Ukiah and the Mendocino coast.
Gramp was a paleontologist, which means he spent decades on his hands and knees in dry places, carefully extracting things that had been buried for a very long time. This is a specific personality type. Patient. Comfortable with silence. Interested in what things were rather than what they are.
On my 2004 road trip north, I stopped in Ukiah to look for birth records for my great-great-grandmother Helene Rickard, born in Mendocino County in 1898. Her parents had sailed around Cape Horn from Ireland because of the potato famine — left one world, went around a continent, arrived in another.
The courthouse didn’t have what I was looking for. But I drove down the Mendocino coast anyway, and I understood why someone who’d sailed for months looking for a new place to land would stop here. The coast is genuinely beautiful. The hills are steep and green and the ocean is visible everywhere. After the potato famine, after Cape Horn, I imagine this looked like paradise.
The family ended up in El Centro. Imperial Valley, hundred miles from anywhere green. Long way from Mendocino.