Show me a sign

The rules are jarringly specific in Upper Bidwell Park.
"No smoking glass dogs …" Is that a pressing concern?
Are we contemplating an adjective or a verb — an assurance
of the absence of such creatures, or a prohibition against the
remote possibility of a silica-induced high? From whence
do these come? Are Chico gift shops overloaded with packs
of glass canines? Would one get them from under the counter?
Or were they smoked to extinction in the park boundaries?

On this holiday, I give thanks for memory of place.

Even though I haven't returned more than thrice in the last 27 years, my college town remains vivid in imagination. Hazy and a bit corner-rounded, perhaps, but vivid.

I walked its streets and wilds many times, usually before daybreak on weekends, to get my mind right for a day of studying (in the white-knuckle and correct fear that if I didn't devote my weekends to homework, I would be doomed).

Each time I picked a different direction and took off. In the tradition of Arthurian knights, each walk was a great loop, never out and back. I had to return from a different direction. I was questing.

I walked until I was good and tired and ready to read textbooks for long stretches.

Places reveal themselves to walkers and all who move at a walkers' pace. Conversely, places hide by the speed of automobile traffic, maybe by design.

But I think the opposite is true. People make people-made places for a walking pace, but it's a 45-mph world.

I'm sure the people who created the tiny Maronite Catholic church not so long ago on a busy street near our home expected people to see it. A statue of the Virgin Mary and the toddler Christ, meant for a cathedral, dwarfs the small building (a former ranch home, it appears, disguised beneath gingerbread eaves). The upraised letters on the signs, angled for viewing up and down the street, glow as if colored in gold leaf. But if I hadn't been strolling by one day, trying to see how difficult it was to walk to the library (shamefully easy), I wouldn't have seen the little church and its beautiful monstrosity.

Maronite parishioners see it. I'm not sure anyone else does.

Part of the sign, as it really looked, greeting Upper Bidwell visitors … but do we really need it
explained why not to bring glass?

I know parts of San Luis Obispo many lifelong residents may not know if they never examined their city at a walking pace. Cul-de-sacs that aren't really dead ends to pedestrians. Architectural oddities. Secret gardens. Shortcuts and hidden connections that come in handy eventually, inevitably.

Nearly out of college, our son has amassed a great sense of place about his college town. In time, so will our daughter. They'll miss their second home, as I do mine.

Our son took us on walk of his place, though not in Chico proper, a rigid-grid city like so many in California's Central Valley, that I confess I have seen almost exclusively by car. Instead, our son took us out to Upper Bidwell Park, part of more than 3,000 acres of wilderness that rises from the city just as it recedes in time. It's easy, in the center of town, among the restaurants designed for parents to take their undergrad children, to miss the volcanic birth of this place, the shift and uplift and rifts, the relatively fresh scars and strange shining rock.

Trails snake and skirt and climb the volcanic country, and our well-traveled son took it easy on us with one that sidled along Big Chico Creek.

Here and there, little signs on posts informed us of the flora. I love those little signs, and signs of most kinds. I love explanations. We camped at state parks when our kids were little because Saturday night usually promised a campfire where a park ranger would talk about bats or constellations. The only reason we never stopped at any historical markers during drives is that I needed to demonstrate some personal restraint. You can read just about any historical marker now on the Interwebs, from the comfort of your lap.

I'd invent Instant Botanist™® or Instant Entomologist©™for hikers: Add a drop of water, and out of a little foil envelope springs an expert to show you pine mat manzanita or elderberry beetles.

Signs'll do until then. Some of the signs along the creek were missing, which is the way with signs. Governments invest in their installation with great pomp, then usually don't have contingencies for their damage or disappearance. A couple of the nice signs I drew to explain sights in Old Sacramento have been gone for many months now; it puzzles me why someone would break a sign.

On the stump of one broken sign on the creek, someone had scrawled in loopy script, "It is the large bush," a satirical response to the next sign on the creek bed, a professional sign differentiating from tree species from another: "It is the large bush." We didn't know which was the large bush.

Signs are better than none at all. If they're wrong or uninformative, at least they inspire entertainment. I'd make it law that every city post well lit and VERY LARGE AND EXTREMELY LEGIBLE signs telling drivers what intersections they're approaching; some cities do this; other cities are mean and cruel.

I may just be old. But I like a good sign. Helps me remember where I am.

I hope you enjoy Thanksgiving in peace. Take a hike, maybe. You never know what you discover.

The road taken

Our card: I'm afraid that in my bumbling I will
tatter, besmirch or even lose this artifact, so finally
I committed it to digital posterity.

Long ago, burning with creative spirit, uncertain of our future paths, and deciding we might as well just blaze our own — in fact,  the same place where my own children are now — my college classmate and former roomie David Middlecamp and I launched a freelance business.

Maybe launched overstates it. Fervently dreamed about and planned with bursts of enthusiasm is closer.

"Questing Unlimited" comes courtesy of the courtly days of King Arthur, when the knights of his and other realms were always gallivanting about the countryside in pursuit of adventure.

From a piece David shot for The Mustang Daily
about a San Luis Obispo ranching family,
demonstrating his excellence as a photographer.
This is old school: He produced these postcards
himself, on special cards with photo paper fronts.

(Now that I think of it, the quests were merely tools for Sir Thomas Malory and other writers of the Arthurian legend to plot stories; kind of like when the cell phones ring on any one in the Law & Order franchise episodes just when the chase grows stale.)

Somewhere in my readings of the Arthur legend (perhaps in John Steinbeck's preempted attempt to retell the Malory version, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights), I think I learned that for a quest to hold meaning, it must go in a great circuit, never to cover the same ground.

The advice, whether from those pages or from my fevered brow, informs me still. I loathe out-and-back backpacking trips (oh, I'll make them, if it means not going at all), and tend to drive in great, gas-wasting loops on errands.

So would it be for us and our budding business.

David and I wanted unfettered wandering, making stories of our serendipity. I wanted to be like Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, except I would be discovering what he was re-discovering. I'm speaking for David — and this is the first of many invitations for him to fill in the gaps or correct me — but I imagine likewise that he wanted to chronicle our travels and travails much as Dorothea Lange did.

We had already begun training, and maybe got the idea for it, by teaming up on feature stories for The Mustang Daily, Cal Poly's student-run daily newspaper.

Our feature stories filled our own craving to move beyond Cal Poly's and San Luis Obispo's geographical borders, and the newspaper's daily need for copy. As long as we could sell even the weakest link to Cal Poly — whether our subjects had graduated from there or visited or merely heard about the campus — we could do the story for the college newspaper. We didn't leave the county, but imagined Questing Unlimited to be our ticket hither and yon.

David with all those postcards, all those
hoped-for assignments, set out to dry.

Then, life got in the way, or I let it get in the way. I got an internship at my hometown newspaper the summer after we hatched our dream. David, in San Luis Obispo, took the burden of nurturing the business — more likely, I let my end drop for David to pick up and carry my share with his — and continued researching story ideas.

When last we worked on the business together, we were just beginning to develop queries, which are story outlines that we'd pitch to magazines whose contacts we had yet to gather. Or maybe I have forgotten that David had already amassed editors' and publishers' names.

(I just discovered a stash of captioned photos David produced as part of a portfolio we'd send to editors seeking writing assignments. The photos are from a feature we wrote about Janita and Robert Baker, who make guitars and mountain dulcimers from their rural home in northern San Luis Obispo County. Wonderful, engaging, talented people, the Bakers were exactly the kind of subjects we wanted to chronicle; I'm happy to find the Bakers are still doing their thing at Blue Lion Dulcimers & Guitars.)

We had our marketing campaign almost ready to unleash upon the world, with a logo made the hard way.

To build the logo today, I'd probably buy the needed typeface from a Website, import it into Adobe Illustrator, type out the words I wanted, convert the word to shapes, then manipulate the shapes at will on my computer screen. Click, tap, click. It sounds involved but it might take an hour tops, no muss, no fuss.

Not so way back then. If you wanted anything even remotely exotic in type treatment, you went to Letraset, and any newspaper or graphic design shop would have piles of these transparent plastic sheets of letterforms lying in storage, usually with just a handful of letters removed from the sheet. I'd either transfer letterforms by burnishing them onto a surface, or cut the letterforms and painstakingly expose a thin adhesive backing. Want the typeface bigger? Smaller? Assemble the type and then throw it into the overhead camera for enlargement.

I spliced "Questing" across the bottom with an X-acto knife, then used thin 2-point black adhesive tape to restore the letterforms into complete shapes. In this case, the job took multiple precise angled cuts. Just before I'd get the last tiny end of the tape to stick in place, my shoulders would invariably kink up, or the tape would stick to my fingers and pull the whole job askew — death of a project by 106 cuts — or the letterform I needed, the only one left on the sheet, would get stuck on the bottom of my shoe. Good times. Good times.

We must have convinced someone over in the print side of The Mustang Daily into typesetting "Unlimited" and the contact information for us. David might know who printed our business cards for us.

That's as far as our quest went. David and I pursued divergent journalism paths, though we went on to lead roughly parallel lives. David's career explored depth over breadth, nourishing his roots in San Luis Obispo County. He became the envy of most Cal Poly grads — one of the few to find a lifelong excuse to stay and thrive in beautiful San Luis Obispo, as an excellent photographer and storyteller and historian/archivist for The Tribune.

He's even a gentleman farmer, nourishing olive roots on family land. Someday I'll write about the day long ago when I "helped" him buck hay.

I'm lucky to have been able to reconnect with David and his family, and talk about now and then.

Officially in mid-life or past it, I can't help but think about then these days. My wife joined me in wondering: What if we had pursued our quest? The words "hungry" and "hardscrabble" come to mind, but also "happy" and "simple" and "who knows?" It might have been a precarious existence, likely requiring us to invest our dreams from other sources, like parttime jobs. It might not have endeared me to my in-laws or pleased my parents, because Nancy and I were planning marry soon; it might be why I didn't give the idea the time and energy it needed. I was afraid.

Certainly I missed out on the people we would have met, missed the stories they would have given us, missed some countryside I have yet to see, missed the memories of epic trips on roads less traveled by, that might have made all the difference.