I’m going to include this letter from the 23rd so you have some context for the next part of our Baja trip.

Dec. 23, 2020

Hello Aunt Joan,

Like I said in the last letter it’s cold and damp in Gasquet now. On Monday I had to go to a dentist appointment in Medford, and the weather was even cooler there. They always get that valley fog in the Rogue Valley.

Anyway, it made me think of one year (about 30 years ago) for Christmas when we decided to go to Baja California. I’m sure we planned this trip the previous summer knowing that it would be cold and damp in Crescent City come Christmas. It’s gotta be warm down there, right?

We didn’t want to drive down and we couldn’t afford to fly down, so we decided to take the Green Tortoise. Have you ever heard of it before? It got its start as a hippy bus line in the 60s. Word on the street was that Greyhound would not pick up hippies, so some guy, probably a jaded hippy, started his own bus line to do just that, basically just for hippies and other free-spirited individuals as they enjoyed their rite of passage into adulthood. They probably even first used old Greyhound buses that were no longer serviceable by that company. The name Green Tortoise was very appropriate. If you used your imagination they kind of did look like some old beat up worn out turtle slowly trundeling down the road. They didn’t go very fast even though they had taken out almost all of the heavy and worn seats and basically just had wooden plywood platforms in their place. I have to think that they couldn’t do that these days with safety concerns being what they are today.

I don’t know if they even had scheduled stops, but they probably did. As I understand it, any hitchhiker that stuck their thumb out for a ride the bus would just stop and pick them up. I don’t even know if they had any kind of fee schedule.

Kind of like the Alaska Railroad used to be between Fairbanks and Seward. By the way, I always wanted to test that out. I did hitch-hike once about a 400 miles Skagway from to Fairbanks, but I paid for a ticket to ride the train to Anchorage. Amazing views!

Anyway, as hippies started finding out that even ‘free love’ wasn’t free and getting jobs and becoming more affluent and buying old VW buses the Green Tortoise had to change their business model. They started offering low budget touring trips for the brave of heart and those people that are fiscally-minded, such as myself. A very low budget trip. And for people with very strong hearts, that don’t need to sleep, don’t get hungry, and willing to hold their bathroom needs for extended periods of time on command. Probably the best fit would be to advertise to evolving young souls that need to slowly be taught a lot of patience. VERY slowly.

As part of our planning we sent and received their catalog of tours. This was many years before the Internet was invented for the general public and other peons. Evidently the government was already using it, probably just not for requesting information on Green Tortoise trips. They had 14 day cross country trips to the East Coast, 7 day western parks trips, Burning Man trips, and lucky for us a 10 day and 14 day trips to Baja California over Christmas! Since we wanted to get as much sun as possible we opted for the 14 day trip. This meant that we would leave right after school got out and we would be arriving back in Crescent City early Monday morning.

We didn’t know exactly what we were signing up for, but we signed up anyway. The pictures always present scenes where everyone is laughing and smiling at all stages of the trip. For about $400 for adults ($250 for the trip and $150 for food) and $300 for kids ($175 for the trip and $125 for food) we could enjoy our 2 week winter break in warm Baja for about $100 a day for all four of us with minimal driving. Just think of swimming in warm and clear ocean waters and laying on the beach and coming back with a sun tan in the middle of winter! We couldn’t wait to go. Anyway, Randy and Andrew were about 8 and 6 years old and had never driven that far. It was a well crafted plan from a budget-minded individual such as myself. The only driving for us was we had to get down to San Francisco the Friday that school got out for Christmas Break and be there by 11:30 that night. The bus was taking off promptly at 11:30 PM. I would be leaving again from the city of my birth. What could go wrong? We were on our way.

I want to get this in the mail, so the rest of the trip will be in the next letter.

Dec. 26, 2020

We did manage to get down to San Francisco on time with the correct toll fee in hand for crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. There were no Golden Gate Bridge Police tailing us as we drove through San Francisco… that we noticed. The weather was not unexpected. It was cold, foggy, and windy. Eventually we were able to get my fingers loosened from the steering wheel after the traumatic experience of my driving through San Francisco at night. We even found a place to legally park the car for a week. I don’t remember how or where, I just know upon our return it was where we left it, and it wasn’t just on the street or been towed. I do remember we had to pay a lot more for that privilege than I thought we should have to pay for parking for two weeks. So much for privileges from the city of my birth!

Getting everyone on the bus was an ordeal in and of itself. All the other people waiting around to get on the bus were talking and chit-chatting like they all had known each other for decades. At times though, it was difficult to tell the differences between the vagrants hanging around the bus terminal and those waiting to get on the bus. Some of them were wild and flat-ass mean looking besides being kind of sketchy. One guy looked so rough he probably ate his peanut butter and jam sandwiches without jam….or peanut butter. Looking back, I’m thinking that a few ne’er-do-wells managed to successfully get on the bus, but no one noticed.

The four of us were just standing there clustered together trying to mind our own business and not stare at the scope of humanity before us, but most important, not get separated. If you imagined the people in terms of a Bell Curve, the people there made up the extreme ends of the curve. That was a real concern since Andrew had a way of wandering off at inopportune times. We really did lose him at Disneyland one time for about 10 years. At least that’s how much we aged before we found him again.

Anyway, when we eventually got on the bus we could see that everyone else had thought ahead a bit more than we had before they got on. They evidently were veteran Green Tortoise travelers, or they had snuck on buses before. They would rush to a section of the plywood platform they wanted to stake out, somewhat like people going to a beach and scattering all their stuff at the extreme borders of ‘their newly claimed area.’ We were left with a small section towards the front that we were afraid would become a thoroughfare for anyone needing/wanting to get to the front of the bus for god knows what. Our fears were realized. We soon figured out why.

Since it was now about 12:30 in the morning we were pretty tired, so we rolled out our sleeping bags on some god-forsaken vintage of a rolled up sleeping pad. I tried really really hard not to think about where the pads had been and what manner of experiences had taken place on them, but the fetid smells and thoughts never really left me the entire trip. Ever tried sleeping up? Me either, until then. Some of those thoughts, to my displeasure, actually permeated into my dreams. Just about when we were ready to fall asleep to the monotonous but yet soothing sound of the tires coursing down the freeway we started hearing some kind of rattling above the low din of people talking and punctuated by stunted laughing. “Great!” I said to Sandi. “Someone brought some bones in a cup to cast a spell on our trip!”

By that time the interior bus lights had been dimmed and some of the ‘fortunate’ people were already fast asleep. Someone handed us some kind of heavy container with aromatic smells emanating from it and said to us, “Shake this until you get tired, and then pass it on.” We just figured that this was just some kind of weird rite or ritual to riding on the bus. We did that (I think) and eventually found out that the off-duty bus driver had, per tradition, brought the ingredients for making vanilla ice cream. In the container were salt and ice, and inside of that were the ingredients for the ice cream. In the subdued light cups were passed around, spoons came out, the open containers came around and we found ourselves eating ice cream, being chauffeured down the road in a freezing cold bus barreling down the freeway at 2:30 in the morning.

Laughter fueled by sugar buzzes and dollops of liquor in their cups pretty much meant that no one was planning to sleep that night. Seems that when some people get all liquored up they become even more obnoxious and believe they can now dance.

To say we had any rest would be lying, so I’ll just say that eventually after a seemingly few days and nights we pulled into some god-for-saken deserted dirt parking lot in east LA, the city of angels, about 6:30 in the morning. If were to characterize the place I’d say it was a few angels short of a city. There we took on more people and probably a few people that had snuck on in San Francisco now got off. The people that had been lucky enough to fall asleep were now in full-on talking mood and not shutting up. Except for about maybe an hour of fitful sleep, we had been awake for about 24 hours, and I’m sure none of us were in a good mood.

Lucky for everyone on the bus, they had planned the stop to include some outhouse facilities at the far edge of that afore-mentioned god-forsaken deserted dirt covered parking lot with all kinds of papers blowing around getting stuck against the fence, topped with razor wire kind of fence. I’m not sure now if it was for people not to get out or for people not to get in. Those types of fences always puzzle me.

The scene of people getting off the bus and seeing those lovely one-seater dilapidated smelly never cleaned outhouses turned into somewhat like a buffalo stampede with everyone running crazily toward them. It reminded me of those pictures you see now of the Black Friday sales days with people panic-running towards the opening doors of a store to buy a 49 cent item for 39 cents!

The quest for the outhouse invariably ended with a long line of no longer jovial people now impatiently waiting for their turn to use it while pee is slowly running down their legs. First lesson learned from traveling on the Green Tortoise was to get off the bus as soon as possible and be looking for the ‘facilities’ while the bus is rolling to a stop. The second lesson was BYOTP. Bring your own toilet paper.

Sorry, Aunt Joan, this was meant to be a short Christmas past letter and now we’re 6 pages into it and we’re not even out of cold Los Angeles.

SENT

Dec. 27, 2020

I don’t remember crossing the border into Mexico, but I know we did. Later in the morning I heard the bus crossed late at night because they felt the crossing would be easier with more lax security measures (new hires that were working the graveyard shift). Dunno, that’s just what I heard. The down side to that was the people with the just-opened bottles of hard liquor were trying to get rid of the ‘open container(s)’ by swallowing all evidence and encouraging others to follow their example. As soon as we cleared Customs they would become louder and more obnoxious.

For next few days the routine slowly evolved (or maybe I just came to understand it), and there was somewhat of a pattern. The Green Tortoise had two drivers that kind of split driving and other duties like cooking, being field marshal, and the ‘Barney Fife’ person. The drivers did most of the driving during the night and when you woke up in the morning you were at some really beautiful place in the middle of nowhere. You only hoped that someone had a map or at least a cell phone. By the way, at that point cell phones hadn’t been invented yet or at least they weren’t available to budget-minded people such as myself.

Bathroom stops consisted of wide turnouts in barren wide open places with few chances to maintain one’s privacy. The only way to be discrete in places like that was to walk as far and as fast away from the bus to do one’s business and hope that no one on the bus had a spotting scope with a voyeuristic bent.

Males to the left side of the road with shovels and paper towels, and females to the right side of the road with shovels and toilet paper. The buddy accounting was done while the bus driver was revving up the engine and honking the horn encouraging whoever was still out there behind that cactus in the distance to hurry up. Never mind now whatever was stuck in their underwear.

One driver would go to their little quarters in the back of the bus and the other driver would be in charge of getting things done, rather dictating directions to everyone that was stumbling around trying to wake up without coffee. We all would help out with getting ready and prepping meals. Tables would be pulled down from the top of the bus and set up. Ice chests would be taken out from under the bus. Coleman stoves would be fired up. Tubs of plastic plates and metal utensils would be soaked in in the tubs with a light bleach solution. People would be directed to cut, slice, and chop whatever was planned for breakfast. If you didn’t look busy a job would be found for you. Generally the ‘good’ jobs were given out at the beginning of the setup. The ‘dirty’ jobs would be given to late risers.

Anyway, in about 30 minutes these amazing, great group-made meals would materlize for about 30 people. For the most part that’s how the meals were prepared the entire trip. When we actually got down to the beach where we were to stay for about 10 days the setup stayed up in the same place and people just showed up to help prep, eat, and cleanup.

On the way down we did stop in the small towns and we would all spread out to eat wherever we wanted to. Everyone would just be told to be back before dark. To account for everyone, we were all assigned a ‘buddy’ and were responsible to make sure no one was left. The bus would drive all night and just about daylight we would wake up in a place with an amazing view and start unloading breakfast supplies.

The beach where we spent the time had at one time been the site of some kind of fishing village. There were piles of shells about 6’ high all over the area. We had brought a tent and sleeping bags that we camped out in. As I remember that winter was a cold one, and there was a really cold period even in Baja where we were. There was no swimming or suntanning involved. There was no laying on the beach involved. Nor did anyone come back with a suntan. There was a lot of relaxing, hiking, and reading.

For context….

You may think that this may have soured us on the idea of the Green Tortoise experience, but, no, it didn’t. Andrew and I took a spring break trip down there a few years later and had a great time with sun, swimming, and tanning. You may think that I was old enough to know better at that stage of my life but evidently not. I really don’t know what Andrew’s excuse is. I can only speak for myself, but if I were 30 years younger…..

Dec. 31

In fact, the year I turned 50, the guys and I hiked the Chilkoot Trail in Alaska, Sandi flew up to Anchorage and we did a 14 or 21 day trip all over roaded Alaska with the Green Tortoise. When I was sneaking up on 50 Sandi, Randy, and Andrew had asked me what I wanted for my 50th birthday. I guess one’s 50th birthday is supposed to be some kind of big deal. The trip was beautiful, memorable, and fun, but there was no swimming or sun tanning involved there either, it did make me want to turn 50 again the next year though. There were a few (too many) very long nights with wet and cold sleeping bags with a growing lake in the downslope corner of the leaking tent while we were in Valdez that we can laugh at now, but it wasn’t quite so damn funny then. It’s amazing what we take for granted on an everyday basis and get incensed about if it isn’t what modern expectations deems it should be. One only has to read something like Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose, to really know what tough is. That is though, another letter…

The planning again probably started around Christmas the previous year. We booked the Green Tortoise trip for a budget tour of Alaska and then booked the passes for hiking the Chilkoot Trail. Even back in 2005 there was limited entry to the trail. They didn’t want too many people on the trail at the same time. It gained its fame by being the quickest route to the gold discovery in the Yukon. The trail was only in use for about 2 years around 1898. It became so popular that a narrow gauge train route was put in to handle the people that were making their way to the goldfields to get rich.

The way it turned out was that Andrew and I flew up to Juneau together and then Randy flew up and met us there. We had booked accommodations ahead of time at a hostel in Juneau. Yes, hostel not hotel. If you are unfamiliar with a hostel it’s a budget accommodation for flexible travelers. I think they are more common in Europe. The way they work is they have group sleeping rooms where anywhere from 4–10 people may sleep. Think of a bedroom with bunk beds enough for 10 people. Generally, men in one room and women in another. Some of them have private quarters that cost more. There is a shared kitchen where you can prepare your meals and some will provide meals at an additional cost. Still, it’s a very economical way to sleep. As a rule, they kind of expect you to be gone for the middle of the day with a roof over your head available at night.The night we were there we stayed in the group room, and let’s just say there was a lot of strange and loud snoring going on. A day before and after our Chilkoot hike we stayed at one in Skagway too. If I remember right we were the only one’s there at that hostel.

Sandi was to fly up to Anchorage about a week later to start the two week Green Tortoise experience. We had a day or two built in to explore around Juneau. It was typical summer weather in Juneau when we were there; cold, foggy, and raining. I remember there was a cruise ship at the dock in town when we were there. You don’t realize how big they are until you walk up next to one. We took a local transit bus from town to see Mendenhall Glacier. I was surprised to see how much it receded in the 30 or so years since I had seen it before when Dad and I went through there.

It is always interesting to see the sometimes huge chunks of ice that have calved off the glacier face. When I was teaching I would use a particular web site every year that showed pictures of about 20 different glaciers taken about 1930. Of course those pictures were in black and white. In about 1995 a doctoral student in geology was looking in the archives of, I believe, Colorado State University and found them. He then, as part of his studies, determined the location of those places and took pictures of the glaciers. It was interesting to compare the change. He even used the same camera lense to get the best perspective and best compare the old and new images. It was amazing to see the changes over time when compared side by side. Change is often so subtle that it often goes unnoticed.

Anyway, it made me want to have taken a picture of the glacier when I went up there with Dad years earlier. While we were there we went to a place called McGinnis Creek just outside of Juneau. When Dad and I went there he showed me the place where he, Uncle George, and a third person that I don’t remember set up a gold mining operation one year. The plan was to use a hydraulic monitor and a sluice box to get the gold. Well, he said that they got it all set up just before winter set in and planned to come back in the spring. When they did come back the next spring there had been an avalanche and it had carried all their setup away. There really wasn’t much left years later when we were there. He did show me a log bridge they had put in there so they could cross the creek on the way up to the site. The three foot diameter logs were about 40 feet long and still spanned the creek. I found it amazing that they were still there 30 years later although the decking for the bridge had rotted away. There were also the remains of the small cabin they used. It was pretty much decaying back into the ground. Since it is so wet there things rot and break down pretty quick.

When the guys and I were there we didn’t go to McGinnis Creek as we didn’t have a car. I really didn’t know how far we would have had to go anyway. We bought tickets on a ferry that went on its daily 80 mile route from Juneau to Skagway. I thought it would take about 8 hours to get there, but it only took about 2 hours. The ferry had two hulls and it actually went fast enough to get up and plane on the water. The scenery was breath-taking. It reminded me of the fiords that I’ve seen pictures of from Norway. The melting snow water was rushing down the steep dark green hills from 500’ above the water. Sometimes they would form multiple waterfalls as they cascaded down. The cloud ceiling was low enough that the rivulets of water would often appear to come out of the clouds that were moving against the mountains. The channel between the mountains narrowed as we got closer to Skagway. Where the arms opened up to the ocean you could feel a slight ocean swell, and we could see floating icebergs from the smaller glacier fingers we passed. It reminded me of when I took a picture of an iceberg from a fishing boat I was on years ago. The picture hung on our wall for about 35 years.

It was when I was about 21 years old that I worked on a long-line boat for a short time. I got the job after working the crab season as a deckhand on a 50’ boat in Crescent City with the guy’s brother. We came up the Inside Passage on the boat from Seattle. One of the other deckhands brought a cassette tape that he played ALL the time. It was Fleetwood Mac playing the song Rhiannon. That’s right one tape, one song, all day and most of the night. I hated that song by the time we got up there. It took about 3–4 days to get up to Petersburg from Seattle if I remember right. We pretty much ran day and night. I think the skipper threw the tape over the rail at some point.

When you’re going up the Inside Passage the skipper has to take into account the tides and currents. Sometimes the water races through the narrow sections 15–20 knots and commercial boats don’t go fast enough to overcome that. I remember a couple of times we would anchor in a cove for a few hours just to let the tide turn. It’s kind of like sailing with the wind or against the wind.

This one place we pulled into wasn’t to wait out the tide change but rather to soak in a hot springs. I don’t remember the name of it, but we pulled right up to the dock, tied the boat up, and walked up this ramp to a hot spring pool. Someone had made a business out of it and there were a few cabins there and a few separate pools with varying temperatures. The tubs were situated with views of the inland waters and peppered with small islands holding a few tough trees. Since it sat on an island there was no way to get there except by boat and floatplane. I think we stayed there the night, slept on the boat, and then took a hot soak before we left in the morning.

I made one trip with the boat to a place called the Fairweather Grounds in the Gulf of Alaska fishing for Black Cod. The seas were 15’ and the wind was probably blowing a cold northwest wind of about 20–25 knots. The boat was rocking around pretty good as we set the gear and as we hauled it in 12 hours later. We set 3 or 4 strings to see where the Black Cod were most likely to be. The idea was to move the other strings to where the most productive string was. If the weather was that bad in Crescent City while fishing for Dungeness crab we would not have gone out and just waited until the next day.

The way long-line gear works is that they use ¼ mile long fishing lines with weights on each end that are called strings. The lines are baited with squid about every 3 feet, so you’re likely to have 400 hooks on one line laying on the bottom of the ocean for 12 hours or so. The weighted ends are attached to vertical lines that are attached to buoys on each end. Pacific Halibut are fished the same way, but the season for halibut was over.

I was so nervous and scared being out there that when we delivered in Petersburg and I got paid I quit the boat and left. The next ferry was going south instead of north, and since I hadn’t seen that part of the inside passage I got on it. I rode the ferry to the second stop which took about a day and a night. I was planning to disembark at the first stop but I was asleep in a chair on deck. Most people don’t rent a room or a berth; they just sleep in the chairs facing the sides (and views) of the ship. Now, I’m about 400 miles from Skagway. I got on the next northbound ferry and about two days later it landed in Skagway. That’s how I ended up hitch-hiking about 500 miles to Fairbanks and riding the train to Anchorage, but that’s when I was 21.

up there for my 50th birthday on the Green Tortoise we saw a lot of Alaska that I had never seen before. It was the same kind of trip as previous Green Tortoise trips. A couple of places that really stood out were Denali National Park and Homer. When we were at Denali we took a bus ride into the park. A place like that is appreciated both up close and from a distance; such as when there are grizzly bears and wolves were present. They only allow buses into the park and the only time private vehicles can go is one day a year, and that is on a lottery drawing basis. When the bus pulled into our camping area it had been a few days since I had a shower. The lines were long and the showers were short and lukewarm at the campground we were at. Actually, the length of the showers depended on how many quarters you put in. It didn’t matter how many quarters you put in, it didn’t affect the temperature of the lukewarm water. I noticed that across the street was a really nice hotel resort where the cruise line guests ended up after riding the Alaska Railroad train from Seward. It had a huge beautiful lobby with a wall of windows facing Denali, exercise rooms, bus people, waiters, maitre-des, all in uniforms. It was opulence on steroids.

Since the lines for the showers were long at our camping area I decided to walk across the street to see how the other half lived. I got my cleanest clothes together and walked into that gargantuan lobby like I owned the joint. I asked someone where the exercise room was and was directed there. At the entrance was a guy standing there handing out really thick white towels. I thought to myself “By the time I’m done with it, this is the last time that towel is going to be that white again!” Wandering around inside they not only had an exercise room but showers, a sauna, and hot tub too! I had the resolve of a kid in a candy store. By the time I was done I was going to be sparklingly cleaned to my very pores. You could even buy a massage there! Sitting on a comfortable train for three long hours must work up a powerful soreness!

By the time I was properly cleansed I was also pretty content and relaxed. I tried to not look too happy when I walked back into camp, but my glistening skin and clean shaven face probably gave me away.

One day, a ‘great’ day will have been the greatest day. That day will probably not happen the same way again.