My daughter Lucy began to walk on Oct. 10, her first birthday, leaving me weepy and in awe of the huge journey she’d just taken from the sofa to her father’s knee. The next morning, Lucy and I started off on a weeklong camping trip, for what became a huge journey for us both. Our destination, the Pacific Coast of Northern California, is one of my favorite places in the world. I wanted Lucy to like it as much as I do.
It wasn’t Lucy’s first outdoor experience. She first slept in a tent when she was 6 days old. An intrepid traveler, she doesn’t seem to mind weather, bugs or dirt. Not so her mom. Living outdoors doesn’t come naturally to me. I crave plumbing. A telephone. A word processor. In many ways I’d planned this trip because I wanted my daughter to be more at home with the world than I am. But what I’m continually surprised about, when traveling with my daughter, is how much she is teaching me.
Day 1-3: Salt Point, Sonoma County
We camp the first three nights at Salt Point, four hours north of San Francisco. It’s one of the few wild and desolate places in California that you can drive to. It’s a place where sandstone cliffs and jagged rocks plunge straight into the sea. Occasionally a chunk of the highway falls into the sea, too, closing the route for days or weeks and making the area even more desolate than before. There’s no town at Salt Point, only a lone general store where the closest thing to fresh produce is a can of chili. There’s an occasional luxury home built on a bluff, a scattered hotel or two in the heavily wooded hills, and the biggest Buddhist temple in the Western world, Odiyan, on the hilltop a few miles above our campsite. That’s about it. It’s mid-October. Definitely off-season, unless you’re an abalone diver. We’re the only people camping in the entire park.
None of these things matter to Lucy, of course. Her perspective on the world is far more immediate: whatever she can grab. Because I can’t childproof the whole outdoors, and don’t want to confine her to a playpen, I’ve spent hours teaching her not to put things in her mouth that might choke her. We’ve developed a unique communication, she and I. Instead of shouting “No!”, I yell “Ah-ah-ah!”–a sound, I’m embarrassed to admit, that was taught to me in dog obedience school for my Samoyed. It causes some confusion in my dog on this trip, but my baby responds immediately by dropping whatever is in her hand.
This afternoon, our first in camp, I don’t need to say it. Lucy says it for me. She prowls around our site on all fours, earnestly searching out every small stone and shouting “Ah-ah-ah!” before crawling over and handing it to me with great ceremony.
Finally, the pile of stones next to me growing out of control, I pick Lucy up, put her in her carrier, put the dog on a leash and take them both for a walk through the woods near our camp. Deer, quail and what-just-might-be-a-fox cross our trail. I point to them with great excitement–my daughter is getting a great look at nature!–but it’s unclear to me whether Lucy sees any of them, because she’s busy looking at the ground for more stones.
Day 3: Stump Beach, Sonoma County
Salt Point’s only real sandy beach is a small crescent of sand, Stump Beach, only a few miles from our camp. I’ve hiked down to the beach with Lucy, hoping to get out of the October wind. I’ve layered Lucy’s clothes until she resembles a miniature fullback. The waves are rough and more than 15 feet high. It’s peak abalone season, but no one is going into the water. A few glum divers sit on the beach in their wetsuits, complaining about the weather.
I’ve brought along a new pail and shovel to the beach for Lucy. She ignores them, preferring instead to play her own elaborate game with pieces of driftwood. She picks up a piece in each hand, throws them into the air simultaneously and watches them earnestly as they drop. Again and again. After a while she crawls up into my lap and falls asleep under my down jacket. I decide to wait until she wakes up before moving her. The wind dies. The tide goes out. I wonder why the only reading material I’ve brought is Sesame Street books for my daughter. I wonder if Big Bird is a man or woman, if Bert and Ernie are TV’s first same-sex marriage. I wonder if my daughter will ever wake up. Lucy wakes up and smiles.
Day 4: Stewart’s Point to MacKerricher State Park, Mendocino County
On the fourth day we break camp, heading north on California Highway 1. The landscape grows more civilized almost immediately, as the craggy outcroppings of Salt Point smooth their way into flat farmland. At Stewart’s Point General Store, we stop to get a book to read for me, and groceries for both of us. I discover that Lucy has learned her first word. As we get out of the car, she shouts “Hi!” to a gruff old man in a battered cowboy hat. The wrinkles in his face realign themselves in a thousand smiles. Later on, behind us in line at the register, he gives us 3 cents so we can pay in exact change. “I knew I’d get rid of those pennies someplace,” he says, looking only at my daughter.
Driving north again, we pass Sea Ranch, a huge and depressing development of luxury homes, before passing a real ranch, where a man is driving a tractor draped with two newly butchered cattle. We pass a llama ranch, too, just in time to see two llamas mate. Lucy has fallen asleep in her car seat and I decide to keep driving, all the way to MacKerricher State Park, north of Ft. Bragg, which is the largest town on this stretch of the California coast. The campsites are large, sunny and a stone’s throw away from a wide and wild beach.
While setting up camp I must keep Lucy confined somehow, because I’m too busy to watch her. I usually leave her in her car seat, or put her in the portable high chair I’ve brought, along with a few new toys for her to play with. After the tent is up I let her roam free, keeping her always in sight.
Today Lucy crawls to the next campsite, inexorably drawn toward the sound of another baby. My God, the baby is dressed in white. She sits in her playpen like the Emperor of the Forbidden City, remote and wise and oh, so clean. My own daughter, whose favorite game in camp is to make mud by throwing dirt into our dog’s water dish, looks something akin to an invading barbarian.
The other mother comes out of her mobile home, looking alarmed as my baby approaches hers.
“How old is she?” she asks in a voice that’s just a little strained.
We learn our daughters were born within days of each other. I look at the two of them, looking at each other, one clean and civilized, the other dirty and wild, and I wonder what I’m teaching my daughter, and if she’ll ever recover from it.
Day 5: Mendocino village
We visit Mendocino the next day, 8 miles to the south. It’s a coastal town so cute that it has been the location of more than three dozen feature films and countless television series and commercials. Even in mid-October the town is bursting with tourists.
Lucy says “hi” to a rough-looking woman in a flannel shirt and jeans. That’s how we meet Mary, a woman who makes her living as a “water witcher,” dousing for wells in the area.
“My partner uses a coat hanger,” she tells us. “I have a more complicated method, involving piano strings.”
Mary shows us her plumb bob, too, about the size of her thumbnail, dangling from a fine chain on her key pocket. She tells us that the plumb bob is connected with the spirit world, and will answer any question Mary asks it. She holds the plumb bob absently over my baby as we speak. It swings wildly. I’m afraid to ask Mary what it’s saying.
Lucy’s “hi” entices people to speak with us all day. It’s a loud “hi,” and lusty, accompanied by a wave and a six-toothed smile. It’s the perfect traveler’s vocabulary, and all she needs to say–the people she says it to invariably take up the conversation from there. Lucy’s “hi” stops a bent old man dead in his tracks. He looks at her in wonder, then tells her, “Look at you! Living for today! No thought for the future! Don’t ever forget how to do that!”
I want to ask how he got all of that out of my daughter’s single-word vocabulary, but he has already walked by. Next Lucy stops a middle-aged couple with Mendocino written on matching sweatshirts, who are holding hands as they pass us. They both wave and say “hi” back again for several seconds, giddy with smiles, before moving on.
Then there’s Larry Springer in Ft. Bragg, Mendocino’s working-class neighbor to the north. Larry has a storefront on Redwood Avenue, where he runs the School of Common Sense Physics. He calls himself many things, including “Explorer of Radiant Energy,” or simply “genius.”
In his 80s now, I get the feeling he is looking for a successor to take over his school. Even in their oddness, Mary and Larry and all the people we meet in between are somehow typical of this stretch of coast. Grizzled hippies, real estate agents, pot growers and cattle ranchers, water witchers and curmudgeons and people just passing through coexist peacefully, with a grudging respect for one another. Thanks to Lucy’s one word, we meet quite a few of them.
Day 6: The beach at MacKerricher State Park
The problems you have when traveling with small children always have something to do with time, and what you’d rather be doing with it. You don’t have time to read the book you’ve been meaning to read, because the baby won’t nap when she’s supposed to. You can’t finish a meal, because she’s getting too tired and needs to be nursed to sleep. You can’t just relax and do nothing for a while, because she’s demanding that you pay attention to her. You can’t have fun, dammit, because your child just won’t cooperate.
On the sixth day of our vacation, Lucy explodes. No more cute smiles–she screams constantly, a grating sound that leaves me on the edge of calling our vacation quits and going home. No more minding me–at our campsite she’s grimly determined to put anything into her mouth–dirt, grass, bugs–that will cause her mother to leap up in horror to rescue her. No more napping on schedule–she stubbornly refuses to sleep that afternoon, despite my best efforts to get her to nod off so I can have some time to myself.
Finally, at 4 that afternoon, beaten by Lucy’s stubbornness and sheer force of will, exhausted from trying to get her to sleep, I give up. I carry her to the beach, just over the dunes from our tent, and put her down on the sand.
She scrambles away from me as if she’s driven to put as much distance between us as she can. Amazing how quickly she moves. I scramble after her.
Something happens then. A shift in the breeze, and in my perception of the world. I discover that my daughter, who barely has taken her first step, can clamber over sea rocks like the most nimble crab. My daughter, who knows only one word of English, can imitate perfectly the cry of a seagull, or a barking dog down the beach, or the drone of a passing airplane. My daughter, who is just a year old, can show me things about the world that are too subtle, or too familiar for me to notice myself. She points to the barest whisper of a moon in the sky before I see it. To a dragonfly high above our heads. To a jet trail, lit up in the setting sun.
I didn’t know she could do any of those things.
The next day it rains. Our vacation becomes a series of knotty problems to solve: how to keep Lucy warm and dry; how to keep the dog from tracking mud all over the back seat of the car; how to prepare and eat hot meals. This last problem we solve by giving up on the outdoor eating experience and going frequently to Denny’s in Ft. Bragg instead.
But nothing–not the rain, nor the mud, nor the sudden chill that tells me winter has finally come to the California coast–can get in the way of this shining memory: Lucy, on the beach at MacKerricher, at sunset, at the moment when I first felt her growing away from me.
Claire Tristram is the author of the just-released “Have Kid, Will Travel: 101 Survival Strategies for Vacationing With Babies and Young Children” (Andrews McMeel Publishing; $8.95).
CAMPING ON THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COAST
When to go: This stretch of coastline is beautiful any time you visit it. Travel from October to February for moody solitude; in April and May to see hillsides covered with wild rhododendron, and for the best chance at seeing migrating gray whales; from Memorial Day to Labor Day for festive crowds and craft fairs. Best kept secret: Although the climate is temperate year-round, the very best weather is from mid- to late September, after the fog that defines this stretch of coast finally clears into spectacular blue sky, and before the winter rains begin.
Getting there: One reasonable route is U.S. Highway 101 north from San Francisco, to the California Highway 12 exit in Santa Rosa. Go west on California 12 to Bodega Bay (site of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”). Near the coast, California 12 intersects with California Highway 1, the California coastal highway. Take California 1 north to Salt Point and beyond. Plan for 2 hours from San Francisco to Bodega Bay and an additional 2 hours along the winding, scenic California 1 to reach Salt Point. From there to the Mendocino/Ft. Bragg/MacKerricher area is another two hours.
Camping: California state parks with campsites dot this stretch of coastline. Improved campsites are $14 a night.
In peak summer season, contact Destinet at 800-444-7275 for advance reservations. Private campsites are also available in many areas.
More information: One of the best guides available for any trip north of San Francisco is “The Northern California Handbook” by Kim Weir (Moon Publications; $19.95), available at some travel book stores or by calling 800-345-5473. Although the book is not updated annually (the last edition is 1994, and the next edition planned is December 1997) it offers a wealth of timeless information about what makes Northern California special, as well as a great section on the Northern California coastline.
