13 Ways of Looking for Yreka: a toolkit for appreciating (any) place
#1: It’s an existential opportunity
I was driving the 600 miles from San Francisco to Portland on I-5 a few months ago, and midway along I realized I was getting tired and it was snowing in the Siskiyou Mountains pass ahead. So I decided to stop overnight in Yreka (population 7,765), which I knew nothing about except vague memories from a rest-stop there 30 years ago.
In such cases, I like to entertain a challenge: what can you appreciate, learn, and do in this place? whatsoever and what so random it may be. One could do this every day, anywhere; but a stop-over, a happenstance, gives us a fresh existential prompt. In the spirit of finding patterns for pattern-finding, I thought I’d try making my notes from this stop into a toolkit of ways to appreciate later stations on life’s way. So to continue on..
#2. Read it in the original: geography
A key way to better find where you are is to drop the road-map and look at landscape views such as topographic, geologic, or aerial.
Yreka, it isn’t hard to notice, is on a line of clear geographic destiny: that path which was thought to be the easiest through the mountains separating the main river valleys (and population centers) of California and Oregon.
This route was firmly established in the early 19th century by the Hudson Bay Company, as the Siskiyou Trail from Fort Vancouver (near Portland) to San Francisco. This itself followed various Native American valley and mountain trails, which often follow natural paths of rivers past or present, and logical points of passage amid hills. Interstate 5 follows it today.
#3. Unravel the history — the past you’re passing here isn’t dead, it’s not even past
Granting the deep-carved patterns noted above, however, one must add: it’s complicated, and doesn’t necessarily unfold naturally. For example, when you look at an Google Earth view, it’s somewhat puzzling why the road routes (old Hwy 99 in white, I-5 in yellow) curve West through the relatively narrow basin near Yreka, rather than a straighter path through the wider Shasta River Valley (green), past competing city Montague.
Somehow the Siskiyou Trail chose the Yreka basin route, then travellers in 1851 discovered gold nearby in (now) Yreka, leading to a 2nd phase of the California Gold Rush, and the establishment of Yreka as mining boom-town.
However, the apparent geographic destiny favoring of the Shasta Valley / Montague route resurfaced within a few decades, when the Central Pacific Railroad in 1886 decided to lay its line there, where it remains as the north-south mainline today. This set off a panic in Yreka and the town quickly pitched in to build a 13-mile Yreka Railroad to connect to the CPR junction at Montague, which seems to have headed off decline just in time. Later on, Yreka did get the Pacific Highway in the 1920s, and its successor Highway 99, but almost lost I-5 to the shorter, cheaper Montague route until a key California state senator from Yreka intervened.
Many a town, like Yreka, is such a story of competing trade routes, and we see that geography is a big part of destiny, but accidents and politics also throw the dice at times.
#4. Find the political temperament
In any place, the curious traveller might inquire how people there vote and what issues they care about — and consider how he might see things if he lived there, unlikely as it may seem. In an effort at such, I try to pick up and at least skim local papers of any type, anywhere. You read a lot of similar things: housing, schools, in recent years more about homelessness, a new building, city council hearings, local elections, crime, a tax measure.
A more unexpected aspect of Yreka emerges from further looking: it’s the proclaimed capital of a long-running, and lately resurgent, regional secession movement since 1941, known as the State of Jefferson. This movement calls for the creation of a new US state from parts of southern Oregon and northern California (as contrasted with the Cascadia secessionist movement, perennially rumbling/pondered in the Northwest, which considers full secession from the US).
A majority of county commissioners in Yreka’s county, Siskiyou, and those around it have apparently voted in favor of this: symbolic vote? conceivable one day as part of the plans periodically floated to partition the bloated, ill-governed and poorly Congressionally-represented great state of California? I don’t know, but it seems to say something about political leanings around Yreka.
#5. Seek the culinary encounter and the spirits
I stopped for lunch at the Yreka brewpub branch of Etna Brewery, which is based in nearby Etna: a 1980s resurrection of the original Etna Brewery which operated on the site from 1852 to Prohibition in 1919. Etna’s logo includes a culinary pun (see below) on Patrick Henry’s Revolutionary War slogan,“Give me liberty or give me death,” which seems kind of California / State of Jefferson appropriate. It’s a bit like My Own Private New Hampshire up here.
Northern California is today blessed with a rich network of such craft breweries, descendants of the two which began the US craft-brewing revival — Anchor Steam Brewery in San Francisco and (now defunct) New Albion in Sonoma. My researches and mission of cultural appreciation increasingly require stops at such places whenever travelling.
I like how local breweries/brewpubs represent local artisanship and a certain amount of terroir, but compared to wineries are more urban (i.e. done anywhere, not requiring unique vineyard land) and democratic. The best product rarely costs much more an ordinary pint; and best of all, as at Etna Brewery, you often can sample anything you want for around $1 / quarter-pint. Even Etna Brewery’s information-design game is strong, as seen in this excellent explanatory beer-sampler tray mat.
#6. Feel the shapes and shapers: architecture & design
Yreka’s main street has an agreeably 19th century feel, and various flourishes of Gold Rush history in signs, historical plaques, and such. The most striking and iconic building is probably the old Franco-American Hotel, painted a blazing combination of brick red, yellow, and green accent. I didn’t look into this but imagine and hope it’s an authentic practice, like the brightly colored paint now believed to have covered much ancient Greek sculpture & architecture we think of as being marble white.
However, since I’m a fond observer of all architectures prefab, vernacular, and self/kit-built, what I especially liked in Eureka was the local facility of the California Department of Fish and Game, a veritable university campus of different metal industrial sheds, trailers, fish-ladders, and other gizmos.
Here was a nice assemblage: three-quarters-span Quonset hut with a flat front, creating a tear-drop-trailer sort of shape; and a sturdy pediment of sheet metal gracing the entrance doors. Possibly all improvised by a particularly handy employee of CDFG one year, I suspect.
#7. Gather the whimsy & local icons
What would you guess, or what do you find, is on any local postcards? If you had to pick one image or icon to put on, say, the town seal or sign, what would it be? In Yreka, it’s clearly gold-mining and Old West. Every place has a genius loci in some way.
Below: genius loci mobile. This was incredible, a very old, even seemingly authentic 19thC stagecoach, sitting right on Main (Miner) St. in front of the old Franco-American Hotel. I liked that it is just sitting there with no sign, plaque, velvet cord, or anything — pretty much as if it’s just parked waiting for the owner to come out of the hotel. I had all the time in the world to carefully study this beauty, and learn just how the suspension works on such a coach: turns out the layers of leather strip clamped together look surprisingly like, and work somewhat like, the “leaf spring” clamped-metal- suspensions still used on many vehicles and trailers today.
In Yreka, “sports” = gold-mining.
#8. Practice ‘dwelling’ there
Stopping anywhere is an opportunity to consider something fundamental: what it means to ‘dwell’ — an intriguing term and concept which, as cultural/landscape historian J. B. Jackson notes, originally and sometimes still means simply to pause or linger. Jackson says we should ask ourselves, how long or in what way must one must stop in a place for it to be a dwelling?
When our presence is ‘customary’ it’s a dwelling, says Jackson. Yet I can think of cases of returning to a well-picked cafe or restaurant near one’s lodging on the second day of a stay somewhere, or second occasion being there, and enjoying a warm feeling of customariness. Or living in a place for a long time without feeling attached to it as one’s dwelling. Or delving into a place so well and enjoyably, on a brief pass through, that I look forward to my next stop there so I may further my habitation of the place.
Extending that into a practical experiment, my longstanding traveller habit is to consider, in any place, how I might live there permanently. E.g., ask where in this town would I most like to live, where could I afford to live, what might I build? What might become my regular cafe and favorite places; what would be a good way to get to know people here; what might be better or worse here than where I came from or where I’m going?
As it happened, in Yreka such a possible Vita Nuova presented itself clearly, in the window of McGregor’s Bookshop on the main street (which in Yreka is appropriately and perhaps punningly named Miner St): a sign offering the bookstore for sale. I pondered this for some time, while lunching across the street at Etna’s: the thought of my later life as Yreka’s bookstore owner, perhaps becoming a notorious trap and pampheteer of local lore and crankery. It could happen. I think it may be happening already. But this is appreciation, inhabiting — I call it a victory for my mission to relate.
#9. Apply the cosmopolitan test
In stopping off in random places, we might usefully apply a test of cosmopolitanism — to ourselves. That is, ask whether we can inhabit well and appreciate a place for its own qualities, rather than just projecting upon it our own. Judging other places and people by one’s own values, seeing it only through one’s own lens, is almost a definition of provincialism, yet is quite characteristic of the city cosmopolitan abroad in the interior.
Maybe I am that too, but I at least try to bear in mind two of my favorite sayings, famous expressions of cosmop0litanism:
1) from the Roman playwright Terence (a piece of dramatic irony in that it is spoken by the ‘busybody’ defending his gossipping): “I am human, and nothing which is human is alien to me.”
2) a Chinese idiom: “At home anywhere within the four seas” (四海为家 / sì hǎi wéi jiā). Tracing from a remark from an ancient minister, Xiao He, on how a wise ruler or official should be able to live anywhere in the Empire.
I’m game for this, sure... I humbly consider settling into my newly rented rooms a few blocks off Main Street, perhaps plunging into the running of a struggling used bookstore, and probably quickly getting to know all the staff over at Etna Brewery as I drown my multiplying sorrows there each day. I imagine becoming a devoted follower of the cycle of Etna’s seasonal brews as if local sports teams or deities, my tiny remaining hopes. No, I jest! I’m sure it couldn’t be that dire.. it would be infinitely rich, in fact, that’s the premise here.
10. Allow epiphany, hallucination.
Imagining that new life.. it may become vivid, perhaps give rise to a revelation.
Stopovers in random places, possibly those with brewpubs offering strange new brews of widely and surprisingly varying alchohol %, offer that opportunity. Stopping in Yreka that snowy evening the other week, I thought of Robert Frost’s famous “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” describing a traveller pausing at a place which is no-place — described only as, away from anything, puzzling the horse who doesn’t see why to stop, and as nowhere near where the traveller is going:
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My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near..
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake…
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep..
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Frost wrote this, he later recalled, in just a few minutes after having been up all night writing a much longer poem, and having walked out to look at the sunrise: “as if I’d had a hallucination.” The poem too describes a moment of inexplicable revelation, the literary figure of “epiphany.”
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The idea of revelatory perception is well expressed by two famous lines from William Blake: “To See a World in a Grain of Sand” (from “Auguries of Innocence,” 1803), and “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
Secularly, the idea of ‘epiphany’ as traced from the ancient Greeks is that a receptive or pondering mind/soul may at any time, merely from perception or thought, make a great leap of realization. Religiously, in Christian tradition or relatedly in literature — such as in each story of James Joyce’s collection Dubliners — epiphany means the possibility of a divine visitation or a religious conversion at any moment, in any place.
The figure of epiphany challenges us to consider no place or moment so ordinary that it could not be the moment of our greatest revelation. In a motel room or a diner in Yreka, say — which would actually be appropriate, for yet another reason, because the town name may have come from ‘Eureka,’ Greek for “I have found it!” As the discoverers of gold in California proverbially exclaimed, and as is now the state’s official motto.
11. Find the social connection
Of course, a great way to appreciate a place is to find locals, get them to share it with you. I’m sure that’s true, but it isn’t my modus operandi so much — it’s the sort of thing I’d look to my better half to help with, if I had one. My M.O. is more like, as someone once commented on a photo album I put up once after a trip, “All of your photos make it seems as if you’re the last person alive on earth.”
12. Consider the bore and the boring
To consider another angle, a stop-over in an any-place is a chance to consider what and why we consider anything, or ourselves, interesting.
G.K. Chesterton deftly explores the paradoxes of interestingness in his essay “On Mr. Rudyard Kipling,” in the collection Heretics. Taking square aim at the Byronesque cult of originality and supersubtle taste, he argues for the ironically greater poeticness of the ploddingly over-appreciating type, the bore:
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores…The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.
To be excited by what others pass over as a boring places — worse yet, to write essays about them!— may be being a bore, but like Chesterton we can look at it as in fact a refined form of poeticness.
13. “The richest square mile in the world”
Yreka was apparently once known, in Gold Rush days, as “the richest square mile on earth” (as was, later and since, another gold-rush town, Center City, Colorado). It would be easy enough to find sad or laughable such former claims of glory, when stopping indifferently or not at all in the now-little-known, somewhat sleepy and struggling small town there now. Yet that would be failing to rise to the challenge that every place and moment gives us: to recognize that the richest square mile on earth is always the one around you now.
More NorCal appreciations: “Roadside Architecture Contraptions: a prefab housing tour of Willits, CA.” (Nov 21, 2015).
