Postcards from the Lost World: The Drive-Thru Tree

In late September of 1980, some guy named Herb got in his car—I’m thinking a beige Buick Skylark with a couple clamshell suitcases in the trunk—and drove through a tree.

For real.

I know this about Herb because right after he nosed the Buick through the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree in Leggett, California, he was enflamed with emotion and purchased this souvenir postcard to send to Mr. and Mrs. Howard Smith of Hanover, PA. On the back, Herb writes:

Once he drove through that tree, Herb clearly could not contain himself. His handwriting is the frantic downhill scrawl of a kid telling Santa the twelve things he can’t live without. Look at the address panel, and you’ll note his slapdash application of the ten-cent stamp (one of those stylish “People’s Right to Petition for Redress” stamps that were all the rage in 1980).

You see the mustache and eyebrows, right?

Let us all observe a moment of silence for Herb. He was a member of a dying breed of humans: the Readily Astonished. His forerunners were those people in the very first movie theaters who screamed and passed out at the onscreen image of a coming train. His contemporaries were the people posed in old resort brochures: ecstatically shuffleboarding, basking in the decadent novelty of a rotating bar with shag carpeting. It’s easy to assume people like that didn’t actually exist, until you find something like this postcard that reminds you of it.

To this day, the word “essence” freaks me out.

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are still tons of people who are like Herb, who look at this postcard like ZOMG A TREE WITH A MOTHERCUSSING HOLE IN IT. Maybe it’s just that an entire lifetime of CGI creatures and Jetsons gadgets have sucked the wonder out of me, like that one scene in the Dark Crystal where the Skeksis harvest podling essence (which is possibly the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen on film, and I’ve seen Caligula and Eraserhead).

Are you still out there, Readily Astonished people? If you are, please say hello in the comments section. I love how excited you get about things, and I wish you could teach a night class for people like me.

For now, I’ll content myself with this final image: Herb opens the door to his motel room that night. The quilt is mustard-yellow and the TV has rabbit ears and the room still smells like the prior occupant’s Jean Nate. He flops down on his bed and notices a little metal box with a coin slot on the nightstand. He drops in a quarter, and the mattress—in defiance of Herb’s 40+ years of experience with Natural Mattress Law—starts to vibrate.

He staggers out of bed, uncaps the motel pen, and promptly begins a postcard to home.