On Saturday, October 24th, Deputy Grand Master Adam Potolsky and Barnes 77 Chief Patriarch Mason Wolf set off on a 5 hour drive for the lovely little town of Point Arena, California to visit the home lodge of Mendocino Encampment #420. For those who’ve never been, Point Arena is a tiny town along the California coast about 100 miles north of San Francisco on Highway 1. You could easily drive past and never realize you were there, but it’s worth stopping in. The Arena Market on Main Street is on the downstairs floor of Garcia Lodge #240, which Mendocino Encampment shares, and it was quite busy on a Saturday in late October. A separate entrance takes you upstairs to the lodge room, which is adjacent to a bar and a couple of pool tables. It has a comfortable old-fashioned vibe before you even get into the meeting room, which feels about 90 years out of time.
It’s small, but not cramped, and at the appointed time, about 15 members of the degree team, which included Mendocino 420, Vineland 123, Golden Gate 1, and one chief patriarch from Barnes 77, began an all-degree rally for Adam Potolsky, Josh Riboli, Eva Lin, Dave Hopps, Jason Loring, and Eric Schneider, who had all been elected to their own encampments.
The encampment degrees are a lot of fun to confer, and perhaps nearly as much fun to receive, but they’re all quite elaborate. Thomas Wildey himself came up with the encampment branch – it’s not something we inherited from the Manchester Unity Odd Fellows that we descended from. And while at least one of the degrees should probably be updated, the teachings of these degrees are still as relevant today as they were nearly 200 years ago.
One of the things that impressed me the most was Past Grand Patriarch Brian Riehl, who took the Chief Patriarch role for all 3 degrees. Because not only did he have the largest speaking role, but he did it all from memory, and did it beautifully.
For anyone else considering the encampment, I’ll share one piece of advice that Adam did not receive – study the signs and passwords of the other Odd Fellow degrees before joining.
After the degrees were concluded, the candidates and degree team all spent time together in the bar room visiting with one another. Most of the participants shared a dinner together down in the Arena Market cafe, but Adam and I had a long way to go and made so we made our good-byes instead. We had taken the roads through the mountains on the way up – a beautiful route through the redwoods, but with extremely narrow lanes and frequent sharp turns that I wouldn’t want to drive during the night – and elected to take the coastal highway back. Although the drive was long, we did stop briefly to take pictures of the incredible sunset over the ocean. Living in California, it’s easy to forget just how beautiful the state actually is. Between the redwoods and the shoreline, we have more natural beauty than you can find almost anywhere else, and it made the long drive feel a little more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been.
— By Mason Wolf
