Humboldt

My first weekend getaway of my second round in San Francisco took place just a couple of weeks after my move back out here, because even though I'm living just enough for The City, I'm not just living for The City.  It was time to escape the congestion, and a silver friend of mine, with whom I crossed paths the week before, had invited me to visit his cabin in Arcata.  Once he mentioned the words "cabin," "redwoods," and "sangria," I was pretty well sold. 

One of my roommates and I made the five-hour trek late on Thursday and met "Yo-Heezy," the owner of the cabin, and another one of my roommates around 1:00 in the morning.  Much to their delight, I brought along some Black Box wine and Sarah Lee baked goods (not to be confused with Sara Lee baked goods), and we commenced our celebration of social solitude in the unkempt but cozy cabin. 

The rain and the cool air on the following day made it difficult to leave the comforts of the cabin, but I experienced a bit of the culture up North nonetheless.  Dinnertime snuck up on us, and me and the fellas made a hodgepodge of yams and ginger, guacamole, fajitas, and sangria that left us slightly comatose.  Ironically, in an effort to revitalize ourselves and mend some of our ailments, Yo-Heezy nearly broke his back while trying to crack mine (I suppose I ate a little too much guacamole), so he was bed-ridden for the rest of the night; the remaining three, however, managed to shake our comas and adventure through the duration of the night.

With the Lost Coast Brewery as our sponsor, we built a roaring fire of aging furniture and other odds and ends in a large and rusted barrel, which we called the Barrel of Monkeys.  We were impressed with ourselves since the conditions were rather wet - though the rain had finally subsided - but our biggest task was still ahead: making the unfunctional sauna functional without doing any rewiring.  And so we put a bunch of rocks in a metal pale and put the pale in the fire and then poured water over the hot rocks once inside the sauna.  We tried this a number of times over the course of a couple of hours, and strange as it was, the first attempt, with mediocre results, was the most successful.  Once this cat-and-mouse game lost its fun, we played in the shipwreck of redwood trunks and fifteen-foot stumps just beyond the cabin, and once that lost its fun (or did it?), we retired to the cabin and fell asleep, sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning. 

The next day of in-and-out of sleep, reflecting, and burnt bacon ended around midnight, when my roommate and I made it sleepily back to San Francisco, which was not so sleepy itself.  It was a lively Saturday night, but I went straight to bed, readying myself for my 7:15 barista shift the next morning.