Samoa Beach
After doing some boat chores yesterday Bev and I biked over to the peninsula that is adjacent to the island that we’re tied up next to. Our destination was the ocean beach and an old lumber camp in the town of Samoa CA.
The ride was short, just a few miles and the bridges were not too high. None-the-less my old knees were killing me. My right knee has been acting up for the past year. I finally went to see an orthopedic doc to get it evaluated this past summer. After some X-rays and an MRI the doc said that I had arthritis, a tear in my meniscus and that down the road I should consider joint replacement surgery. I couldn’t do that without impacting our trip so I chose to put it off with the hope that I’ll be able to “get by” for now. Now my other knee has decided to join the pain choir and they are both piping up pretty good.
I’m not a complainer, so it’s hard for me to write or talk about this but it’s a very real part of the trip now and it’s omission would seem somehow wrong to me because I want to tell the full story as much as possible. That and the fact that this is a blog about an old couple sailing.
This morning I had a frank discussion with Bev about my knees. She knew something was up, had commented on my limping and noticed how I’ve been having to limit the lengths of our bike rides lately. So it’s was good that we talked about it. Bev was very understanding and we’ve made a plan to continue the trip, something we both really won’t, to carry on as long as I can and also to start the process of getting knee replacement surgery something that can take several month to get queued up for. Ideally I’d like to have the surgery some time in the late spring or early summer which with would be at the end of the sailing season (begging of the hurricane) in Mexico.
Back to yesterday’s bike ride. It was well worth the the knee pain to get a glimpse into the history of this place. Samoa is a very cool place. The beach is beautiful and quite long. All that survives of he lumber mill is a few old buildings and it's old cookhouse. Although you wouldn’t know it now, the area around the bay was once surrounded buy giant redwoods.
Those huge logs were cut down and hauled to the sawmill in Samoa that in the late 1800s was the largest in all of Humboldt County. At Samoa the huge trees were turned into lumber and then shipped by rail and sail out to market. The last old-growth timber was milled in 1980 but the mill's cookhouse survives today.
Remarkably the old cookhouse is still serving food today:
This is what it looked like back in the day:
Today's cook house maintains an amazing little museum of local logging artifacts:
I hope and pray that someday the giant redwoods will be allowed to grow again and people can find a balanced way to coexist with them.
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