Walking in the deep end
When you really enjoy learning something, the tendency is to dive deep. One question leads to another, books are read, discussions are held — you might travel to learn, join a blog community, follow Internet trails well past your bedtime. You can take a class, earn a doctorate or reach expert/ super-geek status.
However, this overabundance of knowledge is of very little use in common society.
Some folks can manage to earn a living as historians, teachers, tour guides, park rangers, supergeek consultants or social media superstars.
Most of us with a particular passion simply bore folks at backyard barbecues and wonder why we’re standing alone near the bean dip.
I don’t claim to be an expert on Northern California. However I’ve lived here all of my life and haven’t felt a need to live anywhere else. My job also happens to be helping to plan logistics for classes and educational site visits for educators visiting Chico from other countries.
Most recently, this included a COVID-cautious six-day tour to the Gold Country, big trees, Yosemite, the coast, the capitol and San Francisco. My bossman and I each drove a van for more than 1,000 miles and if the conversations weren’t nonstop they were at least intermittent and consistent.
You can say a lot about California when traveling the backroads in a giant circle, especially with a literally captive audience. I rambled about crops grown in California, ports of the Bay Area, economic diversity, the impacts of gold mining, water delivery, wildlife habitat, hydropower, gravel mines and where to find the bathroom at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The thing is, to someone who doesn’t know California, these details were new and interesting.
Along the way, the folks in our vans talked about their own corners of the world, sharing what was the same and dramatically different.
One stop was to Angel Island, which I remember as a child during a visit with my grandmother, a long-time elementary school teacher who delighted in nothing more than taking her grandkids on educational excursions.
I had tried to book a tour at Angel Island Immigration Station, but tours are on hiatus thanks to COVID. Our group gathered at the end of the dock after the 10-minute ferry ride from Tiburon. We paused to ask directions to the
1.2 mile trail leading to buildings where the ancestors of many current California residents were housed while the government decided if they could stay in the Golden State.
Next thing I knew, our group of 17 international teachers formed a circle around a bearded guy whose shaggy hair flapped in the bay breeze as he answered “just a few questions” before remembering he was supposed to report for work.
Super-geeks come in all shapes and sizes and this one was wearing olive green with a State Parks emblem sewn to the shoulder of his spiffy uniform.
When he answered “just a few questions” he didn’t stop talking until we knew more about the island, its history and the use of the land to process immigrants than you’d read in any fourth grade textbook. When he paused for breath he told our group he had only been working on the island since January, and needed to