Notes From A Paradise Lost

Where there were once hop fields, apple orchards and sheep in the Anderson Valley, by the middle 1970s there was marijuana and an outlaw population of people who weren’t really outlaws, but middleclass back-to-the-landers forced to live like outlaws. 

Hard drugs, and the hard people who come with hard drugs, arrived in Mendocino County and everywhere else in the land in the later years of the 1960s. Most significant of all, a huge demographic change arrived with a large population of Mexican immigrants, and the Anderson Valley, as other areas of Mendocino County, found itself living in parallel societies with the public schools being the primary agent of only a partial integration.

One night in the spring of 2000, maybe a half-mile south of the Anderson Valley Elementary School, on the west side of Anderson Creek, a young Mexican named Jamie Vasquez thought he’d been invited out to the only house on the edge of a vineyard to see a friend, but as he and his young wife and infant son made their way in their battered Honda through the grapevines, four armed men suddenly appeared in front of the family’s car and ordered Jamie Vasquez to get out of the car and come along with them. Vasquez was never seen again. The abducted man’s wife, made her way back into town to make it known that something terrible had happened to her, but something more terrible had probably happened to her husband. Mrs. Vasquez was able to identify one of her husband’s kidnappers. That man was soon arrested, but the only crime the DA could pin on him was being an illegal in possession of a firearm.

The missing man’s best friend, also a vineyard worker, ran off as soon as he heard about his friend’s abduction, and he too has never been seen since in the Anderson Valley. The liberals said, “The cops won’t even look for Vasquez because he’s a Mexican.” But the cops had a helicopter with body heat-sensing devices in it flying low back and forth over the stretch of Anderson Creek where Vazquez was last seen for two full days, and deputies, accompanied by a search and rescue crew, walked the creek bed and the surrounding areas, meticulously combing the wilderness of river rock and scrub brush, but they never found any sign of the missing man. The rumor went around that Vasquez owed drug dealers $40,000, but he didn’t live like a man who'd ever had $40,000; he’d worked in the grapes and went home every night to his young wife and his infant son.

Only a hundred miles north of San Francisco, Boonville’s easy proximity to millions of people has led it to its present battered incarnation as a center of industrial-scale wine production and wine-related tourism or, as Gerald Casey has described the unwelcome (to some of us) phenomenon: “Since moving here I’ve noticed that men and women who are masters of production, finance and opinion have taken an interest in wine. Setting vines in rows as they might have once arranged office cubicles, their genius is now focused on producing the world’s best wines, as they know them. The genetic oddity that gives grapes their mystical potential has been isolated and cloned and set out in neat rows of grow tubes. Force-fed and scientifically watered, grafted, canopied and pruned to balance, they’ll get suckered and sulfured, their ground covered, leaves pulled, and crop dropped. There’s frost to be fought, hand time to hold, the brix to fix, then pick and pack, stem and press, meet the yeast, heat and cool, punch the cap, do the malolactic tactic, filter and fine, blend and barrel. Made in steel, aged in oak behind a chain-link fence, this wine has color and clarity, legs and body, feel and finish, with hints of all the fruits of the cornucopia. A number is assigned that corresponds to price, and the drink that once sent a romantic’s senses tumbling back through the centuries now inspires awe among the cognoscenti appreciative of the technical achievements of the people who replaced Bacchus with Bill Gates.”

One hundred years after the first description of Covelo as a resort for rogues of all sorts, two idealists whose opinions were widely characterized as criminal in the America of their time, made their last homes in Round Valley. Maybe. One did for a fact. The other, Harrison George, perhaps the outstanding figure in the history of the Communist Party in California, and a leading figure in the history of Soviet clandestine operations in the United States and Asia, was rumored to have lived in Covelo after being removed from his responsibilities as a member of the Comintern’s Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, i.e., one of the key persons responsible for agitation among Asian labor. Where George died is not known; it isn’t known for a dead sure fact that he lived in Covelo, but old rumors wafting over the Mayacamas mountains say that George retreated to Covelo to lick his political wounds and maybe even died there.

George had been a Wobbly, or a communist assigned by the CP to sab the Wobs — that argument continues — and, later, an editor of the People’s World. He was regarded as an expert on strike strategy, something he had in common with other ex-IWWs in the CP. There is a whole trove of documents in Moscow in which George complained non-stop at the purported errors of Harry Bridges and Bridges’ CP allies in directing the 1934 longshore strike in San Francisco. George apparently didn’t realize that he was far outranked in the clandestine apparatus by Harry Hynes, the Australian-born underground agent who was Bridges’ main adviser. Hynes, who was a top KGB man, was calling the shots. Once the big strike was over George was replaced and, old whispers say, retreated to Covelo from where he vanished from history.

(An aside here to establish the devolution of trade unionism in the United States: Harry Bridges never took a pay check greater than the pay earned by his longshoremen and warehousemen. Leonard Johnson, the father of an old friend of mine, was a warehouseman in San Francisco all his life, ironically a registered Republican, and a devoted admirer of Stanford and its football team. Leonard was walking home from work one day when a modest Ford pulled up and the man at the wheel offered him a ride. That man was Harry Bridges. Today, the union leader would be in the back seat of a limo and, even if he happened to recognize one of his members waiting for a bus or trudging homeward, it is highly unlikely he’d order his non-union driver to stop for the guy to offer him a ride.)

George must have known Luke Anson ‘Royal’ Hinman, another radical who died in Covelo at age 88. Born in Sheridan, Placer County, Hinman worked as a laborer before he became active in the early 1930s in a branch of the John Reed Club, a communist cultural group. He then became an organizer in a tough campaign to unionize California cannery and agricultural workers, an effort that continues today. In 1937, Hinman went to Spain as a volunteer with the International Brigades, which were recruited to aid the elected left-wing government of the Spanish Republic against a fascist uprising that began in 1936. Hinman served in the Spanish Popular Army until the withdrawal of all foreign fighters in 1938. His combat experience included the brutal battle of Teruel, where many American volunteers were killed. Hinman was cited for bravery and was offered a lieutenant’s commission, which he declined, although he was made a sergeant and attached to the battalion staff. His commitment to the forces of anti-fascist resistance remained for him the high point of his life.

Back from Spain, Hinman returned to the fields as an organizer for the old United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America. He was arrested in 1939 for picketing during a tumultuous strike of pear and nectarine pickers against a Marysville subsidiary of the DiGiorgio Corporation. Demonstrations and further picketing led to mass arrests, and the strike became a cause celebre.

Hinman was held in jail for a week before he was convicted under the now-defunct anti-picketing law, but was eventually pardoned. He later worked for the federal Farm Security Administration and then joined the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union as a dockworker. In 1943, he purchased land in Covelo, moved there and went to work at the sawmill that eventually became part of Louisiana-Pacific Corporation. Hinman retired from the mill in 1970. Covelo seemed completely unaware that an anti-fascist hero had lived and died there.

There was never much radical activity in Mendocino County until the Earth First! period of 1988-1995. That agitation against the outside timber corporations then dominant in the County was led by Judi Bari, a red diaper baby from Silver Springs, Maryland, and the sister of New York Times’ science writer, Gina Kolata. The original Wobblies had agitated some in the woods and the mills of the Northcoast but were never as influential in Mendocino County as they were farther north in Oregon and Washington. There was, though, a left radical presence in Eureka and Arcata from early in the century; Mickey Lima, a well-known communist, was born and raised in Arcata.

There have always been radicals stuck away in the great vastness north of the Golden Gate Bridge, real ones, too, many of whom supported the Bari-led Redwood Summer demonstrations against corporate timber in 1990.

By the beginning of the 20th century, there were Red Finns and White Finns in Fort Bragg. Immigrant woodsmen. As they did up and down the Pacific Coast, the two starkly opposed politically-based communities maintained separate social halls and a chill social distance as well, so chill they often suspected each other of not responding to fires and other catastrophes affecting their enemy Finns.

Fort Bragg’s left Finns maintained a Comrade’s Club (and hall) for years, well into the 1920s, as did the Finns of Astoria, Oregon, home of two competing Finnish language newspapers serving each community — one paper for the left Finns, one for the right Finns. The editors of these publications were brought over from the mother country and could be depended on to fan the flames whose fires had been set in Finland. The competing newspapers were distributed to the Finn communities from San Francisco to Seattle,

One of the saddest pictures one will ever see is a photo of a group of jubilant 1917 Red Finns departing Noyo Harbor in a small sea-going ship they’d built themselves. They’re waving goodbye to capitalism, sailing back to Finland and the Russian Revolution where most of them would disappear into labor camps or be executed simply because they’d lived a few years in America. A few Finns made it back to Astoria after bitter sojourns in Finland and Russia, but none made it back to Fort Bragg.

In 1946, there was a bitter, year-long strike at the Fort Bragg mill. A few communists were active in it, and the owners of the mill, the Johnson family, eventually settled, mostly on the strikers’ terms.

“We dreamed when we were young. We used to talk about working the woods like a big co-op. No bosses, no owners. We'd cut the trees down and mill them ourselves and sell the lumber to people to build their houses,” summed up Oscar Erickson of Fort Bragg, union organizer, who was acquitted of charges of criminal syndicalism, 1946.

And there was us — the back-to-the-landers, the hippies, the white Indians, the dreamers of rustic peace, the estranged liberals, the defeated radicals.