Up The Glass Beach

Chris had the great idea to leave the bookstore early and head out to Ft. Bragg and visit the North Coast Brewing Company. So we took off out to the coast on Highway 20, another of those narrow and windy roads that takes you twice as long to get somewhere than it should. The whole trip out, I had a line from the Dieselhed song BA Band stuck in my head, the one that goes, "bragging to the barmaid about a show we once had in Ft. Bragg”. We checked into a hotel and went to have beers and dinner at the brewery.

A brief note on the North Coast Brewing Company: This is the brewery that makes Acme Ale, as well as Red Seal. The first time I had visited the establishment was after taking a speeder trip from Willits to Ft. Bragg. What is a speeder trip? A speeder is a small box-like vehicle that runs on rail lines. This was an amazing and beautiful experience, but also probably the coldest I have ever been in my life. When we stopped halfway through the trip at a little shack of a snack bar that sat in a clearing in the woods near the rail lines, my hands were shaking so hard that I was spilling the piping hot coffee I had just purchased all over my hands. It took a couple of seconds realize this, and then to realize that the scalding coffee actually felt pretty good. Anyway, we ended up at the North Coast Brewing Company as it was close to the rail lines. I got an "Old #38 Stout" shirt to commemorate the trip as I like me some stout, and the shirt was black and had a train on it.

We ate well, shared a taster tray of all the beers on tap, and then split a bottle of the Brother Thelonius, a Belgium ale that was tasty, and had a great label with Thelonius Monk decked out in monk regalia and a keyboard halo. I was smitten. I recommend tracking it down if you like yourself some Belgium ale, it will apparently be available in California, Portland and Seattle.

We went back to the room, full and feeling fine. We sat around and watched a mish-mash of Dukes of Hazzard, country music videos and Back To The Future until we were ready to venture back out for ice cream. We were shut out of a number of dessert establishments as they were closed (damn you clever and sexy Stephen Colbert for keeping us in the room later than we should have stayed), so we finally settled on buying ice cream at the Safeway.

For some reason this turned into an all out junk food binge purchase party that included two kinds of chips, two kinds of Ben & Jerry's, cookies, Wheat Thins and Eazy Cheese. Yes, Easy Cheese.

The scene that followed in the hotel room was reminiscent of a number of sad scenes where one of our favorite characters is shown in the throws of their drug addiction. There was the excitement, the paranoia, the scrambling for crumbs when the Andy Capp brand Cheese Fries were spilled to the ground. The Eazy Cheese flowed like, well like Eazy Cheese. The highs were exhilarating and the lows came with the realization that a large number of the awful products we were gorging ourselves with contained MSG.

We crashed, and we crashed hard - sick with ourselves and sick with the influx hydrogenated oils into our systems.

The next morning, Chris and Greta left early to get back to the bookstore and Biff and I went up to Glass Beach. Glass Beach used to the dumping ground for old bottles from nearby companies, and over the years the mighty waves of the Pacific have pounded and rounded down that glass until the beach was covered with shiny, glass pebbles. Leave it to Americans to make a tourist attraction out of an industrial waste dump…

And despite the cynicism there, Glass Beach was pretty cool. Biff looked around at all that ocean glass, and I wandered into the tide pools singing along to the Dieselhed song I had stuck in my head (this time the song Tidepool). I listened to the surf pound into the intricately carved rocks about 100 yards out, thought about teaching a child about tide pools and trying to remember how my grandfather had explained the tides to me, and I wondered just how much money the guy selling beach glass off the hood of car in the parking lot made.