A Guttersnipe Christmas 90

309 – Vision Quest

Wooo! So we’re back from the big road trip.  We drove all the way up to glass beach in Fort Bragg, where we looked at the beach and the wife got really excited because there were chitons on the beach and I was vaguely interested for maybe ten minutes before I got tired. But then we miscalculated the distance to Weaverville and ended up missing the tour at the Joss House, BUT it turns out that’s okay because all of northern California’s mountain country is basically one huge tourist trap full of MYSTERY SPOTS and BIGFOOT CARVING EMPORIUMS and WORLD-FAMOUS TREES THAT YOU CAN DRIVE YOUR CAR THROUGH, so we got to see lots of that stuff along the way. I had read a brochure for something called the world-famous One Log House, which this thing where a guy in 1946 felled a mighty redwood tree and turned it into a kitschy mobile home so he could lug it to county fairs and charge rubes a dollar to gawk at it, because apparently it was still acceptable to desecrate these natural wonders like that back then. So yeah, we paid a dollar each to look inside it. I can definitely say it was worth a dollar. In fact, it might be the best dollar I’ve ever spent since that time I paid a dollar to see THE WEIRD THING (Tagline: SEE THE WEIRD THING! WHAT IS IT? IT’S WEIRD! JUST ONE DOLLAR) at our local fair. Hint: The weird thing turned out to be a two headed turtle. For an extra quarter, you could also look behind the curtain to see the gorilla suit glove encased in plastic…I mean authentic bigfoot hand frozne in unmelting ice! The point is that I am a colossal sucker.

Back to the one log house, I did think it was kind of disappointing that there was no toilet. It had a door that was labeled with a crescent moon, which, as anyone who’s ever read Johnny Hart’s BC comic or seen an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies knows, is the international symbol for toilet. But if you opened up the door, there was nothing inside. The closet was clearly far too small to have ever contained a toilet and, besides, the wall of the log inside the closet was untouched so you could tell they had never installed any plumbing there. What gives? Why try to trick people into thinking there was a toilet? I mean, yeah, I know why, because it adds a whole new layer of awe to think that this house made out of a redwood log had working plumbing, but if you’re going to do that, you should lock that door so that people can’t just open it up to reveal the truth. Well, I guess they’ve already got your dollar by that point, so who cares?

Anyway, when we were done, we went next door where a guy in an eyepatch sold us some buffalo jerky.  It was pretty good!