In 1976, the author published
a longer version of this article in the California Living section of the
"San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle". It is republished here with his
permission.
There
were other resorts like this all over Northern California once -- rustic
retreats whose minimal accommodations -- my father once turned on the
shower in a Ray's cabin and a toad popped out of the spout -- were part
of their charm for middle-class city people before they took to the suburbs.
But for us, there was no other Ray's.
We approached
it like wagon-train emigrants, scanning the horizon for signs of the promised
land, a stifling July car, running on rationed gas and therefore overloaded
with brothers, sisters, cousins, sometimes a dog, a crammed box of rivalries
with a beleaguered father or uncle suffering three hours of songs, games,
squirming and bickering like three on the cross.
A
shout of recognition was allowed, but it too was rationed; you had to
save it till you saw The Sign -- a round, rusting, once-white metal disc,
posted at a fork in the road outside the town of Philo, with a faded name
above a faded arrow. We would all cut loose then, with a release of emotion
the driver no doubt shared even as its noise was about to burst his eardrums.
| "Much
of my life since has been, I realize, an attempt to return."
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A landscape
full of forest magic opened around us, a barely cleared meadow dotted
with huge, blackened stumps, land grudgingly won from dense, endless ranks
of redwood and spruce; a biblical flock of grazing sheep; and, at the
road's dead end, a colonnade of oaks so huge they all but shut out the
sun. Within it, darker still, was a cluster of log-and-clapboard cabins
rich with the promise of screened. cricket-noisy rest on sagging spring
beds with mushy concave mattresses.
Each day produced
exotic, pastoral wonders: the dark, bay-and-urine secrets of an old barn;
icy water from a rusty pump; water dogs; hikes through the cathedral floor
of Hendy Woods, a dead, decaying deer. Once, my uncle, coming upon me
fishing unsuccessfully, advised me that the proper way to catch trout
was to sing to them. And left me, amiable greenhorn, standing alone beside
the stream, bellowing at the top of my lungs: "Hut-sut rawl-son on the
rillera." I still got skunked.
It was the
best summer, and the last. By the next June, my sisters, heeding the migratory
urge to go where there were "boys," led us to the Russian River, Boulder
Creek, Tahoe, "better," more upscale, more glamorous places by any objective
measure. But a poor substitute by mine.
I never had
enough of Ray's. Much of my life since has been, I realize, an attempt
to return. Yet I resisted going back to the original from simple fear
that, like so much of the best of California in these years, it would
be too good, too tempting to resist change. Someone would see possibilities.
Develop. Improve. Incorporate it into what Tom Wolfe has aptly dubbed
"the big shopping plaza of life."
So it was
with wildly ambivalent feelings that, faced with absolute deadlines --
my own fortieth birthday, my son's onrushing teens -- I drove with my
wife, son and daughter, on the day after New Year's, up the narrow Mendocino
County sideroad that was anticipation itself of so many years before.
Returning to the home I'd have liked home to be.
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"...
down the shady street, crackling with dry oak leaves; up the gap-toothed
steps of our old cabin..."
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There was
no listing in the local phone book, but the road remained, winding through
land so choked with vegetation that cattle rustled about in it unseen
until their heads poked out like squirrels or quail. A short way down
was the sign, rusted into anonymity. Trees -- bigger than I'd remembered
-- gave way to the hard-won meadow dotted with charred stumps -- eerie,
monstrous figures once to us, walking this road in the dark. In the distance
was the water tower, a relic the most hard-hearted developer would have
kept, and below it the same large white house where the owners lived and
we overate. Just beyond was the row of small cabins, our cabin, vacant,
boarded as if condemned, yet dilapidated only in degree. The resort had
aged, but not changed, and the general disrepair gave the place a curiously
distinguished, autumnal survivor's glow.
We parked
beside the stained white chest where bottles of pop had competed with
slugs for space around the ice block. A woman came out of the house, young,
kitchen-busy, wiping her hands, wearing jeans, curious at our familiarity.
Mrs. Ray, she told us, long widowed, had remarried and moved to town.
The young woman and her husband had bought the place several months before.
She invited us into the firewood warmth of her kitchen, introduced her
husband, tall, intelligent and recently moved from Marin: people with
suburban options, who had chosen to settle here. We exchanged information,
names, dates, anecdotes, filling in each other's history: their Ray's
for ours. The deed they bought, they told us, had been in the Ray family
since the original homestead, and was signed by President Grover Cleveland.
They intended to restore the place, a cabin at a time, would be taking
limited guests, might allow people to pay part of their way by work, were
looking to contact the old families. Ray's and its ideal owners, it seemed,
had found each other.
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They invited
us to walk around, down the shady street, crackling with dry oak leaves;
up the gap-toothed steps of our old cabin, onto the slightly listing porch
with the meadow sloping away to another row of cabins below, the Navarro
River beyond, and the smoky blue-green forests of the Coast Range.
The life that
Ray's and resorts like it represented -- modest family joys, indulgence
within limits, an inward-looking husbandry of summer freedoms -- has all
but disappeared from the California of these years, obscured by clouds
of speedboat spray and camper dust. Yet it's restorable, through work
and love, like a woody station wagon forgotten in a barn. It's about time
for people to rediscover the pleasures of going to a place you don't send
postcards from, and the joys of going away and staying home at the same
time. It's a good life to bring back -- if indeed it ever fully left us.
"There is no present or future," Eugene O'Neill, that most family-ridden
of writers, once wrote. "Only the past, happening over and over again
-- now."
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Editor's Note -- Judging by the many letters that the newspaper
received after publishing this article in 1976, it seems my aunt's
resort had a profound effect on the many guests who were lucky enough
to have summered there.
Mr. van der Zee now lives in Healdsburg. His books include: "The
Gate, The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden
Gate Bridge", "Bound Over: Indentured Servitude and American Conscience",
"The Imagined City: San Francisco in the Minds of its Writers",
and "The Greatest Men's Party on Earth -- Inside the Bohemian Grove",
among others.
--
Bill |
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