Driving the 101 down the coast, Oregon is the longest and hardest part. Endless repetition of idyllic towns, beautiful coastline, and lush forest. Over and over and over. It would be quite a nice place to retire to, but didn't seem to have much else going on. If we had been just wandering instead of trying to get to California, we would have explored much more; there were a ton of little nooks and crannies that promised ever more natural majesty.

In Oregon, roadside camping is now illegal, and there are signs posted absolutely everywhere about it. It must have been a big problem, and I can see why. We opted to escape to California.

The redwoods started at the state line just like clockwork. Redwood national park was amazing and eerie to drive through at night. We camped at a pullout on the beach in California, where roadside camping is mostly legal and unenforced in any case. It was beautiful to wake up in the morning and send the kids out to play in the driftwood. We had a few van life neighbors, but the etiquette seemed to be against too much socializing so we let them be.

We visited a family friend in Arcata, a small town evidently populated by relative liberals. In our brief meeting with our long-lost friend, they seemed like wonderful people. Their garden was a stunner, too. The town was having their big annual Oyster festival that day, so the place was absolutely packed with people. It looked like a fun time overall, but the kids didn't like all the noise.

Despite the social core of the town seeming to be well adjusted, there were a lot of strange and busted-looking people present at the festival, too. It is good to make welcoming space for the neighbors you actually have, which is surely one of the ur-feelings that create this lefty social milieu, but it did not stop there. It went quite a bit further into active celebration and even cultivation of very particular kinds of dysfunction, to the exclusion of others. Democratic partisanship somehow distorts this neighbor-feeling into an exaggerated negative image of any reluctance for it. The result as we all know is a particularly damaging social decay that's especially apparent in California. It would be unfair to say this without noting that the rightist opposition to this stuff has its own version of it, but that's not what was on display in coastal California.

As we got out of the coastal areas, the dysfunction got less political but more comprehensive. Myers Flat for example had a decent front face, but its back road was all decaying tin shacks, broken down vehicles, and shuffling people with hopeless faces. Some teenagers on an ATV seemed to be having fun picking flowers, but it felt like a brief innocence before they would realize their position and either leave or degenerate.

A few miles down the road, we headed into the woods to camp a few days near the lost coast. It was actually quite pleasant and quiet, but there's not much to see from under the dry forest canopy. After camping two nights, we visited Shelter Cove, a nice little town on the lost coast with its own little airport. The coast itself is immensely beautiful. On the way in a colorful sign says "cool your breaks at the general store". I mistook this for mere marketing, and got brake fade on the long steep hill. Still, we managed to stop safely and have lunch at the beach. The beach had many signs warning us not to go in or turn our backs on the deadly water, but the swimming didn't look great anyways.

We stayed briefly with a friend in Sonoma county and then landed at our destination: San Francisco. All the dysfunction of Humbolt county can't hold a candle to what you see in San Francisco. The nasty parts of downtown, which are inconvenient to avoid, are truly post-apocalyptic. But once we settled at a friend's house in Pacific Heights and started socializing, it became clear again that despite the neighbors, this is still one of the best places in the world to be.

Since then it's been back to back socializing, but more on that next week.

Thanks for the post. I grew up in and around Arcata but now mostly only visit for the holidays now. Some of my family would have been there at the Oyster Fest. Your characterization of the place strikes me as accurate and it sounds like nothing much has changed. It would have been nice to visit during my long trip back west for the Pacific Heights party but alas I didn’t have the time. I do miss that place despite its obvious problems.

I think as a batchelor, I could probably live anywhere outside of maybe Port-au-Prince or Port Moresby, but as a Father how do you think about the familial personal safety question, especially in a jurisdiction that basically prohibits self-defense by white men?

>>2141
That doesn't seem so difficult if you can freely plan your route. The U.S. isn't that bad yet. Is there a state in the U.S. where you can't find someplace safe by driving 20 miles?

>>2141
I hate to be callous but a lot of the self defense problems people cite are self inflicted and the result of stupidity, cowardice, and lack of facility with nonlethal violence. They also seem largely imaginary. This is not to say it isn't a problem. It's an unacceptable travesty that criminal scum are allowed to live and terrorize beautiful people, but people make it out to be worse than it is partially as a substitute activity for doing anything about it politically. This actually makes it worse *for them* as they manifest a violent paranoid world for themselves. Be rather as wise as serpents and innocent as doves and you'll have a better time.

If someone is creeping on your family, if you are physically confident (eg skilled in judo) and tell them to back off, generally they will. I notice this works on animals too. If you are beset by some aggressive beast, if you develop in your mind a plan and the will to violently euthanize it, it will smell that intention and back off. It doesn't actually want a fight. There are obviously crazy murderer types who can't be so deterred, but they tend to stay in certain areas, which you can just avoid by being sufficiently racist. This is what I mean by self inflicted. If you hang out in the ghetto, you're going to have ghetto problems.

The other thing the tacticool gun-dads don't appreciate is the power of beauty and grace. If you look like a family of nordic aliens from aldebaraan or something you're more likely to get people yelling about how beautiful your family is than causing trouble. Confident beauty will elicit violent responses from university educated mystery meats, but that's more like amusing impotent spite than actually dangerous. The dangerous types are more awed and soothed by beauty, as it somehow removes you from their wretched victim reference class.

At least, this is my experience. I can't speak to the troubles of the more wretched communities in America.

>>2145 is right.

>>2152

Almost no one ever has to engage in self-defense, but almost all self-defense situations cross the threshold of "painfully disruptive to one's life" if your measure of that is going to work as normal on Monday. Of course, this is downstream of going to work as normal on Monday being an exceptionally high priority.

Separately, making a creep back off is only a solution beyond the short term if either you or he are transient to that locale.

>>2154
> Almost no one ever has to engage in self-defense, but almost all self-defense situations cross the threshold of "painfully disruptive to one's life" ...

I think that's right, but the original context was finding safe locations when freely planning travel in the U.S. In that context, prevention by location-management is the first-order bit.