It is very simple: I am here because I choose to be.
“Here” is a ranch on Route 12 in northern California, about two miles from Glen Ellen, where Jack London lived and drank and piled up the reddish volcanic stones of the region into strong clumsy walls, towers, cattle troughs, a dam. He devised a kind of sled drawn by oxen to come here for some of his best rocks, from up in the Ranch Canyon, where they have lain since Mount St. Helena blew its top about six million years ago, about twenty-five miles northeast of here as a tipsy crow would fly.
Some fifty feet south of my house there is a pile of the same rocks that flew through the air during the mighty blow. By now, native trees have grown up through their rich cracks and crannies: bay, madrona, live oak. One of the great rocks landed with its flat side up, to make a fine table. When the foundations of my little palace had been laid, more than ten years ago, some dear friends and I sat there on the other stones, and one of us ran along the top of the new walls, sprinkling a bottle of champagne on them in a ritual of goodwill that was actively religious.
And that was almost surely the first and last time that the flat rock has ever had a tablecloth on it, because I soon observed that the great pile was a perfect cool dark bastion for the rattlesnakes that still consider this their rightful territory. The day of the Blessing, they were courteous, recognizing our naïveté, but soon even my cat decided to stay away from their compound as long as they stayed off ours. We do not bother one another, even with more winy ceremonies.
It probably took a long time for those flying boulders to cool off, but by now they are beautiful and mossy to look at, and to leave alone.
Jack London was a born builder, no matter how untrained, and the man (David Pleydell-Bouverie) who owns this ranch is another, although highly shaped and skilled, and neither one could leave the rocks where they had fluttered down, as in my tumultuous little grove. Where London had his oxen drag their slow heavy loads for many miles, to build a gawky trough or a strangely perfect dam, David Bouverie simply hauled material clown from his canyon to construct bell towers and gateways and suchlike. Where London was touchingly uncouth, Bouverie has been almost lightsome in his use of the seemingly limitless supply of solid ash that flew here.
To the east of my house, plumb with two tall stone gateposts that are in turn plumb with the bell tower, I look through and past them toward the mountains that separate Napa and Sonoma valleys. Between my house and the Tower are vineyards, and hidden from me as the Canyon curves back toward Napa there is the Waterfall. It is about 150 feet tall, and in winter I can hear it roar. At its base, behind the curtain of water that falls into a lovely pool, there is a long deep cave where Indians often hid, I’m told, from the white men.
The bell tower is mysteriously correct for this landscape. It is at once monolithic and graceful, unlike most of Jack London’s piles of stone, and was built piece by piece by Bouverie and a local mason, of course Italian. It houses a fine bell, which Bouverie sometimes insists is the only reason he built the Tower.
He bought the big bell from Old Man Hearst, as one of the countless rejects from the European booty that now loads the castle at San Simeon. In a capricious joke, it was priced at thirty-six dollars, to be paid on the spot. Years later, one of the Old Man’s sons offered Bouverie a hundred times that for it, but by then it was so firmly a part of this Valley, to see from the highway or to hear when the wind is right, that such a sale was unthinkable. It rings almost every day of the year, at sundown: twenty-one strong measured pulls. At midnight on New Year’s Eve it is pealed longer, faster, louder.…
Ringing the bell, first made to summon monks here and there in a Spanish monastery, is no easy trick. Now and then a newcomer to the Ranch will ask to give it a few pulls, and its uneven stutter is painful. The appointed ringer, presently, is Jason King, going on fourteen, and after a few timid try-outs (ringing a big bell is like painting with watercolors: once it’s started, there is no turning back …), this lanky redhead is in control, so that even the finality of the end of another day is acceptable in his weighty music. The bell rope is on the east side of the Tower, and hidden from me, but I often smile at the suspicion that my young friend is airborne at the end of it, no matter how seasoned and sure his peals sound.
When Jason, or his father the Foreman, or Bouverie the Builder swings up and down on the long rope, I go like a moth to the candle flame and stand on my East Balcony until the twenty-one rings have sounded. Then I stretch my arms and wave them, as the ringer steps around from the back of the Tower. There is no use to shout to him, for he is deafened in his cocoon of sound waves. He lifts his arms to me. It is a twilight ritual, sprung surely from some atavistic pattern.
On the north side of my house there was, for a few years anyway, a planted grove of several kinds of eucalypti, tall and healthy. Then in about 1974 there was a freakish period of day and night temperatures of under 20 degrees Fahrenheit, for eight days. It started early one morning, while I was staying overnight in San Francisco, and when I got home, everything was frozen tight. The pipes at this ranch never burst, as did most of them in our part of the Valley, but they were solid ice for much more than a week.
By then I’d lived here for several years, and was in close trusting relationship with the other people who lived all the time on the Ranch, whether the Boss was gone or not.
Joseph Herger, who had been Foreman here since the Ranch took shape in the forties, was a doughty Swiss peasant, a milker by trade, who had “pulled tits,” as he put it, until he moved onto this 500 acres of wild country and started pulling poison ivy and pulling fence posts and pulling loads of cow pats into the gardens. And right then, in the Big Freeze, he was very ill with some kind of influenza. He lived in an isolated cabin, because he was a loner.
Phyllis Whitman, the Housekeeper, was really in charge of the Ranch when Bouverie was not here. She was and is a strong forceful person, at her best in emergencies, but also admirable at the kitchen stove. (Now she is far away, remarried after a sad widowhood.) And she looked after Joseph from her house in the Ranch compound, while I drove every day to nearby Boyes Springs to get water from a friend’s outside hydrant, which by a fluke had not frozen.
I would load my station wagon with every big kettle from the Ranch kitchens and mine, and fill them with a hose and then ease back to the Ranch, trying not to slosh too much over the two cattle guards between the Ranch houses and the highway. (They are made of old rails salvaged when tracks were pulled out to prove that it was more patriotic to buy cars than to travel by train.)
Then Phyllis and I would flush all our toilets. Joe’s and mine took only a few gallons of water, since we lived alone. Phyllis needed more, because some of her many children still lived here. That was when I decided firmly that every rural dwelling should have not only a battery-powered radio but a workable outhouse.
And then I would come down here, over the cattle guard and into the pastures and my grove, and try not to listen to the eucalyptus trees dying. They cried out and groaned and sometimes shrieked in the cold, for they were strangers here. The native trees growing up from volcanic rocks stayed strong and quiet, but the tall Australians perished noisily, and it was nightmarish to hear them, as they cracked down from tops to roots.
By the time Bouverie came back from Greece or perhaps Bavaria or New York, the trees had changed from their soft silvery greens to a strange black, and were plainly splitting into two long halves. They were a great hazard, since they could crash every which way in any wind from north or west, and burn like torches with their rich oils. People came finally and cut them down. It was almost as painful as their dying had been. Later lush sucklings came up from most of the roots, but the cattle trampled them. I saved a couple near the house, to catch up with the fourteen that were left, and now they look strong and promising as I smile at them through the north windows.
All this is no doubt part of why I live here.
Losing the grove of course changed the clear perfumed air, the climate in my house, the light on its walls, but it gave me a new view of the northern hills and mountains, past the flat green or golden meadows where aristocratically bred cows wait every spring and summer for their scheduled birthings. (The first bull here, when I came, was old and placid. He was called Maximilian. Since he retired from active duty, a succession of young ones of great race perform their jobs quickly and soon leave for other pastures.)
My house is between the two cattle guards, so that I am somewhat in limbo, literally on the wrong side of the tracks, while the Ranch life goes on under the bell tower and past the sprawling vineyards into its own courtyards and similar enclaves. Brave friends risk the railroad tracks to come down here, and even to go back. And since I need to cook simple meals the way some people need Bingo or Double-Crostics, a considerable number of hungry thirsty allies move in and out of this place where I have chosen to live.
The house is, as far as I can tell, a small gem. It is indescribably well conceived and constructed, so I must content myself by stating that it consists of two large rooms and a middle one for the privacies of life: toilet, shower, bath, washbowl, things that most of us Anglo-Saxons hide in small unventilated closets as if our bodily functions were perforce ugly and shameful.
My bathroom, thanks to Bouverie’s forthright agreement with this theory, is large and low, with probably the biggest tub in this region, and a capacious shower and a long counter, all sane and practical but voluptuous. Everything is tiled a pattern made in Japan from a Moroccan design, and one long wall is painted the same Pompeian red as the ceiling, and has a changing pattern of pictures I feel like looking at for a time. I move them at will, and people who use the bathroom often stay there lengthily, in the nice old rocking chair or the shower or the tub, looking at what I’ve put on the red wall and thinking their own thoughts.
The bathroom is low-ceilinged, but the other two rooms of this palazzino are domed, in a fine conception of Bouverie’s: random-width and random-laid redwood, never touched with oil or varnish, in a contrived curve (of course of straight lines!) that runs through the whole structure. Gradually the wood is turning darker, but I am almost unaware of this, since I live with it. In fifty more years it may be nearly black, from the strong indirect light of the days, and the subtle gases that cooking and laughing and sleeping people send out. Now and then, in a quick atmospheric shift, it will make snapping crackles, from west to east, in a mischievous but not frightening way.
There is a three-foot drop in the house, between the two rooms, but the ceiling goes straight through so that it seems higher in the western half. In “my” room, where I work and sleep, I look up at it when I am in bed, and its random symmetry cools my mind.
The western room is not only deeper but larger, and the big balcony outside it almost makes another room, and keeps the house cool in blazing summertime. From all this space, I look not only south into the native grove, and northward across meadows to the far mountains, but due west into a low range of wooded hills that are a county park, with easy trails, and then on to the high blue mountains of the Jack London Preserve. And now that most of the Bouverie Ranch has been added to the protectorate of the Audubon Society, the only houses anyone will ever see from my porch on the slope up from the meadows are already built, down along Highway 12 … small, inoffensive, and tree-masked.
And all this may be another reason why I live where I live.
For several years before I came here in 1970, common sense as well as various good friends had been telling me that it was foolish for me to plan to spend my last years in a three-storey Victorian house in Napa Valley, with no more nubile daughters to act as involuntary slave labor. At times it seemed that I was trying to run an unlicensed but popular motel-bar-restaurant there, instead of the welcoming warm home my girls and I had lived in for a long time, and most of my peers in St. Helena were either moving away or holding discreet garage sales before they settled into elegant mobile-home parks near supermarkets.
I did not want to leave the little town. Almost half of my heart was there, sharing honors with Aix-en-Provence, where I could no longer live as I would choose (in a second-floor apartment on the Place de l’Archevêché!). Time and taxes told me otherwise.
It would have been folly for me to rent or build a little house out in the hilly vineyards of the Napa Valley, because of the logistics of marketing and transportation and so on. The alternative was to find a nice old garage or tool shed in St. Helena, and install plumbing and wall-to-wall carpets, and accustom myself to air conditioning and viewless windows, and hope that if I didn’t show up for a few days somebody might peek in to see what had happened to the queer old lady-authoress (found quietly dead between the stove and the icebox, with a glass of vermouth in one hand and an overripe pear in the other). The prospect was dismal … not so much the dying as the living that way.
Then my friend David Bouverie in Glen Ellen, westward in the next valley, proposed that I leave my beautiful old house and build a practical two-room palazzino on his ranch. I could use his land, and the little house would revert to his estate when I finally left it, and my heirs would be repaid what it had cost me. All this I did, especially since he proposed designing it for me.
And this he did, with all the bold skill of his earlier days as an English architect, and his knowledge of the winds and weather of this country as an American rancher. I said I wanted two rooms and a big bath, with an arch at each end to repeat the curved doors of his two big barns. I wanted tile floors. He did not blink … and I went back to Aix for several months to grow used to a new future.
It took a couple of years, once here, for me to feel that this was and would be, perforce and Deo volente, my “home.” I had never before lived in a new house, and I felt like a guest in a delightful rented cottage, perhaps there to write a book, to hide, to escape. But there were familiar books and chairs and pictures, and Ranch people nearby to keep a kind eye on me in case of worry or trouble. Slowly but willingly I grew into the place, so that I was here.
The air is mostly dry and sweet, where I have chosen to stay. During the rains it is soft with seasonal perfumes of meadow grasses and new leaves. By mid-April the cows are back from their winter pasturage, usually heavy with imminent calvings, and they tread down myriad wild flowers into the volcanic ash that makes up much of this valley’s earth, sometimes three inches deep and sometimes thirty feet.
Dear friends from St. Helena and even Aix and Osaka come here, or I go over the high hills on the beautiful Oakville Grade to be in St. Helena again, to walk down Main Street under its noble old electroliers and see dentist-doctor-CPA-librarians-winemen. In summer, here, I am a kind of female Elijah, fed by the kindly local ravens: fresh vegetables and fruits, all eminently meant for my table, which is seldom bare. For more than half the year, the air moves in four directions through the little house, and in winter I can be as warm as I want, with a Franklin stove in each room and an unending supply of madrona and oak from the Ranch, if and when electricity runs low. My cat and I like heat in the bathroom, but I am weaning him from this sybaritic attitude, if that is possible with felines, and plan to get him a little electric pad for the coming winter. I have not yet settled my own puzzlement about how to enjoy a chilly shower bath or toilet seat.…
It is plain that creature comforts are an acceptable part of my choice to live here in my later years. Aside from them as well as because of them, I find this house a never-ending excitement, and I think that this is as necessary when a person is in the seventies as in the teens and twenties. What is more, knowing why and where is much easier and more fun in one’s later years, even if such enjoyment may have to be paid for with a few purely physical hindrances, like crickety fingers or capricious eyesight.
My eyes, for instance, are undependable by now, so that I do not drive. A young friend takes me marketing once a week. And my legs are not trustworthy, so that I have given up the walking that can be wonderful here on the Ranch: the sharp crumbled volcanic soil slides easily and is brutal to fall on. I move about fairly surely and safely in my palazzino, and water the plants on the two balconies. I devise little “inside picnics” and “nursery teas” for people who like to sit in the Big Room and drink some of the good wines that grow and flow in these northern valleys. I work hard and happily on good days, and on the comparatively creaky ones I pull my Japanese comforter over the old bones, on my big purple bedspread woven by witches in Haiti, and wait for the never-failing surcease.
How else would I live where I live? It all proves what I’ve said before, that I am among the most blessed of women, still permitted to choose.
—Glen Ellen, 1980