We reached the top of the cliff, and the blue Pacific spread like infinity before us. “The ocean, the ocean!” the children cried, springing from their seats in delight. There was no place for a picnic here; the river’s alluvial fan was muddy, and the breakers crashed against high, rocky cliffs on either side. We turned north along the cliff-top road. Here the only live things were wheeling gulls, lonely sheep, and cypress trees which stretched wind-blown arms away from the sea. At Van Damme State Park, where the road dipped down to a sizable beach, we pulled in and parked. The children spilled out like marbles from a bag. Fall comes early to the wild, rockbound coast of northern California, so our youngsters had the beach to themselves. They raced up and down the sand, shouted into the sea spray, dug for treasures, collected shells, waded in the chilly surf, and played jump rope with a long, rubbery, tubelike seaweed. (pp. 185-186)
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The above is yet another extremely descriptive passage from The Family Nobody Wanted (1954, New York: Scholastic Book Services), Helen Doss’s memoir about the experience of adopting twelve children from several different racial/ethnic backgrounds with her husband, Carl, the minister at the Anderson Valley Methodist Church in 1951 (the year after I was born), when Life magazine did a feature article on them which was printed in the Nov. 12th issue. That was five years before my family moved into the same parsonage that this family had inhabited, and describes one of my favorite memories during the three years that my family lived in Boonville.
As much as I loved attending the primary grades at the elementary school and continuing with my piano lessons, I also loved the many leisure activities in which I was blissfully engaged during weekends, holidays, and vacations, of which trips with my family up the coast to Mendocino or even just across Mountain View Road to Point Arena were only one. In addition to completing my school lessons with great facility and ease, I was particularly drawn to the intricate characters and settings in the classic fairy tales—so much so that to this day, one of my favorite gifts that I ever received from my parents was a large hardback anthology, simplified into child-friendly language, with vivid illustrations, which was one of the first books I ever learned to read on my own. I still own the book, and even now that 60 years have passed since it was printed, it is still in reasonably good condition, awaiting the arrival of any future grandchildren I might have.
My father and I had a very special relationship, and practically every Saturday was spent going to the movies with him, occasionally bringing one of my many friends from school along for the ride. Of course, since Boonville at that time did not (and, I assume, still does not) have a movie theatre, we would make an entire day of it, traveling to Ukiah, Healdsburg, or Cloverdale, having lunch, watching the movie, going out for ice cream afterwards, and not returning home until dinner time. Most of the movies we saw were the animated Disney versions of the classic fairy tales, such as Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella, but by far, of all of the movies we saw together, my favorite was the non-animated, live action Disney film, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, with a then virtually unknown Scottish actor named Sean Connery in one of the featured roles.
I suppose my attraction to the film was a combination of my family’s partial Irish heritage (the one I still claim above all others) and the fact that Darby’s close relationship with his daughter, to the extent that at one point in the film he was even willing to give up his own life to save hers, mirrored the one that my father and I had with each other. This was the only point in the film that left any negative impression on me—when the banshee appeared at the point that the young woman was near death, I shrieked with terror, and experienced vivid nightmares for several weeks afterwards. To this day, however, it still remains one of my favorite Disney films, and I endeavor to watch it every March 17th.
I suppose being a Methodist minister’s daughter was one of the main contributing factors toward my lifelong fascination with Christmas and Easter; the two churches, in Boonville and Philo, were always decorated with such vibrant, rich pageantry, with poinsettias decking the sanctuaries and pulpits for the former holiday and lilies for the latter, and my father donning more colorful sashes over his robe than for regular Sunday services. Apart from the annual fair in mid-September, however, my favorite special occasion during those three years was the annual July 4th picnic/barbecue at Hendy Woods. It seemed as if the entire populations of Boonville and Philo were in attendance; if any inhabitants were left in either town, they were few and far between.
Apart from the majesty and splendor of the location itself, the food, camaraderie, recreational activities, and fireworks made the celebration one of the most memorable experiences of my entire life. None of my subsequent July 4th celebrations, including the bicentennial in 1976, which I celebrated in San Jose, have been able to equal or even approximate the sense of small-town community and solidarity that this annual event in Hendy Woods instilled in me as a young child. In fact, since 1983, the year my father died suddenly of a massive heart attack (the same year that my younger son was born, in January), just two days after July 4th, the holiday has forever lost its appeal for me.
Every summer for at least the past three decades, my brother has traveled back to CA to spend a fortnight at the Little River Inn. He is one of their most cherished seasonal customers, and the entire staff knows him by name. I was fortunate enough to join him there in 2006, and one of our short excursions was a drive to Hendy Woods, where we wandered through the forest, bonding through those earlier pleasant childhood memories. I could almost envision Darby O’Gill’s pal Brian the leprechaun suddenly appearing…
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