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Lady Yota Blog Journalist is in the House!

Updated: Mar 6, 2024

I am happy to announce that Kimberly White is our new Blog Journalist! Kimberly has worked as an editor for the Seattle Times and she has written articles for newspapers around the country. Kimberly has been on a journey of discovery last year, and this is her story.


Welcome, Kimberly! We are excited to read about the events and trip reports you'll be covering.


 


I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, and starting at about age 15, my dad and I would load our two German shepherds in the back of his Tacoma and drive until we found an out-of-the way road where I could practice driving. Our go-to spot, though, was a long, asphalt road that ran parallel to a riverbed near our house.

 

The Tacoma was a stick, which meant I had to learn how to operate the clutch and gear shift. With a thudding heart, I’d slowly release the brake and press the gas, then lurch down the road with all the grinding gears and shuddering stops and starts of a new teenage driver. I don’t remember now how my dad reacted or what he said during these sessions, but that’s probably for the best.

 


Amber and Leia, meanwhile, would trot along beside the truck. They seemed to sense my newness behind the wheel and were usually smart enough to steer clear. But every once in a while, I’d notice, out of the corner of my eye, that their ears had popped up, and their noses were pointed at something off in the distance. That’s how, as a new driver, I learned to always be aware of my surroundings.



My dad spent 30 years working at the Los Angeles Times, and after retiring in 2001, he and my mom decided to move to the coastal redwoods of Eureka. My alma mater, Cal Poly Humboldt, is about 10 miles away, and they’d fallen in love with the breathtaking beauty of the area during their trips to see me.

 

Outside of Eureka, Arcata and a few small towns, Humboldt County is largely rural and rugged. You need a truck to access those tucked-away places along the coast or nestled among the redwoods.

 

My dad had already sold his Tacoma by the time they’d decided to move, but in a fortuitous turn of events, my mom’s car broke down the day before they moved. (To this day, my heart does a little flip whenever I see a Tacoma cruising by, its tires splashed with fine sprays of mud, or parked at a trailhead on the side of the road.) Later that same afternoon, he pulled into the driveway in a brand new, dark gray 4Runner SR5.



 

That was his dream truck, and it served them well while they lived there, taking them to the weekly farmer’s market in Arcata, the community forest adjacent to the campus, and the quiet lagoons that dot the coastline up to Del Norte County. In Orick, they’d stand outside the truck with binoculars and watch herds of elk, their antlers glowing in an ethereal, late-morning light, quietly grazing in the nearby fields.




I can picture my dad even now, his eyes filled with child-like wonder, as he drives along the length of the Avenue of the Giants – windows down, moonroof open, breathing in the earthy scent of old-growth redwoods, ferns and underbrush, still damp from the evening’s rain.

 

One of his favorite roads, though, was the winding, 12-mile scenic route from Moonstone Beach to Patrick’s Point State Park (now Sue-meg State Park). I can picture him here, too. He’s gazing up at the redwoods as he drives past, across fields filled with birdsong and brightly colored wildflowers, and through cavernous valleys whose walls echo the gurgling streams slipping over weather-worn rocks down below. Or he’d park at a vista point and watch as storm-driven waves slam against the offshore rocks below before dissipating into nothingness.

 

But nothing is ever really gone. The energy is still there, will always be there, even if we can’t see it. And matter never disappears. It just changes form.




My parents thrived on the North Coast, and probably would have stayed there if family matters hadn’t called my dad back to Florida. In 2011, after six years in Eureka, they loaded up the 4Runner once again and drove the 2,700 miles to Destin. (((https://destinflorida.com/)))

 

Decades earlier, he’d written an article about what it was like to grow up there, a small barrier island on the Gulf coast between Pensacola and Panama City. With its white sand beaches and blue-green waters, it’s part of the roughly 100-mile “Emerald Coast” – and, not surprisingly, a major tourist destination.

 

But it was just a small fishing village when he was growing up there, so things were different.

 


We would swim the several hundred yards from the mainland … and walk up the beach until the white dunes behind us blocked off the harbor and our homes and our parents. It was like living on the edge of the universe. Behind us was the known world. Ahead was a blue infinity, a void from which anything might come, and often did.

 

The Island was a refuge. It was always there, beyond the reach of obligations and rules, always with something to offer. It was a place where magic was real, and reality just another shadow on the sand.

 

Of course, high-rise hotels now sit where the wind once sculpted those dunes. And it’s hard there now, like in so many places, to catch even a glimpse of the small, seafoam-topped waves endlessly rolling on to the sugar-white shores.

 

Unless they can find solitude in their minds alone, my children have no place to go, as I did, to be alone, no vantage point from which to view a world untouched by human hands.

 

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the appropriate settings, like the adventures, just pop out as needed from youthful minds.



Still, just in case, I take my kids into the desert whenever I can, so that they can look at an empty horizon. And into the mountains, where there are places they can stand and see ridgelines, in ever-paler shades of blue, rising away until they fade into the blue sky.

 

Moving to Oregon

 

My dad passed away in 2017, and by 2023, my mom and I had decided to make our way back to the West coast where we belonged. And I was suddenly faced with a difficult choice. By that time, the 4Runner had racked up more than 200,000 miles. And in the end, I decided driving cross country with my 74-year-old mom and Xena – also a German shepherd – in a 20-year old truck wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.

 

Meanwhile, my mom had gotten into a minor accident in the 4Runner and we were in the process of getting the bumper fixed. So I asked the dealer if he could find a truck just like my dad’s, but with fewer miles. And that’s how I ended up with a dark gray 2023 4Runner SR5 – once again, coincidentally, just before a major move. We traded in my mom’s almost-new Camry as part of the deal. But not my dad’s 4Runner. There was someone else I wanted to hand those keys over to.


Jesse and I met two years earlier, while I was going through treatment for breast cancer, and as we got to know each other over the following months, I started noticing all the similarities between him and my Dad. And I knew Jesse had been dealing with back-to-back car issues, including the final nail in the coffin: a lemon that he’d purchased after signing what turned out to be a predatory loan.

 

By the time we were packing up to leave, he’d become one of my best friends. So I decided to “rehome” my dad’s 4Runner, and signed over the title to Jesse the same day I drove off in my 2023 model. Every once in a while, when we’re talking or texting, I’ll ask him how the old girl’s holding up.



Trip to Humboldt

 

I thought about my dad’s article a lot during a recent trip my mom and I took to Humboldt, to celebrate what would have been his 81st birthday and their 53rd anniversary. I got my mom and her friends a room for a couple nights at the same bed-and-breakfast where my parents always stayed when they came to visit me in college.

 

Once I dropped her off, I suddenly realized I had the next 48 hours to myself.

 

I’d spent the week going to all my old favorite haunts: Avenue of the Giants, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, the Arcata Marsh, up Fickle Hill, and down to the Mad River. I felt him with me as I detoured onto long dusty roads, or when I spotted the cracked remains of a long-abandoned road, now all but obscured by tangled bushes and overgrowth.

 



He was riding shotgun when I whipped back around on the freeway and went back to that rock-and-mineral shop I’ve always wondered about. Was he somehow behind the brilliantly hued rainbow we saw, hanging so low on the road that we could almost drive beneath it?

 


So, as a final tribute to my dad on the trip, I hit the road for the Lost Coast, an 80-mile stretch of road that winds its way across rolling mountains and valleys.

 


The skies had been dark and gray for most of our trip, but not so today. The sky was almost the same color as the azurite I’d seen at the rock and mineral shop. It was the perfect backdrop to the dusty road we traveled along that afternoon, offering stunningly beautiful, panoramic views of shadowy mountains and grassy valleys, where cows lazily lifted their gazes as we passed.

 


 

“Over the mountains, and across the sea

Lie many lands unknown to me.

But if fate is willing, some day I’ll go

To see those lands, for I must know

What lies there, across the sea,

In those many lands unknown to me.”



That’s a poem my dad wrote for one of his college courses, and it’s always stuck with me. His quest for knowledge and sense of adventure permeated everything he did, from his choices in his career to books to travels.

 

And to where he chose to take my brother and me so we could “stand and see ridgelines, in ever-paler shades of blue, rising away until they fade into the blue sky.”


Kimberly White

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2 Comments


Unknown member
Mar 07, 2024

Kimberly, what an amazing piece. Very touching. I'm so excited for you to be a part of the team!

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Unknown member
Mar 07, 2024
Replying to

Thanks Kellie! I enjoyed writing it and reminiscing on the memories. :)

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