by Bill Graves
Arroyo Grande dates back to when Mexico issued land grants here. It was their territory until 1848. The Pacific Coast Railway set up a depot here in 1882.
35
A Convex, Equilateral, Three-Sided Temple
Halcyon, California
Even before Areoyo Grande laid out its boundaries, the town of Halcyon sprouted in its midst. With 125 people now, Halcyon is a square town of 95 acres.
A group from Syracuse, New York, with common religious beliefs established Halcyon in 1903.
They built a single-story, triangular-shaped temple here 20 years later. A 7-foot-wide porch and 36 white pillars surround it. Each pillar is 7 feet tall and 13 inches in diameter. These numbers all have significance, especially when added together and divided by each other.
The temple owns most of the houses in town. To live here, you don’t have to belong to the temple. Only half of the people in Halcyon do. They are a low-profile group, with no strict rules or roles.
Eleanor Shumway is the guardian in chief of the Temple of the People. “I’m the minister, the mayor, the whole thing,” she joked. We met in the post office and store, Halcyon’s only commercial enterprise, and walked to her office across the street, above the town library. Among its racks of books, the library features a 700-cassette collection of old-time radio shows.
While Eleanor and I visited, another lady entered the office. Her name was Barbara. I think she is Eleanor’s secretary, probably part-time. With a worldwide members hip of fewer than 200 people, I don’t suspect the guardian in chief of the temple needs much of a staff. Barbara volunteered to show me around.
“No street lights or sidewalks here, did you notice?” Barbara asked as we reached the temple. “Go around to the front door. I will let you in.”
I started around the convex, equilateral, 3-sided temple, past 3 equal doors and the 36 pillars. Back where I started, I stopped. I heard footsteps on the porch coming around one of the triangular points of the temple.
“Which door is the front door?” I asked. Barbara came through it, looking for me.
Inside, she pointed out 26 windows, each having 8 panes of glass. Barbara read from a brochure: “Each clerestory window forms 6 squares, plus 8 triangles, equaling 14, or 2 times 7.”
She offered me the brochure.
“I better have it,” I confessed. “I never get things right the first time.”
36
Adventures on a Narrow-Gauge Speeder
Arroyo Grande, California
Back in my motor home, I headed north up Halcyon Road and hooked a right on Grand. It passes over U.S. 101, which splits Arroyo Grande in two. Grand there becomes Branch Street, the main street of Arroyo Grande Village, where this town started. Buildings along here were built the 1880s.
Down the street is the county’s last remaining one-room schoolhouse. It served the town until 1957. Another one-roomer, a block off Branch, is the Hoosegow, built as the village lockup in 1906. It still serves the town, but mostly just as a place for visitors to look at.
The “Village” is a good example of what many small towns—and big ones, too—are doing to save their historic main streets.
They have been wilting in this country for decades. If they wither and die, we have only ourselves to blame. If they do, we all lose a tangible piece of our legacy. Already, there is precious little left.
The villain, of course, is progress. Perpetual and unstoppable. Every generation embraces those highly visible advancements of the American lifestyle. Granted, our acceptance may not be to our ultimate betterment. Often, just because they are here, we accept them.
Maybe the whole thing began when folks were riding buggies from here to Pismo Beach. Henry Ford created a car that made it easier to get there, and we taxpayers made roads that allowed us to get there quicker. Then Sears & Roebuck mailed us catalogs so that we didn’t have to leave the house to shop. Trucks began using our new roads to deliver things to our door. So, who needs Main Street?
Here in Arroyo Grande Village, main-street merchants have not given up on the local shoppers. Their focus, however, is on the outsider, the traveling public, we tourists. The village is not the center of commerce it once was, but at least it is still here. The shops are independently owned, one-of-a kind businesses. Of all the buildings, it appears a Saloon and the Hoosegow are the only two that retain their original function.
“The biggest building along there had the boiler for the Lewis Dehydration Plant,” Gordon Bennett remembers. “They dehydrated pumpkins in there and made flour for pumpkin pies. It was packed in tin canisters, twelve pies to a canister. They shipped them out in boxcars. The railroad track went right through their building.”
Started in 1921, the dehydration operation did not last long. A wagonload of overripe pumpkins hastened the demise of the company. “The already mushy pumpkins were stored near the boiler, Gordon recollected. “They rotted in a hurry and smelled up the whole town. My cousin and I got in there one time, after they had closed up, and took a drying cart. It was like a small flatcar, a speeder that ran on narrow-gauge track. We would ride it to school. Four kids could ride if two pushed. Together we pushed the postmaster up the track one time. He gave us some stamps for the ride. I still have them.”
“What about trains?” I asked.
“Trains quit running around 1937 or 1938. When the railroad found out about our speeder, that ended our railroading days.”
Gordon led me to the yard behind his house. He pulled back a blue tarp. Under it rest the narrow-gauge speeder, complete with a 6 ½-horsepower gasoline engine.
“I didn’t say that ended our railroading days forever.”
37
Vandenberg Air Force Base: Thirty Miles of Beach
Pacific Coast Highway, California
The Pacific Coast Highway runs up the California coast, at times right at the ocean’s edge. It passes by Los Angeles and San Francisco almost unnoticed. Then in towns like Newport Beach, Malibu, and Big Sur, it is the main street.
Officially called Highway 1, it was built when America’s first cars needed roads to run on, a need that still determines how big the pavement gets. Where traffic mandated expansion, its personality as a two-lane scenic byway disappears, and its highway number becomes an also-ran. For example, once out of the Los Angeles maze, the northbound Pacific Coast Highway becomes U.S. 101, the first superhighway to San Francisco.
Beyond Santa Barbara at Gaviota, U.S. 101 turns north, and Highway 1 takes off again on its own. It swings inland for about fifty-five miles. Interestingly, this leaves coastal travel exclusively to Amtrak passengers on the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Highway 1 joins the ocean again farther up the coast at Grover City and Pismo Beach.
During itsinland passage, Highway 1 goes through a couple of towns and cuts across a piece of Vandenberg Air Force Base. This space-flight and missile facility covers about 100,000 acres, including thirty miles of pristine coastline. Vandenberg is the biggest piece of ocean-front property on the West Coast—probably the whole country—which is pretty much as it has always been. Part of the Pacific Missile Range, this piece of land that is bigger than some countries is more a physical barrier than anything. The Air Force does not traipse around on it like the Marine Corps or Army would, conducting training exercises and war games. Consequently, plants and wild life live there relatively undisturbed.
I drove that inland pass age, tracing El Jarco Creek on Highway 1 through long shadows and the rounded hills of the Santa Ynez Mounfains. It was a lazy drive unfil just short of Lompoc. There the road took on shape, mostly curves, and the oncoming traffic seemed in a rush. The workday was ending. People were hurrying home.
38
Fog, Flowers, and Watermelon Seeds
Lompoc, California
Highway 1 took me into the center of Lompoc on Ocean Avenue. It is “subject to flooding,” according to signs posted here. I envisioned that the person who named this street was on it one day when it flooded
. Nothing so fanciful ever happened, of course. Ocean Avenue simply leads to the ocean, so I let it take me there.
It was nine miles to a place called Surf, which is little more than a railroad crossing. Fog was heavy. I parked, pulled on a jacket, and walked across the hard sand to the very edge of the American continent.
The surf rolled out an unbroken uproar like a waferfall, not an intermittent crash, as you might expect. I walked to a fence that closed off Vandenberg to the public. All this beachfront belongs to the Air Force. Seagulls hung in the air like satellites. They were watching me, I think. It’s always curious when nature looks back.
Were it not for the defense needs of our country, this beach would surely be lined with high-rise condominiums and restaurants draped with fishnets and colored lanterns. Besides saving the world from a few disasters, our military has quietly preserved a piece of this Pacific frontier for generations to come. Obviously, it is not the Air Force’s mission to be a land conservator. They get the job by default, and they do it well by just maintaining the fence.
Leaving the beach, I drove through a curtain of fog. The sun and Lompoc lay on the other side. This town is not a saltwater tourist mecca like the others tied to it by Highway 1. I don’t suppose even a Snoopy beach towel is sold here, nor the knickknacks you buy a third cousin who is getting married. Lompoc appears focused on its own people, not those who come in off the highway. That was good enough for me. I decided to stay.
I stopped at the open-air farmers’ market, a once-a-week occurrence at Ocean and I Streets. Vegetable shoppers clustered around the stands, shaded by umbrellas. Behind them, like a colorful stage prop, was a huge mural with sweeping waves of blues, reds, greens, and browns. It adorned the side of a building and took up half a block. Even an open door in the mural did not create a significant void in the picture. It was that big.
The Lompoc Murals Project began in 1988 and probably will go on forever. It now numbers twenty works of art on buildings around town, depicting events in local history. I found ten of them, all within five minutes of where I parked my motor home. One alley is a two-walled, outdoor art gallery. The subjects ranged from people to porpoises.
I settled at the town’s RV park next to the Santa Yenz River. There is no water in it, but a sign still warns of sudden flooding. Guess it could happen here, too, but not tonight.
The next morning, fog off the ocean made the day look chillier then it really was. Although the people in Lompoc can’t see the ocean, their weather is controlled by it. An average high in July is seventy-one degrees; in January, it is sixty-four degrees.
This marine influence, with days beginning and ending in moisture-laden fog, has made the Lompoc Valley ideal for growing flowers. It has been the sole crop here for most of this century.
Darrel Schuyler has been here the whole time. “I am a third-generation farmer,” Darrel said. “We grow flowers for seeds, not for funerals and things like that. But much of that seed production has now moved to Chile and China. The hottest crop here now is asparagus.” I met Darrel in the Hi Restaurant, where he and a group of guys gather for coffee most mornings.
Every town has a place like the Hi. If one group activity remains exclusively male in this increasingly unisex world, it happens every morning in small-town America around Formica tables. Like an all-night poker game, the composition of the table changes one at a time.
“It takes two years to get a crop of asparagus,” Darrel continued. “They cut it by hand and wrap it in a wet blotter that feeds it going to the market. And ya know where that market is, don’t ya? It’s Japan.”
Then he told me just how hard it is to grow seedless-watermelon seeds. “It’s so tough, they sell for $1,500 a pound.” “You mean a ton?” I was sure one of us had it wrong.
“No, a pound. That’s about a quart jar full.”
Before I could further pursue this question, we got sidetracked saying good-bye to the judge, who was leaving for court. Everyone was very courteous to the judge, the only man in the restaurant wearing a tie.
The fellow across the table changed the subject to diatomaceous earth. He mined it, which involves scraping it off the sides of mountains.
“It’s used in filters. They call it diatomite. It’s really a few million layers of a few million years worth of dead marine life, like crustaceans and algae,” the miner explained. “Out of here, most of it goes to the brewing industry, but you see it too in swimming-pool filters.”
The Lompoc Valley is the world’s largest producer of diatomaceous earth. Obviously, this was ocean bottom eons ago. In spite of baking in the sun since then, the material is still 50 percent water, which is cooked out when it is processed.
Darrel drifted somewhere. I never got a chance to talk with him again. The price of seedless-watermelon seeds still hounded me. I wanted to get it right. I spent the rest of the day working at it. My search led me all over town.
I drew a blank at the chamber of commerce. They made some phone calls, tried to help, but couldn’t. I asked a lady at a plant nursery. She thought I was nuts, but referred me to the Bodger Seeds Company at the edge of town. They only know about flower seeds, and they showed me multiple bags of those. I even called the Santa Barbara County Growers Association. Their answer: “We don’t grow melons in this county.”
As a last resort, I logged on the Internet and tied into the Froese Seed Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Kathleen Froese wrote me that she sells seedless-watermelon seeds for 11 or 12 cents apiece to truck farmers. By the pound, they can run as high as $1,500, Kathleen wrote, but she sells them retail for about $750.
Glad that’s over!
39
Servicetown, USA
Buellton, California
In a town known for ranching and a great recipe for pea soup, Buellton’s Avenue of the Flags appears as a magnificent boulevard waiting for a city. With four lanes in each direction—two for driving, two for parking, and room for six more in a grassy meridian—it’s a lavish main street for a town of 4,000 people, even in Cali forma. Each block has its own floodlit flagpole, from which the American flag is never lowered. On a summer day, the vehicle count on the avenue averages around thirty an hour. That’s a mere trickle compared to what it once was.
“‘No way!’ we told ‘em. That was the first time, in 1948. They wanted to move the highway out of town so they could make it wider. Well, the highway was the town. We lived off it. In those days, Highway 101 was the direct route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This was the first natural stop for those out of LA and the second stop for those coming south. We had eleven gas stations and a big sign: Welcome to Servicetown, USA.”
Jack Mendenhall pulled a pen from the pocket of his plaid shirt and roughed out a map on a paper napkin. We sat in Mother Hubbard’s Coffee Shop, on the Avenue of the Flags, and are well into our third cup of coffee. A lady who overfilled the chair at the table next to us was spooning up the remains of her biscuits and gravy. Her tight wristwatch had almost disappeared around her beefy arm. She chided us for drinking so much coffee. “Bad for your heart and vessels,” she scolded us with a Texas accent.
“Buellton is 150 miles from LA,” Jack goes on. “That’s about as far as a guy drove in a day. The road was two lanes, full of curves. The cars were slow.”
Jack savored a special memory.
“When I started pumping gas, and I mean we literally pumped it, it was five gallons for a buck, including tax. Remember the old visual gas pumps? At night they were a thing of beauty.”
A visual gas pump had a cylindrical, glass tank on top. The tank ususally held ten gallons. An attendant pumped gas into the tank by hand. Gallon markers on the tank showed the customer exactly how much gas he or she got and what color it was. Some was blue-green or orange. Ethyl was usually red.
“Light from the globe on top would streak into the glass tank and filter through the gasoline, making the whole tank glow, almost shimmer. As the gasoline went out, air bubbled up through it. T
he bubbles were clear as crystal in a sea of orange or whatever. Who remembers that? Darn few, I’ll bet.”
I learned later that Jack is a collector of the old visual gas pumps and their colorful, lighted glass crowns. At age sixty-seven, he is also a race-car driver. He’s done 219 miles per hour at Bonneville Flats.
I tapped on the map-napkin. “So, what happened in ‘48?”
“Well,” Jack leaned back in his chair. “the businesses along the highway agreed to move their buildings back, at their expense, so the state could widen the road. What’s more, they gave the state the land to do it. Pretty generous, eh? That worked fine until 1962. Then the state proclaimed that 101 was to be a divided highway and that it would bypass Buellton. We said, ‘But you owe us from last time.’ We wanted three interchanges into town and the old highway turned into a parkway, grass and all. They agreed, surprisingly. Later, we put up the flagpoles.”
There is one tree on the parkway. It’s a mature pine, about two stories tall. It was cut fresh from the nearby hills for the Christmas tree in 1970. They stuck it in the ground and wired it down as in years past. It was Jack’s job, since he then owned the tow trucks in town, to lift the tree out and dispose of it after Christmas. He claims he forgot or got busy. By the time he got to it, the tree had sprouted new growth and apparently had taken root. It still stands where they stuck it in 1970. It is Buellton’s perennial Christmas tree.
Slick travel brochures—the kind that overflow showy racks in tourist centers—call Buellton “the Gateway to the Santa Ynez Valley.”
White wooden fences embroider pastures of prosperous cattle ranches and horse farms in the Santa Ynez Valley. The fields create a patch-work-quilt effect in the rolling hills of oak and eucalyptus. Carefully tended citrus groves and vine yards add a mix of pattern and color. Tucked away in the valley are three little towns, a lake, and seven wineries open for tours and tasting. The valley oozes with rural charm and is increasingly a retreat for the Los Angeles crowd seeking serenity and sanity. A few entertainment celebrities call it home. An ex-president did, too, until a few years ago.
