aANDpAtoPia: Day of Mysteries

After leaving the East Brother Light Station, the next step in our itinerary was to join Micki* and Stull* in Mountain View (California) for a full day of activities. Since we were currently in the bay area, we decided that it would be an utter shame if we did not at least see the Golden Gate Bridge after having driven all the way from the Atlantic coast. A quick detour later and we were on the bridge, floating in the fog on a crimson skeleton, the massive contours stretching out like the wings of a red dragon. A rushed, confusing attempt at finding the visitor's center and a truncated photo session later, we were back on track.

Past all distractions, I got on the phone with Micki and Stull to hammer out the finer points of the plan. After sorting out everyone's current locations and driving preferences, we deduced that our first attraction was the most logical meeting point for all of us, instead of Micki's apartment like originally planned. We reprogrammed the GPS and continued driving through some beautiful San Francisco architecture while marveling at the series of trolley cables that hung over the city streets like abandoned webs of some monolithic arachnid.

Our first attraction was the Winchester Mystery House, the bizarre dwelling that I had once seen on TV a long time ago and had vowed to see one day. As such an unusual architectural specimen, I had anticipated driving through some winding, secluded driveway to get to it. Instead we found it at a major intersection; budding metropolis had found its way to the doorstep.

We selected a shady spot in the sizeable parking lot, excused ourselves through a long line, and found Micki and Stull nearing the head of the line in the enormous lobby/gift shop/cafe. Here we mutually decided to take the main house tour, opting out of the "behind-the-scenes" tour in the interest of time, and we killed a little while in the gift shop until our tour was ready to begin.

After the tour guide collected the proofs of purchase from about 25 to 30 of us, she launched into an amusingly rehearsed tour-guide narrative monotone that persisted for the entire one and a half hours that the tour lasted. This did not detract from the tour, instead it added some humorously charming tourist-trap-kitsch to the experience.

The house itself was astounding, the kind of abode I could happily abide. Every odd twist and peculiar turn continued to reveal new facets to the strange house, from the doorways that opened into walls to staircases that lead into ceilings. As the story goes, Mrs. Winchester believed she was being haunted by the ghosts of those killed by her heirloom invention: the Winchester Rifle. This house was some form of atonement for her husband's sins, in a manner that no one has quite understood to this day.

A woman standing at a stately 4' tall, Mrs. Winchester had commissioned the mansion to suit her proportions. The staircases built for her (as opposed to the servant staircases) were referred to as "easy risers", with each step measuring only about 2 to 3 inches high. With my punctuated stature, I found the steps not only manageable, but comfortable. Adam and Micki were fine too, but it was a lot of fun for us to watch Stull sputtering up the cumbersome steps, completely mismatched in scale for him. The mansion was a convoluted spaghetti heap of passageways, some leading into bare wooden rooms with 13 windows each, some leading into rooms protecting millions worth of Tiffany stained-glass doors and decorative adornments. Some rooms had impossibly small secret compartments while others had massive, unwieldy spaces where there shouldn't have been. Some wrong turns could lead you out a window to crash into a kitchen or living room below. It was surprising to me that in an environment that most would correlate with sharp senses and acute memory (after all you could easily get lost in a loop), the master of the domain was clearly someone who had lost all touch with reality.