Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  Bruce Anderson liked to pay tribute to Boonville’s eccentricity. He would tell you that Charles Manson had lived there for a time, and that Jim Jones of the People’s Temple had taught sixth-grade in Anderson Valley for two years.

  Even the old-timers in the valley were a trifle strange, Anderson would suggest. Some of them could still speak Boontling, a language that the kids in Boonville had invented more than a hundred years ago so that they could talk freely in front of adults. Ed “Squirrel” Clements and Lank McGimsey were instrumental in spreading Boontling. They did their best creative work in the hop fields and at the swimming hole.

  Boontling drew its inspiration from the town’s actual life. A doctor, for instance, was called a “shoveltooth,” because the valley’s first resident doc had a protruding set of choppers. To be embarrassed was to be “charlied,” after, Charlie Ball, an Indian who was bashful. The Boonville constable affected a unique, high-heeled boot because one of his legs was shorter than the other, so if you got arrested, you were “high-heeled.” Anybody who’d been thrown from a horse was “bluebirded,” after the lad who’d once said, “I got bucked so high that a bluebird could have built a nest on my ass.”

  As an occasional reader of the AVA, I had formed an image of Bruce Anderson as a pugnacious fellow, but in person he was considerate and self-effacing. I thought he might have developed a gentle manner so as not to be physically intimidating. He was a big, strapping man closing in on his fiftieth birthday, and he looked as though he earned his living felling trees, not sitting at a computer.

  I met him at his house outside Boonville. He and his wife, Ling, were saying farewell to a Norwegian foreign exchange student who’d been with them for the school year. Ling was a tiny woman about five feet tall. Anderson towered over her by more than a foot. They had been together nearly thirty years.

  Bruce Anderson was a native Californian and had grown up in a large, struggling family in Marin County. His adolescence was so tumultuous that he got farmed out to the U.S. Marines for character adjustment. Afterward, he won an athletic scholarship to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, but he was more interested in history and the liberal arts than in engineering, so he transferred to San Francisco State, where he earned his degree.

  In 1963, Anderson entered the Peace Corps in Malaysia. The job pleased him so much that he continued teaching there after his tour ended. He and Ling met and married there, and they had the first of their three children, but soon Anderson got in trouble with the authorities for agitating against the Vietnam War. He was accused of associating with a clandestine Communist organization, had his passport revoked, and was expelled from the country.

  Anderson had remained an idealist. He and Ling had moved to Boonville from San Francisco, where he worked as a cabbie after he got home, so that they could buy a big, inexpensive house and take in foster children. They’d taken in about seventy of them to date, mostly black teens from the inner city. Anderson felt that they had done more good than harm, but it bothered him that so many of his wards wound up in prison. They were maimed in early childhood, he said, beyond any attempt to heal them.

  In 1984, Anderson bought the AVA, which was an ordinary country paper, as an experiment to see what would happen if he told the truth—his truth—in print. His editorials were often satirical or sarcastic, and he loved to prick the balloons of pompous officials. Babbitry he skewered with glee, but he tried not to hit anybody who couldn’t fight back.

  The Anderson Valley Advertiser had a circulation of just 2,500 copies, but its clout in Mendocino County was significant. For example, Anderson had attacked the quality of public education in the county with such bite that the superintendent of schools once confronted him at a public meeting. A scuffle broke out, and Anderson ended up doing thirty-five days in Mendocino County Jail. He hadn’t minded so much, he told me, because he was in there on principle.

  Vineyards were a recent crusade for the Advertiser. The price of land in Napa and Sonoma counties, the choice wine-grape regions in the state, had skyrocketed, so grape growers and vintners were spilling over into Anderson Valley. In the past year, Louis Roederer, the French giant, had set up shop to make a champagne-style sparkling wine, and other wineries were buying the last orchards along the highway. The Navarro River, a salmon and steelhead stream used to irrigate the grapes, was going dry.

  Anderson worried that the wine crowd would have the same effect on Boonville that they’d had on Hopland. The ranchers, the farmers, and the loggers would go. There would be tourists and a social scene. Land values would escalate, and the children of valley families would be priced out of their home territory. The valley would be transformed into another Hopland.

  All is flux, the philosopher said, but I sympathized with Anderson. The next thing he knew, he’d have a bunch of shoveltooths on holiday messing with his beer. He might be hot-tempered and sometimes bullheaded, but he seldom lost his ability to laugh. I liked an editor who was bold enough to publish a Boonville kid’s report about the annual marijuana harvest. The kid was his son, Robert Mailer Anderson.

  Young Anderson, a dope neophyte, had happened on a moonlit group in the woods, who were listening to a Grateful Dead tape and inhaling the vapors from a pink ceramic bong. He had joined them tentatively.

  “Anybody burns incense or gets naked,” he wrote, “and I’m leaving.”

  HIGHWAY 128 TOOK ME OVER HILLS and through redwood groves along the vanishing Navarro River toward the coast. There I picked up Highway 1 and followed it north, enjoying the ocean air and watching the sky go dusky.

  Albion, Little River, all the coastal villages on the highway had been connected to the timber industry at their inception. Every mile or so, on every creek, there was a mill and sometimes a narrow-gauge railway. Trains chugged up into the mountains and were met by ox teams hauling logs. The logs were milled and delivered to ships anchored below the ocean bluff through big chutes—a cascade of lumber, forests tumbling down to the sea.

  Mendocino was Hopland intensified, rife with gingerbread Victorians and gay little shops, a Cape Cod imitation where the primary business was tourism. Most rooms were expensive or booked, so I drove on to Fort Bragg, a blue-collar town where Georgia-Pacific had a working mill, among the last around.

  In Fort Bragg, it was simpler to find a tattoo parlor than a bunch of arugula. At one parlor, I studied the designs on display—a snarling panther, astrological signs, Jesus Christ in his Crown-of-Thorns—and wondered who bought them. The religious imagery sold to the Hispanics who worked at Georgia-Pacific, I was told.

  I heard in town that the timber companies were cutting smaller and smaller redwoods, debarking them, and chipping them for waferboard, a material that was often used in tract-house walls. Along the highway, you didn’t notice any clear-cuts, but if you drove along a logging road into a forest, you saw the scarred hillsides and the stumps and the deadfall.

  Fort Bragg also had a commercial fishing fleet that was based in Noyo Harbor, at the mouth of the Noyo River. The fishermen were voluble activists, who were trying to save what they could of the fishery. They had lobbied successfully against a proposal to license offshore oil drilling, a major issue on the North Coast, and not so successfully against the sale of salmon habitat—water from spawning streams—to farms in the Central Valley.

  The times were hard for working stiffs, really. They, too, were becoming an endangered species in California.

  Some fishermen were making ends meet by donning wet suits and diving for abalone. Others were selling sea-urchin eggs to the Japanese, who prized them for sushi. The fisherman hired Mexicans to do the picking, because Mexicans were the only ones who would do it. The hours were weird, subject to the tides, and the rocks were slippery. The spiny urchins and barnacles could slash a picker’s hands.

  In the harbor, the trailers and the shacks of the Mexicans were sprinkled among boat dealers and some businesses retailing nautical gear. It was astonishing to think of some bloody-fingered kid from Guadalajar
a dozing there between shifts, while the uni he had gathered were being packed in ice for the long flight to Tokyo, and the redwoods were sleeping in the walls of tracts.

  MIKE KOEPF CAME FROM A FISHING FAMILY and knew the Mendocino coast as well as anyone. He was an old acquaintance of mine and met me for dinner at The Wharf, a waterfront restaurant, where the bar was jammed with fishermen drinking shots and beers and carrying on about the fish that were missing from the empty, blue sea.

  As a child, in the early 1950s, Koepf had spent his summers in Noyo Harbor. His father had fished commercially out of Fort Bragg and Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, and had docked his boat at Noyo for the salmon season. The salmon were so plentiful then that Koepf could remember them stacked up three and four feet high on the floors of the fish-packing houses. He had slaved on the boats himself for eighteen years, but he was a confirmed landlubber now and had written a few novels. Twice he’d run for a congressional seat in the county as an environmental activist, and had surprised himself by almost winning once.

  Koepf had the Germanic temperament and was no stranger to brooding. A former Green Beret, he sat in a slump-shouldered way and gave off an aura of acute physical power. Ordinarily, he could be found at his old stomping grounds in Elk, another little town farther south on the coast, but he confided that he’d just got married again and had moved in with his new wife, Anne-Marie, in Fort Bragg. He was happy about the turn of events, but he had to shake his head shyly over the wonder of it all.

  In California, the domestic permutations must be infinite, I thought. I doubted that Koepf had ever imagined that he’d have more than one wife, just as I had never imagined that my own marriage might end someday. How poorly prepared we were for what happened to us when we finally gave in to our yearnings.

  We ate some fish, and chips while talking about timbering and fishing, and Koepf was feeling so expansive after the meal that he invited me home to meet his bride. They lived in a quiet neighborhood on a hill above town that showed them a sliver of the ocean. The houses down the block were workers’ houses, older, compact, and unadorned.

  Koepf had told me that Anne-Marie was a gypsy, but I didn’t know whether or not to believe him. I would only recognize a gypsy if she were dressed in flowing silks and shuffling some fortune-telling cards, which Anne-Marie was not. She introduced me to her children from another marriage—marriages, ghostly and otherwise, were everywhere that night—and then Koepf and I went outside to watch the sunset.

  I noticed immediately that something odd was going on at the house next door. On the lawn, a compact, burly, squat little man was pacing around and muttering to himself, while he kicked at some fallen leaves and snatched at the shrubbery. He seemed to be having an intense experience of some indescribable kind and was about to spontaneously combust.

  “Hello, Joe,” Koepf yelled to him through cupped hands.

  Joe trotted over barefoot in a soiled white T-shirt and khakis. He had muscular arms and a broad peasant’s back. He was a Portuguese from the Azores. In Fort Bragg, there were lots of Portuguese, Italians, and Finns whose ancestors had fished or worked in the forests. Joe himself worked for Georgia-Pacific and earned nine dollars an hour. He had been at the mill for fourteen years, but his English still wasn’t very good, except for his swearing.

  The stew he was in had to do with a formal letter that he had just received from Georgia-Pacific. He’d gone over it several times, but he couldn’t read well enough to understand it.

  “I bring it to you, Mike,” he said urgently. “You read it for me. Okay, Mike?”

  “Okay, Joe.”

  Joe dashed to his house and was back in a flash with the letter. It was typewritten on letterhead stationery in corporate legalese, but Koepf was able to decode it. In essence, a government watchdog agency had ordered Georgia-Pacific to inform Joe that he’d been exposed to some asbestos fibers around his work station.

  “What it mean, Mike?” Joe asked, his brow knitted. He figured that he’d been fired.

  Koepf held the letter at arm’s length and looked at it in disgust. “You know what it means, Joe?” he said. “It means that you’re screwed.”

  “What you telling me, Mike?”

  “It means you should get a lawyer, Joe.” Koepf was angry. He had seen such things before. “Get yourself a fucking lawyer and a fucking doctor. Get yourself a chest X ray.”

  Joe looked both stunned and anxious. “You shitta me,” he said.

  “No, Joe, I’m not shitting you.”

  “You shitta me, Mike.”

  “No, Joe.” Koepf sighed in commiseration and counted wearily on his fingers. “One, get yourself a lawyer. Two, get yourself a doctor. Three, get yourself a chest X ray.”

  Koepf drew Joe into his house and poured him a shot of whiskey. We all had a shot of whiskey.

  After the initial blow, Joe seemed remarkably calm. It was as if he’d been kicked in the head by a mule he knew was going to kick him. He’d been waiting for the kick all his life.

  Koepf tried to apprise him of his rights, but Joe had no access to the world of doctors and lawyers and appeared to be frightened of it. The only news he had ever heard from a doctor or a lawyer was probably bad news, so he poured himself more whiskey, made a fist, and punched himself in the palm, over and over again.

  “You shitta me,” Joe said, pacing in circles. “You shitta me, you shitta me! What I gonna do?”

  THE GEORGIA-PACIFIC MILL offered tours to the public, so I joined one in the morning, thick-headed from the whiskey and curious to see what life at the mill was like. Our guide was an emotionally restricted youth who had us sign a waiver absolving the company from all blame if we should be injured or killed on the premises. He handed out hard hats and earplugs and recited some statistics in a voice absent of inflection.

  Georgia-Pacific had 650 hourly workers and 100 salaried workers. The company owned about 200,000 acres of redwood-type timberland in Mendocino County. The mill ran for eighteen hours a day.

  In the millyard, a cogenerator was burning sawdust and bark, throwing off thick clouds that blocked the light. A truck stopped to dump a load of cedar logs. We entered the mill proper and walked up a catwalk to a big room where the debarking was done. A worker seated in a control booth enclosed in Plexiglas used a computer and robotics to do the job. Such new technologies had cut the workforce in most mills by about 30 percent.

  A log dropped into a chute, and the worker pressed some buttons to maneuver a hose into place. It fired a stream of water that spun the log and stripped it of its bark. Chips of wood tore free and stuck to the Plexiglas. Under our feet, the platform rumbled. The noise was deafening, even with earplugs.

  Another log dropped into the chute in a few seconds, and the worker repeated the process. He did this all day, every working day, and no doubt considered himself lucky. He had one of the highest-paying slots at the mill. A saw sharpener was at the top of the heap, and next came the chief sawyer.

  The faces of the workers showed no feeling. They worked with precision, ceaselessly repeating the same tasks. The mill was far too noisy for them to carry on a conversation or to lighten the boredom with a joke. The saws and the machinery were a constant danger, so they had to be alert. In some ways, the mill was not unlike a minimum-security prison, except that you were released at the end of your shift. But as Joe had sagely said, “What I gonna do?”

  BOATS ON THE OCEAN BLUE. I watched the fleet set sail from Noyo Harbor on my final morning in Fort Bragg. The fishing might be poor, but the calvacade remained commanding and imperious, an act of optimism in dark times. It needed an anthem, the tonal riches of a Sibelius. Blue Horizon, Blue Pacific, Lydia, Janie W., Christina Marie, the fleet drew your eyes away from the floating cigarette butts and the trailers with sheets and bedspreads pinned up to cover the windows.

  Scruffy guys in rubber boots circled the harbor looking for a day’s work as a deckhand—twenty bucks, twenty-five bucks, they’d go out for fifteen or even ten—an
d at night they’d blow their earnings at The Wharf and howl about the wealthy bastards who were buying up Mendocino County from Anderson Valley all the way to the coast, planting their vineyards, designing their fancy wineries, and building their mansions.

  In the sky, real clouds, and clouds from the Georgia-Pacific mill.

  CHAPTER 9

  DEPARTING from San Francisco on October 18, 1846, Edwin Bryant, who had worked his way from the Sacramento Valley to the city, set sail for Sonoma in a cutter that belonged to the Portsmouth, a sloop-of-war. He was impressed by the little islands in the bay, Yerba Buena, Bird, and several others, not so much because they stung him with their beauty but because they were a snowy white from the copious droppings of waterfowl.

  Bryant and his party reached the mouth of Sonoma Creek that night, and after a supper of salt pork and bread the men bedded down in the marshes. At daybreak, with a favorable wind and tide, they navigated the creek, landed at an embarcadero, and started hiking the four miles to town. Although it was early autumn, they experienced an intense heat as they walked. The hills framing the valley were overgrown with dry, brown wild oats and other grasses on which free-ranging cattle grazed.

  In Sonoma, Bryant came upon the remains of a mission, its buildings reduced to a shapeless mud. The buildings—what was left of them—were grouped around a plaza that looked “dull and ruinous” in contrast to the picturesque countryside. The walls of the plaza had crumbled, and its fences had been trampled or burned for firewood. Its chief ornaments were the skeletons and skulls of butchered cows.

  Securing rooms in the half-finished adobe house of a Mr. Griffith, a North Carolinian, Bryant tried to console himself with a good night’s sleep, but fleas and vermin hounded him mercilessly. He thought that they were the result of Indian filthiness.