Perspective

I met Charmaine at the Grandfather Tree extravaganza of stuff that surrounds a giant redwood. She is from South Carolina but has lived west for years and worked here for two. I asked her why all the kitsch down in these trees...
She said it was because the trees are beautiful and it was a way to draw attention to them and let people enjoy them. I believe her. We take pictures of one another under the Grandfather Tree.

Might I Suggest

As a trained professional, I have the industry know-how to recommend the very best. For the NorCal coast, I offer the following suggestions...
Buy taffy and a beach activity at Candy & Kites Shop in Bodega Bay.

Send a postcard.

Look at this church south of Gualala and The Sea Ranch community.

Walk out and watch waves explode.

Let the Kitsch Begin

Many stories have been based on what happens when you go into the dark woods. About 15 miles north of Fort Bragg, the coastline becomes too rugged for the Highway 1 so it takes off east into the forests. The last trickle of Bay Area weekenders have petered out miles earlier, about the same time all those cute cottages disappeared.


The redwood forest seems to swallow everything. But the people have fought back with the most damning weapon of all, Kitsch Americanus.

Hunters, test your wits with the Chipalope, it is rare AND elusive. It should not be taken lightly.


The onslaught begins in Leggett with the Drive-Thru Tree and does not end until the Last Chance Liquor store at the Oregon border. As you'll see, the redwoods win in some stretches of road and lose badly in others...


For a complete guide to this area of endless superlatives, visit roadsideamerica.com

Just Charming

Mendocino on a sunny spring day is the end of the search. There are a lot of tourists, a few of whom take photos outside the front gates of private homes, but it doesn't matter. The wide-open feel of the grasslands and the little streets and the big ocean and the Big River down the way to swim in as the tide reverses its current and it flows upstream... it's a tough town to leave. And there are all these water towers that look like backyard treeforts of the luckiest child in the world.

A Silent Suggestion

The Yellow Existential Experiment

It is often difficult to pull oneself out of the present situation and take a big-picture look. From within the Banana Yellow, the world seems glorious: the northern CA coast streams by, the wind flows through my ample locks, Michael Bolton is cranked. But at one tunnel of cypress trees on Point Reyes, a little voice told me to think about the other people for a second. The innocent road-trippers passing me on perhaps their only chance to cruise Highway 1.

The tunnel of trees provided a perfect testing ground. The comparisons left me slightly ashamed of my own shadow.

Honk If You Brake for Scenic Pullouts

Raw and Slimy Does It

It doesn't take long for the scenery to pick up north of the Golden Gate in Marin County. Stinson Beach offers the first temptation to halt the northward momentum and bang some rays, especially since it is Saturday, 75 degrees and sunny. It seems the Marina and Pacific Heights neighborhoods of San Fran have been evacuated and sent to this beach and beyond for the day. Beautiful people and their beautiful children walk with great posture toward the water and set down baskets full of cheeses, salami, sliced vegetables, and spritzers.
And oysters are everywhere. I eat 6 bbq'd in Inverness, a tiny town on the edge of Tomales Bay and the north side of Point Reyes. They come from the nearby Drake Bay Oyster Farm. They are salty and delicious.

Further up, I inspect a few oyster grill areas on Tomales. The Tomales Bay Oyster Company is packed with 20-somethings that look and sound sufficiently lubricated for this noon hour. I continue to Marshall where the energy calms a bit and the Hog Shack Oyster bar's outdoor picnic spot looks appealing. I lurk around, wander among the picnic tables, and snap some photos, the lone, creepy ranger of Hwy 1.

My Wheels, Banana Flavored

What a great car for a road-trip. The Mini Cooper. Classic, stylish, zippy.

That is not my car. I shot this picture from inside my car.

I roll a Chevy Aveo. It was accidentally sent through the Crayola factory car wash on banana yellow day. It is special.

My car.

Hwy 101: A Road Trip

(note: the Golden Gate Bridge has four lanes of traffic suspended 746 feet above the bay. Yellow bumps the size of discarded hats line up to separate the oncoming lane's 55mph from my ongoing 55mph. Taking a photo over the steering wheel is ill-advised. I am a professional.)

And thus it begins: Point 0.0.
This will be a five-day road trip from San Francisco to Seattle, sponsored by Coastal Living Magazine. My mission: to find close to 101 things to do on the 101. So the first thing I do when safely across the Golden Gate is exit from the 101. Highway 1, aka Shoreline Highway, hangs over the coast like a paved goat trail so I assume the Coastal Living editors will prefer this route as opposed to the inland 101. I'll catch up to 101 when it veers back to the shore in a few days (above Mendocino).

The Rat Race

I spent a night in San Francisco. It was the last Friday of the year so my friend and I slipped into some polyester clothing and yellow vest. It was Critical Mass evening, a last-Friday-of-month event in San Fran (and many cities) that celebrates the old bicycle. Throngs of happy, smoky, well-inked young folk hoot and holler from their two-wheels through the city causing great havoc and stalling traffic for an hour.
It is intended to spread the word of biking and bike-friendly cities. Judging from the glazed looks on the faces of drivers stuck in concrete at cocktail hour Friday, I imagine it is about as effective as driving a stampede of horses through the county park in order to promote your interest in horseback riding. But I rode and I rode hard.

Orthodoxy and Coffee

Megaphone prayers wake roosters in Yirga Cheffe. The roosters wake the sleeping farmers in their mud-walled houses or stick-sided round huts with thatch roofs that meet at a pointed tip like the pinch of a soft-serve cone. In the whitening light of morning, the air still clear, the farmers shuffle barefoot to add just enough dry wood to the still-warm embers. Another fire, another day.

As the metallic droning beats its clumsy fist against the new morning, the blue smoke builds against the thatch roofs’ crispy layers, spiraling to the apex, then back down until the hut cannot hold it and the exhale seeps through cracks and beneath the overhang of stick wall and roof. This initial, reliable first breath rises, almost simultaneously with the thousands of other huts and, along with the prayers like moans from a wounded deaf priest, fill the valley space between steep ridges patterned in heavy banana leaves, flowering coffee branches, eucalyptus, mango, avocado, and hardwoods. By the time the sun peels open the white sky behind the straight ridge-line, the air is blue and the ground coffee has been dropped into the boiling water of the black kettle set directly onto smoking coals, and the people, covered against the 2000-meter chill by white shawls and sweatshirts, have drank their cups with sugar and now move into the day.

I came here to see the source of coffee, the backyard gardens where families tend a few coffee trees on their property, a parcel that, throughout the nation, averages about 0.1 hectare in size. But on my first morning here, I follow the nerve-spiking voice. It takes me up a small hill, through a gate where forms covered in white shawls kneel, faces to the ground at the base of the compound’s fence or beside eucalyptus roots. Like piles of white sheets left out for laundry collection, the worshippers curl over themselves throughout the compound and up to the edges of the round ornate temple.

At an open door I stop. A man stands covered in a white robe from neck to feet, a similarly dressed assistant beside him holding an oversized book open at chest level. The first man’s mouth moves in unison with the now deafening noise coming from the megaphones wired to the temple’s eaves. The man seems too small, thin, and soft to be the source of such mind-numbing, mechanical, and almost inhuman emanations.

The next night I wake in the early morning covered in silence. I have to listen to it through the darkness to make sure it is silence and to remember what it sounds like and that it exists. Noise means life and happiness here so only at the deepest point of sleep, when the day’s fire has retreated into a core heat incubated by ash and before it is fanned back to life with the new day’s wood, is silence permitted.

Now I imagine the coffee trees beneath the curving false banana leaves. The cherries have been picked - harvest season was last month - and they now sit, dried, in sacks. The farmers wait for the price to rise one birr (10 cents) per kilo. This is the rich time of year when 100 kilo sacks sit like bank accounts surrounded by fallen, rotting mangos, and still-sleeping roosters, subdued by silence.

Ethiopia: Kaina Village, Hamer Tribe

Photo: Michael Hanson Photography

In this round hut made of sticks and straw, smoke stirs the smell of Africa. I’m sitting cross-legged atop a dried goatskin, its hard edges sharp and curling away from the packed earth floor. A few inches above my head, a rack of horizontal sticks holds the dark bases of kalabasha gourds, the only household items in storage. Through the suspended shelf’s cracks, beyond the gourds, I see the underside of the thatch roof. The blue smoke swirls against it.

The smoke rises from a small wood fire smoldering without flame on six inches of ash piled between three angular rocks, also blackened. The coals heat a round jug of fire-darkened clay the size of a beach ball. Steam curls out of the black hole at the top and the steam comes from the boiling coffee pulled by a ladle into this hut’s twelve-foot-diameter circle of gray, slanting light.

Milio, age 35, holds the ladle, moving it quickly and smoothly through the kettle’s narrow opening and tilting the dark brown, watery brew into a halved gourd that is textured and black like the tops of the father’s hands that take the gourd and turn it up to mouth then place it between bare feet planted on hard, orange-tan dirt at the edge of a goat hide. Two men share the skin, both elders, both with knees bent, elbows wrapping the outsides in crisscrossing angles as straight as bone, the dark skin tight across the top and sagging slightly below from gravity like damp fitted sheets on a clothes line. The smoke moves and crosses their faces, dulling the oily glow shining off the cheekbones and foreheads that pull away from the golden-gray eyes in wrinkles like geology seen through a plane window.

They drink again from their kalabashas and spray the last bit of saliva and coffee onto my face, their countenances serious and unchanged. I sip my coffee and spray back, attempting the same exaggerated spewing sound. Their faces break and they laugh with straight, white teeth. Milio’s hand keeps moving with the ladle, stirring the coffee and refilling gourds. Smoke expands behind her like a white screen of pulled cotton around her head of braided rows that fall like a hundred bracelets of beads colored red-brown and glistening with the rock powder and animal fat paste used as decoration by Hamer women. Her right shoulder faces me with its pattern of small vertical scars in horizontal bands that cross from the back of her arm onto the upper back and over the shoulder blade. She doesn’t smile. She squats, her short goat-skin skirt’s tail blending into the goat-skin mat below her. This is her house and she sleeps where she cooks.

A toddler, naked below a necklace of white shells, crawls over her bent legs, his dusty bottom round, his soft thick legs pumping upward as if climbing an invisible ladder, trying to push the chubby, dust-colored face closer to a nipple that falls low and to the side. The ladling motion disrupts his progress and he slides down then angles for another attempt. His lips grip and his body stills for a few swallows before sliding back down to goat skin and bare feet and blackened gourds and dirt packed with coffee, sweat, semen, corn, cow shit, breath, blood, and ash. All in this round, ribbed, circling hut that exhales smoke into the world like a breathing fossil in raised relief above the scorched and dusty earth.

MILIO BONKO, age 35
Lives in: Kaina Village, Turmi, Ethiopia
Profession: To make hair for Hamer women
Favorite part: I like farming and fetching water for my family.
Least favorite: I don’t like keeping the cattle because I am a woman and have to keep the cows for the men.
Free time: I make my traditional clothes.
Travel: I want to travel in Ethiopia, like to Lalibela Church and Axum in the north. And I want to go to Addis Ababa.
Last meal: Drinking coffee (in the morning with other families – only coffee for breakfast.)
Book: I would not write any kind of book because I never learned to read or write.
Religious: I have no religion because I am a Hamer, a nomadic person.

Kitfo is raw ox meat

Wondering all the time: are those bastard microscopic eggs incubating to the point of swelling to the point of splitting and sending worms whose ancestors grew up in the belly of a plough-pulling ox into my part-blue-blood, all air-conditioned and vaccinated and pasteurized and first-worlded small intestine coils? Right now, as I write, not eight inches from this useless hand and these more useless words?
I will assault them with car-hot vodka, antibiotics, and White Horse whiskey.