Places near but not in San Francisco

Muir Woods National Monument Named after conservationist John Muir, this is a lovely park slightly north of the city along Rt 1 which contains one of the last old-growth stands of costal redwoods. These are the tallest trees in the world (Sequoia sempervirens) which grow only in the coastal fog belt from mid-California up to southern Oregon. I drifted through the edge of a very... stereotypically californian... park ranger's kid-friendly talk about redwoods. (I wandered off when she started elegizing some woman she had "had the great privilege to meet" who had spent several years camped out in the top of a redwood to deter loggers. And I'm all about not cutting down huge thousand-year-old trees, but I don't think camping out in somebody else's tree for two years makes you a valliant culture hero, either.) Aparently there are four ways in which redwoods are "magic."

Reasons why Redwoods are magic: # 1: Redwoods are the tallest living things, growing up to 370 feet tall, but their roots only go about 12 feet deep. They manage not to fall over by growing in groves, where their shallow roots spread out in a 60 to 80 foot circle, holding hands with all the trees around them underground. # 2: Redwoods produce lots of seeds, but very few of them actually sprout. The mature trees can clone themselves, however, sending up new sprouts from burls near the base of the trunk, or farther out along the root system. Thus even when an old tree falls, its descendants are ahead of the competition, and will often form a ring around where the old tree once stood, hundreds of years ago.

# 3: (Here the speaker held up an old soda bottle filled with dark red-brown liquid and asked if anyone knew what it was. Unfortunately, it looked remarkably like flat soda...) Tannins. The redwood gets its red color from vast amounts of tannins, particularly present in its spongy bark, which can grow up to a foot thick. This serves as a fire supressant, so that when lightning hit a tree at the top of the ridgeline (now long since deforested & covered in houses) and fires swept down into the redwood grove, they would burn out the underbrush and do little damage to most of the mature trees. Forests like this would once have seen as many as 40 major fires a century, and the scars are visible on many of the trees that have survived these fires. # 4: Costal redwoods grow only in the fog belt where in the winter they get rain, and in the summer the fog condenses on their needles and drips down to provide moisture throughout the dry season.

As I was mentioning, this is a forest that, before human intervention, was used to seeing substantial fires clear out the brush every two or three years. The place has been a park since people started building upslope of it, over a century ago, and it hasn't seen any fires in that time. So a century of dead needles and detritus litters the forest floor, providing excellent tinder which, if accidentally lit, might well be enough to wipe out the whole grove. It scared me to think about, anyway. The piles around the base of each tree here are at least a foot deep.

After leaving the park, I drove up Rt 1 north for a ways-- not an excercise for the faint of heart, let me assure you. It is a narrow, very winding road, bordered by cliff faces going up on the inland side and down on the ocean side, with occasional sweeping views of beach and water. The posted speed limit is 35 mph, and even with turns that in other places would be posted down to 15, the local drivers behind you (half of them on motorcycles) get frustrated if you don't stay up to speed, which makes it difficult to admire the lovely scenery, especially if you are beginning to feel faintly motion sick.

Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose This is actually a quite good museum, despite being run by a sketchy pseudo-cult. It has fascinating information, some of it more comprehensive and mundane than what I have seen in other museums, and the most serious flaw appeared to be the lack of proofreading in their signs. The museum facade is based on the temple of Amon at Karnak, and the statue features the goddess Taweret, depicted as a pregnant hippo, who protects pregnant women and newborns. Although she is no longer often remembered, she was one of two major household gods in ancient Egypt. The other was Bes, a bearded dancing god, who protected children and the helpless. The numbers under his protection increased over time, to include those sleeping, using the privy, and later, soldiers as well.

It was popular to give a mummified animal to one's patron god, especially on a pilgrimage or as a thanksgiving for some favor that the god has shown you. This demand created a shortage of animals to mummify, however, and over the years this practice degenerated to presenting a mummy-shaped wrapping with a token bone inside, and later to merely presenting the representation of the animal. Eventually priests begain to discourage this to keep the temples from getting cluttered up with these fake mummies, and the practice fell into disuse. This baboon mummy was a gift to the god Thoth, and has been in the museum for many years. When the museum curators began to get scanned images of the contents of their mummies, they determined that this was too delicate to be moved and went to great lengths to scan it in situ. (Why they keep it in an earthquake zone if it's too delicate to move is beyond me, but anyway...) Much to their surprise, they discovered that instead of a baboon, this mummy is actually built around a vase-like jar, with a wooden head affixed to the top. Hence the caption on the sign, which includes the sentence: "There is no baboon in this baboon, not even a bone that can be seen on an x-ray."

The clay people in this diorama are making beer for their lord to drink in the afterlife. This baboon just looked so cheerful I had to take a picture of him. He does not have a baboon in him either.

This is the museum's pride and joy: a replica of an actual rock cut tomb, from entrance to burial chamber. As you can see, even the walls are copied with precision, down to the chips in the paint of the original. The museum's website provides a lovely, if spacially disorienting virtual tour of the tomb.

Object lesson in environmental conservation: These cedar cones are from the forests that once covered ancient Lebanon. The owners of these forests became immensely wealthy through trading the wood and oil of the cedar trees throughout the ancinet world, to the point where they deforested their entire country. The climate changed and their economy collapsed, and the semi-desert treeless Lebanon remains to this day.

Today one of the most famous symbols of Ancient Egypt is the scarab. In ancient times, it would not have occurred to anybody to keep a carved scarab in the house, or as jewelry, as it was a symbol only associated with the dead. The scarab was placed over the heart of the dead to protect it, and to remind it not to speak of its sins during judgement.

Sadly, time did not allow a visit to the "Winchester Meestery House" which was aparently built and added to by the heir to the Winchester rifle-making fortune who, believing herself to be haunted, kept building doors to confuse the ghosts.

In this location Carmen Sandiego would probably steal: The Golden Gate Bridge (over which I drove, completely by accident, having missed my exit, and without the proper toll. Oops...)