Big Dreams (21 page)

Selling your grapes could be a tricky business, in fact. Naïve growers sometimes chose to deal with small, boutique wineries where the craft of wine making was revered. They wanted their own hard
work to be reflected in the bottle, but the boutiques, while well intended, were occasionally slow to pay their bills. It was not unusual for one of them to go belly up, leaving cartons of elegantly designed labels to molder.

Other growers belonged to co-ops that marketed grapes to a variety of sources, but the biggest buyers in Alexander Valley and all of California were the Gallo brothers, Ernesto and Julio, whose headquarters were in Modesto. The Gallos could be counted on to pay promptly, but they played hardball. To get top dollar, a farmer had to bring his grapes to a Gallo winery outlet in Sonoma County when the sugar content was exactly right, up to a high standard. Sugar was measured on a Brix scale, by degrees. It happened that farmers sometimes hit the Brix just right only to have their trucks turned away at the winery because so many other trucks were lined up ahead of them.

We knew such a farmer in Alexander Valley, a cautious, serious-minded man who was proud of his grapes. After being turned away one afternoon, he parked his gondola at home, and the grapes kept ripening through the night and became sweeter and sweeter. At the winery the next day, his crop was downgraded to distilling material, or DM, the inferior stuff that went into cheap brandy and such fortified Gallo wines as Thunderbird and Night Train. It cost him thousands of dollars.

After the crush, farmers could relax a bit and watch the vineyards go through their autumnal show of color, the leaves dying in shades of red and gold. Starlings migrated through the valley in dense flocks and patterned the sky like buckshot. Pruning started around Thanksgiving, with workers shearing away the old canes and burning them in piles. In winter, the vines were dormant, but they leafed out in March, and the dance was on again.

Along Chalk Hill Road, there were a few new wineries whose architects had exceeded the boundaries of good taste, and a few new estates for weekending attorneys and dentists, but the valley had not changed very much in a decade. It was still a rarity in California—a
place where the land was valued for what it might produce and not for what might be built upon it—and so it had retained its integrity.

O
N OLD REDWOOD HIGHWAY
, where the redwoods are few and far between, I stopped for a hitchhiker, Luis Martinez, who had a small Samsonite suitcase at his feet that was bruised in many spots. A decal was stuck to it, like the old decals from grand hotels that travelers used to glue to their steamer trunks. It showed some palm trees against a blue sky, a picture-perfect image of what you might see while floating on an inflatable raft in a swimming pool in Los Angeles.

Luis, a carefree man in his early twenties, was going to the Greyhound Station in Santa Rosa to catch a bus to San Diego. He had a huge gap between his two front teeth and a little curlicue of a scar beneath his right eye. He couldn’t have been much taller than five-foot-three, but he looked tough and durable, reminding me of certain Mexican boxers, bantamweights and flyweights who could always be counted on to last ten rounds.

He spoke some English, and I had a bit of Spanish, so we could communicate after a fashion.

“Do you like
boxeo?”
I asked him. “Julio Cesar Chavez?”

On hearing the great champ’s name, Luis lit up and seemed to take a new comfort in his surroundings. He relaxed and told me that he had come north from a village about sixty miles from Tijuana for the grape harvest the previous autumn. He had two cousins in Sonoma County, and they had helped him find a job, but he’d been idle for a few months now and missed his family back home.

Luis liked my car. He liked everything Californian. It was a joke to him, all the wealth around.

“Muy bonita
,” he said, touching the dashboard and letting a low whistle escape from his lips.

I could see that he was working on his memories, refining the sensations and descriptions of life north of the border that he would
retail to his village friends back home. Hesitantly, not wanting to scare him, I asked if he had his legal documents. No, not really, he said—but he had thought about getting them. Mere intention held some valor for Luis.

Anyway, he believed that he would have no trouble sneaking into Mexico. The only hot spot would be the San Diego bus station, he said, where border patrol agents sometimes were on the prowl.

Santa Rosa was the county’s big city, although it didn’t look like one. Instead, it resembled a gigantic shopping mall with various subdivisions inside it. The population had doubled in the past ten years, leaping from fifty to a hundred thousand or so, and Santa Rosa, once a slow-paced country burg, had become a frenzied spot, with everybody rushing around trying to outwit the circumstance of being among the overpopulated.

The growth in Santa Rosa had been almost entirely unplanned, so the city had traffic problems, water problems, and serious problems with its overburdened sewage system. When the city’s treatment plant was pushed beyond its capacity, the untreated sewage had just been pumped into the Russian River—a lackluster solution and one for which the appropriate state agencies had inflicted penalties. Downstream, in late summer, swimmers had risked colliding with tampons, condoms, and scraps of toilet paper.

About half the land in Sonoma County was still in farms and ranches, but they were fading fast, except for the vineyards. There were fewer chickens in Petaluma, fewer dairy cows in Valley Ford, and fewer Gravenstein apples in Sebastopol. Again, subdivisions were the culprit. Commuters who worked in and around Sari Francisco were buying into them and moving up from the city and from Marin County because they got more house for their money.

Right on Old Redwood Highway, the new houses and condominiums were piled up one upon the other, often so close together that you could literally stick an arm out a window and shake hands with your neighbor next door. They looked hastily built, too, as though the developer had packed up and left in a hurry.

As we went by one tract after another, I remembered a passage from Stendahl’s
The Red and the Black
and later looked it up. In speaking of Verrieres, a lovely town in the Franche-Comté, the novel’s narrator says that we might imagine that the inhabitants are consistently influenced by, and even enlightened by, the notion of beauty. In fact, though, every decision in Verrieres, down to the trees that were planted, was made according to a single principle,
yielding a return
.

The hastily built houses, the sewage in the river, the frenzy in Santa Rosa—they were
yielding a return
.

I pointed to a new home in an offensive color not yet named and said to Luis, “How’d you like a
casa
like that?”

He surprised me.
“Mas grande
,” he replied. Too big.

At the Greyhound station, he tried to give me three wrinkled dollar bills. I wished him good fortune in San Diego.

“Will you come back for the next harvest?” I asked.

All Luis could do was shrug, as though I’d raised a perplexing matter that could be answered only by the gods.

I
N CALISTOGA
, a spa town at the northern end of Napa Valley, east of Santa Rosa, I went looking for traces of Robert Louis Stevenson, who had turned up there in May of 1880. He was almost penniless, tubercular, and madly in love with his bride, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a Californian.

They had met at an artists’ colony in France, in 1876. Fanny was a married woman, but Stevenson had followed her to the states and pursued her from Monterey to her home in Oakland until she agreed to divorce her husband and wed him. They came to Calistoga for their honeymoon. Stevenson was apprehensive about the place. He felt that he had gone back in time, to an England of a century ago. There were outlaws about, he noticed, highwaymen who robbed the local stagecoaches.

The Mayacamas Range runs through Napa Valley, and Mount
Saint Helena, its towering peak at about 4,400 feet, is visible from almost anywhere in Calistoga. All around it, Stevenson discovered, were geysers and boiling hot springs. Miners had once worked the foothills for silver and cinnabar, but the mines had played out, and now there were many abandoned camps that were slowly capitulating to the usual ruin.

On the advice of a merchant named Kelmar, the newlyweds elected to squat at a camp where the Silverado Mine used to be, about nine miles from town. The altitude would supposedly benefit Stevenson’s lungs, but he had an anti-Semitic streak and didn’t trust Kelmar, a Russian Jew. He was also doubtful about Rufe Hanson, their escort to the camp. Hanson was a dimwitted hunter given to demon bouts of poker playing that caused him to be undependable.

Rufe Hanson put his charges on a stagecoach that went over the mountain to Lakeport, on Clear Lake. The Stevensons got out at the Silverado Hotel, an establishment on the brink of collapse. They were amused by its grassless croquet pitch made of hard-packed dirt. On foot, they climbed a trail that took them through an enchanting forest to their camp.

As Kelmar had warranted, the camp was deserted, but it was also a shambles. The mineshaft was still there, along with some chutes and platforms, but a film of red dust covered everything.

The Stevensons chose a trembly two-story building as their home. The ground floor had been an assay office and was littered with debris, part natural and part human, sticks, stones, straw, nails, and old bills of lading. This became the squatters’ sitting room and kitchen. Upstairs, they found a bunkhouse with eighteen bare-frame beds and transformed it into their bedroom.

In the afternoon, Stevenson applied himself to making the camp habitable. He walked back to the hotel, got some hay, and spread it on two beds for mattresses. There was some fresh water dripping into a hole behind the mineshaft, and he deepened it with a pick and a shovel. He lit a fire in a blacksmith’s forge in the evening, and
he and Fanny sat by it waiting for Rufe Hanson to deliver their effects, which included a cooking stove.

Poker had apparently detained Hanson. He finally showed up about nine o’clock. He had brought the Stevensons’ stove, but he had forgotten its chimney, just as Fanny had forgotten the keys to the locks on the packing cases containing their books and their kitchenware.

No heat, no food, no furniture, no plumbing, only a candle for light, and yet how tenderly Stevenson painted the scene in
The Silverado Squatters
, published in 1883. I read his book while soaking in a warm mineral pool at Roman Spa among some stout Baltic types who were playing chess on a floating board. The pools were fine by day, but they were truly wonderful at night, when steam rose from them in plumes, as though tension were evaporating from all the submerged bodies, dead cells and nagging worries burning away.

Stevenson’s health did get better. His life at Silverado was simple, just Fanny and the lapdog Chuchu and an occasional visitor from such civilization as Calistoga could muster. He was the first to wake each day and made the coffee and the porridge, and then spent hours resting and reading, listening to the hum of insects and watching for the rattlesnakes that slithered through the chaparral.

His residence, even after some repairs, was half-house and half-tent. The elements penetrated it at will, with sunshine flowing through a hole in the roof to illuminate the tattered floor. But that was all right with Stevenson—he was with his beloved in a wild canyon of blooming azaleas and calycanthus, high up in the clouds.

Often as I soaked at Roman Spa, I’d close my book to look up at the buttes of Mount Saint Helena through a fringe of ornamental palm trees, thinking about Stevenson and Fanny. At Silverado, they must have experienced the same kind of seduction I’d undergone in Alexander Valley, the palpable splendor of California as a compliment to their romance.

Stevenson had appropriated a broad platform to use as a deck,
and he liked to pace it before going to bed, luxuriating in the near-total dark and gazing down at the Napa Valley, “to where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards.”

T
HE AGRICULTURAL COMMISSIONER OF NAPA COUNTY
, Nate George, drove a car with grape clusters stenciled on its doors. He had an office in Saint Helena, from where more cases of premium wine are shipped than anywhere else in the state. He offered me a chair when I dropped in on him and gave me a copy of his annual crop report to look through.

The report showed how essential wine grapes were to the county’s economy and listed some new varietals that growers were trying out, such as Grand Noir, Sangioveto, Flora, and Malvasia Bianca. They were still experimenting in the vineyards, just as Haraszthy had done.

After that, our talk turned to real estate. There seemed to be no way to avoid it in California. You could begin by discussing deconstructionist theory or the San Francisco Giants, but sooner or later, inevitably, your sentences slid toward property values, and you were shamelessly throwing around phrases that you never expected to utter in polite company, such as “curb appeal” and “adjustable-rate mortgage.”

George, a Napa boy by birth, had just bought his first house, so his interest in and depression about real estate was still strong. He hadn’t been able to afford anything in Saint Helena, of course, or in Yountville or even Napa proper, so he now lived in Angwin, up in the hills among some Seventh-Day Adventists, who had a college there.

Saint Helena was the society town in Napa Valley. On the streets, I saw immaculate hairdos and thin lips and restaurants that prepared exuberantly priced meals unrecognizable to most Americans. At its worst, Saint Helena could be as recherché as the old TV series “Falcon Crest,” which had been filmed not far away. I walked for three blocks
downtown and went by seven real estate offices. They all had full-color photos of fetching country homes and vineyards for sale. Here was a plain house on 8.8 acres planted to Pinot Noir that was priced at a mere $1,350,000. Here was a nasty house for only $160,000—not a fixer-upper, the realtor told me, but a knocker-downer on a buildable lot.