Big Dreams (18 page)

A good, hard rain stopped the world for a while. Somehow it put tender emotions into the heart, maybe because it scared us a bit and trimmed back our wishes to the basics—shelter, warmth, food,
and human company. Storms were sexy, too, galvanizing the nerves and setting a kinetic energy to roaring through the vitals. The rain made you want to connect, to be joined to another as you were joined to the furies.

A taste of rain. Now I understood. After only a week in the heat and the torpor of the Sacramento Valley, I had a craving for something liquid, for the ocean and the coast.

T
HE RAIN SLOWED ME DOWN ON MY WAY TO MENDOCINO
. Highway 20 was not a road to make any time on, not during a storm. Twilight found me unhappily holed up in Clearlake Oaks, in Lake County, in a cottage on Clear Lake. The towns on the lakeshore could be as isolated and depressing as any in the Far North. Work was just as scarce. Apple and pear orchards, some vineyards, a handful of cattle ranches, downtrodden resorts—that was Clear Lake.

Like the rain, Clear Lake held memories for me. Somebody had told me long ago, when I was an infant Californian, that the bass fishing at the lake was unbeatable, so my brother and I once made an excursion to it in a 1951 Hudson that he’d just bought. The car was the color of a dill pickle and had enough room inside for the Brady Bunch. The woman who’d sold it to him phoned every month to be certain that it still ran. The Hudson had belonged to her grandfather, and she seemed to feel that his soul had transmigrated to it.

How California, we thought.

Later, a robber in the Haight-Ashbury stole the seats from the Hudson, and we would drive it around sitting in armchairs. The slipping and sliding could be entertaining, but that was another story. As for the bass in Clear Lake, we never caught any, hooking instead such slum-dwelling species as carp and catfish.

The decline of Clear Lake was another chapter in the ongoing saga of California’s fall from its princely place in nature. In the 1920s,
the lake gained popularity as a family resort, but overfishing killed off many of the bass. Others were killed by the chemicals that were sprayed to control festering clouds of gnats. The water needed for households left the lake choked with weeds and deteriorating from the effects of a sewage system that was built as an afterthought. By July, Clear Lake was often awash with algae blooms.

Trailer homes were concentrated in the lakeside towns now, and that was the first thing you noticed—trailers everywhere, some dandy ones and some gross ones, their yards patrolled by an army of ceramic jockeys, gnomes, trolls, and sleepy Mexicans astride their predictable burros.

Retired people owned many of the trailers. They moved to Clear Lake because the living was cheap and the climate was fairly mild, but the isolation often drove them away. They left the care of their trailers to local realtors, who rented them to tenants on welfare or with substance-abuse problems, or those who were hiding out from a bad marriage, a bounced check, or the law. Bikers also favored the trailers and operated a prosperous methamphetamine trade out of labs in the woods.

In California, someone was always getting rich, even Hell’s Angels and Satan’s Slaves.

My cottage at Clearlake Oaks was a masterpiece of its kind, the 1950s preserved. It had knotty-pine walls decorated with framed, paint-by-number canvases of boats, kittens, and flowers. The kitties made you want to reach for your .357 magnum. The refrigerator was a Kelvinator. In the living room, a wicker couch was arranged invitingly next to an endtable scarred with cigarette burns. Two ashtrays appropriated from Harrah’s Casino in Reno were set on it, along with a box of matches.

Relax, pal, the cottage seemed to say. Take off your shoes and light up a Chesterfield. Do a crossword puzzle, scratch yourself idly, or flip through the evening paper—but the paper only made me more tense. The lead articles were devoted to a teenager who’d been
assaulted, illegal sewage spills into the Lakeport water system, and some lawsuits that had been settled on behalf of thirteen diners who’d contracted hepatitis at a Wendy’s.

The log of the Clear Lake Sheriff’s Department was mere lagniappe.

The cottage. A fishy odor and the sound of water slapping against a dock. I bolted my door and went to bed at nine o’clock.

C
HARLES STONE AND ANDY KELSEY
were pioneer ranchers in Lake County. In 1847, they bought some land at the southwestern tip of the lake from General Mariano Vallejo, who controlled many big parcels in northern California and fathered sixteen children to help populate them. Stone and Kelsey hired some Pomo Indians to build them an adobe house and subsequently treated them like slaves.

The Indians and their families were subjected to sadistic bullying. The men were beaten, whipped, tied up, and hung from trees. The women were raped. The Pomo slaves were often denied any food. About twenty of them starved to death in the winter of 1848.

There was a tale about a young Indian whose starving mother had sent him to Stone’s house, where her sister worked, to get some wheat. The boy’s aunt gave him five cups wrapped in an apron, but
Stone ran down the boy on horseback, took away the wheat, and shot him.

The Pomo finally rose up in 1849. Five Indians went to the adobe house after the servants had secretly stripped it of weapons. They put an arrow through Stone’s gut and stabbed Kelsey in the heart with a spear.

A party of soldiers from the federal government was sent to Clear Lake the following year to avenge the murders. The only Indians that they could find lived on some islands far from the site of the massacre, at the other end of the lake. The troops decimated them, anyway, using cannons, bayonets, and whaleboats. About a hundred Pomo died on Bloody Island.

A few Pomo still lived on a small reservation by the lake. I toured it in the morning. They, too, had trailers, and their yards were piled with the junk that Indians seemed to collect everywhere in the state—old tires, rusty auto parts, batteries in need of juice, stove flues, broken TV sets, and so on.

When I had first seen such yards up in Smith River and in Hoopa Valley, I had thought the Indians identified with the junk and viewed themselves as outcasts and castoffs. Now I believed that the Indians knew something that we didn’t—something about the white man’s world coming slowly undone—and that they also knew that the demand for, say, a 1952 Kelvinator refrigerator freezer coil might someday be worth its weight in gold.

The most logical explanation, of course, was poverty. The lives of the poor were miserable, even in California.

I left the Pomo and Clear Lake and drove over the Mayacamas Mountains to Hopland. The fields along Highway 101 were once planted with hops that were sold to breweries, but the hops were gone now and vineyards had taken over. Hopland was in the throes of a wine-grape craze. It had fancy wineries, trendy shops, and effete bed-and-breakfast inns—California as interpreted by a set designer, precisely the sort of place that Bruce Anderson railed about in his
Anderson Valley Advertiser
, the most controversial little weekly around.

B
RUCE ANDERSON HAD NOTHING AGAINST GRAPEVINES
, but he didn’t like what they stood for. They carried connotations about class and privilege that went against his proletarian grain. Anderson was a throwback to the Old Left. He joined hands across the centuries with such other fly-in-the-ointment California journalists as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce.

Not for nothing did the
Advertiser
have a quote from Vladimir Lenin on its front page: “Be as radical as reality.” Lenin’s words were a bookend to a quote from Joseph Pulitzer on the other side of the page. “Newspapers should have no friends,” Pulitzer counseled.

The
AVA
was widely read in Mendocino County and in hip enclaves around the state, but it also had subscribers in such far-flung liberal parishes as Greenwich Village, Minneapolis, and Madison, Wisconsin. Its approach to the news was literate, muck-raking, opinionated, and frequently off-the-wall, mixing high-school sports with gossip (“Shirley MacLaine’s
Inner Workout
videotape, the latest New Age rage, is a hot item locally”) and with slams at timber companies, politicians, and tourism.

Anderson was not related to the Walter Anderson who’d settled the valley in 1851. He worked out of Boonville, on Highway 128. The town had been a way station for New Age dropouts since the 1960s, when marijuana growers, mid wives, dope casualties, psychics, artists in macramé, genuine organic back-to-the-landers, and others moved in and took the loggers, sheep ranchers, and apple farmers by surprise.

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.