Only the Occasional Whiff of Patchouli

A couple days ago, Josephine turned six months. We did nothing to celebrate because the last quarter has not been the most harmonious season between Josephine and her parents. But because we control the purse strings, Jenny and I did recently treat ourselves to a fairly ambitious vacation to Northern California, albeit with l’enfant terrible in tow. It has been about a year since we’ve had a true getaway, but when we planned the trip a few months ago, we mistakenly assumed that a child who is more or less serene at three months old would maintain a similar disposition over the course of the subsequent three months. Ha! [I'm laughing with tears in my eyes.]

Chalk it up to another hazard of naivete for first-time parents. Here are other things I learned in Northern California, some thankfully unrelated to parenthood:

• There are more Priuses than people in Berkeley.


• Berkeley has gone commercial, and its archetypical acolytes have fled to surrounding communities like Sebastopol, where stores selling locally handmade glassware and pottery are exceedingly common, often advertising their wares as so-called “functional art.” My best guess is that, in this case, "functional" means “can be smoked out of.”


• In the wine country, the natives feel there’s no limit to the ways in which oak wine barrels can be repurposed with apishly stylistic effect; it’s the landscaping equivalent of that particular Napa/Sonoma font that proprietors feel they can put on signs to provide their establishment with instant cachet.


• Of all the temptations we passed up in the wine country, from high vintage tasting rooms to the French Laundry and other fine eateries of national repute, none seemed more irresistibly alluring than the occasional daycare on the side of the road.


• One shouldn't be surprised when you spend the night in a mountain town crammed in the middle of several national forests, only to find out that all the rooms are booked up by hundreds of people from the park service, all of whom are in town to eradicate the surrounding forest of marijuana.


• “Where time stands still” is not a promising motto for your lodging for the night


• As it turns out, there’s little you can do to reason with a six month old


• For civil engineers in California, any indication that lanes are merging is an afterthought. (The arrows are usually painted on the pavement after you pass through the stop light, roughly 15 ft before the lane disappears.)


• Beach towns have beach trash and river towns have river trash, all washed up from the Summer of Love (or at least the ever-elusive dream of its renaissance).


• Many hardened hippies are ultimately irritable and difficult.


• Shirts are no longer in vogue for men in offbeat towns of Sonoma County. Guerneville, with its above average ruffians per capita, can be particularly harrowing after dark.


• I was astonished to find that Northern California is still the sort of place where people drive down main street with country music blaring out their rolled-down windows. You don't have to go to far out of the Bay Area to be in the backwoods.


• On the other hand, rural gas stations there stock bottles of organic apple juice sourced from local orchards, and by "local," I mean the orchards that are located within that same county.


• Coffeeshops in otherwise unassuming small towns carry books like the one I noticed titled “10 Minute Activist”


• Sometimes churches have to be converted into natural foods stores.