Here we see Julia Butterfly Hill, an activist who became famous around 1998-2000 for living in a giant redwood tree for about 738 days, to prevent the tree from being cut down. She named the tree "Luna," and it was ultimately saved from the lumberjacks' saws, along with a small section of trees near it. I love what she says about the idea of thriving in this clip.
I've always been an explorer. Not a "travel to the deepest parts of the African jungle, " or "sail the ocean to the unknown islands," explorer, just someone who likes to see what's around where I live. Many of my first memories, going back to when I was 5 years old, are of wandering the woods near my house, outside of Massillon, Ohio. My family moved nearly every year as my sister and I grew up. My dad got a new job every 2-4 years, and my mom got sick of our apartment or house after a year, so we just kept moving.
With every new house or apartment, came a new neighborhood, and in one case, a good sized farm. After unpacking in a new house, I was off on my bike exploring the new area, or hiking around the local patch of woods. We bounced around small town and rural Ohio until I finished 8th grade, then headed to Carlsbad, New Mexico. That was a major culture shock. I hated the heat, but came to love exploring the wide open spaces of the desert, especially in the winter and spring.
A year in New Mexico, and we changed states again, that time to Boise, Idaho. Boise is a little river valley tucked into the corner of a huge valley, nestled up against the mountains. There was miles and miles of waist high sagebrush in one direction, and mountains in the other. I managed to get through three years high school at Boise High, but we lived in two houses in town, and a mobile home out in the desert (technically steppe), outside of town, during that time.
In the trailer park, during my junior year of high school, I got into BMX bikes. First jumping, then racing, and then into the just emerging, tiny, sport of BMX freestyle, or trick riding. As a BMXer, trails in the woods or desert were places to ride, but the entire urban landscape became our "skatepark, as well." I began to spend a lot of time, first in Boise, then in San Jose, California, then Southern California, ranging far and wide on my bike, looking for fun stuff to ride. BMX turned into a career for a while, and became my lifestyle for 20 years.
All the time, I was exploring new places, on a regular basis. In 1999, I left my entertainment lighting company job, where I was kind of a roadie, but working in the warehouse, prepping lights to go to TV shows, corporate events, movie shoots, and movie premieres. I got injured, and became a taxi driver in the Huntington Beach area. It was during that first year of taxi driving that I heard more and more about this crazy young activist woman who was living in a tree in northern California. I'd lived in California for 15 years at that point, but had never bothered to go up and see the giant redwood trees, or the giant sequoias. When Julia Butterfly Hill came down from the tree she lived in for about two years, she wrote a book called The Legacy of Luna. I went to a book signing, met her, and then read the book.
I decided it was time to finally go and see the redwoods. Otherwise, I might put it off forever, as us humans tend to do when engrossed in everyday life. A few weeks after meeting Julia, I dropped my taxi off, packed a few things in my 1982 Datsun 280ZX (with a cracked windshield and no heat), and headed up the coast out of L.A. I drove PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) all the way up to the Bay Area. That trip turned out to be one of the greatest weeks of my life.
I stopped at Hearst Castle, I saw young, but still 300 pound, elephant seals, on the beach. I went to Monterey Bay Aquarium, and saw sea otters right outside it, for the first time. I went to Muir Woods, in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge, and saw redwoods for the first time. I continued up PCH into the redwood country of the northernmost part of the long state of California. There, I hiked around the really huge redwoods trees, much larger than those in Muir Woods.
You can't do those trees justice in a photo, or video, and I shot both. I can't describe how cool it was to walk among those 250 to 350 foot tall living things that were 1,500, maybe 2,000 years old. You have to experience it to get it. And THAT is what this blog is all about. Taking a little time to go and check out things that may have been nearby for years, but you never took the time to go look at, learn about, and experience.
I owe the inspiration for my redwood trip in 2000 to Julia Butterfly Hill. In this blog, I'm going to look into all kinds of what the big state of California has to offer, delve into some of the history and stories, and give you some ideas for your own adventures. Whether it's a half hour trip to take the kids to Bunnyhenge (yes, that's a thing), or maybe a week long adventure to check out redwoods or some other place in California you find interesting, that's what this is all about.
I've been yearning to get out and explore places in California since I got back from living Back East for a decade. Sometimes I love just wandering a cool area and taking photos. Other times I dig into the history of a place I thought I knew, and learn a lot more. Some places may be heavy tourist spots (I've been starting by exploring Hollywood, since I live so close to it now), and some spots may wind up being way out in the boonies. Like any good journey of exploration, I have no idea where this blog will ultimately take me, and that's half the fun.
I hope a bunch of you get a little entertainment from this new blog of mine. But more than that, I hope to inspire all of you to take a little time out of the grind of everyday life, and go explore something you find new and interesting. Enjoy!
Steve Emig
Explorer type guy, blogger, artist
April 26, 2021
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