Pescadero Memories

Hi June,

Though the headline labeled this a “Freak of Nature,” I like to think of such things as mini-wonders, a less negative appellation.  What caused it and is it contagious?, are usually the first two things I wonder, but in this case it was, “I wonder where it is now?”  I would have loved to have seen this work of pareidolic art, even though it was enhanced by a carver, rather then a pefectly natural wonder.

The name Nye is vaguely familiar in regards to Pescadero, but I can’t remember anything further at this time. For now it will have to remain one more minor, vanished oddity of the Coastside, home of so many others. This was in the July 3rd, 1890, issue of “The San Francisco Call.” Enjoy. John

A Freak of Nature.

J. R. Nye of 9 Rausch street has mounted and polished and exhibited yesterday a most curious freak of nature. The same is a trunk of an orange tree, grown in Pescadero and ending in a most singular tangle of twisted and gnarled roots, grown into each other or hanging. These branches assumed various shapes of human limbs or animal forms, the effect of which has been heightened by carving. On the roots were also swells or prolongations in forms of a tortoise, a fish, a snake’s head, the body of a lizard, a fox’s head, etc., whose outlines of course have been made truer by the carver’s knife. The base of the trunk took the lines of a head and bearded face, nature’s work upon which has also been rounded.