How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part Two

Joe and I set out on what was to be the longest trip of my sabbatical — ten days — on Monday, June 25. We had decided to make the trip to the Bay Area in two hops each way. You can, and we have, driven from Portland to the Bay Area in one day, but it can end up being anywhere from ten to twelve hours behind the wheel, and that just gets tiresome.

We stopped for the day in Gasquet, California (just a few miles over the state line) at the Patrick Creek Lodge. The main lodge building was constructed in 1926, when Highway 199 was still a gravel road. Around 1980, my dad had a second job tending bar at the lodge, and I had always wanted to stay overnight there. Our room was small (but hardly the smallest hotel room I’ve ever been in), but clean, comfortable, and quiet. As it would have been back in the 20s, there was no television. No cellphone reception, no Internet. Joe and I agreed that all it would need was a desk and it would have been the perfect writing retreat.

After a little while in our room to rest and relax, we ventured outside to have a look around. The lodge sits where Patrick Creek runs into the Middle Fork of the Smith River, and there is a National Forest campground just across the highway. We followed a path along the creek, underneath the highway, to the river. We found a spot where one branch of the path ended where we could sit and take some pictures. I perched on a rock for a little while and put my feet into the water, letting the sensation take me back to my childhood, where I spent many summer days swimming in this very river — albeit never at this particular spot.

We wandered along a series of paths built of river stone. In some places the trail had washed away, and in others, the walls were covered in thick moss. It felt a little like stepping back into Middle Earth. We found some signs later that explained that the old campground had been built in the 1920s as well, and in those days there was a footbridge across the river and even a diving board at one of the best swimming spots. Major floods in 1955 and 1964 had washed away a lot of what had been built back then. (There are a few more pictures of the old campground and the lodge in the gallery; click on either of the pictures above and you can navigate to them.)

We walked back to the lodge, enjoyed a very nice dinner, and retired to our room, where we ended up playing a session of Call of Cthulhu — my first effort at being a Keeper of Arcane Lore, and one in which I thought I did rather well, at the risk of being immodest. It was warm, and the room didn’t have air conditioning — but we slept with the window open, hearing the rushing water of the creek and the wind in the trees. We both want to go back, and stay longer next time — we’ll just have to make sure we get a room with a desk.