Not that far south of Hollister, make a left at a little complex of buildings or a large farm, depending on how you look at it, that’s the start of it. This is CR J1, the Panoche Road, and it is only marginally maintained. As it winds its way up the Tres Pinos gulch the grand landscape views are presented in miniature. The views are close, the walls rise steeply but not to a particularly great height, and yet all the necessary components are present. The flat valley bottom, the flood plain, it’s barely a hundred feet wide. The creek, mostly dry right now, has cut a sharp vertical channel through it, a couple of feet deep. And the stream bed itself is gravel and stone cobbles. Everywhere along the bottom is green and as the land rises above the tiny plain, the grasses dry and brown. There are some cows here, and some horses there. In the wider places there might be a farm, or a dirt road leading off into the mountains, up some side creek’s draw. The Diablo Range is an intricate place. For the first hour the road is never not bending, always winding, ever routing around some topography. A few cars pass going the other way, but not many.

Then we reach the end of Tres Pinos creek and pass over into Panoche creek’s wash. The land opens up a bit, the road is a bit straighter, at least on a scale measured in multiple seconds of not turning the wheel. The pavement is in no better shape, there are and have been sections that are 50% slapped down asphalt patches. There are still farms, and even small communities. There is an elementary school out here, if you can believe it. At this point we haven’t had cell service for over an hour. In the wide Panoche valley, we pass a solar farm in the distance, and a sign for the Mercey Hot Springs. Stretches of road are only half paved now, sometimes it’s the left half and sometimes it’s the right half. Signs warn “impassable when flooded”. The green is gone and all around is a sea of dry yellow grass. The road makes a couple of those jig-jogs, a right angle right turn followed quickly by a left. It wants to keep going in a straight line, due east, but some property got in the way.

And then we’re on the New Idria road, and stopping at the Griswold Creek BLM day use area. There is beer litter, and old pizza boxes. The sign says no trash pickup and that is true, the trash has not been picked up. Littered in amongst all the carefully collected garbage, some of it is even bagged and ready to go, are shells of all sorts. Shotgun shells, 40 caliber, and a few rifle shells too. There are a few bullet holes in buildings, doors, and posts, but not as many as I expect. The picnic tables and shelters are newish, maybe less than five years old. The pit toilet building is in great shape, minus a few handgun dents and holes in the door, and minus the mess inside. Only use it if you really have to. Not sure the last time the septic was serviced.

There are a few graffitis around; stickers and a couple of tags. We have entered the territory of HTF and KOSE EVICT, whoever they are. There are others too, I can’t make them out.

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The courtyard on the outskirts, between Nordstrom’s EPUB coffee bar and the blank side of the Crate & Barrel, wasn’t the first place I noticed, but it is where I spent the most time observing. I was having a water break, and sat in the shade under the lilac tree on the tiled rim of its giant pot. It wasn’t a hot day, but it was hot enough and all the shaded patio tables in the half-fenced area were taken. A well-dressed guy in a tan blazer and blue oxford shirt, maybe a doctor or some other researcher from the adjacent Stanford medical center or even the university, slouched over the table, head down and evidently having a rest. Maybe he was even napping under his dark sunglasses. Another young man, also in business attire but this time a navy sport coat and a light blue shirt, sat with several plastic takeaway salad bins from the EPUB counter. The evidence suggested that he was on an extended lunch break; he had been at the same station an hour earlier when I started my inaugural tour of the shopping center. These two guys didn’t appear to me to be shoppers at these outpost shops, nor to be employees on break from their duties in the shops. Members of both of those cohorts were evident and obvious in the patio as well, scattered about and the former mostly solo, the latter in small groups around a table or making an order.

The space surrounding the patio seating puts either building some noticeable distance away. And the rectangular fenced area itself, occupying the closer-to-Nordstrom’s half of a square that surrounds the central tree is even larger still. All this space wasn’t so obvious in the moment. The few people walking through, except if they came into the lunch pen, they had no reason to approach one another at all out there. An elegant and reserved older shopper carefully carried her salad kit from the counter window to the small table next to my seat, and the clutch of young employees exiting the Nordstrom’s brass and glass doors for a break took another table closer to the store. A large circle of the floor is paved with a grid of plain terracotta and sculpted, colorfully hand painted, tiles. Occasionally a small group of construction workers passed through the gap between the buildings on the right, outside the fence, still wearing hard hats and electric green safety vests, on their way to or from some project. Crate & Barrel’s facade on the far side is a tall brick wall with a metal sash covering the bottom half rather like an armored reinforcement. It’s a high wall, far away.

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There were a few small straggly bits, not much magnetic tape was missed. I looked for any other remains of the huge mess from last week along the center median of 85. Some few pieces of it fluttered and glinted in the breeze, but most had been cleaned up by someone, a highway worker or a good samaritan, or some unknowable party doing the good work to keep our city’s infrastructure at or below a threshold level of dirtiness. There was still plenty of other trash along the sides of the road: a five gallon bucket lid, pieces of blown apart tire, a flattened In-n-Out Burger paper cup, a pair of shoes¹. All the usual things and just enough of them to look regular, look just as it usually does. I kept looking for the tape, and I really didn’t see much.

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The offshore platform is just there, day and night. Lit, dark, and dusk, it is a permanent presence from an earlier strata. It could go on to outlast us all against the sea; a still anchor, untended and disused. And unreachable by us on the shore. Like a beacon of foreign industry, it’s always there, will be on the horizon doing it’s unknowable things, making it’s unbelievable produce.

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I spent a day at the Sonoma Raceway; my expertise in cars runs about as deep as playing Gran Tourismo and Forza Motorsports many years ago will get you. The cultural experience, the different scene in the pits, and all the forms and colors of the cars, the race track itself and its infrastructure made for a very interesting day. I’d do it again, for sure, just to see things that are totally out of my norm.

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The uniformed man walked past, straight down the middle of the two rows of chairs, perfectly ordinary. He’s young-ish, he’s wearing a hat, a baseball cap, but I didn’t catch the logo. When he got to the back of the shop, I lost interest in his activities, but on recollection I see that he entered the scene empty handed, which is odd for a delivery person or service man. When I glance at him again something slightly odd is happening. He’s got the carboy out of the water dispenser and is looking at the main body of the dispenser itself. Maybe a repair? The carboy is empty. Everything seems normal. But then I see that the dispenser is unplugged and he’s holding the cord. He picks it up and hoists the whole thing onto his shoulder. My eyes track him, head held still, as Maria continues cutting my hair. The empty carboy is in his other hand and he walks back out right down the dead middle of the chairs with all of it. He doesn’t look left or right, and says nothing to anyone.

They’ve started taking the place apart. Maria says it’s been like this all week. There were some workers out measuring at the front of the shop a day or two ago. “Bro, we’re still here,” she says, gesturing toward the emptying room, the barbers beginning to pack combs and trimmers, the decorations barely still hanging on the wall. One of the other clients leaves a bottle of tequila for them, after his last haircut. I send a larger than my usual tip along with the payment. Maybe I’ll see her again at the next barbershop.

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The forest is misty at five in the morning, and the air still and quiet. The wind broke sometime late in the night and the air was now only gently drifting. I was returning from the trail camp’s pit toilet, deciding what to do next in the dim pre-dawn gray. The edges of the trees are all softened in the pale atmosphere. Trail camp is at 1580 feet above the sea and I had expected to be in the clouds more than some of this weekend, but it had not happened until this morning, the last morning. There had been only blue skies and the tireless wind, and some thin shreds of white racing overhead, just out of reach.

But the wind had tired of its constant 30 mph or more racing and gusting in the green tops of the blackened red giants. Now it was something much less, something rarely heard and only faintly felt.

The low roar, the distant rumbling that had been noticeably palpable since the wind had picked up the night before last, it’s not gone. Perhaps it is not wind in the trees’ trunks. It could be waves on the coast, or maybe it’s still windy in the trees where the sound is coming from, where the wind has gone for a rest.

The sun is rising. I can see the crinkles in the tent’s rain fly in the grazing dawn light, and the tiny faint dots on the pages of my notebook without the flashlight.

Soon I will go back out, go for a walk in the misty dawn light and look, again, for the landing strip in the still air with the distant low roar. An airstrip is an improbable thing to find on the top of a ridge, in the middle of a redwood forest in the clouds, far away from everything. The map says it is there, so I will look for it.

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This place is a hotel restaurant at the end of Menlo Park on Sand Hill road, past SLAC but before 280. Could it be the local spot for the ultra wealthy that live in the hills past the freeway, up in La Honda or wherever? Hotel restaurant is sometimes a bad word, but this one used to be the spot back in the day. I’m unclear which day that was. It wasn’t yet built when the dot com boom was on. The other tech boom has been a sort of continuous series mini-booms and busts all happening in parallel. The AI boom is on right now, but so is the AI employment bust. It’s all very confusing and stressful.

But at Madera there is no stress. It is a place that has the right amount of space between the tables, is not too bright or too dim, is quiet for conversation and your own voices are absorbed into the special air they use so your party doesn’t disturb any other party, or vice versa. I don’t know how they do it, but I wish more restaurants would stage this way. Not all, of course, but being able to hear each other is a nice experience.

I haven’t yet mentioned the view. How do I capture this, because it is not a postcard view. I would assume that the spectacular feature is the marine layer clouds falling over the crest of the hills, something that happens quite often and is always a delight. Well, it wasn’t on today. Perhaps Madera was saving a little for bigger guests. We just got a normal cloud layer, even diffuse light on the green oaks and ridge lines and a bit of freeway poking around one corner behind the pool. It is a view that I enjoy and I am pleased to have been seated near the large windows and facing them so I could look out and savor those hills and ridges and trees, even if they didn’t include any spectacular falling clouds in evening light. Maybe next time, maybe I can be on the lookout. We were there for brunch.

I am glad to say that the food was every bit as carefully selected and prepared as the atmosphere. Lemons were bright, greens were perfectly crisp and fresh, vegetables each a piece of art, and all the entrees were just so. This is dependable quality, reliable luxury. The people back there preparing this stuff are perfectionists and notice the details and address them. They probably use tweezers. They are craftsmen- people, crafts-people, and highly skilled technicians of food. An overseer is directing this orchestra, the menu was very coherent, none of the dishes were present only to fill a hole. I can see why it’s not the spot right now, but also, please, for the hope of letting us keep some nice things, do not throw out this gem. Everything was delicious and perfect and to me worth every penny. I would go again anytime I wanted that experience. It ranks with Dio Deka, another house of perfected food that I have experienced lately. I cannot imagine ever being disappointed by either. Nor would I go there to be surprised or wowed or shown something new. You go to a place like this because you know exactly what you are going to get and it is going to be as perfect as possible because all imperfections have been either edited out or that thing is just not possible to serve right now so it will not be offered. The gluten-free Lemon and Ricotta pancakes were absolutely worth every bite and they are also among the least “California” dishes on the menu. The avocado toast was a work of art, a living still life, right down to the jammy egg on top. The artichoke hummus was so amazing that I couldn’t resist the drop of oil that had fallen on the table because the lemon infused-ness was that good. The mixed vegetables looked like something out of a painting and the green goddess dressing was bright and tangy and frankly a small revelation that such things are still made with such attention and care in today’s world.

I haven’t mentioned the staff. They were excellent. And invisible. There to do their job, all elegantly poised and perfectly dressed and immaculate. Frankly a bit of the Edwardian house staff about them, a little upstairs/downstairs in the air. I’m not sure how that would have arrived here on the western end of the world, but I swear I felt it. Must have come with the clientele. It did take a few minutes longer than we thought it should to get some extra slices of bread for the remaining hummus. I assume they needed to bake and slice it and butter it at just the right temperature and the baker was refusing to rush the cooling period, that bread would be perfecto when it reached the table or there would be blood on the kitchen floor. That we even asked for it probably betrayed that we’re not that clientele. Who knows.

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I haven’t been on University Ave in possibly eight, maybe nine, years. Not since before the pandemic. It’s changed. It’s the same.

There are rich people. I mean really rich people. There are normal folks. There are homeless and beggars and buskers and panhandlers. There are people that are probably high, but who can really say. Maybe they’re just high on life. Or they don’t feel like wearing a shirt. What I am saying is that the people watching is good.

The CVS in Palo Alto has timed safes and doesn’t stock promethazine with Codeine anymore. At The RealReal, the security guard has to press a button to unlock and open the door for every customer. To let them in. And to let them out. Maybe the streets of Palo Alto are just like that now.

We walked down University Ave and got a juice at Joe’s. Mostly just to use the bathroom, but also to get a juice. The accent pink is an off-Pepto. That’s a weird choice for a cafe.

We walked back up and contemplated moving our cars. The signs seemed to say we didn’t need to, but they were a lot of words. Jeff told the story of the signs around the Smithsonian. How they were easily misunderstood by tourists, and lots of cars are towed every day at 3pm. He’d been lucky and seen the line of tow trucks on their daily mission. Palo Alto doesn’t seem like that kind of place, but I don’t know. We left the cars where they were. They were there when we came back later.

We kept walking up, looking for our dinner, and passed another Joe’s. A different Joe’s. I’m sure of it. Seems odd to put two Joe & The Juice bars within a couple of blocks of each other. Maybe a questionable pink isn’t their only problem. Maybe I’m hungry. Then again, I’ve seen the Starbucks diagonally across the intersection from each other. So, again, I don’t know.

Beeple has been by recently. That’s cool, I’m curious. It’s an ad. Coulda been some secret and cool art piece. You can go to his retrospective show, if that’s your thing.

You know what the standout at dinner was? The elevator. Darkest elevator I’ve been in. The best mood lighting I’ve ever seen. Who could resist it? Goes between two floors, a short trip, and has a disconcerting jolt when it goes down. Unaccountable how it got there, got in this restaurant. The chicken was quite good too. But that elevator. Probably worth a detour if you are into it.

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