Mendocino: a cute coastal town in northern California. The city has done a good job of preserving its character, and the coastline has a lot of areas that look like they’d be nice for swimming if it weren’t so cold. (Apparently, I forgot to photograph the town’s distinctive wooden water towers.)
We went on a walking tour to learn about Mendocino’s history. At one point, a passerby—a young guy with a mullet—asked our tour guide if she’d shown us the Digger-Hayes tree, and at this, she became angry and flustered. It turns out that the guy hadn’t said “Digger-Hayes,” but rather something quite different.1 The town lost a fraction of its charm after that.
- As it happens, there is only one recorded lynching in all of Mendocino County, of three white men accused of stealing a saddle in 1879, and it happened in a different part of the county. ↩︎