back down via the cable car while I remained on the viewing platform, utterly alone, looking out across the top of the world – for some considerable time. I felt so completely unaware of where I was, or even, for a while, who I was. I was feeling something I did not understand, nor would for some years to come.





Many people write about travelling and comment on the joy of not knowing where one is, of becoming lost. And some writers acknowledge the connection between being lost on the outside and the internal feelings of being lost in one’s life. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf writes, ‘For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. ... To be silent; to be alone.’ It was something of that feeling I had back then, standing there alone high up in that Redwood forest, able to look a great distance across the top of thousands of trees — with no one else. It was beautiful – perhaps all the more so because there was no way to release that intense influx of sensations. I began to feel something new, something I had never felt before. It was something I was not able to verbalise until I saw a film that would not be made for another 4 years, in which this feeling, which so many travellers have felt, was beautifully and perfectly vocalised.


"Then something happened, something difficult to describe. Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’d been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness because I felt alive. Yes, alive."

The film is called Paris Je t’aime (2006), and the scene I’m referring to is when an American woman explains in clumsy but poignantly learnt French, the story of her recent trip to Paris. At that time, there among the top of the Redwoods, I could not have vocalised it at all, let alone as well. But the feeling was one of the most powerful experiences of being alive I have ever felt. It is without doubt necessary to be somewhere unfamiliar and, I think, at a distance from whatever home currently is, to feel it. And it is not easy to stay with that feeling, though it is beautiful, for there is also such an intense ‘alone-liness’ that it changes you, I believe. When I returned to my car, I was not the same.

 

I had and did make several stops along Highway 101, too many to list, but that night, 130 odd miles south of the SkyTrail, and still in the heightened state of its gift, I turned off the 101 into Garberville. It was just one of those spontaneous decisions we make when travelling, looking for somewhere to sleep, but as I drove through the town I passed a bar with saloon style, red swinging doors. Outside was a sign reading “Wednesday Night Music Night”. Back then, I had no idea that this kind of bar could be dangerous, so armed with my newly acquired joie de vivre, and the kind of naïveté necessary to survive tricky situations when travelling, I checked into a motel down the street, and walked back for what I hoped would be an entertaining night.

 

It was about 9 o’clock when I arrived at the bar and I very soon discovered that the Wednesday Music Night sign had been referring to the weekly karaoke. An event that was clearly a popular occurrence with the twenty or so people there. It was large, spacious with many tables and a long bar at one end. American bars are often dim, but it was brightly lit by the karaoke DJ lights and everyone was in a good mood. I sat at the bar and ordered beer and listened to the various locals sing their chosen songs. Everybody knew everyone and had their own well practised track, and they sang them with a familiarity very much their own. The best song to be re-rendered was To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before. The microphones were wireless and passed around to where the lyrics were provided to the singers via a number of screens, set up around the bar. The two older men singing this one were just a few feet away from me and it was immediately apparent that although they were watching the video playback intently, they were not reading a damn thing, and were in fact making up their own words. This was done with great skill, for their words fitted both the music and the sentiment of the story – indeed, I half suspected what we were hearing were personal fantasies, or even autobiographical revealings, for these guys were old enough to have lived and loved abundantly. But however it was that they came to be using their own lyrics, the reason was obvious: the backdrop to the official lyrics was an abundance of bikini clad young women cavorting through or on an assortment of swimming pools, beach scenes, classic American car bonnets (or hoods I should say) and of course, horses. All in all, it was one of the most amusing four minutes of my life – helped, I must say, in no small part by their rather good voices.

 

That was not the case with Ruby. Ruby was certainly entertaining, but she did not so much sing as shriek. I could probably be mistaken for thinking I was the only person in the bar who was aware of that, because whenever Ruby went up to sing, a surprisingly large number of times, nobody dampened in their appreciation or enthusiasm. Yet, she was terrible, truly terrible, so I bravely dealt with the dilemma (by which I mean trying not to laugh) by swinging my barstool away from Ruby and her admirers and ordered more beer – which I began to chase down with bourbon. In between Ruby’s numerous assaults on the world of music we were treated to a few erotic-dance-cum-pop-song numbers by “The Mill Girls” and various other regulars. I watched all this in the same solitary observation that had accompanied me on my walk among the Redwoods. However, unlike Redwoods, people notice you and eventually a few became curious about me.


The first person to actively engage with me was a woman probably in her late 40s. Perfectly pleasant and friendly and curious. When she discovered that I was not only an out of towner (though I think that was obvious to everybody), but also British, she seemed to think it important that everybody in the bar knew me. By this point, being somewhere between 11 o’clock and midnight, I’d had quite a bit to drink and the invitation to be introduced one by one to everybody seemed quite amusing, if a little strange, so I happily agreed to let myself be guided round the bar by her. For the most part this was just a case of simple hellos, fielding the odd question and demonstrating my British accent. However, it did get a little hairy at one moment:


“This is Tim, he’s from England,” my new guide explained to a young couple. “This is Tiny and Cherri.”

I suppressed my first thought that it must be somehow compulsory for everybody in America to have a name that ended in ‘y’ or ‘i’, and just smiled happily and said hello and it was nice to meet them.

“Oh my God,” Cherri cooed. “Your accent is just so cute.” (The ‘so’ lasted quite a long time).

 

The enthusiasm which she said this clearly upset Tiny and, even drunk, that worried me instantly. Whoever said that Americans don’t get irony was wrong (well, they weren’t actually), but in this particular case his name was highly ironic. Tiny was huge: at least six and a half foot high, made from apparently only muscle, with shoulder length hair with a handlebar moustache that was itself so long that it dropped below his neckline. I placed him mid to late twenties at most and in the peak of physical fitness. From a distance, he would have looked like an impressive rodeo star (I had already been told by my guide it was essential to be able to ride horses to live in the town), close up he looked like a cage fighter. As his girlfriend enthused about my accent, Tiny stood up in a way that was undoubtedly threatening. Some automatic sense of self-preservation and innate knowledge of how to deal with the single-minded male brain clicked in, and I cried out: “Oh no! You guys have way cuter accents than we do, we just sound stuck up.” Tiny stopped, looked surprised, oddly pleased, and then sat down.

 

Generally speaking, this really ought not to have worked. I had already learned that you can’t pay an American a compliment, because they tend to think you’re just stating the obvious and look confused. But what they are less used to is modesty – it’s completely alien. I appreciate this sounds like criticism, a put down, but I don’t mean it that way. Americans it seems, are conditioned from young to be highly patriotic. A child making their way to school across a playground, I was told, who was arriving too late to be in class for the morning national anthem, will stop and stand outside, hand on heart, while it plays. The American greeting of, “How’s it going?” or similar, has to be answered with something positive. It’s a ritual identical to our obsession with the weather, attuned instead to an obsession with how great life is. When they say, “Have a nice day”, they genuinely mean it. It’s almost compulsory. So, me making a flattering remark about their accents while ridiculing my own might not have worked, but it did, fortunately.

Eventually I made my way back to my barstool, ordered another drink, and turned around to find another local wanting to know all about me. I was already familiar with the highly enthusiastic friendliness of the average American, but this lady really surprised me. She was probably not much older than myself, and explained to me, uninvited, that she was single and lived with her four children and — adding, sincerely and with great pride — that, “Oh yes! I’ve travelled a lot too!” It turned out to mean that she had lived in four different states. But I didn’t argue: I was already aware that Americans see different states as effectively different countries. What was interesting and surprising was that regardless of what I said about where I did live, had lived, or what I was doing, or what my plans were, she was convinced that Garberville was, “you know, this is absolutely the best town - anywhere in the world! You should come and live here!” I honestly thought I was being picked up, or groomed, and even being drunk it was a little disconcerting. I really did not want to become the father to four children overnight. As it turned out, she was genuinely just being friendly and when the evening ended, she melted away into the general crowd as we all headed out to the street. Relieved not to have to try and disengage myself from an awkward situation, I floated down the sidewalk to my motel and a contented night’s sleep, much the wiser about out of town American culture. Odd, dogmatic, dangerous, but undoubtedly beautiful. One might even call it authentic.


The point of including the above in this memoire-cum-personal-essay, my ‘messy’, is that I am a shy person, I don’t do that sort of thing. I don’t go to bars, or clubs. I don’t like crowds. I don’t join in. For instance, by some strange chance of fate, I found myself at the 1985 Live Aid Concert, when I was 19. Yet when in the middle of the crowd, near the front, during the Queen set in which everyone around me was performing the Radio Gaga synchronised hand clap, I was the only one who wasn’t. I’m just not that person. But on this trip, on that mountain and in that bar – and other places too – I was free, different, able to be whoever emerged. I had an emptiness that was peaceful, intriguing and – in ways that are hard to explain – felt safer.


When I look back on this trip, and in particular what happened to me up amongst the Redwoods, I’m reminded of something that had happened to me when I had arrived in India, those two years previously. Something I had completely misunderstood at the time. I’d had the feeling, when I got off the plane and first stood on Indian soil, that I had in some way come home. I felt more like myself than I had ever done. At the time my mind made up all sorts of imaginings about having lived in India in a past life or being in love with its spirituality — or something like that. But since then I’ve come to understand that what happened to me in India, and to a degree in the Redwood Park, was that I, the me I had always had to be, had gone, it had got lost. In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit talks about this strange phenomenon:

‘For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are. This dissolution of identity is familiar to travellers in foreign places and remote fastness...’

The truth was that I had experienced culture shock. Nothing at all was familiar, and so neither was I. However, rather than be distressed by it as some are, I experienced it as a liberation. My experience of not having a permanent home for so many years meant I was experiencing, there, a ‘coming home to myself’. I was free of any of the associations and baggage of culture, family, or social expectations. Things I had never liked or felt at peace with. Likewise, living in America (and before that in Spain), I was able to be myself more than when I was in England; able to live with more of my insides showing. Travelling, being somewhere unfamiliar, being somewhere where we are not required to be what we have always been, allows us to be ourselves.

So, ultimately, and perhaps to be fair to Matthew, what he had done by following a guru, I had begun to do by following territories unknown. In our own ways, we had both lost something of the old self that stopped us finding our true selves.