We stayed up in a B&B up in Sonoma, a bit outside of the main square. It put the fun in funky, but like arsenic and old lace sort of fun. Like, the owners seem ok, but you're out of scream range of the local houses. We had the Mural Room, a cool place on the bottom floor of the main house, with our own sitting porch and an adjacent sitting room done up like my Auntie V's apartment, except on sort of a burgundy infused acid. There was a scary doll in the closet.
Sonoma put the bourg in bourgeois. But in a kind of downbeat way. And Mexican. But with Frenchie sort of things. So like a working class Mexican bourgeois with Frenchie leanings, and like cheese. We had some great cheddar at the cheese shop. I don't really like many other cheese but cheddar. We walked around and saw two roosters on the square, apparently lost, filling us with pity. Heather took a picture to document the sadness.
After a very nice dinner with the B&B-owners-who-don't-apparently-eat-their-guests, we visited Jack London's old ranch up in Glen Ellen, a little north of Sonoma. James and I had visited there many many years ago, a pilgrimage for the English majors (and therefore frustrated writers). There was less angst on this visit; most of my young-man travels with James are tinged with that angst, like sepia photographs, except in the color of angst.
Beautiful place, so Californian. And what a character London was, an unresolvable tension between the adventuresome individualist and the Utopian Socialist. I would have liked to have him as a neighbor, but probably not a boss. There were a lot of rules for the workers on the ranch. It must have been awkward to be the J.K. Rowling of your day, and a socialist. His house burned down somehow. The Russian students' chaparone thought it was arson, though others believe it was oily rags. I think it was the Masons. Every bad thing that's happened to me has been because of the Masons. Or the Knights Templar. Or the IRS, except they're really just the KT in ties instead of metal shoes. So I figure a bad thing like that must follow similar logic as in my life.
It would have been a majestic house. It had it's own stag party room, which makes you wonder.
From there we went into Napa, which put the work into working class. It was like that area in a beautiful, ornate fountain where all the silt and gum wrappers collect, near the drain. The guide book described it like a sacrificial object, thrown to the dogs that the rest of the community might exist in grape splendor. Which reminds me that the Book also said wine growing in the valleys was destroyed by bug-pestilence in the 40's, and only returned in the 70's. We also learned a new word, or rather, as Heather clarified, a new use of an old word: "appellation," defined as a wine growing region. E.g., "We drove through the Sonoma Appellation, consuming the vinyards with our eyes, eating salty cheese and whistling sad sea shanties, thoroughly uninebriated."
We took a jog back through the East Bay, to that toxic box called IKEA, and bought Heather a crafts table, then home for a little rest before heading out for a dance performance at the ODC theater. It's very curious when dancers pretend to not have a body. Which is one way of saying I sat there cocking my head like the RCA dog. I really wanted to like it. Heather thought that the artists were just young, which I can accept. I guess I just like my dance a little more...feral.
I broke the news to Heather late that night that we'd be doing a 6:30am start, which might be analogous to informing a priest that the Papacy had just past a law saying catechism must be done in the nude. But she's a trooper, and up we went and got on a fishing charter boat at Fort Mason, along with 20 other unsuspecting souls. Out we went, under the Golden Gate, along the Marin Headland coasts towards the Faralon Islands. The naturalist guide was Ka-RA-Zee about her sea birds. Not birds. SEA BIRDS. I tried to talk to her about parrots and she glazed over like I was describing how to gap spark plugs. I didn't know you could have such discreet categories of affection with animals who share all the same bits.
Sea sickness. What a lame term for such an awful condition. Six hours or so of feeling nauseous, wanting to throw up but can't. Trying to find some place of relative comfort, some little crack in the oppressive cliff face of suffering that leads through to a quiet place with dripping water. That turned out to be sitting on the front of the boat, near the center line, and staring at the horizon. Or in the cabin, near the heater, head down and dozing. Everything else was near vomiting.
And no whales! Where were the god damned whales. We saw twenty varieties of birds, including a boad-stopping puffin, sitting in a little dip of the ocean doing nothing, while the naturalist shouts, "Puffin! It's a puffin!" and I see a black blob with a red attached blob. Well, we did see the Faralons, a small cluster of rocks and birds and a few sea lions, and two houses for the scientist wierdos who stay out there weeks at a time. But no whales. We did see the tail fin of a porpoise, trying to escape the boat full of green-faced gawkers.
Still, I'm glad we went whale non-watching. The ocean is amazing out there. There's no surface--that's what really sticks with me. The plane of water that you see on the beach simply does not exist. It's an abstraction, or a visual mean of the million data points. But on top of it, there's just a constantly shifting rising and falling, dips and hills, curves and infinitely subtle shades of metallic black waters. And a sense of power in even the mild waves we encountered, so great and impersonal and yet not not you. They seem to be the non-personal part of you, so there's a deep familiarity there. And there's a desolation that I would not have expected, like in the desert but more uniform. Not at all apologetic or sinister, just empty and inhospitable. You're welcome to participate as you like, to swim or float or drown, as you like, it's all taken in stride by the ocean.
We staggered home and read the rest of the day. I finally dug into Zodiac by Neil Stephenson, a very different take on water. A good read, very much the product of someone raised on films. It's one of those books you think, "Why hasn't that been made into a film?" Then sleep.
(You can read Heather's account of our trip by clicking here and here.)
