Mendocino
What starts city people moving to some places in the country is often more or less a mystery. Big Sur and Taos have nature at its grandest, Woodstock has the Dylan aura. But there are some places, like Mendocino, that seem no more than congenial.
Concretely, the move to Mendocino in the last two years owes a lot to some articles by Paul Williams, printed in US and elsewhere, and a Sir Douglas Quintet song. But these were merely speaking of an existing scene, which started some ten years ago when a few artists — mostly of the flowers and seascapes variety — set up shop in Mendocino, in a symbiotic relationship with the antique shops. Somehow, more artists came, things got freakier.
Most of the original members of the scene have moved on now – like the people who put out The Illustrated Paper, the only underground monthly in the world that came out about every eight months. But a scene once started tends to perpetuate itself. About three years ago a commune called the Trolls set up in tents and cars near the town of Mendocino. Though it eventually broke up, after a disastrous encounter with the necessities of country life, there are now about a dozen communes in the Mendocino area – depending on your definition of commune, and on when you make your count. There are also many families living in individual cabins. Cabin space is hard to find now, in fact.
When city people move to the country, they are looking for a different life. When they move to Mendocino, they find this new life means such things as worrying about water supplies, for the first time in their lives. There isn’t any water company in the woods, not even in Mendocino town, and when your well runs dry, you go looking.
Few of them have ever worried about building codes and building inspectors before, either. But every new structure meant for habitation has to pass a rigid code of specifications on electrical systems, plumbing, roofing, structural plan – every detail of building, right to the number of doors in the house.
Mendocino County suffers from ordinary rural poverty. The average income is about 3/4 the California state average. Unemployment has hovered around ten percent for the last ten years: There aren’t enough jobs for the country people alone. There are many complaints that the welfare system is poorly advertised, and strict about qualifications. The distribution center, it is said, was arbitrarily moved from Fort Bragg (ten miles north of Mendocino) to Ukiah, 50 miles away. The biggest complaint is that the system doesn’t give welfare stamps, but surplus food: dried milk, dried eggs, barely palatable from overprocessing. But the woods are lovely, and the climate is tempered by the ocean, and there’s a scene there. A good place to experiment.
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Peter and Catherine’s farm is spacious and orderly for up here in the woods. There are apple trees around the little old farmhouse where Catherine’s mother lives, and a number of structures: a greenhouse, some sheds, livestock quarters, a water tower. Peter and Catherine themselves live in a converted chicken coop.
“When we moved here three summers ago,” says Catherine, looking very much the pioneer woman, even to the squint in her eyes, “the taxes on the place came to $35. You won’t believe this, but by this year they had raised it to $385. It’s practically forcing us off the land, because we’re not quite self-sufficient as a farm. If my mother didn’t work in town, we wouldn’t be able to stay.”
Their farm happens to be on a road favored by second-home and retirement types from the big city. It’s a picturesque place, Mendocino’s famous Pygmy Forest, where the pine trees grow only six feet high. People pay $4,000 an acre to sit on canvas-backed chairs and watch the picturesque pines.
But Peter and Catherine and the other six people on their farm, who are trying to scratch a living from soil so poor it stunts trees, are being taxed by the County at the same rate as the pinewatchers. They own 20 acres. If they owned 25, they would qualify as a farm, but as it is they’re considered homeowners with a big lot.
“We’re pretty lucky with this place though,” Catherine says. “We’ve got a good well and a pond, we’ve had water all summer. This was a working farm for 70 years before we took it over, and the soil’s been improved. Mostly, though, it’s this clay and sandstone soil that runs all through Mendocino. The ground is so acid here the only things that grow well are like berries, peas and garlic. This used to be a berry farm, in fact. We just picked a whole gang lot of blackberries for blackberry syrup.
“We’re growing — let’s see, beans, milo, carrots, turnips, squash, greens. The frosts at the end of September killed the peas and kind of messed over the squash, but the corn is ripening anyway — the ears are going to be kind of stunted.
“We have a greenhouse to extend our growing season, for tomatoes, peppers, and some other trips like loquats. The heat of decomposition from the compost keeps the greenhouse warm.
“The trouble with the compost heap is that the pigs get first crack at kitchen scraps, and we have a little trouble getting things to add to it. We even save empty peapods, for instance, in burlap sacks, for goat fodder in the winter.”
There are flowers growing around the farm, but not necessarily for looks. The elegant rows of sunflowers are for chickenfeed. The pretty red and yellow flowers next to the Italian garlic are a source of pyrethrum, an organic pesticide – just grind up the dry flowerheads and mix with soapy water and a drop of vinegar. The marigolds planted among the cabbages are there to discourage cabbage worm and for dyeing wool.
Mendocino, Page 1 of 6