zin sins

That’s what Bobby thought about most when he went to the coast – the drive.  The trek, despite its beauty, always had held the stigma in his mind of being a test of endurance.  It was a stigma developed in childhood.

His mother had not seen the coast since Bobby was eleven.  He remembered Janie’s – their – last trip vividly.  Jeremy was driving the family out in his new Cadillac convertible to hunt for abalone at low tide.  A perfect Sunday outing.  But when the family had rounded the hundredth-odd curve and finally beheld the first glimpse of the Pacific, little Tobie, unable to contain his car sickness any longer, threw up in a “world-class” heave on the back of his father’s head.  This immediately set off a chain reaction among the other queasy passengers in Jeremy’s rocking boat.  Jeremy deftly pulled over at a scenic turnoff, and the entire family returned their smoked-salmon sandwiches to the sea.  The barnacle that refused to pry off that whale of a memory in Bobby’s mind was the drive back, and how he had dreaded it on the beach that long-ago afternoon.

His father took mercy on the motley crew and had driven at a snail’s pace on the long trip home.  Bobby remembered the immense logging truck tailgating his father, who had no place to pull over on the narrow, winding road to let the logger pass.  The impatient trucker finally swung around Jeremy on a long, blind curve.  Bobby remembered his father’s reaction:  Jeremy went totally berserk.  He pulled up behind the trucker and honked and flashed his lights.  Realizing the insignificance of those actions on the giant rig, Jeremy sped alongside the truck, came up off his seat and, in the open air of the convertible with three terrified, screaming children and his wife beside him, proceeded to shout and gesture at the driver in the worst language Bobby had ever heard.  Bobby remembered it being the first time he had ever seen his father openly hostile or angry.

The logger had apparently heard of vehicular manslaughter because he complacently observed Jeremy’s diatribe and slowed, and the family survived the ordeal.  But on that day Bobby and Daniel christened Jeremy’s Caddy The Titanic, and the Sunday outing was forever referred to as “Voyage of the Damned.”

Bobby found the ride so different on his trip to see Shaun.  It really was a beautiful drive.  The route wandered through The Valley toward the coastal highlands.  The view for the first fifteen miles was spectacular.  The vineyards fanned out in neat rows before the rising sun.  The large plain — the last true valley before The River veered to the west into the redwood-covered hills — held 75-year-old plantings of zinfandel and obscure Italian grapes.  An early morning fog hung over The River in the distance.  It looked like a suspended cotton snake winding its way through the vines.

Bobby passed the ranches – not true working ranches, more retirement estates – owned by the former stars of Perry Mason, M*A*S*H, and My Three Sons.  Bobby wondered what involuntary reflex caused him to rubberneck when he passed by, and if he’d pay the same attention to the hideaways of the inventor of the micro-chip, the modem or the ah-so.

The vines abruptly gave way to a grand entrance of redwoods rising from hills eroded by the anxious river.  Day versus night.  The canopy of tall trees darkened the sky, the temperature dropped a half-dozen degrees, and the air smelled of evergreen spice.  It was the distant outpost to Shaun’s fortress by the sea.

The road curved tightly beside The River, hop scotching over it when the steep banks fell straight to the water.  At times the forest would open upon a small clearing and the size and density of the tree-covered hills could be seen.  Ten miles into the redwoods, Bobby approached the only stop sign on the road that linked his valley to the ocean.  It stood in the middle of the town of Guerneville.

Guerneville and Bobby’s valley were located in the same county, but he thought they could just as soon have been on different planets with as much as the two had in common.  Guerneville was a tiny town tucked in the coastal redwoods that had suffered from exploitation and identity crises since its inception.  It had prospered at the turn of the century on what was a new principle of the lumber companies:  “Conquer, then divide.”  The lumber concerns had pillaged the area of almost all its best first-growth redwoods – trees up to 300 feet high – before the appetite for lumber in The City drove them northward.  The lumber companies then sold the ravaged land in small parcels as vacation-home lots to the upper middle class of San Francisco.  Guerneville’s popularity as a summer retreat grew – until the Era of Mobility arrived in the 1950s.  The freeway and the airplane made the area’s charm pale to that of other areas that were only a half-day’s ride (or flight) away.  Guerneville wasn’t in the same league with Lake Tahoe or Yosemite or Hawaii.  So the paint began to peel and fade.

In the late-‘60s the walls began to crumble.  The area became a cheap place to hang out for bikers and flower children.  And crime skyrocketed.  Anything went, anytime.  Formerly pleasant subdivisions were renamed with titles like “Heroin Hill.”  A decade later the burgeoning gay community in The City discovered the quaint spot hidden in the redwoods where tolerance was king and non-conformity, queen.  Although the town that Bobby drove through was still mostly Keasy-generation hangers-on, the place had gained a reputation as being the Fire Island of California, the West Coast gay Mecca.

Bobby thought that superficially, Guerneville seemed like any other small north coast lumber town.  The new residents were pumping some needed money into refurbishing much of Guerneville’s dilapidated downtown.  But even a quick recognizance turned up the incongruities:  An old man with Rip Van Winkle beard sitting in a doorway playing the accordion to his audience – a pair of arthritic Dalmatians; a “Poodle Lines” vacation charter bus unloading a platoon of close-cropped young recruits at a local gay resort; a middle-aged hitchhiker wearing her pink-tinted granny glasses, gauze dress, and on her legs what resembled designer ace bandages.

Just as soon as Bobby had begun to play deluxe highway bingo with the unique characters, he was out of town and again into the redwoods that cloaked the fleeing river.

Eventually the canopy gave way once more, the road flattened out, and the forest opened upon the grass-covered headlands.  The River was a wide aquamarine expanse, and hundreds of sheep stood motionless in the gently rolling fields at its banks.  The air took on the crisp, salty bite of the sea.  At last the tidelands came into view, and the white-streaked rock at the mouth of The River rose up in the mist.

The journey seemed to be over – Shaun’s café was only fifteen miles north of The River’s mouth, but those fifteen miles were a stretch of climbing, curving road that at one point hugged a high cliff more than 1,400 feet above the surf-line.  From the scenic outlook above the cliff, on a clear night the lighthouses in the two adjoining counties could be seen, a distance from point to point of 80 miles.