It's a little hard to tell but there is a boysenberry apple crumble pie underneath the chocolate ganache ice cream 😉👌🏽 thank you @sm_nichols for the pie! This is the perfect snack for House of Cards S2! #latenightsnacking #julianpie #boysenberry #applecrumble #chocolateganacheicecream #houseofcards
Trip to Remote Pie-Making Town, Somewhere—a good story in a bookstore
[Things covered: Octoberfest, a llama, Farenheit 451, pie]
We decided on it in a close-to-home 7-11, which was appropriate.
“Let’s go somewhere again.”
“Yeah—it’s been, like, two weeks,” I said. Two weeks is a long time.
“Where?”
“Julian?”
“I don’t know what that is.” Andi grabbed an atomic-orange Hostess cupcake.
“Julian makes the pies in all the local grocery stores.”
She put the cupcake back. It glowed at us, radioactively, from the shelves. “Is there anything else there?”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s go.”
The next morning, we packed up and headed west. To coffee. Then east, to Julian. We noticed how quickly the landscape changed, started looking dry and mountainous. We wanted to take a picture, but we didn’t know what of. Andi put her feet out the window and snapped a few pictures.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“It’s for the blog,” she said, “It’s cool. FreePeople would do it.”
“I guess.”
“Shut up!” She said, “They would.”
I laughed, “Whatever you say.”
They actually turned out pretty cool, looking at them now. And they make for a great excuse to show the drier parts of California.
(Photo credit: Andi)
When we actually got to Julian, we parked on a side-street off the east end of the “strip,” if you could call it that. Andi looked worried, like maybe we had found ourselves in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
When we opened the car doors, we heard music: a tuba, maybe. Then a guitar. Then a group of maybe five or six people clapping. We turned onto the main road and stopped with the clappers before what turned out to be Julian’s own Octoberfest:
“This is awesome,” Andi said.
“It is.”
We stopped and watched a while—a long while, actually. It was neat. The band was good, and we were a third of the audience. Also, we were surprised by how festive six people could be. I noticed that the person most affected was a little boy. Eventually, his family moved him along. It reminded me of that Joshua Bell video, the one of him rocking in the subway, the one where nobody notices except the little toddler whose mother clearly doesn’t have time for a subway musician.
Then, somehow, we got distracted by a llama:
Post-llama, we found our way to the local bookstore. It looked homey, authentic—familiar, even. There was something about the little, plain-text genre tags on the shelves.
“Are you the owner?” I asked the owner.
“I am.”
“I know this place,” I said. “Do you own Fahrenheit 451 in Carlsbad?”
He raised an eyebrow, “Funny story.”
The Old Julian Book House’s owner is named Don. As it happens, the store’s former owner, Phil, is a genuine bibliophile. According to Don, Phil’s house looked just like his bookshops: organized shelves upon organized shelves, marked and categorized by little, white label-printer labels.
It’s our guess that Phil started on a mirror-breaking spree, or bought a litter of black cats, maybe. Whatever it was, he lost near 100,000 books from his personal collection in the California cedar fires of 2003. Hence the Carlsbad shop’s name: Farenheit 451.
(Photo credit: San Diego Union Tribune)
One day—the morning Phil sold his cats (again, our addition)—Ray Bradbury called him up.
“He wanted to know how the store was doing,” Phil later told us, “and if it was a joke or what?” Phil recounted the fire incident, explaining the store’s name in the process. Bradbury was moved. He invited Phil to his little, yellow house, and offered to sign his books.
“I was expecting a mansion,” Phil told us, “but it was just a little house on the corner. And it was full of big, stuffed dinosaurs. And movie posters from all the movies they’d made of his novels.”
(Photo credit: PBS)
He gave Phil a few books, too: a copy of his intro to Richard Bach’s Biplane, Prelude to Bach—Bach was apparently a student of Ray’s; a ‘57 playboy with one of Bradbury’s short stories, illustrated by Picasso; you know, things you could get today if you were willing to trade limbs. Anyways, Phil and Ray kept correspondence for a while, but Ray fell ill soon after.
By this time—and we mean no disrespect to Don (if anything, it’s an attestment to our own chicken-brain attention spans)—Andi and I spotted a sign peeking in through the street-side window.
Pie.
We thanked Don for the story, and mentioned telling it, in some incarnation, on our blog. Don gave us Phil’s number and we departed, pie-bound.
For travel bloggers, there are a lot of places to see, big places: Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, Berlin, you know, Gotham City, Who-Ville. But one of the best parts of travel blogging is finding your way to other places, smaller places. Sure, there’s something rewarding about seeing the largest city in america, or the largest bookstore, but there’s something equally fulfilling about visiting a tiny bookstore with an incredible history. In Pie-Ville, Somewhere.
Also, the pie.
Casey Dayan is a writer and musician living in San Diego, California. He has a couple of wonderfully useful degrees from UC Santa Cruz: a B.A. in literature and a B.S. in Anthropology. He has written creatively for Phren-Z, MusikFace, Snazzy Traveler, The Rumpus, and UC Anthropology. He has written content and copy for many places you don’t care to hear about.
