Monday, 10 June
Sister no. 2’s flights were all delayed, so the road trip started mid-afternoon rather than mid-morning. Redding’s waving brown grass and defiant oak trees soon gave way to tall, scraggy hills covered with the half-verdant, half-dead trees of Trinity National Forest. On the winding road halfway up the hill, we sped through several Wild West-style towns. A good handful of false façades, a suspicious-looking pizza place, a surprisingly organic coffee bar, perhaps an RV park, and an obligatory tired-looking volunteer fire department.
As we neared Trinidad, our destination on the northern California coast 2.5 h south of the Oregon border, the hills came increasingly alive, patches of fresh grass appearing beneath the evergreens. What a relief to emerge from the car on Trinidad State Beach, its picturesque arrangement of rocks exactly as I remembered from childhood visits, and feel the Pacific breeze. I was fine in shorts and a fleece, but the air had a colder bite to it, smelling something like snow.
Trinidad is a picturesque, blue-and-white little town, rather like I (probably incorrectly) imagine a lot of places in Maine looking. We were too late for the Beachcomber Café, but we visited Murphy’s supermarket for provisions. Murphy’s is the kind of charming local grocery store chain where you can find novelty lip balms and locally made candles alongside your tortilla chips and tomatoes. I was gratified to discover a wide selection of Humboldt Cider County cans in a fridge near the back, selecting a ‘dry heirloom’ cider made with apples from Albert Etter’s orchard (including crab-like varieties and red-flesheds). Alfie went for a single-variety Gravenstein, while the sisters chose a honey-infused option and the grandmother selected the classic off-dry ‘Drysdale’. The store also had quite a few Brew Dr kombuchas, my new favourite brand since discovering it in Portland. (How many kombucha brands can this economy support, I wonder? When will the bubble burst?)
We cooked local rock cod, potatoes, and salad for dinner at Sylvan Harbor RV Park & Cabins, shaded by redwoods and cosy in our little 1950s cabin. What I will say for The Overstory is that it lent new gravitas and majesty to the redwood trees towering overhead. We are tiny humans, and they are sempervirens, ‘ever-living’ giants in the sky.