David Beach's Blog

Winter Ride

I was thinking about heading up to Mavericks today on the Vespa. However by the time I left, the competition was half over. So I just took a ride. I wanted to see how I'd do on HWY 1 anyway. I rode up past Ano Neuevo, just south of Pescadero. I realized that going on to Half Moon Bay and Mavericks would have been brutal.

It was crisp but sunny. A perfect day for a ride. The scoot did well and I got it up to 65 at a few points. It slows on inclines, struggling to carry my beefy frame up the hills. I had to pull over a few times to let cars pass. I stopped at Coffeetopia on the way out and Costanoa Lodge on the way back. Costanoa is a nice place. Camp grounds, lodge, restaurant, cabins. It looks like a good place for a conference or retreat.

Just south of Davenport on the way back, I turned up Bonny Doon Rd. Oak trees, redwoods, hills, and curves. The musty smells of wet forest combined with cut timber and wood smoke made me smile. The fragrances are some of the best reasons to ride sometimes. You just don't get that trapped in a car.

Here's a map of my trip (you might want to zoom in):

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Santa Cruz Coworking

I've been looking at some more spots for a coworking space. There's an ideal spot downtown Santa Cruz right on Pacific, but it's pretty pricey. $1.70 a square foot. Maybe that's okay. But when a space is over 2,000 square feet, I have to wonder how sustainable it will be. There's a killer spot in the older warehouse/train depot area that's now an art gallery/studio but it's 4,700 square feet at a buck a foot.

My goal is to find a place that can sustain itself with little of my own investment. Especially since I won't be able to use it much. I think the idea is viable, I just need to line up the ducks to make it happen.

If anyone reading this has space, knows of space, or is interested, go to the coworking wiki for santa cruz and make contact!

Mystery Spot Mystery

As you know I live about a mile away from the famed Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz. I wrote a post around Memorial Day about it. But things have gotten weird this year since then.

First, there seems to be more visitors than ever to the hoax on the hill and they are crowding the entire area with their SUVs and Toyota Camrys. So much so that residents all along Branciforte drive have had to resort to cluttering the road with "No Parking" signs. Once the Mystery Spot parking lot is full, they now turn people away, which encourages them to park on the road, sometimes a up to a mile away.

One of the problems is that the road has little to no edge space for bikes to ride safely, let alone a Cadillac Escalade to park, or people to walk along. So I've seen entire generations of families from grandma to baby in a stroller hiking in the middle of the road to get to their mysterious destination. Local cars and motorcycles zip along the picturesque drive on their trips to and from town. Not a good combination.

Now something I didn't mention on my last post is that Mystery Spot Rd. actually goes beyond the Mystery Spot to a community of residences. There are hundreds of people that live beyond the spot. These poor folks have to bob and weave around the tourists just to go to the store or wherever. The road is so often blocked that most of the people that live up there resort to staying home during the weekends. Yes these people have chosen to live up there, but the problem is that it's gotten increasingly worse over the past two or three years. And no one knows why.

There could be an interesting sociological paper written about why people flock to the spot. It has always been popular with foreign tourists, German, Japanese, Indian, etc. In Japan it's advertised by travel agents right along with the Statue of Liberty. But for some reason more and more Indian tourists are arriving each day. Granted it's a beautiful spot. Quiet, peaceful, amazing tall redwoods, and Americana at its kitchiest. I know the allure. Clearly I'm fascinated with the place. But why, all of a sudden has there been this change and huge increase in visitation?

The owner's name is Christopher Smith. What I know about him is second hand, so take that for what it's worth. His actual occupation is a lawyer. One who handles a lot of divorces. The story goes that Mr. Smith acquired the Mystery Spot from a bad divorce gone worse. The previous owners were in the thick of it, and Mr. Smith esq. took the property off their hands. Apparently he does this a lot. According to stories this happened with a property across the road from the entrance to the spot. A large, old, yellow farm house with some decent property.

I've heard that Mr. Smith has been very difficult to deal with regarding the recent traffic problems. To put it plainly, it appears that he doesn't care and doesn't want to listen to resident concerns or possible solutions. I'd say the biggest issues is the safety of his customers and the fire hazard that this problem is creating. There have been several smoldering cigarettes and small fires caused by them along the road and in tree stumps. This is what concerns me the most. For obvious reasons. I live in the same forest as the spot.

So what's the deal?  What can be done?  Some petitions have been passed around and a local resident is who lives on Mystery Spot Rd. is starting to make some noise. But really I'm not sure what can be done. We can't stop people from coming there. And we certainly don't want to make a bad impression on the folks who make the pilgrimage. Some come a very long way to visit. I don't want to ruin or at least inconvenient innocent people's vacations...  so  it's up to the owner to figure it out. Start a shuttle service from another parking area? That would be my suggestion. Raise prices a bit? That might help.

I don't know. It's a  mystery.

Working at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk

I've been working since I was 13. My first job was at a repertory dinner theater company called the West Abbey Theater in Soquel. I did everything from serving bowls of snack mix, to working backstage, to acting on stage. We'd share tips and sometimes the audience would throw money on the stage during the curtain call.

My second job was at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Canfield Concessions. Canfield ran all the games that you find along the walk beneath the rides and between the corn dogs. I was essentially a carny. $2.85 an hour. On my first night, I was assigned the milk bottle game. Three balls to take down a pyramid of heavy metal milk bottles. But you didn't have to just knock them all down, you also had to knock them off the platform. It was next to impossible.

It was tradition to get the new guy to do the worst job. At the milk bottle game that meant to crawl under the game on your stomach and find the stray baseballs. The joke is that there never is any. But you had to look everywhere just to make sure.

The milk bottle game was the worst. This was a time when the Fort Ord Army base was still in action and every weekend every jarhead around the bay went to Santa Cruz to get some aggression out. For some reason this meant paying to throw baseballs at bottles. The problem was the inebriation... and when an Army Private on leave is drunk with baseballs, the guy working  behind the counter looks an awful lot like a milk bottle. I've been beaned more times than Craig Biggio.

While there, I worked the dime toss game, Skee Ball, hoops, clowntoss, a machine BB gun game, some weird game where you try to knock down a wall of cats with balls, the roller bowler, and a bunch of others that I forget. The one constant between all the games is how black my hands got handling the money. We wore aprons for the change and would constantly squish our hands in the pouches of quarters.

The gig paid for my first scooter; a blue Honda Aero 50. It took the entire summer to earn the $600 to buy it. I'm not totally sure it was worth it.

What I remember most about the job... the mix of low tide, fried artichoke hearts, grease, and beer aroma.  The stick of the sea air on my skin. Gang violence. The constant mistrust by the Canfield management of me and my teenage sub minimum wage earning co-workers with bags and bags of cash around us.  Free rides on the Giant Dipper.

I took the kids to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History today. Since the boardwalk is celebrating its 100th anniversary, they have a great exhibit featuring art and relics from and about the place. It brought back some memories.

Mystery Spot - Santa Cruz

Every Memorial Day weekend it starts. Cars line up on either side of Branciforte Dr. in Santa Cruz to visit the world famous Mystery Spot. The Mystery Spot is open every day, but Memorial Day marks the open season for Mystery. I live on Branciforte Dr. about half a mile away from this spot. I can always tell when someone is trying to get there. They drive slow, weave a bit, and look lost. They look for any indication that they are near. Their necks crane up at the glorious redwood trees that line the road, perhaps thinking that this spot could appear out of nowhere at any moment. Magic!

It's a phenomenon on many levels. First, this thing has been open since 1940, every day. Second it is hugely popular for Japanese, German, and Indian tourists. Like crazy popular! It seems, in California, you have the Golden Gate Bridge, Yosemite, Disneyland, and the Mystery Spot. Must see attractions! Third, people really believe that something mysterious and/or alien is going on there. Like really believe!

As I was getting my hair dyed blue this morning, the subject of the Mystery Spot came up. I  tried to explain to my hair care professional that it was all an optical illusion. She wouldn't buy it. She didn't want to go there. I tried to explain that the mystery is in your brain and how it perceives what it sees, but I had to stop. It's more fun believing.

But for you, you have a choice. You can either read on and have your spirit crushed or you can go elsewhere. It's all the same to me. My goal here is to try to reduce the traffic jam around my house  by just a little bit.

The Mystery Spot is a hoax. It's an old timey roadside attraction that is very well executed and has been for years. Here's the deal. You are told some crazy story at the beginning of your tour about a possible meteor that landed there, or something to do with the gravitational pull of the earth's magma at that certain area. It's never totally explained... it's, well a mystery. Then  you walk up a steep hill and go inside a fenced in area. The horizon is totally cut off from your field of view and the structure you see is built on an angle. From this point on, your brain gets scrambled. You see balls roll uphill, you can stand on the wall, people shorter than other people look to be the same height. You can lean over without falling down. When it's all over, you get a bumper sticker. For $5 it's actually a pretty good deal. A little hocus pocus, some laughter at other peoples expense, and a souvenir. I think the tour lasts about 15 minutes.

The Mystery Spot demonstrates the influence of visual context on perception.

Now don't just believe me... there has been some actual scientific study done on this effect. A UCSC psychology professor named Bruce Bridgeman has written an article called "Influence of Visually Induced Expectation on Perceived Motor Effort: A Visual-Proprioceptive Interaction at the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot" for the Psychonomic  Bulletin & Review... which sounds fake, but it's not.  Here's the abstract for his article:

"It is known that dense objects seem heavier than larger, less dense objects of the same weight. We have investigated a related illusion, in which visual context biases the apparent weight of a single object. The apparatus is a cabin on a steep hillside near Santa Cruz, CA, tilted 17° from vertical. From its ceiling hangs a weight on a chain. The cabin's tilt makes the weight appear suspended at an angle. Pushing the weight toward the visually based vertical is perceived as difficult, whereas pushing it away from the visual vertical is perceived as easy. Seven subjects pushed the weight in both directions, judging required effort on a double-anchored 1–10 scale. All experienced the effort illusion, with no significant subject effect. When subjects' eyes were closed, the effect was smaller but still present. Apparently proprioceptive and skin inputs, equal for both directions, are ignored or underweighted as visually based expectations influence perceived effort."

Gotta love that! Professor Bridgeman takes his classes to the spot for field trips. And UCSC doesn't give out grades...

So there you have it. It's just a shack built on an angle on the side of a steep hill with no view of the horizon so your perception is thrown off. And the owners are super rich. I hope that helps.

For more information, here are some articles and an awesome interview by Jesse Thorn on The Sound of Young America.

• IngentaConnect
• UCSC Currents
• Cal Berkeleyan Article
• The Sound of Young America: Interview with Bruce Bridgeman (.mp3)