Author: Paul Gerald

On one of the last nights of our Italian vacation, the family had this conversation:

Dad: I found something that I’d really like to do tomorrow.

Me and Mom: Great! What is it?

Dad: A trip to the Ferrari museum!

Me: Cool!

Mom: I’ll stay in the hotel, thanks.

After some family-style negotiation, it was settled. Mom would sleep in and chill at the hotel, and Dad and I would have a Man Day. The final, successful bargaining chip was our assurance that every male member of the extended family could be taken care of souvenir-wise at the Ferrari gift shop.

So we headed out, like hunter-gatherers leaving the woman in camp. We were bound for the town of Modena, birthplace of Enzo Ferrari and the Ferrari car company. Being men, we had only a vague notion of where we were going: Modena, west of Bologna, where we assumed we’d see signs for the Ferrari museum. Good enough. Let’s go.

We made our way easily to Modena: the right highways and exits, the right tolls, the right ways out of the right roundabouts. As we approached Modena, we looked for Ferrari signs. Nothing. We headed for the center of town. Nothing.

When we started to unintentionally leave Modena, I experienced a moment of man weakness: I decided to ask for directions. I even saw a sign for tourist information and headed that way — but the European Road Rules came into play. Those rules dictate that if you’re looking for something, there will be a sign for it at a roundabout. These rules further state that when you have gone to the next roundabout, or intersection, or gathering of signs, there will be no reference whatsoever to whatever you’re seeking. And so it happened this time: Tourist Information, 150 meters. Travel 150 meters. Encounter major intersection and numerous signs. None of them says tourist information. European Road Rules strike again!

Man Rules say, “Just keep going.”

We checked the guidebook again. Turns out that while Modena was the birthplace of Enzo Ferrari, the home of the Ferrari Car Company is in nearby Maranello, south of Modena. This is in accordance with the European Road Rules’ Guidebook Section, which states that guidebooks will give no specific directions for how to find things. Undaunted, we moved on with new purpose: Find Maranello, south of Modena.

I sensed that we were now north of Modena, and a glance at the map showed a highway going west and then south, so we headed for it — not by asking directions or checking the road number, mind you, but by figuring out which town the road leads to (in this case, Parma) and then looking for signs to this town. This is the essence of European Man Driving.

So we find a sign saying Parma, the next town west, and I assume there will soon be a road going south, around Modena, and that on said road we will eventually encounter signs for Maranello. I informed Dad of my plans, and he was dubious, especially when I explain to him that I know we’re north of town, heading west, because it’s a spring morning and the sun is behind us — and that the sun will gradually move along the left side of the car and into our eyes, at which point we will be south of town, driving east, and see signs for Maranello.

We passed the turnoff for a big road headed for Parma, which means we were on the west side of Modena, and the sun was now over our left shoulders. Dad grew some faith. We kept looping around, tending left, and soon had to put the visors down. Then we saw signs for Maranello! After a high-five, we followed the signs; of course, we got all the way into the center of Maranello before we saw one reference to La Galleria Ferrari … and then, of course, at the next intersection, we saw nothing about it at all.

But we found it — and there’s no better destination on a Man Day than the Ferrari museum. You pay about 15 bucks to walk around a few rooms filled with cars and engine parts. You stand shoulder-to-shoulder among other men with cameras, waiting to take pictures of each other standing in front of various cars. Some of the men pose with shades on. There are very few women around.

Having drooled and lusted and shaken our heads in awe and taken many pictures, we then shopped, Man Style. The purpose was not to browse; the purpose was to buy. And we did buy: We got shirts and caps and stuffed animals and a board game and a Ferrari coffee mug. No doubt all of this was made in China, but we didn’t care. And we have never discussed the amount of money that was spent. In terms of dollars-per-minute, it was a historic moment in the history of globalization.

Then we put the afternoon sun at our backs and rolled toward Bologna like hunters returning with fresh kills, knowing that the matriarch would be pleased and the clan would be fed.

As I write this, I am, apparently, in Europe. I could just as well be in Chicago, but the accents are a little different. So are the chairs. And the electrical plugs. And instead of a chapel, there’s a meditation center.

Otherwise, I seem to be in the generic world of airports, in this case with a luxurious twist. I just spent eight hours sitting in what felt very much like a room that barely seemed to move, a kind of earthquake simulation machine that occasionally twitched and hummed for effect, with a movie of clouds and ocean playing out the little windows. It almost seemed real, like we were actually going someplace.

It’s a kind of magic, really. Virtually all the hassles, except expense, have been removed from modern travel — along with any sense of where we are or where we’re going. Flying into Amsterdam is much like flying into Birmingham: You see industry, some trees, some water, some apartment complexes, then a runway … then you get up and leave your little magic room and you’re back in a hallway filled with people who look like people anywhere else, only they sound different. I even saw somebody with an LSU sweatshirt on.

Or consider this: Before I left Memphis, I interviewed a person in California to help on a book about Oregon that is being written by someone who lives in Sri Lanka.

Part of me fights this. I demand that a certain sense of wonder remain in our experiences. When we were flying over England — and watching Capote on our video monitors — a map on an overhead screen showing the flight’s path included Moscow and St. Petersburg. I wanted to elbow the lady sitting next to me and say, “Hey, check it out! We’re, like, practically in Russia!” But she’s English and uses this flight to work, and besides, English people have a better perspective on these things than Americans. They are perfectly aware of, and not entirely excited about, their proximity to the Russians. And saying Amsterdam is close to Moscow is like saying Memphis is close to Anchorage.

The comfort of flight is also more strange to me than … well, more strange than comfortable, especially when my folks cash in frequent-flyer miles to put us in the Class Formerly Known as First. I wanted to elbow the same English lady and say, “Check it out! We’ve got our own video monitors and shit! We’re already drinking before the plane even taxis! And I can, like, stretch my legs and not hit the seat in front of me — watch!” But she had her laptop out and didn’t seem too overwhelmed by the experience of “World Business Class.”

When they handed out a menu, things got truly weird. There was an insert that read, “On today’s flight, the Jamaican spicy Smoked Salmon will be replaced by Broiled Halibut topped with Toasted Parmesan and Piccata Sauce on a bed of Seasoned Pappardelle Noodles.” I could have also had beef tenderloin or prosciutto-and-fontina-stuffed roasted chicken breast. When the fish showed up on my little fold-out tray, I cast a sideways glance at the English lady and considered elbowing her, but she was already working on her chicken, wine, and magazine.

So then we’re walking through the airport, and my Inner Child is yelling, “Look — people with turbans! And seats without backs! And a currency exchange! And a soccer team!” I kept this to myself.

And then we went through customs, which was about as intense as entering a concert, and I realized I had just entered Europe. I stood around for a second, like a fool, and took in my first details of the Continent: precisely more of the same as on the other side of customs. A cheesy version of a local pub, just like the barbecue joints at the Memphis airport. Another cheesy version of a cafe. A business center filled with suits on phones.

I guess I should be comforted by all this similarity, but mostly it just feels strange. For example, when I told the English lady I was going to Tuscany, she said she’d been there many times and that I’d love it. She also said we’d be missing “Brit Season,” which is in August. Missing that, I admit, was fine by me, but it made me wonder: Does this mean everybody there speaks English? Certainly, it appears to be the official language of the Amsterdam airport. So, is the whole world becoming more like America? What does this mean about visiting Italy? Are we going to another country or to a place that dresses itself up as another country to entertain tourists? And how do those people feel about that?

I know I should be grateful that at least, in this century, the world speaks my language. It’s just that somehow having a meal and taking a nap and waking up in a shopping mall which they tell me is another country leaves me feeling … well, strangely at home.

US 101 south of Arcata, California, is among the prettier drives in the U.S. — and also the goofiest. There’s Confusion Hill where balls roll uphill, the Tree House, the Drive-Thru Tree, Trees of Mystery, and every sort of Bigfoot thing you can imagine. There’s also the headwaters of the Russian River, a winding road through tree-covered hills, and the little town of Garberville that’s like dropping into an Eden of redwoods and riverside cabins with smoke coming from their chimneys.

As the Greyhound dropped out of the mountains, the big trees, fishing holes, and Bigfoot statues gave way to generic Santa Rosa: strip malls, Applebee’s, construction sites, Starbucks, traffic jams, and smiling TV news crews on billboards. Feeling deflated, I just wanted a hotel room and some food. Then I saw the words “Charles Schulz Museum.” It was one of those “no way!” moments when suddenly your whole perspective — and schedule — shifts. I knew I would be spending some time in Santa Rosa.

After transferring to a city bus and asking directions, I arrived at an ice rink. An ice rink in sunny Santa Rosa was odd in its own right, but I was looking for the Schulz Museum. As it turns out, Schulz built the ice rink — known as Snoopy’s Home Ice — which is done up in a Peanuts/Swiss Village theme with murals of frozen ponds, a Woodstock room, a stained-glass image of Snoopy playing hockey, and a Snoopy room in the Warm Puppy Café (as in, “happiness is”).

And thus began my introduction to the world of Charles M. Schulz, a world which happened to take shape in the otherwise completely uninteresting Santa Rosa.

Every day, for 50 years, Schulz wrote a Peanuts comic strip. Every day. For 50 years. Every day, he would dip into his world of ideas and come up with a joke, a situation, and some human interaction that we could all identify with.

For the last 30 of those years, he was in Santa Rosa, living, in many ways, a profoundly ordinary life. He’d wake up and walk over to the ice rink he built. He was a native Minnesotan, so hockey and skating were a big part of life, and Santa Rosa to this day is a hub of both activities. He’d have breakfast at the same table at the ice rink, then walk back home and sit down at his drawing table, which is now in the museum, and sketch out ideas. He’d break for lunch, walk back over to the same table at the rink, and somewhere along the way he would “ink” the final strip for the day. He said you need to be in the same place to let the creativity flow.

They still reserve that table in the Warm Puppy Café for him, even though Schulz died in 2000, the day before his final strip ran. The museum is across the street from Snoopy’s Home Ice, where, on the day I was there, all the conversation among the locals was about Olympic figure skating and the problems in the scoring system.

The museum isn’t large, but it takes a while for the experience to register. At first, you see the strips and your mind says, “Right, got it — Peanuts.” Then the scope starts to sink in, along with the fact that you’re looking at the original drawings, so they’re quite large, and you can see the strength in the lines. There are also sketches that Schulz threw out but his secretary rescued, ironed flat, and saved.

You see the changes in the strip over the years, whether it’s girls becoming less mean, Snoopy getting thinner, or characters coming and going. And in the sketches you see the subtle changes in a character’s expression, or the last-minute adjustments to a joke’s wording, or all the cross-outs that suggest a tough day at the drawing table.

Two images stand out in my memory. One is a 17-by-22-foot mural of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. It’s such a familiar, sad, and sweet image — all the elements that make Peanuts what it is — but the mural is made of more than 3,500 strips printed on 2-by-8-inch ceramic tiles. Somehow that captures the whole experience: the simple made up of the massive.

My other memory is the museum’s reconstruction of Schulz’s studio, where a video plays. There are interview clips with Schulz, but the best scenes show his hands making drawings. It’s pure magic to watch those familiar forms emerge from emptiness: so easy-looking, so clean, so elegant. In the middle of all the marketing and analysis and the years and the memories there was one man whose very routine life included creating a world all his own right here in Santa Rosa.

I went back to the redwoods last week. In fact, I went back to the same place I’d been to twice before. Three times I have stood at the base of these trees, walked among them, looked up at them — and even now, I feel like I’ve never seen them, because I’m not sure what it means to see something.

What you hear about the redwoods is true: They are beyond description. The problem is, they’re beyond comprehension in the first place.

It’s like your eyes send this signal to the brain that reads, “Really big tree,” and your brain says, “Yep, got it. Big tree.” But the eyes keep at it, insisting, “No, this is a really big tree,” and to deal with the info, the brain has to dumb it down, shrink it to something manageable: a tree. The problem is, “trees” in our normal brainworld don’t get 20 feet thick, 300 feet high, and 2,000 years old.

It’s like the first time I saw the Grand Canyon; my brain adjusted after a while, and then I saw a sign that said it’s 16 miles across the canyon and that some of the features in it, features that look like they’re right next to each other, are actually five miles apart. Faced with information like that, the brain loses its footing in reality; you realize that everything you were basing your perception on is false and that you actually have no concept of what you’re looking at.

It’s the same when you’re looking at a tree that a whole family can hide behind. Often, you can’t even see the top of the tree. It just sort of disappears up there in a canopy, a canopy that’s so far away that it only resembles limbs and needles in a general sense, like a photo that needs to be zoomed into.

The redwoods are so big they make a sound in my head. Ever hear a huge clap of thunder, with no rumbling afterward? A big BOOM and then you can hear the echo in other places, the sound waves retreating from you. That’s what happens in my head when I see one of the really big redwoods. The sight of it makes such a BOOM that for a few moments, there’s no thought, no feeling, not even perception — just an echoing emptiness, a psychic pause, a stillness. The same thing happened to me when I first walked into St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. I was consciously aware that I had stopped thinking. BOOM, then stunned silence.

The other aspect of the redwoods is there’s so damn many of them. Miles of them. And once you “adjust” to the ones that are “only” 10 feet thick, you stop gawking at them and lose track of how many you’re seeing. It’s tough to take a picture, because there are so many others in the way.

Besides, how do you take a picture of them? Do you go for the trunk, where you use another tree or a person to show how big it is? Do you go for the looking-up angle, to show how tall they are? Do you go for the looking-through-the-grove angle, to show how many there are? Perhaps the along-the-road shot, preferably with a car for perspective.

Then there’s the light. Most of the time you’re in shadow, and the occasional shaft of light really confuses your camera. That’s why whenever you see a cool picture of redwoods or other big trees, it’s shady or, even better, foggy. And the fog — that’s where you go back to some primordial state.

And yet, as I sit here now, looking at my photos, I am struck all over again. I see a photo and think, Look how big they are! They seem bigger than I remember, but I’m the one who took the picture and logic tells me the camera didn’t capture their real size.

So here’s what I think. First, a human life that doesn’t include time among old-growth redwoods is stunted. Second, one must spend time among the trees to even begin to deal with them. Last time, I spent three days; I camped among the trees, walked among them. This time, I was a bit rushed. I would see a particular angle or play of light, take a picture, move on and then realize I’d just spent more time on the picture than I did simply looking at the tree.

When faced with something of this magnitude, I have to remind myself to sit with it for a minute. Feel it. Be with it, quietly, and soak in the moment.