American Sabbatical 041: 10/28/96

10/28.. Ukiah

We stocked up on roadfood at the Arcata Co-op in the AM, rolled out onto California 101, tuned up the CW-FM, and let’er smoke for south. We took the highroad for about 15 miles before we jumped ship, heading for Ferndale. That hamlet is one long row of western falsefronts in wood and stucco, all tarted up in boutique colors. Ferns and eucalyptus.. maybe it’s all the rampant eucalyptus towering over the valley byways, but even the roadsides smell like boutiques out here.

We wanted to make a loop along the coast, but couldn’t find the sideroad out of Ferndale, so we stopped an elderly gent out on his morning constitutional. And got the entire history of the universe, centered on Ferndale. Well, we had to see Petrolia, where oil was first discovered in CA, and Honeydew.. well Honeydew used to be the heart of Marijuanna Country, he winked. OK!.. let’s go, we crowed.

In a blink we were inching along another paralyzing pathway scribed on the side of a mountain. 15-20 mph fish-hooks and rollercoasters with the Owl’s brakes smoking on the downgrades. Peggy is getting fingercramps from hanging on. But the views are spectacular. Behind us the coastal plain running up to Ferndale is green and steamy with agricultural fertility, just like the “reclaimed” marshes around Arcata. The onshore wind, starting to rise, is pushing a misty haze up against the evergreen hills surrounding the Humbolt Valley, as it disappears in our rearview, between the heights.

Over the first ridge, and we are in the Scottish Highlands. Leaping and diving moorland.. beige dry grasses with a lowering gray overcast. Occasionally we can spot the roof of a ranch house far below in the deep valleys, and there are horses and cattle scattered decoratively about the abrupt landscape. After 40 minutes of wiggling up and gasping down this sear upland we start getting flashes of a roiled green sea between the slopes. Then one long yodeling drop spits us out on the beach. Where we stop to cool the Owl, and our selves.

A couple more miles of surf-stomped foreshore and we have our noses pointed at the sky again. As the land rises the vegetation lushens. First gigantic eucalyptus (an immigrant) and full blown hardwoods in the bottoms, and then mixed needle-leaf secondgrowth reaching for the sky. Our heart-in-mouth views are of staggered rows of conical upheavals, topped with dark evergreens and streaming mist, and pocket ranches on the green valley floors. We leave Honeydew behind us in the Matole Valley and crawl up and over the coastal divide. Skidding down through the switchbacks, the big trees loom up beside us. We are in another holy grove.

The Roosevelt Grove lies in a creek bottom (the east fork of the Eel), unlike the Ladybird Grove which climbed a dizzy slope, and there is virtually no undergrowth beneath the exalted pillars. You can see row after row of impossible stems. Here are processional ways fit for the gods. And no birds sing. Sequoia sempervirens are so chemically hostile to insects and other plants that they create a solitary universe, and the hush of these cool dank aisles doesn’t entice you to linger.

You have to give credit to the C state, though. The highways funnel down to a trickle-lane for the big trees. In fact 101 is a schizophrenic episode for the through traveler. Fourlane with a breakdown for slow traffic, pinching down to twolanes for 10mph hairpins, followed by a gawking meander through the redwoods, then back to fourlane flank speed.

When 101 breaks out of the lofty greenstuff you are back in rainshadow country. Crisp khaki grasslands, scrub oak and madrone parklands on the rolling slopes, and irrigated agriculture along the bottoms. Vinyards, orchards, hops. This is the landscape out of cartoons. Sweeping beige hills scattered with romantic cedars and junipers rising up to hardedged groves of evergreens. Every panorama looks like a storybook painting. All it needs is a turreted castle out of Fantasyland. You know that Disney was a Californian.

And that means vegetables! We actually followed our noses into Ellie’s Vegetarian Restaurant and Mutt House. We didn’t ask about the latter, just relished in the garden truk.. right out on the strip with Motel6. Almost heaven.

10/29.. Bodega.

Up in the morning and off to school.. heh heh, just joking. Actually we had multiple quests today. First the big solar calendar in Hopland, then Torbertville. We stocked up on fresh bread and java and wondered at all the bookstores and cafes in this county seat (Mendicino). Is it a good thing when lawyers read? We remarked on the educated diction of the downtown service people, and wondered if that was a sign of the educated choosing where they live over economic opportunities, or just signs of a lousy economy. Peggy quoted a friend who says only 50% of PHds get to work in their chosen field. Pass the latte.

Hopland was just a skip and a jump down the Redwood Highway from Ukiah, and the Real Goods Showroom and Futuristic Environment is just off 101. The site rivals classic KOA campgrounds.. between the interstate and the railroad on a dry flat abandoned industrial strip. But this is visionary reclamation, not Winnebagology. Real Goods is an alternate technology mailorder vendor and their roadside pitch is equal parts New Age and buy now, environmental design sophistication and yuppie consumerism, eucalyptus and barcodes.

Entering the grounds through radial lines of young plantings, which echo the agricultural linearity of the regional vineyards and orchards, we entered the carpark, whose drainage feeds into micromarshes designed to filter out the heavy metals from the runoff. LLBean take note. Then we picked up brochures for the self-guided tour. Vinecovered ramadas for oxygenation and cooling, trickling fountains and mossy ponds and winding channels for waste purification, fish to eat the algae.. the whole ark. The central courtyard, enclosed to the north by the showroom building, is a 1/4 acre solar calendar, with notched stones on the perimeter marking the solstice and eqinoctial sunrise and sunset, and a radial paving installation. The solarheated showroom is strawbale construction with huge south windows. In addition to all this passive organic design there are arrays of tracking solar panels, battery power grids, interstellar wire webs and architectology. Like a garden in a space station. Bucky Fuller and The Druids meets Mendicino County. A renewable resource technology is very attractive intellectually, and organotechnics smell good, but I found this prototype of the future curiously reminiscent of the 1964 New York Worlds Fair.. nice world to visit, but could you live there? Even so, we started talking about a ramada out back in Bowdoinham.. without satellite dish.

Our next stop was an experiment in recent historical research. Our friends Jim and Theta Torbert lived up in the Mendicino hills twenty years ago, raising goats and living the life. They decamped due to a collapse in the goatmilk market, and after sojourns in Arkansas and Maryland, have been our neighbors and compatriots in Maine since 1983. We’ve been curious about the world they left. Their tales made it sound like a rural paradise being swallowed by exurbia. How would it look to wandering outsiders?

The road from Cloverdale to Yorkville fishtails and swivels into the sensuous hills, past pocket vineyards, tilted pastures, and the occasional archispicuous new consumption. This is sheetmetal edifice territory, rust-streaked barns and tapdancing roofs. To the ignorant eye this was still rural backcountry set in romantic panoramas. Cowboy Tuscany.

At the local watering-hole all we could elicit was headshaking. Nope, before my time. Sorry, all the oldtimers have moved out. Well, maybe those goatwomen in Boonville would know, but I wouldn’t go up there, at least I wouldn’t send a man up there, might get shot. So Bryce uses the old stand-around-and-wait technique. Tell a few stretchers about the Torberts. “Well, maybe Larry would know..... LAAARY!”

Sure enough. “Used to live next door. Always like Jim, nobody ever had a bad word to say about Jim, even after.. Course I never liked those goats much. Specially that old, whaddycallit, buck? Stink? Whew.. and mean? The big old buck took to butting the D8 we were using to root up new vineyard. Blam. Blam. He just wouldn’t quit butting that D8.” It sounded like an emblematic story to me. Goatman beats his head against mechanized development. What mythic tales will each of us leave behind?

We’d been warned not to take the crossroad to the coast through the Mailliard redwoods.. all washed out in last night’s downpour. So we ducked into the Point Arena road, and were back on the snakeway again. The array of microclimates in the Coastal Ranges, with their assorted vegetation, makes crossing to the coast an education in gradients of moisture and verdure, and an exercise in breathlessness. This corkscrew bit of engineering sure pulled our corks. Another stretch of spectacular heart massage. When the final descent was marked “16% grade for the next 10 miles,” even the Owl hooted.

Peggy kept saying, “I can’t imagine trying to drive a truck down this.. I wouldn’t want to drive a bus down this.. I wouldn’t...” I was quietly wondering if Red’s brakes were holding up better than over by Honeydew. If, like Maybelline, the water blowing up under the hood was maybe doing the motor good...Maybelline, won’t you be true. And suddenly there are flares in the road, somebody flagging us down, and we come shuddering and smoking barely-in-time to a stop, nose-to-tailgate, alongside a big truck that’s lost it on the downgrade, rolled over, and crumpled into the trees. The first responders are there, and the sheriff. A helicopter is clattering overhead, about to set down for a rescue. And we pull into the next turnout. Let the Owl’s brakes cool for a spell. I’ve had nightmares about hills with no brakes since our brakeless beater days, and here’s a reflash reminder. Even new brakes, on little cars, get too hot on the steep pitches. Cool it.

Our next target was Fort Ross, a reconstructed Russian trading base which was occupied into the 1840’s, and we had just about enough time to get there before the gates closed. So we hotfooted down the coast road, another scizzy feat of engineering, one minute fourlane speedway, next a twolane serpentine cliffhanger. I suppose the Californos get used to skidding past the washouts and straddling the rockfalls, but these slaloms still turn me insideout.

It was raining intermittently again, which made us wonder at the parched grasslands around us. And we were surprised by the thinness of development. As Mendicino turned into Sonoma we were only 50 miles, as the crow flies (more likely big ravens, here), from San Francisco, but the coastal hills only sported the odd manse. Huddled in the rivermouth valleys were sparse settlements, the requisite oysterbar, maybe an inn or two, but not the vacationland crowding we’d expect.

It took us 3 tries to find the entrance to the Bodega Bay State Park, and we groped into a niche in the dunes, nestled under exuberant junipers.. cooked up a feast from the food locker.. and zipped ourselves in by 8PM. Owls came to serenade us, while the waxing moon played peekaboo through high clouds. Hoohooh..hoo..hoo.

Every so often as we travel in the northwest there is a Russian River or a Petersburg to remind us of another movement to the area - from Russia EAST to North America. I’ve also seen pictures of Russian Orthodox churches in tiny Alaskan villages that still show Russia’s presence. It is a history I want to explore, one little covered in the US history texts except in a paragraph about the competition between Russia and Great Britain and the United States for the northwest territory. Another paragraph will tell of our purchase of Alaska.

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