In 1990 I went back to Anderson Valley, where my aunt’s summer resort was located and where I had gone to high school. After eight years of production pressure, I had been looking for a weekend retreat for some time and was driving all over Northern California in my search. Returning from somewhere, I happened to stop for the night at a B&B in the Valley. When I got up I had breakfast with the couple who owned the place, and they started telling me about how much they loved living there.
That’s when it hit me: How come I had never considered Anderson Valley? This could be perfect. It is two and a half hours north of San Francisco, just far enough that you feel like you are somewhere else, but not so far you can’t frequent it often.
A lot of my childhood memories were slightly disastrous, but not here, not in the Valley. It was a child’s paradise, whose fond memories have never left me.
As a kid the Valley was all about timber, sheep, and apples, with a few summer resorts and kids’ camps thrown in. Now it was all vineyards, tasting rooms, and small organic farms, with a few apple farms and loggers. But unlike Napa and Sonoma, it is real. Best of all, my aunt’s resort is still there. It’s been changed by new owners, but it still looks like an old summer resort and I still swim there occasionally.
For me, perhaps the oddest thing of all is that “Shorty” Adams, the guy that drove me to high school fifty years ago, is still driving the school bus. At first I thought, how is that even possible? I spotted his hot-rod pickup and stopped him for an off-duty chat. “I’ve got over two million accident-free miles,” he said. It is very hard to be thought of as a “local” here, but my history on Shorty’s bus seems like a pedigree.
My neighbor Frank sells firewood. He runs a big operation out of another location in the Valley, but he used to sell to one customer out of the property next to mine, and that customer was Wolfgang Puck. The wood was for Spago, Puck’s restaurant in West Hollywood. Puck would send a semitruck to be loaded with oak firewood twice a year from Frank’s place.
Now, this is a long way to go to get oak firewood for your pizza ovens, but since it was the oak-fired pizzas that initially made Puck’s restaurant successful, he must have felt it was part of his trademark brand and he kept doing it.
They loaded the trucks just below my house every six months or so. Frank kept asking me if the noise bothered me early on weekend mornings. I told him I would let him know if it ever annoyed me. It never did, because I like living in a real country town where people work at real jobs, a town where they say even if you get a wrong number, you still talk for half an hour.
Boonville is also one of the only towns in the world that has its own language, or lingo, as they call it. Boontling is a type of speech that was invented by young people in the 1880s working in nearby hop fields as a way to talk freely among themselves when outsiders were around. My uncle could speak it, and I know a couple dozen words. Linguists have studied it widely and there is a book about it, so it will never completely die out. One local speaker was on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson several times giving demonstrations of it.
Boontling is mostly made up of nouns that represent local people or lore. People from the city are called “brightlighters.” “Collar jumpy” means irritable. A “horn of Zeese” is a cup of coffee because a man named Zeese was famous for his strong coffee and a “horn” is a cup in Boontling.
I’ve always known the Valley as a creative place. It is here where the author Alice Walker wrote her novel The Color Purple. She now resides in the Valley and once said that she tried to write the book in several places, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, “but my characters wouldn’t speak to me.” “When I got to Boonville,” she relates, “they wouldn’t shut up.”
Anderson Valley is a weekend home to Kary Mullis, who won the 1993 Noble Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the polymerase chain reaction, aka DNA “fingerprinting.” He came up with his breakthrough idea on the last few twisty miles of Highway 128, which leads into the Valley. His friends later uprooted the highway mile marker that symbolized the place where he conceived his world-changing revelation and presented it to him as a gift. Mullis at the time worked for the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California. Cetus awarded Mullis $10,000 for his discovery and then sold the patent for $300 million. In the movie business, they at least give you another movie deal for those kind of profits.
This is my place for reading books and listening to music. Lately we have gotten broadband Internet here, so I can also stream movies and run my online businesses. My brother says that Boonville is an illusion, and it certainly is. How else could I be so interested in a place with so little to do? But it is precisely that illusion that enchants me. Like a painter forever painting the same scene, trying to capture the look of sunlight falling on nature, I chase the faint charms of this little rural town. I know what they are but am hard-pressed to describe them to others.
“Unheralded” is a word that I once heard to describe it. I’m borrowing this word from a wealthy San Francisco clothing magnate that weekends on the Mendocino coast. He said, “In the Anderson Valley you can participate in the blossoming of an extraordinary, still unheralded world.” There is something going on here that hasn’t reached the radar screens of the chic. In the end, this may be its saving grace—that what is here ain’t chic.
For instance, the other day I stopped by an organic farm that belongs to a neighbor. Usually I just select the vegetables set out for sale and count out my change from the little self-serve cash box there. But this day Vicki, who owns the place with her husband Mike, came out and said, “Would you like some corn?”
What a question. Would I like to walk with her into the cornfields with her tiny daughter Hanna trailing behind us in her birthday suit to pull ears of fresh young corn from the stalk? Corn which I would be eating at my dinner table within an hour? Like a thirsting shepherd who has wandered out of the desert and is offered water from amongst an oasis of pools, I said yes as matter-of-factly as I could. Yes, I would like some corn.
So we headed out into the fields in the warm sun of the late afternoon, first stopping to admire the giant pumpkin crop that her husband was growing for the contests he enters every year. Little Hanna marched right up to one behemoth that was approaching 800 pounds and pulled back the netting that shaded this carefully nurtured specimen. “Daddy’s pumpkin,” she announced triumphantly.
As I looked around this idyllic farm with its original thirteen-star American flag flying high atop a pole planted securely amongst the organic crops, I thought of the imprint this simple ritual of going into the fields on the Valley floor surrounded by redwood forests on one side and rolling grassy hills on the other will make on this little girl, just as it did on me so many years before her. Hanna’s own senses were drinking it all in as she stumbled over dirt clods trailing mommy to the corn patch at golden hour in Boonville.