We’re back, folks.
The 49ers season met its unceremonious demise. And with it, the blog returns… with a mildly misleading title.
Mendocino
I took the weekend immediately following the season’s end to drive up to Mendocino with my girlfriend. What I adore about the northern coast, and something she pointed out when we got there, is its rare clash of redwood forests and beaches.
You feel simultaneously protected by the woods and exposed to the ocean.
Life is slower up there.
You forget yourself within those forests, standing beneath natural, ancient skyscrapers. Ferns, moss and clovers jump out from the reddish-brown loam at your feet.
The shade of 100-plus-foot trees envelops you. Jagged, lofty branches cross over each other, forming wooden webs. Golden rays peek through the gaps. Everything outside of those woods disappears.
It’s not silent. You can hear chirps and buzzes, leaves crinkling, the not-too-distant flow of the literally-named “Little River.” But it’s the sort of natural repose that reminds you just how noisy life is outside of its arboreal gates.
Departing that scene is a jolt to the system.
Nothing is comparable to the sensation of leaving the daytime dusk of redwoods and immediately emerging at the beach.
In a moment, that visual quietude evaporates and gives way to an imperious scene of sand, rock and waves.
No beach there is the same. Some are tucked inside alcoves of enormous bluffs. Others are — or used to be — smattered with sea glass.
And you’ll find more, still, that are grey and rocky, with slabs and shelves of climbable, jagged basalt and mélange at the fringes of the waves — depending on the tides. You step past jellyfish and abalone shells washed ashore as you scramble your way up.
Hiding in those open slabs are are curiosity-inviting tide pools, filled with an overwhelming sum of anemones, sea urchins and occasional small crabs.
This was the first time I saw this all at high tide, with a full moon encouraging waves and highlighting the towering jettisons of sea foam.
It’s the sort of scene that draws you in and forces you to consciously pull yourself off the shore. I could watch and listen to the crashing of waves for hours.
Those waters are captivating. And they’re just as much a part of the natural clash of habitats in Mendocino.
(As an aside, I have, what I feel, is a healthy fear of and respect for the water. Poseidon doesn’t fuck around.)
On the way to one beach, we drove down a steep, narrowing one-lane road. It opened up to a sandy parking lot, where rocks mark off a short ledge towards a beach facing a wide river.
After this winter’s storms, enormous stockpiles of driftwood had washed ashore. The term “driftwood” fails to properly convey the scale.
We saw an entire trunk, some of its roots still intact, floating into the ocean from the river. Slowly, then suddenly.
There was a visible, yet imprecise point where the river met the ocean.
These furious, half-story waves swarmed the bluffs and crashed over the tops of rocks, with smaller waves following in their wake. Eventually, the inward crash of the tides towards land met the outflow of the river.
There’s a near total calm for a few hundred feet, which, if you’re me, registers as ideal rock skipping conditions. The key is to get your torso as low as possible while keeping your rotator cuff intact.
Literally a stone’s throw (crowd boos) from that point are layers of blue-greens, tipped with white.
Watching the tide roll in at sunset can be treacherous, but even when the beach begins to shrink, it’s hard to force yourself back to the car.
Eventually, with the water encroaching, you do. And with the waning daylight, you get to experience the Highway 1, which is no bore either.
The PCH is as treacherous in parts as it is stunning.
The trees that line the roads have a aged affability to them. That’s especially true when you get further south towards Sea Ranch — a funky community of houses that is simultaneously quaint and a little unnerving — where the trees are wind-beaten in a way that reminds me of Martha’s Vineyard.
That perilous sense of being cliffside is never more palpable than when you wind your way down the coast on the Highway 1 and the sun sets behind storm clouds. You find yourself driving on a cliff’s edge through fog and roads unknown. There’s no prescience that can prepare you for that drive. It takes its toll, but it’s also deeply impressive.
Restlessness
Since getting back, I’ve been antsier than usual.
Part of that is the shift from being unburdened by work and settled in nature, to returning to the rhythm of a job. But it’s also the disappearance of the schedule of the 49ers’ season, plus a desire to be productive without much to do.
When there’s not too much to write about, I get fidgety, like in the pandemic. We had no sports for months, but if I left my computer, I’d feel like I was missing something by stepping out.
What I had to remind myself then, and what I have to remind myself now, is that I need to go outside. The moment I feel that mental itch, that sense of constriction, of sitting too long, I need to get up and go.
But sometimes I won’t.
“Mind playin’ tricks on me”
Even if walking doesn’t solve the problem, it physically takes me out of that place of claustrophobic thinking. It offers time and space for contemplation. I know that.
But for reasons subconscious, work-related or otherwise, I’ll sometimes forget or refuse to go. Until I actually leave the house, it can seem, somehow, like a weighty proposition.
Sometimes it’s about the ranking of chores. I’ll tell myself I’ll take a walk or a run after I work out, or put my clothes away, or finish an article… and then wait too long or not do those any of those things and procrastinate.
All I’m telling myself is to go outside. In no scenario will that be detrimental.
But to make the conscious choice to peel myself away from the screen, stop responding to messages, scrolling, whatever it is, there’s a mental hurdle I have to clear.
The second I’m outside, I scold my past self. There was no tangible obstacle. That is made immediately, embarrassingly apparent.
Laziness is the obvious culprit for getting stuck inside, but it’s deeper than that. And it’s unfair to our psyche to dismiss the technology-glued state we operate in as simply being lazy.
Much of the reason a walk is so mind-altering is because we get stuck.
I’ll speak for myself and drop the royal “we.”
I find myself constantly looking to sit and play Xbox, or do absolutely nothing on my laptop, bouncing through YouTube or Twitter, despite the fact that I do not want to do that.
It’s habitual, not intentional. I’m doing these things in spite of what I want to be doing.
There’s a gravitational pull to technology. It is invasive and unrelenting, with its sole goal to keep us using it.
To break that cycle requires both motivation and execution.
The idea of a hike or a walk can be inspiring, but the comfort of a bed versus the prospect of changing clothes, strapping on shoes, finding the headphones you tossed somewhere unknown and — if you have a dog, putting them in a harness, finding trash bags and their leash — and actually proceeding out the door, is burdensome if you let it be.
As silly as it sounds when you actually consider the minimal effort required in those steps, it is a legitimate mental leap.
It’s outrageous that it can feel like it requires such a dogged effort.
But our brains like the bright screens, and unless you take action on that inspiration immediately, there’s a chance it might slip.
It’s a sensation that reminds me of the scenes in Harry Potter when Harry has to pull himself away from the face of a dementor.
Yes, 1. that’s a corny pop culture comparison. 2. it’s a bit of a dramatic simile to compare donning athleisure and taking a few steps outside to getting your soul stolen by a ghoul 3. I don’t really care because it’s a good comparison.
Do you ever feel yourself typing the keys to get to a website, and before you finish, you realize you have no interest in hitting “Enter” (or “return”)?
I find myself typing in “Twitter” or “YouTube” automatically in my browser. I’m typing without having a conscious thought of whether I actually care what’s on Twitter. It’s muscle memory.
My internet mind works steps ahead of my conscious brain, deciding what familiar neural path to tread before I’ve actually decided whether I want to head down it.
Walk it out
So, you un-glue yourself and take a walk.
I realize I’m sitting here proselytizing, preaching the gospel of a walk as if everyone reading this has never taken one.
This isn’t novel. Do any cursory research on taking a walk. It is resoundingly positive for your physical and mental health.
The science behind walking reinforces that. To put it in lay terms that my girlfriend has explained to me countless times — and which I have still had to look up again for this — our eyes constantly adjust on walks, which basically puts our brain in a state of activation.
Our eyes make lateral movements to update our brain on where we are, what terrain lies ahead, etc. It’s called “optic flow.”
To summarize some very interesting research that I haven’t read — in addition to, er, other summaries — our brain turns off or dims our stress centers when we walk, because it has to focus on moving.
There’s even a therapy called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), founded by Francine Shapiro, MD that is a recognized PTSD treatment founded on moving eyes laterally, in much the same way you would on a walk.
A walk.
I don’t mean to sound callous and assert that a walk is the end-all-be-all salve to mental health.
‘Tis not.
‘Tis, however, extraordinarily helpful.
And the key here is not that walking is something new. It’s that we forget how substantial it can be.
To use the words of neuroscientist Shane O’Mara:
“We persistently underestimate how good a walk will make us feel.”
That video is worth watching, and includes such revelations that show walking not only improves mood, but it increases the functions in and development of the hippocampus. Studies show consistent walking reverses brain aging. We perform tasks “more creatively,” O’Mara says, if we walk beforehand.
The other day, after some frustration at something that was out of my hands, I took Tucker and headed out.
You can make a rational argument that sources of aggravation out of your control should not be as bothersome. But being helpless to solve them always tends to be bother me more. It’s frustrating in a way that leads me to sit and stew, which helps no one.
The walk I took drew me out of that.
I’ve taken a walk or gone for a run every day this week, right at the moment when I started to feel stir crazy.
I went for one the other day earlier than normal because I felt myself starting to get antsy.
It was the sort of “cold” that only exists in the lexicon of a Californian.
It was 60 degrees. But I was walking against a steady, light wind and in some shade. In California, that qualifies as cold.
That identification of “cold” was proven ludicrous — as I knew it was when I left — when I got to the park. It was the sort of unabated sun that you dream of on a park day.
Kids were running around, climbing through jungle gyms. Dogs were trotting around. Middle schoolers were biking uncertainly, wearing oversized, clunky helmets. Aside from the prior day’s rain swamping up the grass, it was exactly how you’d picture a park on a weekday.
It reminded me of that dream sequence in the second Terminator. Sarah Connor takes a nap and sees a vision of herself and her son at a park with kids running around and a merry-go-round spinning, moments before nuclear disaster.
But there’s no disaster. Despite our collective predispositions towards believing our doom is imminent, it tends to be, well, less so.
The most uplifting sight was a mom with her baby. She laid out a blanket under the shade of a tree for her probably six-month-old nugget to splay out, and then attempted to read him a kid’s book. He was hilariously and completely disinterested.
When she gave up on the book and went to put it away in the stroller, he, like a literal pig in a blanket, did a full 180-degree roll over on his back, down the slightest of inclines.
I was sitting at a bench far across the way just chuckling to myself.
I sometimes worry that I look like a maniac smiling at people and their babies. But I mean, come on. They’re built like Pillsbury dough. They have no fucking clue what’s going on, let alone what to do with their limbs. That’s good stuff.
Remind yourself to step out
Every walk this week has been soothing. Tucker and I stop at the park in the same spot every day, sitting at a bench in the sun, soaking it in for a few minutes.
Those few minutes, with Tucker sniffing around, trees shaking behind me, families running around in the park, a half acre of grass and an open blue sky above, are precious. Call it hokey, but it centers me; it makes me less reactive and critical.
It is absolutely imperative to remind yourself that life is overflowing with beauty. We forget that because we constantly remove ourselves from it.
You have to consciously fight the insipid, sedentary forces of modern society. The ones that whisper to you to remain sitting. To stay watching. To keep working. That you don’t have time to step outside.
You always do.
This was lovely, Jake. I felt like I was right there with you in the great outdoors. As a follow-up assignment, I would like you to retrace all of the scenes and steps taken in this article, but this time while high on magic mushrooms. Best holiday wishes.
I've been dealing with exactly what you described, that mental back and forth, the false step rationalizations, the procrastination, all of that. And every time I walk I chide myself for not... just... doing it. Thanks for publishing this, I really felt seen reading this!
And for my money, the north coast is one of the most gorgeous places on earth and the biggest pro of living in NorCal. Salt Point State Park is absolutely incredible, there's a ton of small towns in the actual Russian River/foresty area that remind you of those adorable getaway towns in Vermont/NH, Bodega Bay is simply magical, and you don't even have to go that far up north... Point Reyes, an hour north of SF, might be my favorite place in the world... I'm loyal as hell to Brickmaiden Breads before a ten-miler on Alamere falls, even though Chimney Rock is more than good enough...