California (again) day 15

August 27

This morning Razelle discovered that she had left an important item behind at Joy and Jason's home last night. We called Joy and she said the item had been found and would be brought by her mother to the synagogue we would all be attending that morning. No problem.

The synagogue was actually very near the motel we'd stayed at. It was Conservative Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiberon, CA. We arrived in our van and parked near the base of a long walkway up. In this parking lot were several giddy girls in very short and frilly ice-cream-cake dresses. Razelle and I looked at each other; we knew just from that clue alone that there was probably a bat mitzvah scheduled for this morning. Inside we were asked by some friendly receptionists if we were friends of K or S. We knew neither of these girls so we were randomly handed a kippah (skullcap) with one of the girl's names and we entered the sanctuary. Two families sat in view with their two girls (who were about to become women). One had a Japanese father and an Italian mother; the other had what appeared to be two fathers. The latter had a Jewish-sounding name but the former was notably better at carrying out her parts of the service. The rabbi of the congregation was a woman who has a small child her husband carried in a baby sling. We couldn't help but note again today how eclectic the current state of Conservative Judaism in America had become: same-sex parents, exotic converts and female rabbis. Perhaps we have not visited a representative enough sample of Conservative congregations (two of them have been in California! which skews things a bit), or perhaps this congregation represents Marin County in microcosm and not the rest of the country, per se.

The prayer for the sick was done differently here. People stood and as the rabbi turned her gaze in a sweeping pattern around the sanctuary the standing people quietly mentioned the names in their hearts. When the rabbi's gaze reached me I quietly spoke the names of my mother and sister in yet another place in the world where prayers emanate in aggregate.

We were impressed with the prayer service and how much of it involved participatory singing. We were joined by Joy's parents, Judith and Steve, who sat beside us. Judith is my distant cousin and she brought with her a copy of the Serbin Circle compiled in 1983, so we could look up our family connection. I was elated to see this older version of the Circle because it settled a question that the more recent version from 2000 couldn't answer. I hope to discuss this with Belle Fields when we reach the Carolinas toward the end of the trip.

After a nice post-service meal involving the usual fare, and after a stimulating conversation with a wonderfully astute man (who needed an oxygen supply because of a respiratory problem) we finally left Marin county behind. We still had enough hours of daylight to reach the coastal redwood trees before nightfall. We took the Redwood Highway (US101) to see these trees. I was surprised by the volume of traffic that accompanied us so far north on this apparently major artery. We made good time, however, and passed exits to places Razelle noted as being familiar to her from movies (Fort Bragg, Mendocino). We found ourselves in hot weather again, after a few days of cooler Bay Area temperatures. It is August, after all.

We arrived at the gate to the Drive-Thru Tree in Leggett, CA in time to pay to enter and see this attraction just before sunset. Our van, alas, is too large to go through the giant redwood tree that has been an attraction here for many decades. (I drove through this tree in 1997 with Maayan.) Instead, Razelle and I walked into the tree as we took turns posing for each other's cameras. 

  We watched as other cars drove through and we watched how people behaved as they photographed each other driving through the tree. That was fine with us. I also noticed that the small number of cars in the lot at this time at the end of the day were each from a different state or province. One was even from Hawaii. That car had to drive across an ocean just to drive through this tree; the wondrous things we have seen on this trip! The sun disappeared while we were visiting the gift shop. We found some interestingly unique items in there, but darkness was gathering and we had no place to stay yet, so we moved on.

I didn't want to drive through the most exemplary groves of redwoods in the dark so we stopped a short distance ahead at the Benbow Valley RV Resort and Golf Course. We arrived about 10 minutes before the office closed. I was asked when I expected to leave the following morning, because I wasn't driving a regulation RV with all the sanitation hook-ups, and shouldn't really be allowed to stay. We paid for and were given a site nonetheless (and a receipt to prove we were legitimately there). I spent the night feeling out of place among the other campers. One of the best features of this RV park was the room full of washing machines and dryers. But the site we were given was so far away from this facility that neither of us wanted to walk or drive back there to take advantage of it. Instead, we got out our pot and propane stove and I cooked up a batch of rice and tuna with mushroom sauce. We hadn't cooked our own meal since Australia. We enjoyed the food, and then, satiated, closed up the van and went to sleep.