leaving mendocino
Before I can explain what it was to leave Mendocino, I suppose I’ll need to describe what it was to live in Mendocino, as ephemeral as such an experience can be. I entered the weird world of Mendocino with an open heart, and it enchanted me for four years. Until it didn’t. You see, Mendocino is more than a just geographical place. I understand, of course, that many, if not most places are more than that, it’s just that, well, Mendocino is more more than that. It’s a startlingly original mix of seemingly paradoxical qualities that defies description, though I’ll try. It is isolated, but international. It is provincial, but sophisticated. It is charming but hostile, quaint and yet dangerous, old-fashioned, but progressive, rustic but also artistic. I guess I’ll just have to tell you about Mendocino itself and let Mendocino do the talking.
When we moved there, it was our intention to stay forever, to raise our kids there and never leave. When you live in Mendocino, it seems like there’s no where else possible to live, no where else you’d ever want to live. The first year we lived there when the rains came a lot of us lost our power, so the grocery store set up tables with big pots of hot soup and spaghetti and meatballs, so that everybody had access to a warm meal. It was such a simple gesture, but somehow it made me feel like I was really home, like we were all in it together. On Fridays there is a Famer’s Market, where I’d choose peaches and lettuce picked that morning, chatting with the small farm owners, sunburned and cheerful, who had been harvesting in the fields since dawn. Year round, there are characters around town who would seem bizarre in any other town, but who fit in perfectly and are treated warmly here.
Once you live here, you are quickly and hopelessly spoiled by its charms. You become used to the air, which is not only highly oxygenated, but also deliciously scented, and makes every other place you’ve lived seem soiled, and corrupt. You get used to no billboards, no junk food restaurants, no chain stores. Everything you see is beautiful. The architecture is pristine, tasteful, and classic. The sounds you hear are birds singing, waves crashing, seals barking. Everything you do is made more pleasant by the prettiness of your surroundings. Mendocino is hard to get to. The roads into it are long, winding and redwooded. This means it’s also not easy to leave once you’re there, and for a long time I never wanted to.
Moving from Chicago to Mendocino caused instant culture shock. For one thing, to a Midwesterner like myself, seeing the ocean in real life, one is as star struck as if meeting Marilyn Monroe in person. You’ve seen photographs of course, but being in its presence is another thing altogether. The cliffs look over a charismatic sea that churns foamy white against the jagged rocks jutting out from the water. There are many signs as you approach the trails on the Mendocino Headlands, warning of the myriad dangers involved with getting too close to the sea. For those who don’t read English there are pictograms with those red ghostbusters cirlces with lines across them, showing figures engaging in what I would call strongly unreccommended actitvities. One figure is swimming, one is surfing, one is fishing off the cliffs, another is diving into the ocean. Many times, when walking along the trails, I have seen actual people doing many of the verboten acts pictured, and more. The thing is, you can’t say Mendocino doesn’t try to warn you.
The beaches are decorated randomly, but photogenically, with seashells, pebbles and drift wood, and populated by seagulls, who argue amongst themselves over crabs, starfish, and other treasures. On the huge rock formations off the coast you can often see seals, draped languidly on the surfaces of the rocks, sunning themselves. An important aspect of the beautiful coastal cliffs however, is that people are always falling off them and dying. Or being swept away from the beautiful beaches below, or when in the water, boogie boarding or cayaking, caught in undertows, pulled down and out. Sometimes an abalone diver will just be attacked by a great white and killed that way. There are endless variations.
The first week we were there, an ominous warning sign, it seems to me now, a brother and sister were tossing their mother’s ashes into the ocean from the cliffs, after her funeral, and were swept out to sea by a “sleeper” wave, so called because they sort of creep up on you. One weekend, about a year after we moved there, a dad and his two sons was playing on “Glass Beach”, so named for its proliferation of sea glass, which is glass from shipwrecks that the surf polishes and smoothes, wave by wave, wearing away at it until it has no jagged edges. The boys were taken out in the undertow. The dad swam in to get them, and he drowned along with them. The dad and one of the boys didn’t make it. A few weeks after that, a young couple was walking on the beach in Mendocino with their dog, who was swimming, and who got caught in a rip tide. The man went in after the dog, and was drowned. The dog survived. It was the day before their wedding. The woman’s wedding dress was laid out in her hotel room waiting for the next day. It is treacherous here, even to locals. One day I was at the video store, and the lady who owned it was on the phone to her friend, who had just learned that her teenaged son, who had grown up here and lived his whole life here, had just fallen off a cliff the night before and died. An abalone diver’s head washed up on a beach five miles north of where he’d been diving, having been spit out by a great white shark, who was disappointed that, while he probably looked like one, chubby and shiny and dark in his wet-suit, he wasn’t actually a seal.
The natural setting of Mendocino is endlessly glamorous, effortlessly beautiful. It looks good all year long. It is beautiful when its sunny, it is beautiful when it storms, it is beautiful in the morning, in the daytime, and at night. When it is sunny, the water is azure and the foam white, and it sparkles as it moves. When it is foggy, the ocean becomes dark and moody. When it is stormy, the sea roils and you can hear it roaring, stirring up pieces of sea foam that float in the wind. The natural flora includes bright pink flowers on the cliffs that open to the sun and close at sundown, dramatically slanted cypress trees that form natural canapés you can walk through, and fields of high grasses from which crickets sing to each other at dusk.
The historically preserved village of Mendocino sits on cliffs overlooking the Pacific ocean. The houses and buildings are all circa 1850-1910. Many have white picket fences, most have gardens and window boxes with flowers decorously spilling out of them. The scent of wild flowers as well as those in the gardens; jasmine, rosemary, lavender among many others, mix with the eucalyptus, redwoods, and the ocean air, creating an intoxicating aroma that is unique to Mendocino. The town itself is Rockwellianly picturesque. There is one bank, the former Masonic Hall, which sports pristine white statuary on its roof called “Father Time and the Maiden”. There is one grocery store, where you can buy everything from wine and firewood to coffee mugs and toys. There are three churches, one stained glassed and catholic, one whitewashed, spired and protestant, the third quaint and homely. There are many art galleries, shops and restaurants. Many of the grandest houses in town are now Inns, their gardens and grounds perfectly maintained, where anyone can walk through them to admire the rose bushes, magnolias, and rhododendrons.
As for the people who live in this pretty little paradise? We met some of the “locals” through the school. Two of Ares’ friends, a pair of brothers, had two parents who were active and enthusiastic meth addicts. They were were being raised by their grandmother. One of these boys had holes in his teeth. The grandmother, a nice lady, had, in addition to her meth-addicted son, a daughter who drunkenly slammed her car into a car full of teenagers, killing three of them. They had been set to graduate from Mendocino High School the next week. The grandmother, mom to the meth addict son and drunk driving daughter, once explained to me that she had raised her kids up here in the woods, away from what she deemed a corrupt society. Another boy in Ares’ class lived in a tiny trailer with three dogs, a parrot, and two grandparents, and stole from Ares on a regular basis. One local man we hired to do some work on our house would demand his pay in the morning, before he started work, and immediately disappear, stopping by the beautiful bank with the white statuary first to cash the check, and then spending all of it at the local bar, Dick’s Place. The locals like to call Dick’s Place “Richard’s by the Sea”. As you can imagine, Richard’s by the Sea is always packed. Once I overheard a waiter at the Mendocino Hotel say to the bartender “I’ll take any tourists you seat, as long as their stomachs are empty and their wallets are full.” The last time I was in Mendocino, I heard a local man say to his friend, as they walked along main street, surveying the parked cars, “Why so many cars? It’s February. Go Home!” Friendly.
And lets not forget the organic food co-op, Corners of the Mouth. “Corners” is situated inside an old red building that used to be a church, and is run by a collective who have names like “Sky” “Garnish” and “Rain”. Inside and out there are notes, so many notes, posted on the walls and doors that have passive-aggressive messages like “We sure could use your (gently used, neatly folded) bags! Thanks!J” or “Please don’t use the organic scoop for the non-organic coffee! Thanks! J” or “Don’t forget this is a cell-free zone! No phones please! Thanks! J” At ‘Corners’, you don’t want to make the mistake of seeming in a hurry, as this will mark you as corporatist and self-centered. Also, you don’t want to buy too many of anything, like two-dozen plums, say, as this will make you seem greedy, and unable to ‘leave some for the rest of us’. They will actually call you out; “You need all of these plums?” they’ll ask pointedly. On top of the wood-burning pot bellied stove, always ablaze in the winter months, there is a basket of bumper stickers that sport slogans like “Dirt Worshipping Tree Hugger!”, “I can Explain it to You, but I Can’t Understand it for You!”, “The Best Things in Life aren’t Things”, “Arms are for Hugging” and, perhaps inevitably, “Jesus was a Hippie”.
It’s hard to leave Corners without feeling a sense of shame about something. Once I bought several mesh shopping bags, so as not to kill trees and waste paper bags. Rain, who was working the register, looked me dead in the eye and said “You really need ALL of these?” I said “Yes.” And without missing a beat, she said “Well, good thing I’m putting an order in tomorrow.” I took this exchange to mean that I was hogging all the mesh bags, because I was entitled and greedy. I was once informed by a lady stocking the shelves in the ‘Organic Teas and Herbs’ area upstairs, that I had the “wrong color” aura, but that she would be happy to schedule me for a “touch free massage” if I wanted to address the problem. What is a touch free massage? How is that even possible?
One day I took Ares out of school so that he and Anais could get their flu shots. Another mom saw us leaving school in the middle of the day and asked where we were going. I told her, and she said “Oh no! You shouldn’t do that!” I asked her what she meant. She answered that I should never try to prevent the flu, because “it is something they need to go through…spiritually.” She said she had heard other moms talk about me, describing me as “pharmaceutical” because I believed in “Western medicine” and now she understood what they meant. I told her that the flu can kill children, and early death was something I didn’t think they needed to “go through” and that I also believed in soap. She seemed disappointed in me and clearly felt sorry for my children. I could see her in my rear view mirror shaking her head sadly as we drove away.
There is a baseball diamond on the northernmost side of town, where Ares played little league. For one week each summer it is occupied by an actual circus, complete with a big tent and various circus wagons. The Mendocino High School is perched above the Mendocino Headlands, so that the football field looks out onto the ocean. There is a tennis court to one side of the football field, where we’d play tennis, while the ravens carried on their malevolent business in the enormous trees above. It’s pretty windy and overgrown with weeds, but somehow I felt that these things made it more endearing. It became its own adventure. When the ball is blown off course by the wind, or bounces at a peculiar angle from hitting a weed growing from a crack in the court, you’d think “only in Mendocino” and keep playing. That’s the thing about Mendocino. The very things one would normally see as strange, or unpleasant even, could take on a rakish charm.
The high school used to have its own radio station, run by the students. It was probably the best radio station I’ve ever had the privilege of hearing. The students were the producers, the engineers and the ‘on air talent’. Their taste in music was catholic, eclectic, and splendid. They’d play the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies one minute, a song by a local singer/songwriter, the next, followed by a hip hop song, then a Bollywood hit, followed by a Loretta Lynn classic, like Honkytonk Girl. It was endlessly wonderful, totally non-judgemental, and the students must have learned so much from running their own radio station. It was cancelled, due to the locals in town who were convinced that the radio waves emanating from the signal tower were toxic or carcinogenic or… something.
There is a Recreation Center in the middle of town with swings, a play structure with a slide, an old wooden teeter totter, and a sand box that always has trucks and shovels and stuff in it because in Mendocino, no one thinks to steal them. It also has cat feces in it, because, in Mendocino, no one thinks to chase the cats away. It is surrounded by a white picket fence, and across the street from an actual mini winery with a sheep in the yard. Inside, there are rooms for art classes for children, a big gymnastics room with mats, and a ceramics studio with a sign on the wall that reads; “Misbehaving children will be sold into slavery!” complete with a drawing of a hot cup of coffee. Children’s artwork is displayed in the hallways, hanging on the walls, and ceramic pots and paintings displayed on the shelves, and there are sign up sheets for classes and summer camps.
There is a big, empty field in the middle of the village, where all kinds of events are held, like craft fairs and swap meets. One can only speculate how much such a large swath of land here is worth, but it stays a community asset. In front of the little wooden church across from this field, if you are lucky, you can often find a man sitting at a folding table, with a sign that reads “Free Prayer”. Down the street from there, Frankie’s Pizza, a pizza and ice cream shop, has a blackboard on one wall with stupid things the tourists say that the employees write down as they hear them. Some examples are, “Are there a lot of homeless people here or do you guys just dress like that?” and “Are the hippies here real?” and “Is there chocolate in the chocolate chip ice cream?” and “Which way is the ocean?” That last one is hilarious to the locals, as pretty much everything in the town is literally on or overlooking the ocean.
The single gas station, (where gas costs at least twice as much as anywhere else) is next door to the protestant church with the white spire. This church has a preschool with a play area outside that has a small train that children can ride around in and a sand box to play in while enjoying their own preschool ocean view. Just down from there, you’ll find paths that wind down, through tall grasses, wild flowers, and blackberry bushes, to the ocean. Along the way you can expect to see makeshift tents, made of blankets and clothing draped over trees. These are little temporary homesteads, where lost, filthy, mostly caucasian twenty-somethings make camp. You’ll know who the inhabitants of these little campgrounds are instantly after you’ve lived here for about a minute. In town, you’ll pass by them as they sit cross-legged on the sidewalk, often strumming a guitar, next to a dirty blanket displaying their wares; sea shells they have found, or pebbles made smooth by the waves, or flowers they’ve picked and braided into headbands, that they are selling.
In the hills above the town, there dwell what I came to call “Jesus Hippies” who are apparently descended from actual hippies who “dropped out” of society during the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies to “homestead” the land and “live off the grid”. These folks wear their hair in matted dreadlocks and reproduce like mad. Do I need to tell you that these are white people? One sees them in the park with their children, who have olden timey biblical names like Jonah and Jebadiah. They keep to themselves to a large degree, but one senses a certain traditionalism in their lifestyles. The womenfolk seem to stay home to tend to the children and god only knows what the men do. I was told that living ‘off the grid’ means that they don’t partake in things like electricity or telephones, much less television and computers. I don’t know how accurate this information is, but from the look and aroma of them, they don’t seem to avail themselves of running water or soap either.
In Mendocino, one sees bumper stickers like “All My Babies were Born at Home!” and “Mean People Suck!” There are buses painted in rainbow colors parked on the side of Main Street with messages cheerfully adorning their sides that say things like “fueled by love and donations!” There is a weird combination of people in Mendocino. For instance, one time in line at the video store, I stood behind a couple of grubby young people who paid for their large stack of video rentals with cash in brown paper bags. They reeked of fresh marijuana and stale beer. The lady behind the counter told me that they were in town to work on the crops, meaning the cannibus harvests. There are artists too, who helped found the Mendocino Art Center here during the nineteen-seventies. This is a sort of art compound, with art studios, galleries, and little cabins for visiting artists to live in during their residencies. There is a music festival every summer, and a film festival in the fall, so one can glimpse prominent musicians and the occasional actor here as well.
