San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Quick getaways offer window into good life
The days are getting shorter, and the kids are heading back to school. Summer is fading away. So my faithful companion and I decided to try one of those great West Coast traditions: the quick summer getaway.
If you live in Northern California you don’t have to go too far for a quick escape. So we took two quick trips: one to Carmel for a few days, one closer at hand for a few hours.
Both trips were small delights. Carmel first. That town has been on our radar for some time. It’s just over the hill from Monterey, which is pleasant all year but crowded in summer. Carmel is smaller — only 1 square mile, just over 3,200 residents, only 2½ hours away. And it was designed to be a resort.
It first developed around Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo, located on the small river just south of town, in 1771. The town itself, christened Carmel-by-the Sea by land developers at the turn of the 20th century, became what was arguably California’s premier seaside resort.
It still is. We picked up Kent Seavey’s book on architecture and local lore and roamed the streets for a couple of days. It’s nice to imagine that a California town like this exists: beautiful boutiques, art galleries, houses that look like something out of a fairy tale, a main street that ends at the Pacific Ocean with a beach of fine sand, open to all.
It’s a rich town, and it’s fun to pretend to be rich yourself, to look in the window of the good life, to have lunch in a French restaurant and dinner in an Italian one just around the corner — both excellent.
It’s nice to imagine you could afford an expensive electric bicycle at Mad Dogs & Englishmen, or an expensive fountain pen with Carmel blue ink on the next block, or to take your best friend to a superior dog boutique.
They sell illusions in Carmel. We were strolling along, looking in beautiful shop windows when a salesman lured the lady inside his elegant-looking establishment to try a new facial cream. He was most persuasive and applied a little, gently, softly. It was an absolutely special formula, he said, found nowhere else. “It will do wonders for you,” he said. She inquired about the price. Only $1,400, he said.
We strolled on and sat on a bench under a tree on Ocean Avenue and watched the passing parade of people. We drove back to San Francisco. But within a couple of days, the city had closed in again, and it was time for another break. We’d signed up a few days earlier for a Sunday afternoon reservation at Muir Woods, and it was an easy drive, only an hour.
It’s hard to imagine a redwood forest on the edge of a region of 7 million people, an hour away from the worst parts of San Francisco. It’s always been one of my favorite places.
I first went to Muir Woods when I was almost 7 years old, and I still see the forest through the eyes of a city kid. The redwoods are big and very old, serious trees. Even in summer the sunlight is filtered, and in places, the light shifts with the wind and the afternoon fog. I can only imagine it at night. Muir Woods is closed to the public at dusk, and when everyone has left, it must be very quiet, with only the wind and the animals and the spirits. Are there spirits in these dark woods? There must be.
Until recently, a million visitors a year came to Muir Woods in daytime, so many that cars clogged the roads in all directions. Some people had to park miles away. It was a mess. Something had to be done, and the National Park Service did it. Now visitors to Muir Woods National Monument have to have an advance reservation. Parking is limited, and there are shuttle buses.
You walk through a hundred-year-old arch into the forest and are handed a brochure. “Welcome to this rare ancient forest where coast redwoods reign ...” the official brochure says. You get the illusion you are entering the forest primeval. Yet the paths through the trees are wooden boardwalks these days. It is less a stroll through the woods and more like a walk in a botanical garden.
To its credit, the park service has put up many more signs explaining the forest, the redwoods and life in the canyon. The woods have been tamed, managed.
Once again, we sat and watched the people walk by. We watched whole families step into burned cavities in the big trees and stand there, inside the tree, in the heart of something that has been alive for hundreds of years.
Then it was Monday again, back to the city. It was pleasant, though, to spend some time in a beautiful little town by the seashore and in a forest so beautiful and so popular that admission has to be rationed. It’s good sometimes to escape real life.