The Floodgate, almost 50 years ago…Open Every Day [1975]

Floodgate, like history, is Open Every Day. From anywhere in the Valley, you go “down to Floodgate.” Whether you need something as prosaic as flypaper or sublime as white redwood, chances are good you'll leave with what you came after. If you're a highway tripper, Floodgate will furnish licenses for fish and game, gas, ice, the coldest beer to go, unfailing courtesy. If you're a local woodsman in a hurry, short order saw repair's a specialty. If you're Spanish-speaking, you'll find your lingo hilariously attempted, and Mexican staples handy. If you're sick or hurt, you'll get first aid. If you're a child, you'll be received as a favored creature. If you need credit, that’s most likely okay. If you’re a loudmouth or a deadbeat, you'll be given no encouragement, and if you’re selling something silly, you'll get the sad-eyed word that the boss, who handles that kind of thing, is vacationing in South America. And if you're sick to death of the world that's full of 7-11 stores, Safeways, and suburban cocktail lounges — and if you have the inclination, and patience, and a good ear — Floodgate makes history, fresh every day. 

The market-and-gathering place has been a long-lived institution, dating in western civilization from the Greek agora and the Roman forum, and presenting itself in American experience as the general store. The classic snack at Floodgate is a Coors draft and a Hot Stick; in other times and places, the fare has been sarsaparilla, or vanilla coke, or hard cider and soda crackers, or RC and Moon Pie, and people of other accents and occupations have gathered to refresh themselves. But whatever the style, the old-fashioned general store has served an enduring social purpose wherever rural communities have come to life. 

And in the fortunate backwater of Navarro, in 1955 — just when much of the rest of America was poised to dive down the tubes of progress, prosperity, and glassy-eyed shopping centers — the Floodgate Store opened its doors, on hinges coming all the way from Brady, Texas. The building wasn't old — it was built during what some old-timers are beginning to call “the first de-pression” — and the proprietors weren't descendants of first Anderson Valley settlers, but over the years Floodgate has become an important place in the deep end of the valley, a social center for the community from Mill Creek to the North Fork. 

Floodgate is one of the all-time-great general stores. With dignity, warmth, and endless good humor, Sam and Margeurite Avery preside over the pumps, the groceries, the cold Coors kegs, play host to public life. They provide a meeting ground for hippies, little old ladies, old-time ranchers and woodsmen, newcomers of all kinds, and various animals including the late bear Tommy and Missy the dog. 

Floodgate's a place where stories are swapped, where the news of the day may be the northern lights of Iceland during the second World War, or Sally the donkey cadging ice cream 15 years ago, or a fish caught yesterday, or the story of the man who blew up his watch one New Year's Eve. Bill Owens might be singing ‘Wabash Cannonball’ by the candlelight of a power failure, or someone might be remembering a day when Loren Bloyd played concertina, and Sam jews harp, or how the pumps were cranked by hand “before the electric came in.” Angelique Isbell might be there, or someone who remembers when Bernard Avery was a baby. And if the story's well-told, a child or other newcomer may go home feeling that he knew Walter Gschwend, or saw the glow of the great Comptche fire, or built the bed for the biggest tree. “I’ve thought of that a thousand times,” someone will say, and there's Harvey Morris falling into the Mill Creek burner, scooting across the fire on a sappy board, escaping to tell the tale. 

You almost remember horseman Frank Roux backing his new pickup over the edge of the Navarro dump, yelling “Whoa! Whoa!” all the way down, and riding it up again. 

Floodgate's a place for the quick and the memorable dead. 

Sam and Margeurite are rooted like redwoods by now. And they have stories, too: 

While Floodgate was being built (among the builders were Carl Schmidt and John Smith; early proprietors were John and Julia Smith (nee Schmidt), Richie Owens, Curtis Randall, and Byron Graham, Margeurite Steyer, daughter of a French civil servant, was a young woman in the village of Longeville, in the Lorraine. As a youngster, developing a nose for trouble, she and her brothers earned spending money as they walked the gas-lit streets four miles to school, sniffing out leaks for the utility company. 

Always a good businesswoman, Margeurite went to school at night while she worked for ten years as a buyer of general merchandise for the firm Maison Sibille, until war with Germany intervened. From 1939 until the end of the war, staying alive and fed was everyone's chief pursuit. After their home was cut off by fighting, Margeurite and her brother Bernard smuggled food in from a relative's farm. They went on foot or by bicycle, fooling the German soldiers however they could. Bernard, a bright 15 at the time, once saluted a German patrol with a hearty "Heil Hitler!" in order to bring home the bacon. The currency of the time was butter, milk, meat, eggs — “Your money,” Margeurite recalls, “etait no good: you could not buy anything…” When the hospital ran out of food, she and her brother fished the frozen Moselle with hand grenades. In a shrewd trade, happily remembered; she saved her brother Joseph from being drafted into the German army. (“They take all the French boys to fight in Russia, and all the boys are die,” she remembers.) With the help of her best friend — who would later make her wedding veil — Margeurite bribed a German officer with ham, and Joseph stayed home. “He do not get much ham, either! I could have give much more!” She laughs; that's how it was. Coming up from the cellar after an air raid to find the roof gone from the house, she recalls that “we are not pay much attention — heck, we are laughing! What you want do? Not much you can do!” More laughter. 

All the same, they were glad to see the Americans come: “If les Americains avez do not come, I don't know what we are do — just die, you know. People who do not like the American people really have no sense. They might not help too much; They probably the same thing do in Viet Nam, that might be why we are down like this today.” 

Marguerite met Sam in January of 1945, and they married in August. In April of 1946 the English boat St. Paula, carrying a hundred war brides, sailed, from Le Havre to New York; the St. Paula was small, the weather was rough, and the crossing took nine days — “C’etait bad,” Margeurite remembers. She hasn't been back since then, but hopes before too long to visit her brothers in Dijon and Perpignan, and her sister in Algeria. 

Early photos show Margeurite with dark hair, a big square-jawed woman, flamboyantly lovely. Attractive now in a more delicate way, her fine blue eyes don't miss much. Now she hefts beer kegs, or knits for her three grandchildren — whatever needs doing — and seems unimpressed by her strengths and accomplishments. “Each one got to do the best he can,” she says, “it's the only way to do.” 

* * *

Samuel John Avery, meanwhile, (“Where am I from? Why, Floodgate Store!”) is the son of a Texas railroad man. He has a twin sister, Annie Wheatley, back in Brady. Sam was an enterprising recruit in the three C's — “I exaggerated a little to get into the the army,” he chuckles — building roads and bridges in the Big Bend country, 135 miles from town, town being Alpine, Texas. They built “the largest grand national park in the world. I'm going by there to see it again,” he says. 

Passing up a coyote-keeping hermit's invitation to help uncover hidden treasure on the Rio Grande, he heeded his father's advice to “save your money while you're young.” To supplement his monthly pay of $36, he took in laundry, stashing the money deep in the bank. (“Oh, the government's done plenty for me — gave me soap for a year and a half, and hot water to wash the clothes.”) He did all kinds of work before the war. “”I never was broke in my life, but I always worked hard. Trucking, ranching, railroad work, baling hay for 15¢ cents a ton. He later saved enough while earning 35¢ an hour to buy a new Dodge truck, sang with his cousin, rode across the country on a freight train (“It wasn't too much fun, you'd freeze to death in the night-time.”), became a woodsman, and had many adventures. He developed the philosophical attitude that “When the going gets rough, you've gotta go with it; when things get really bad, it's just getting right.” 

Sam went to war on the Queen Mary, and was overseas for more than three years with the 347th Army Engineers — building bridges again, and also blowing them up. He saw England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, Belgium (he was in the Battle of the Bulge), and Russia. In a photo of the time, he appears as a dark Charlton Heston, a helmeted and handsome Yank. “We built lots of bridges,” he says, “and we built some graveyards, too.” 

After the war the Averys moved to Greenwood Ridge, renting the schoolhouse for $10 a month and running a split stuff operation on the 40 acres (now Rocky Bluff Ranch) Sam had bought from John Brown (Eileen Pronsolino's father). They also lived in the “honeymoon cabin” Sam had built with only a pruning saw and a ballpeen hammer for tools. (When he finished the building, he threw the hammer up onto the roof, and says “It’s probably still up there.") 

Margeurite couldn't speak English, and says Sam’s French was “not very much, we just guessed.” Sometimes Mrs. Gowan, Margeurite Gowan, who spoke French, would visit, but most of the time Margeurite did cooking and washing for the loggers, helped load the truck, took care of baby Bernard, and tried to keep up with Sam. 

Sam, for his part, was a wild and woolly woodsman in his younger days. Nowadays he's a moderate tippler of Mug Root Beer, but he and Margeurite agree that he took an enthusiastic part in the most outrageous antics of the boom time, playing as hard as he worked, a tough logger helling around the Valley. 

Bernard's sister Anna was born in Sonoma, where the family lived for a couple of years after they finished logging and sold the place on Greenwood Road. Sam worked in the hay and grain business there, but missed the woods and didn't care for the uptown pace, in which most business was transacted in bars. “I got tired of drinking,” he says, “and moved up here to get away from it.”

Back in the Vallev, more hard work followed: Sam and Margeurite leased the Masonito Camp, taking on 14 cabins and several trailers full of loggers. For the next three years, Margeurite cooked three meals a day for 30 men, did their laundry, and took care of the kids. "And me,” adds Sam. “Ha!” she laughs, “I was the only one working over there!” Sam worked both in the woods and in the camp, and decided to quit in 1954, he says, “because Anna and Bernard were stealing my beer.” 

They spent six months in Texas, then returned to the Valley. And there was Floodgate Store: closed and empty, cold, quiet, waiting to fulfill its destiny. 

And the rest, like they say, is history: the brass balances belonged to Sam's grandfather, who had the first grocery store on Lake Worth in Texas. The log-train whistle was last in service at Philbrick's Mill; the yarder whistle's local, and the velvet antlers. Bill Witherell made the redwood burl pipe. John Christianson, a Finnish split-maker, made the spoons over the storeroom door; the coffee grinder belonged to Grandma Gschwend. The silver bar's the brake key for the logging train that ran from Mill Creek to Navarro. The paintings were done by Harry Conway — or Cornwell Craigo, the name he prefers — a World War I vet now of Toronto, Ohio, who used to live in the old Bennett place. And the hornet's nest was given to Margeurite by Monty Bloyd, who — at the age of 86 — picked it out of a tree. 

Among the missing, but well remembered, is “Haystack,” the giant hand-hewn redwood logger dressed in $16 dashboard pants, balancing a hay bale overhead. He used to stand over by the drag saw, but is said to have met with foul play. A floodgate tames the river, and history focuses the flood of time — recalls, records, commemorates, celebrates or passes over the events of daily life, fits everyday living carefully into the patterns of distance and time, snags the here and now against the long ago and far away, with no gaps, and no pieces left over.