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Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo was the first European to set foot on the west coast of what is now the United States. He set sail in three ships from Spanish territory in Mexico, sailing north to claim land for the king of Spain and to discover a route to Asia and the Spice Islands. He was also charged with searching the uncharted coast for a passage that some people believed connected the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Lastly, he was to search for gold. He certainly had a lot of assignments!

On September 28, 1542, Cabrillo reached a harbor that he described as "a closed and very good port." In the statue he's looking right toward that harbor, which is now the bustling port of San Diego. He named the area San Miguel and stayed six days while he waited out a storm. Then his ships proceeded on up the coast, naming one bay "Bahia de Los Fumos"--Bay of Smokes--because the horizon was smoky that day. The bay is named San Pedro today, and the land that looked smoky that day is now covered by the city of Los Angeles. Could the name have been prophetic of the smog that would one day envelop the city?

Cabrillo died of injuries he sustained on one of the Channel Islands north and west of the Los Angeles area, but his ships and men continued north, possibly as far as the Rogue River in Oregon, before returning to Mexico. The expedition did not discover a route to Asia or find a passage that connected the Pacific and Atlantic or find any gold. However, over 800 miles (1287.5 kilometers) of coastline was claimed for Spain, and the voyage added knowledge of landmarks, winds, and currents that would aid in further Spanish exploration of the Pacific.

Meanwhile, back at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego, this large statue sits atop a high hill on a peninsula that guards the entrance to San Diego harbor. The end of the peninsula is named Point Loma. I walked along a short trail through ice plants to this lovely old lighthouse and then climbed up into the tower. On the way up the winding staircase, I looked into rooms that were furnished as if the Robert Israel family still lived there. The year was 1891, just prior to the move the Israels made to the new light station at the bottom of the hill. You see, the fog and low clouds that created a need for the lighthouse were the same fog and low clouds that obscured the light from being seen by the ships approaching the harbor. It became necessary to move the light down the hill where it could be seen under the clouds. So this building was abandoned in 1891 and now serves as a lovely little museum to show us what life in a lighthouse would have been like. And it seems it would have been pleasant, indeed.

Here is a former Bennett Elementary School student, Tim Howe, who is now in the Navy and stationed on this ship, the U.S.S. Antietam. I met up with Tim the day his ship came back into port in San Diego after a two-week naval operation out in the Pacific Ocean. He gave me a thorough tour of the inside of the ship, including the bridge (where the captain sits and controls the ship’s course) and the big engine room (where we had to wear protective gear over our ears to drown out the very loud noise of the engines). We also saw the ship’s library, workout room, dining area, and the door to the sick bay. We didn’t go in there. Tim showed me several rooms where he works with some of the many computers on board the ship. The Antietam serves as a control tower for planes that take off from aircraft carriers, Tim explained. Once a plane takes off from a carrier it receives its information from computers and personnel aboard the Antietam that help guide it to its target. The Antietam also carries missiles, and the computers that Tim works with control the flight of those missiles.

The U.S.S. Antietam was named after the Civil War battle fought near Antietam, Maryland. In that battle on the 17th of September, 1862, more Americans died in one single day than on any other single day in American history. At the end of the day, neither the North nor the South had won a decisive victory, but the battle had prohibited Southern General Robert E. Lee from carrying the war into the northern states. And it gave President Lincoln the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared freedom for all slaves in states still in rebellion against the United States.

Please see the March 3, 2001 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the March 5, 2001 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

In these pictures you see two of the 21 missions that were built by the Spanish in California between 1769 and 1823. They were constructed along a road the Spanish built, named El Camino Real -- The Royal Road. It was about a day’s journey along this road to get from one mission to the next. All of the missions were constructed of stone and adobe and roofed with timber beams covered with red tile. The walls inside and out were covered with whitewashed mud plaster. The construction workers for all these missions were Native Americans , for the most part, under the supervision of the Franciscan priests.

Mission Santa Barbara, shown in the first picture, was founded on December 4, 1786, the feast day of Saint Barbara. It is called the "Queen of the Missions" and is one of the best preserved of all the missions in California. I learned that the Indian woman whose story is told in the book Island of the Blue Dolphins is buried in the cemetery next to this mission.

The second picture is of Mission San Francisco de Asis, also known as Mission Dolores. It is one of the oldest buildings in San Francisco. It was opened in 1776 by Father Junípero Serra. The roof timbers are made of redwood and still are lashed together by rawhide, as they were originally. The first book to be written in California was done here at this mission. It was Palou’s Life of Junípero Serra.

The Indians were sometimes reluctant converts to the faith. Not only did they have to build the missions, they also tended the cattle and worked in the fields surrounding the missions. Many of them died at the hands of the Spanish, and many more died of the diseases the Spanish brought.

The missions formed a nucleus around which the first permanent settlements in California formed. Most of the missions had fallen into disrepair or had been damaged by earthquakes through the years but today are being restored to the beautiful condition in which you see these two.

John Steinbeck's Hometown - Salinas, California

The author John Steinbeck was born in this house in Salinas, California, in 1902. He lived there for his first nineteen years and began writing stories as a child. There is a museum a few blocks away, devoted solely to John Steinbeck’s life and work. I spent an absorbing two hours in the museum, looking at displays of his childhood toys and photographs of his parents and grandparents, hearing the words of his books read on tape, and seeing video clips of his books that were adapted for movies. My favorite part of all the exhibits was this pickup truck--named Rocinante--in which Steinbeck traveled around America with his big poodle Charley. Rocinante is named after the horse in the book Don Quixote. Steinbeck wrote a book about his journey, called Travels with Charley. The trip was done in the 1960s; this camper that was added onto the truck may have been one of the first ever made. The door to it is open, and it’s lighted inside so I could look in and see where he sat and wrote his notes for the book while he perked his coffee on the stove. What you can’t see in the picture is the lifelike (but fake) tall poodle sitting in the passenger seat of the truck.

I was talking to the women at the front desk of the museum about my own "travels with Charlie"--Charlie Brown, that is, which was parked on the street just outside the front glass doors. I told them that reading Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley was partly what inspired me to do my own trip. (The final impetus came, however, from William Least Heat Moon, author of Blue Highways in a lecture he gave at the University of Northern Colorado in 1988. He said that after Steinbeck had done the journey in the Sixties and he, Least Heat Moon, had done the journey in the Eighties, it was time for a woman to take the trip and write the book. I kept the dream for twelve years before I could make it come true--at least the part about taking the trip. The book will take longer.)

The women gave me a pamphlet that would help me find all the sites in Salinas, Monterey, and surrounding countryside that are mentioned in Steinbeck’s other books about the area: Cannery Row, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, and others. I did go to the old wharves of Monterey to see the smelly old fish canneries Steinbeck wrote about, but today the buildings house shops selling aromatic candles, designer clothes, cinnamon rolls, and rich fudge. It smells much better these days!

Here are two of the landmarks that give San Francisco its unique character--the Golden Gate Bridge and the cable cars. That fort you see under the Golden Gate Bridge is part of the Presidio, the name the Spaniards gave to the fort they originally built in this location in 1776, the same year that Father Junípero Serra began building Mission San Francisco de Asis. The Golden Gate Bridge crosses a very narrow strait, which for years in the early exploration of this coast hid San Francisco Bay from passing sailing ships. Once the harbor was discovered, the Spaniards wanted to defend it from any enemies who might try to enter, so they built a fort here. The original fort was replaced by this one that the United States built years later, after winning California from Mexico in a war.

It was the gold rush in 1849 that gave the sleepy little village of San Francisco a huge nudge toward becoming a city. Suddenly, the port was very busy with incoming ships bringing prospectors headed for the Sierra Nevada Mountains (here are some neat pictures of the Sierra Nevadas on the web). With the wealth from the gold fields and later the silver mines being sent back to be deposited in San Francisco banks, the city became a banking center and is second only to New York City today in banking activity. Those prospectors who came to the state during the gold rush were called "Forty-niners." They haven’t been forgotten by this city, because today San Francisco’s professional football team is named after them.

I took a ride on this cable car up steep hills and down. The car has a mechanism underneath it that grabs onto a moving cable under the street. It’s the cable that pulls the car up the hills. It’s not a fast ride, but it’s exciting because of the hills. At intersections the conductor reaches up to a cord and rings a clanging bell a few times to let approaching cars and pedestrians know the cable car is coming. That sound is so San Francisco! It was a happy day for this traveler returning "home" to a favorite city.

Please see the March 16, 2001 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Fort Ross was built in 1812 by Russians on the north coast of what is now California. The name Ross derived from the word for Russia (Rossiia). At that time the Russians controlled Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. They needed a place in a warmer climate to grow food to support the Alaskan settlements. California belonged to Spain at the time, but the Russians claimed the bay here and built a fort to defend themselves against the Spanish if attacked. No shots were ever fired on it.

Crops were planted around the fort, but the rocky soil, wind, frequent fog, and lack of trained farmers prevented the Russians from being able to harvest much. They had pressed the local Native Americans into service to farm for them. The locals, the Kashaya Pomo, had lived abundantly for centuries on wild game and wild food they gathered; they had had no need to develop skills in farming.

The Russians also used this settlement to conduct trade with the Spanish and later the Mexicans when Mexico gained control of California in 1821. The Russians constructed a boathouse and built the first ships ever to be made in California. They built the chapel that you see in the picture--the first Russian Orthodox structure on this continent, outside of Alaska. And off the coast they hunted otter, almost to extinction. The fur was greatly prized back in Russia.

When there were few otter left to hunt, the Russians decided to sell the fort. They approached the Mexican government and Hudson's Bay Company, but neither wanted to buy it. John Sutter, in Sacramento, bought it for the furnishings and the 2,000 head of stock. A succession of ranchers owned the land until it was given to the state of California in 1906. Because the fort is close to the San Andreas Fault, it suffered damage in the big earthquake that year. Most of the fort has been rebuilt, because of that earthquake and a subsequent fire in the chapel, and today it is as close to the original as possible.

I visited in March, and the peace plants were blooming everywhere outside the walls and down the steep, grassy slopes to the ocean below. I liked the thought of a fort surrounded by "peace" plants.

This California redwood tree is so tall that there was no way I could back up far enough to get the whole tree in the picture. You get the idea of how thick it is when you look at Charlie Brown up next to it. It is between 250 and 300 feet (76.2 and 91.4 meters) tall, nowhere near as tall as the Big Tree, which once stood 367.8 feet (112.1 meters) tall. In July 1964 it was proclaimed the world's tallest tree. Sometime after that the very top of it broke off in a winter storm, and it became about the same height as all the other tall trees in the grove around it. It is estimated to be about 1100 years old. I couldn't get a picture of it because the forest was so dark and dense where it is, but I stood beside it for a long time just looking up at it.

The old-growth redwoods today are protected in 40,000 acres (16,187 hectares) of national and state parks in California. The responsibilities of managing the park are shared by the National Park Service and the California State Parks system. It is estimated that these 40,000 acres (16,187 hectares) represent only about four percent of the original two million acres (809,371 hectares) in which redwoods used to grow here in northern California, until 1850, when logging began. The rest of the redwood forests were then harvested so excessively that only these protected stands of the tall trees survive.

Redwoods grow from a seed the size of a tomato seed. Those redwood seeds come out of a pine cone that is only about as big as a large olive. Redwoods can also sprout from burls, which are bumps on the side of the tree near the ground. The new sprouts from the burls use the parent tree's roots and eventually can form circular stands of trees around the space where an older parent tree has died. Redwoods thrive in the cool, wet climate of this land near the sea. Fog plays a crucial role in their ability to thrive.

Scientists have determined that redwoods covered much of North America during the time of the dinosaurs, when the land was bathed in a mild, moist climate. The trees continue to thrive here on the northern coast of California in the same climatic conditions.

A redwood tree can weigh as much as 500 tons (453.6 metric tons) and stand taller than the Statue of Liberty. It can get to be 2,000 years old. It has no known killing diseases, and doesn't suffer from any significant insect damage. A lightning strike or fire can burn part of the tree, and it will survive. People have cut holes through the bases of these trees to create tunnels that a car can drive through, and the tree will survive! In a museum in the redwoods I saw a 1930s version of a motor home that one man had created from a downed tree. He carved it out so that there was a bed and table and cupboard and closet inside it. He made a chair for the table out of the wood of the tree. Then he set a motor inside the front of it and put four wheels on it, and he actually drove it. He called it his "Travel-log!"