This was not the life I wanted.
I couldn’t stop thinking of those shimmering days before my father sent my mother away. The world she created. Between the hours of eight and seven, the household hummed and buzzed joyfully. No job was valued more than another. There were no delineations between rich or poor. To be useful, to do good work with people that you respected, that’s what was important. But that world did not exist anymore.
I’d have to go out and create it.
—
It was in June of 1889 that I stepped off the train in Glen Ellen, California, steam curling around my ankles, the smell of fate in the air. I took a deep breath. A perfume of mountain laurel, ripening grapes, and chaparral danced on the breeze, deepened with a base note of sun-baked rocks and ferns.
My requirements for our new home? Close to a train—there were two train lines that ran through Glen Ellen. Near a large city—Santa Rosa and San Francisco were not more than a few hours away. Arable land—the hills were veined with springs.
I was enchanted as soon as I stepped off the train. As were the hundreds of others who got off the train with me who were now in the process of climbing into buggies and wagons, en route to the dozens of resorts, enclaves, and tent campgrounds in the area, where they would soak up the sun, get drunk on Cabernet, swim and picnic in the druidy redwood groves while reciting Shakespeare.
I climbed into a wagon and was driven off by a Mr. Lars Magnusson to view the old Olson farm. We traveled a mile or so into the hills, past oak glens, brooks, and pools of water, past manzanitas, madrones, and trees dripping with Spanish moss. Sonoma Mountain was to the west; its shadow cast everything in a soft purple light. When we finally reached the farm and I saw the luscious valley spread out in front of me, I knew this was it. Greengage. It would be a home for me and Martha at first, but I hoped it would soon be something more. A tribute to my mother and her ideals; a community in which she would have flourished, where she would have lived a good long life.
Greengage. The burbling creek that ran smack down the middle of the property. The prune, apple, and almond orchards: the fields of wheat, potatoes, and melons. The pastures for cows and sheep. The chicken house and pigsty. The gentle, sloping hills, mounds that looked like God’s knuckles, where I would one day plant a vineyard. I was done with fancy trappings, done with servants, with balls and hunts, with titles, with soot, with my Cambridge pals, the stench of the city streets, with war. I was about to cast off my old life like a tatty winter coat.
“Did you know the Olsons?” I asked Magnusson.
“We emigrated from Uppsala in Sweden together.”
“Why are they selling?”
“Dead.”
“Dead? Of what, may I ask?”
“Husband, diphtheria; wife, scarlet fever.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“One right after the other.”
“Really?” My mouth twitched in sympathy. “How difficult that must have been for you.”
Magnusson scowled. Compassion from a Brit was both an unexpected and unwelcome intrusion. “You plan to use this farm for a commune?”
“A commune? Who told you that?”
“Jake Poppe. The proprietor of the general store.”
“No. He is mistaken. It will be just me and my wife. At first,” I added, not wanting to mislead him. There were already twelve people waiting to join us. Three farmers and their wives, four children, a carpenter, and a stonemason.
“You will need help. It’s a large property,” he said.
“I’ll get help.”
“You will pay well?”
“Yes.” And I would pay for everything to get the farm up and running, but hopefully it would eventually pay for itself. That was my plan.
“Look, what is your price?” I asked, unwilling to reveal anything more to him.
Magnusson stared stonily down into the valley as if I hadn’t spoken. I couldn’t have guessed that this gruff, withholding Swede would not only join my endeavor but eventually become my indispensable right-hand man.
“Five thousand dollars,” I blurted out. “That’s more than fair. Fifty dollars an acre.”
In a matter of weeks, on my twenty-fifth birthday, I would come into my full inheritance, and that would fund not only the purchase but all the other initial costs. My father would not be pleased. I would rarely speak to him again once he heard of my cockamamie plan.
Five thousand dollars was a fair price. The farm had gone to seed; it would take a lot of work to bring it back. Magnusson snapped the reins, growled ja, and just like that I was the proud owner of one hundred acres of the promised land.
—
Within a few years Greengage was well under way. Word quickly spread of the farm in the Valley of the Moon where residents would not only be given a fair wage (men and women paid equally no matter what the job) but share in the eventual profits.
Was I a dreamer? Yes. Was it a foolishly naïve scheme? Possibly. But I was certain others would join me on this grand adventure, and it turned out I was right.
Our numbers rapidly increased. We built cottages for families and dormitories for single men and women. We erected a schoolhouse and a workshop. We repaired the chicken coop and the grain silo. The jewel in the crown, however, was the dining hall. The hub of the community, I spared no expense there. In the kitchen there were three iceboxes, two enormous Dutch stoves, and a slate sink the size of a bathtub. The dining room was a bright and cheery place: southern exposure, redwood floors, and five long trestle tables. Greengage was still small back then, only a few tables full at mealtimes, but I hoped one day every seat at every table would be taken.
“Please don’t tell anybody about the O’Learys leaving,” I said to Martha.
“No goodbye party? You just want them to sneak out in the middle of the night like thieves?”
That’s exactly what I wanted. Leaving was contagious. In 1900, we’d had nearly four hundred people living at Greengage Farm. Now, in 1906, we were just under three hundred.
“They deserve a proper goodbye.”
“A small party,” I conceded. “Let’s have it here, rather than the dining hall.”
“No,” said Martha, putting an end to the conversation. “It will be in the dining hall just like all the rest of the parties.”
After she went back upstairs, I pulled a small tablet out of my breast pocket. In it, I kept a roster. I found the O’Learys’ names and put lines through them with a pencil. I would just have to look for a new family to replace them.
—
The O’Learys left on a beautiful day in April. I’d gone to their cottage before the party I couldn’t bring myself to attend, said my goodbyes, then made my excuses. An upset stomach. I said I was going off to the infirmary in search of an antacid. Instead I climbed up into the hills.
A hawk circled above my head. I soothed myself by looking down upon Greengage, which looked particularly Edenic that morning, bathed as it was in the late morning sun. All was as it should be. The hens were fat and laying eggs. Sheep grazed in the pastures and bees collected nectar.
I could see Matteo Sala working in the vineyard. He leaned back on his shovel and wiped his brow with a hankie. He came from a family of Umbrian vintners and was doing what he was born to do—what made him happy and fulfilled. That was the entire point of Greengage. Why would anybody want to live anywhere else?
The bell gonged, announcing the start of the party. People walked toward the dining hall. Fathers carried their children on their shoulders. Women strolled arm in arm. What was on the menu? Butter and cheese and apples. Mutton stew. Lemonade and beer. The smell of freshly baked sponge cake was in the air.
I’d worked hard over the years, carefully cultivating relationships outside of Greengage, gaining a solid reputation as a fair and honest businessman. We sold much of what we grew to restaurants in San Francisco and Glen Ellen. It wasn’t difficult. Our produce was magnificent. When asked how we did it, I tal
ked about nitrogen-rich cover crops, compost, some of the traditional Chinese farming methods that we employed. I didn’t tell them our secret: contentment. We were a happy lot.
“Joseph!” called a woman’s voice from down in the valley.
My sister, Fancy, had caught sight of me. Now I was doomed. I would have to attend the party.
“Get down here, you cranky old man!” she shouted.
She stood in the meadow surrounded by a group of children who all craned their heads up and began shrieking for me as well. My heart filled at the sound of their voices.
If only I’d brought my camera. I was not a sentimentalist, but I would have liked to have captured that moment. To freeze time in my lens. To be able to gaze back at the image of the party just beginning. To remember precisely how it felt when the pitchers of lemonade were full. When the cake had not yet been cut, and the afternoon stretched out in front of us.
—
Early the next morning, before dawn, I went outside to relieve myself. As I was walking back into the house, the floor began to shake. A temblor. I froze in the foyer, waiting for it to stop. It did not.
Martha shouted from upstairs. “Joseph!”
“Come down!” I yelled. “It’s an earthquake!”
Martha appeared at the top of the stairs in her nightgown, her eyes wide. The staircase rattled, the banister undulated.
“Hurry!” I held out my hand as she ran down the stairs. I threw open the front door and we stumbled into the yard. The full moon was a bone-white orb in the sky.
The sounds that followed next could only be described thus: a subterranean clap of thunder, an ancient sequoia splitting in two, a volley of bullets, the roaring of a train coming into the station. A preternatural whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, a lasso spinning through the air.
We’d been through many earthquakes and I knew one thing for certain. Never had there been one like this.
It was April 18, 5:12 A.M. We clung to each other on the front lawn and waited for the shaking to stop.
—
When we walked back into the house, Martha gasped. Nothing had been disturbed. No painting had fallen off the wall, no porcelain jug had bounced off a counter. No books had slid out of a bookshelf. No brick had cracked in the chimney. Everything looked just as it had before. It was incomprehensible. In every earthquake, no matter how minor, we’d sustained some damage. This temblor was clearly a monster and yet…
“Quickly,” said Martha. “We must see how the others have fared.”
We all knew the emergency drill. Fire or quake—congregate at the dining hall.
The sky slowly brightened, from indigo to a robin’s-egg blue. We walked through Greengage in a state of disbelief. No trees were downed. No chasm rent a field in two. The schoolhouse, the cottages, the dormitories, the winery, the barn, the cooper’s shed, the workshop, every structure was intact.
Martha, who rarely showed her affection for me in public, picked up my hand and threaded her fingers through mine. It was not a romantic gesture. It did not make me feel like we were husband and wife. Instead it stripped me of my years and made me feel as if we were two orphan children wandering through a vast forest.
You might think our behavior odd. Why weren’t we rejoicing? Clearly we’d been spared. But I was a realist, as was Martha.
Something was very wrong.
Everybody was present and accounted for, and there wasn’t so much as a single scratch or a scraped knee. If there were wounds, they were not the visible sort.
The only thing that was different was the towering bank of fog that hung at the edge of the woods.
—
“Glen Ellen,” Magnusson reminded us.
“Yes,” said Martha. “Of course, our friends in Glen Ellen.” She clapped her hands together and shouted out to the crowd. “We can’t assume they’ve been as fortunate as us. We must go to them.”
I stopped a moment to admire my spitfire of a wife. Barely five feet tall, maybe ninety pounds. Butter-yellow hair, which was loose around her shoulders, as the earthquake had interrupted her in mid-sleep. Martha was not a woman who traded on her beauty. It shone through, even though she eschewed lipstick and rouge and wore the plainest of serge skirts. I felt a sharp prick of pride.
It took us nearly an hour to organize a group of men and a wagon full of supplies.
“Be careful,” said Martha nervously as I climbed up on my horse. “There could be more aftershocks.”
“The worst is over,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t like the look of that fog,” she said. “It’s so thick.”
It was a tule fog, the densest of the many Northern California fogs. When a tule fog descended upon Greengage, spirits plummeted, for it heralded day after day of unremitting mist and drizzle. But these fogs were vital to the vineyard as well as the fruit and nut trees. Without them the trees didn’t go into the period of dormancy that was needed to ensure a good crop.
“I know the way to Glen Ellen. I could get there blindfolded.” I smiled brightly in order to allay her fears. “We’ll be back before you know it.”
—
Within seconds of entering the fogbank, I fell off my horse, gasping for air. Disoriented, confused, my chest pounding. A profound, fatal breathlessness.
The two men who had gone before me were already dead.
I was lucky. Magnusson pulled me out before I succumbed to the same fate. Friar, our doctor, came running. He later told me that when he felt my pulse, my heart was beating almost four hundred times a minute. Another few seconds in the fog, and I would have died, too.
In my experience, when the unthinkable happens, people respond in one of two ways: they either become hysterical or are paralyzed. Greengage’s reaction was split down the middle. Some panicked and screams of anguish filled the air; others were mute with shock. Only a minute ago we’d ridden into the fog, as we’d done hundreds of times before. And now, a minute later, two of our men, husbands and fathers both, were dead. How could this be?
I preferred the wails; the silence was smothering. People covered their mouths with their hands, looking to me for answers. I had none. I was as shocked and horrified as anybody else. The only thing I could tell them was that this was no ordinary tule fog.
—
We put our questions on hold as we tended to our dead. The two men had been stalwart members of our community, with me since the beginning. A dairyman and a builder of stone walls.
Magnusson tossed a spadeful of dirt over his shoulder.
“Let me help,” I said to him, feeling a frantic need to do something.
“No. You are not well.”
“Give the shovel to me, I’m fine,” I insisted.
Nardo, Matteo’s sixteen-year-old son, took the shovel from Magnusson. “You’re not fine,” he told me. “You’re the color of a hard-boiled egg.”
He was right. Whatever had happened in the fog had left me utterly exhausted, and my rib cage ached. It hurt to breathe.
“Thank you,” I said.
The boy bent to his grim task. Digging the graves.
—
That afternoon, time sped by. It careened and galloped. The men were buried one after the other. People stood and spoke in their honor. People sank to their knees and wept. Grief rolled in, sudden and high, like a tide.
Then it was evening.
I lay in bed unable to sleep. I felt hollow, my insides scraped out. I sought refuge in my mind. I turned the question of this mysterious fog over and over again. Maybe we were mistaken—perhaps the fog was not a fog, it was something else. Had the massive temblor released some sort of a toxic natural gas that came deep from the belly of the earth? If it was a gas, it would dissipate. The wind would eventually carry it away. By tomorrow morning, hopefully.
—
During breakfast in the dining hall, I relayed my theory. The gas was still there, as dense as it had been yesterday, though it didn’t appear to be spreading. There was a little nigg
ling thought in the back of my mind. If it was a gas, wouldn’t it also emit some sort of a chemical, sulfurous odor?
I divided us into groups. One group set off to investigate the wall of gas further. Where did it start? Where did it end? Probably it didn’t encircle all of Greengage, but if it did, were there places where it wasn’t as dense? Places where somebody fleet of foot might be able to dart through without suffering its ill effects?
Another group conducted experiments. The gas had to be tested. Was there any living thing that could pass through it? The children helped with this task. They put ants in matchboxes. Frogs in cigar boxes. They secured the boxes to pull-toys, wagons, and hoops. They attached ropes to the toys and sent them wheeling into the gas.
The ants died. The frogs died. We sent in a chicken, a pig, and a sheep. They all died, too. The wall encircled the entirety of Greengage, all one hundred acres of it, every square foot of it as dense as the next. Whatever it was made of, it did not lift. Not the next morning. Or the morning after that.
—
The first week was the week of unremitting questioning. Wild swings of emotion. Seesawing. The giving of hope, the taking of hope.
Was it a gas? Was it a fog? Why had this happened? What was happening on the other side of it? Were people looking for us? Surely there’d be a search party. Surely somebody was trying to figure out how to get through the fog and come to our aid.
The second week was the week of anger. Bitter arguments and grief.
Why had this happened to us? What had we done to deserve this? Were we being punished? Why hadn’t any rescuers arrived yet? Why was it taking so long?
People grew desperate.
Late one night, when everybody was asleep, Dominic Salvatore tiptoed into the fog, hoping if he moved slowly enough, he would somehow make it through. He got just five feet before collapsing.
Valley of the Moon Page 2
