The Day They Burned The Apple Trees

“Why it's positively Vesuvian out there!” exclaimed a nicely dressed forty-ish woman waiting at the counter of Café Glad in Boonville for the decaf latte she'd just ordered. “Where on earth is all this smoke coming from?”

“The wineries are burning apple trees,” another customer volunteered.

“Why would a winery burn apple trees?” Ms. Vesuvian asked.

“To clear old orchards for grapevines,” explained the customer, a Boonville man who stood looking out Glad’s big windows at the thickening gray pall descending on 9 a.m. Anderson Valley, ashes speckling the vehicles parked outside.

“Oh my,” Ms. Vesuvian, exclaimed. “I hope it’s a burn day.”

“I hope it’s not the end of the world,” the Boonville man said.

By 10am Octopus (Tarwater) Hill was not visible from Highway 128. Peachland Road had disappeared. Highway 128 looked like the down ramp to Hades.

“What the hell's going on?” a caller demanded of the local newspaper.

Another sputtered, “It's got to be those winery bastards, right?”

Sort of, as blame began to be portioned out by mid-afternoon and continued to be portioned out a week later.

There was so much smoke from that dark non-sanctioned Ash Wednesday in May of 2000, and it was so dense, that from about ten until noon, Anderson Valley did seem end-of-the-world-ish or “Vesuvian,” an unharmonic convergence of decafs, uncontrolled controlled burns, old apples for new grapes, smoke, fire, and fear.

The AVA’s Major Scaramella happened to be returning from a Willits print run that morning. He remembers that as he was coming down from the ridgeline into the Valley he couldn’t see anything but smoke blanketing the entire Valley. “I was reminded of the times I used to drive over the Grapevine down into the Los Angeles basin on bad smog days in the 60s,” said Scaramella. 

There were three burn sites responsible for the great smoke out. One was a controlled burn up on Signal Ridge that veered out of control and had to be tamed by the California Department of Forestry. The Signal Ridge fire, however, was the smallest contributor to Big Smoke Day. George Bergner at the Philo end of Anderson Valley Way, had ignited 35 large piles of wet apple trees, all of them freshly bulldozed into gnarled heaps and replete, it was said, with plastic irrigation pipe. Nearer to Boonville, at the old Schoenahl Ranch, Norman Kobler, the 33-year-old vineyard manager for Welch Vineyards based in Potter Valley, had ignited some 30 more piles of apple trees, which he'd massed for immolation last September.

The old apple trees didn’t want to go. If they could talk they'd say that they'd produced a versatile and valuable food for more than a hundred years, that there are truly old apple orchards all over Mendocino County planted by the first settlers still working their magic, that it is a sin to heedlessly pile us up and burn us as if we'd been of no use. The trees went down hard, burning long and slow, emitting hours of final, smoky sighs. 

Kobler, the son of legendary Philo winemakers Hans and Theresia Kobler, works for Welch Vineyards but was burning the apple trees for the parcel's new owners, Cakebread Winery of the Napa Valley. Kobler's apple trees were drier than Bergner's trees because Kobler’s trees had been down for seven months, but between the two burns, only a mile from one another, so much smoke arose that much of Anderson Valley became a don't go outside zone for four hours.

Norman Kobler became a walking act of contrition in the next few days. He started saying sorry as soon as he started talking about Wednesday’s smoke.

“I apologize to everyone,” the young Valley native said Friday. “I did not mean for it to happen. I live here in The Valley too, and I'm not a guy who enjoys making trouble.”

He is sorry, too. Sorry but confused. Kobler had his paperwork in perfect order. He had his burn permits and he had a burn day, but he could be burned himself for a thousand dollars in fines. In theory. Rules for wineries are waived.

So what happened? A big accident happened. Unpredicted, unforeseeable weather happened. Bureaucratic inattention happened. 65 piles of burning apple trees and an unprecedented smoke therefrom happened, and Anderson Valley wanted to know who was responsible.

“When I started the fires that morning,” Kobler began, “everything looked fine. The smoke went up to the ridgetops and headed toward the Coast like it is supposed to do, so I continued to burn. But when I had all my piles lit the wind switched, and that's where the whole problem started.”

Kobler said he'd burned two piles of trees the previous day without any of the smoke lingering anywhere near The Valley floor. And up until about 9am on Apple Ash Wednesday, the smoke from his and Bergner's fires went up and outtahere, wafting away on the Pacific-bound breezes blowing west high above Anderson Valley’s unsullied air.

“But suddenly,” Kobler says, remorse audible in his voice, “the winds changed, and the smoke blew back down into The Valley.”

But it was a burn day, and Norman Kobler had his permits. Ditto for George Bergner a mile down the road. Until the winds changed and the apple smoke returned as if for a final pass through The Valley where they'd thrived for half a century, it was a perfectly clear day, not a cloud in the sky, not so much as a hint of an hazardous element in our ocean-scrubbed air.

And then a choking sky collapsed on The Valley's unprepared head.

Irate motorists swerved in off 128 to berate Greg Ludwig at his new nursery at the old Tin Man apple stand, assuming that he was doing the burning across the road. Someone called from the Elementary School to inform the hapless Kobler, “Thanks to you the kids have to stay in for recess.” More than one worried Boonville senior got in his car and headed for Ukiah where air quality is often, well, think LA Basin and repeat after me, “From out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Even the local bliss ninnies were upset. “Why me?” blurted a male-type purple person to no one in particular at Boont Berry Farm, as if The Big Smoke had been aimed specifically at him.

The only comment even approaching approval for The Big Smoke came from an old timer who growled, “This is an agricultural area, for cryin' out loud. What do people expect?”

Not to be asphyxiated by the wine industry when they step out of doors would seem to be a modest enough expectation and may, perhaps, even represent a rare local consensus.

Phil Tow was the personable boss at Air Quality Management District, Ukiah, and a former teacher at the Anderson Valley Elementary School. The elasticity of Tow's personable-ness got a vigorous stretching last Wednesday.

“I'm holding my head very low today,” Tow said. “Let me put it this way, complaints about the smoke in Boonville on Wednesday were voluminous and completely justified.”

Tow, forthrightly claiming his share of the responsibility for the fiasco, recalls The Big Smoke as he experienced it.

“By the time we got the fifth complaint, Diana Barker, one of my investigators, was heading out the door for Boonville. By the time we got the sixth complaint, I said to myself, ‘I've got to see this for myself,’ and we both were out the door and headed for Boonville.”

Arriving in Anderson Valley at the junction of the Ukiah Road and Highway 128 about 11 a.m., Tow and Ms. Barker promptly determined that visibility on the Valley floor was an alarming “just over a mile.” And they got here late. If they'd arrived at 10 when the smoke seemed to have achieved peak density, visibility would have been about a half-mile between Boonville and Philo.

Mr. Tow wasn't about to quibble. Mile or half-mile, the smoke was bad.

“What we had,” Tow said with a refreshingly unbureaucratic candor, “was a total failure of the whole program top to bottom, and since I'm in charge of air quality for Mendocino County the failure is mine and I accept responsibility for it. But,” Tow added, “we have initiated an enforcement action against two people over there who did the burning.”

The two people are the repentant Norman Kobler and, so far as anyone is aware, an unrepentant George Bergner.

“You might have a permit,” explains Tow, “and you might have a burn day, but you still can't smoke out your neighbor. We depend on the good judgment of the people doing the burning. The ultimate responsibility lies with the people holding the matches.”

Tow conceded that his 7-person office had not noted that two large burns were planned for the same day. He also conceded that the boys holding the matches last Wednesday could not have anticipated the unexpected temperature inversions that prevented the smoke from blowing away to the west, as everyone had anticipated, which was why last Wednesday was a Burn Day in the first place.

“We didn't co-ordinate the burn with them,” Tow admits. “We should have had a person over there to monitor things.”

The “things” an on-site Air Quality professional might have insisted upon was increased applications of the diesel fuel ag burn piles are doused with to get them to burn fast, and maybe even the deployment of a tractor to drive over the smoldering piles to break them down into faster burning chunks.

But Tow said he views enforcement more as “an education process” than “simply taking money out of someone's pocket.” He said Air Quality “has already issued violation notices” that “will be followed by letters to Bergner and Kobler explaining exactly which rules they violated. “But,” Tow emphasized, “a monetary penalty will definitely be assessed.”

By 2 p.m. The Big Smoke was over.

Kobler, apologetic as he is for his role in The Big Smoke, is nevertheless perplexed.

“I've been cited by Air Quality for creating a public nuisance, but I'm not a weatherman. They said I should have known there was an inversion layer and that the smoke was coming back into The Valley. I try to obey all the rules, but everything went wrong that day. It was terrible. I thought I'd done everything right. I had my perimeters disked, I had water ready. Colin Wilson (Boonville's fire chief) came over in the morning about 8 and said it looked fine to him. But then the winds shifted and….”