Chapter Two: Rainbow Finds A Home In The Valley

To begin, let me report that after submitting the previous Rainbow story to the Advertiser, it occurred to me that I had not asked the interviewee the origins of his pseudonymous moniker. One windless spring day over half a century ago “Rob” and a bunch of Berkeley friends were enjoying mescaline up on Grizzly Peak’s Tilden Park above the UC campus. Rob was lying on his back at the base of a large boulder wriggling in ecstasy at a drove of tiny rainbows flowing across the rock. Part of the ecstasy included seeing his nearby companion writhing as ecstatically as he was. “Aha, a great shared hallucination.” But then with disappointment he noticed that some of the rainbows were also flowing across his personal gemstone wrist bracelet; nope, not a shared vision. But his nearby writhing friend comforted Rob with, “it’s cool, man, you’re the rainbow maker.”

1972 found Rainbow ensconced in a new neighborhood centered around the old mill flat where Mountain View Road crosses Rancheria Creek, about five miles west of Boonville. “The Bear Tribe’s,” members included “Cloud,” formerly Brad Moss, a founder of the Kate Wolf music festival, “Crazy Wolf,” who allegedly crashed a hippie Seder and became Elijah for a night, River Jeff and Betty Boop, Kathy Macdonald, still in the Valley, Gail Deutsch, later a Buddhist monk, and Doc, a veteran Vietnam War medic who also shared his midwife skills with mothers and their kids around The Valley.

Rainbow reports that he and his Tribal peers rarely went to town back then, they were afraid their various antiquated cars and trucks would break down on Mountain View before reaching Boonville; and they felt treated like “outsiders” by the local “straight” culture. One time in town Rainbow was told. “It’ll be ten years before you’re not a ‘newcomer,’ and you’ll never be an ‘oldtimer’.”

But after some five years of survival isolation at the millsite, Rainbow began cautiously coming down to town in Boonville. The issue was money; he needed an income to help support his communal life style. He and his comrades had in previous summers driven all the way to Winters and even Vacaville to pick apricots, apples, pears and plums. During the harvest season, which began in mid-June for Winters apricots, they would camp in an orchard in a tipi with their communal goat, “Tootie” who provided fresh milk. Along with their modest wages, they would also harvest some of the fruit to can and dry for winter home consumption.

The first Anderson Valley employment Rainbow found was at a vineyard north of downtown Boonville, probably the B.J. Carney Pole Company place, now part of Roederer Estate’s empire. The vineyard crew was all Mexican immigrants speaking no English… And Rainbow.

The crew boss, Balthazar, did speak English and also became Rainbow’s mentor in the craft of ditch-digging. Rainbow had never handled a trenching shovel in his previous lives, and Balthazar taught him how to power the tool efficiently to ditch trenches for the vineyard irrigation system. Your reporter can personally attest that ditch-digging for eight hours on a hot day in May isn’t the most interesting kind of ag labor, and Boonville typically is seven degrees warmer than my vineyard site in Navarro.

So after a couple of months of ag labor, Rainbow found a more rewarding job that also shaped his professional career. Home building contractor John Burroughs hired Rainbow as a journeyman carpenter. John had a John Dewey approach to coaching an apprentice, no lecturing, just grab a hammer and a nail and sink it, you’ll learn by trial and error. And if you asked, he’d give you some retrospective advice about improving your work. I worked for John on a number of home building and restoration projects on my place and personally prefer that trial-and-error approach to learning any new manual skill.

John Burroughs was not afraid to hire “hippies” as part of his construction crew, and on the job Rainbow began making friends with back-to-the-landers from around The Valley. Among his new friends were, for example, Hammond Hemble who had migrated to California around the same time as Rainbow from a middle class family in Saluda, South Carolina and ended up in Anderson Valley via the Haight-Ashbury.

Like Rainbow, Hammond was also a skilled carpenter/home builder who while working for Burroughs also took on other construction jobs around The Valley. Rainbow and Hammond became a team. A very memorable Team job was for Eddy Carsey: “Eddy had bought 300 acres on Greenwood Road (Philo) across from the Margaret LeVann’s Hagemann Ranch, the acreage surveyed by Valley Old-Timer and timber scaler Jack June. Hammond had become a licensed contractor and Eddy had the plans and he picked a spot for a two story, two bedroom house. And so they went to work. The crew had the home framed and sided when these guys from PG&E with maps and compasses showed up surveying for the spur line to bring electricity to the new home. According to their maps they said the construction was on someone else’s property.

PG&E was right, though Eddy tried all kinds of rebuttals on them. Finally he and the construction crew chainsawed the house into moveable pieces and hauled it down the road where Eddy had a smaller property and where Hammond and Rainbow got to build the house for a second time.

Not long after completion of the Carsey home, Hammond, his wife Tracy, and son Merlin, found themselves discouraged by the overcrowded winery and vineyard-dominated Valley culture and headed north, ending up building and living on a houseboat, the largest most elegant one on Lake Shasta.

As he began to spend more time in the Anderson Valley community, Rainbow also found himself embarked on another mission important to his ambition to live successfully in a small rural agricultural community. That is, to find a surrogate father to educate him in the skills and behavior that would allow him live comfortably in what he still considered a “redneck” environment. Adrian Newton was a retired logger, born in 1903, at Melbourne Station along the Albion Branch of the Northwest Pacific railroad. Adrian had moved to Boonville when the Melbourne mill shut down in the 1950s and lived in a small cottage on Lambert Lane.

Rainbow’s description of Adrian’s interest in knowing and tutoring him reminded me of a similar experience I had with my mentor about country living on the land skills, Bill Witherell, the neighbor/uncle-figure I wrote stories about several years ago. My sense is that both my mentor Bill and Adrian enjoyed being a pedagogical father figure and through engagement with a young “hippie” could learn something about the urban, middle class world Rainbow and I had migrated from to Anderson Valley.

And so Adrian became friends with Rainbow and other longhairs, boys and girls. Rainbow reports Adrian became a confessor and counselor to them all, often about the boy- and girlfriend problems. For Rainbow he became more, a “surrogate father figure” in lieu of the absent aloof Dad he grew up around until his dad passed.

More important though were the craft skills Adrian taught Rainbow. Most rewarding, for example, he showed Rainbow how to make “split stuff” out of old growth redwood salvage logs that used to lie along the streams and logging roads all over Anderson Valley. On a day’s expedition they might drive out along Rancheria Creek, Adrian providing the choker, wedges, hatchets and mauls to make a finished product, Rainbow provided the labor dragging a chunk of tree out of a stream, up onto a flat spot, where Adrian would teach him how to make grape stakes or fence posts.

I know from experience as Bill Witherell’s student that making splitstuff was a fun, gratifying activity that made more money when you sold the finished product than picking fruit or grapes would, and made me feel more like a skilled- rather than a mass-production woodsworker.

In the late 1970s, Rainbow and a group of his theatrically inspired friends around the Valley began to imagine staging a public “clown show” featuring a band, songs, magic, skits and so forth. In fact they had already done some of their acts at kid’s birthday parties, and other private events. They had also arranged some public events in places like the Fairgrounds Apple Hall, the Portuguese Hall in Mendocino and at the Sonoma County fairgrounds in Santa Rosa.

Besides Rainbow, the troupe included Doc, the Vietnam War veteran medic, back in The Valley from working professionally with travelling circuses all over America; Henry Hill, Professor Dubious with his squirrel-tailed false mustache, a prestidigitationally talented magician; Henry’s partner, Lady Rainbow, the Queen of Mystery, dancing gracefully/wildly with Jabrowski, a puppet, billed as the world’s greatest dancer.

Lynne Archambault was “Polka Dot,” the group’s musician, playing either keyboard or accordion, slide whistle and kazoo. The rest of the ensemble included a varying cast of characters according to who wandered into rehearsals. The troupe named itself One Less Clown.

A wonderfully ideal place for a live public performance the troupe believed was the Anderson Valley Grange hall on the corner of Prather Ranch south of Philo. Built in 1939, by the 1970s the Grange building had become a social center for Valley oldtimers. Potluck dinners sponsored by elders like The Cecil Gowans, Smoky and Charmian Blattner, Alma Maddux and sister-in-law Alda Rooks, and such. A previous theaetre\troupe had staged a one-night duet one-act plays at the Grange Hall around 1980.

The old Grange building lay fore-and-aft to Highway 128. It looked a lot like an old country church with no steeple. Its exterior and interior invited an audience inside to see a show, as they featured two wide steps across the building’s front, welcoming double doors, a nave-like single room heated in winter by a huge barrel stove, and a building-wide stage proscenium arch at the rear with, I believe, a curtain.

A member of the troupe approached Grange officers to rent the building to put on a show in. One winter evening with the stove roaring One Less Clown presented a one-night performance at the Old Grange. The place was packed, the audience spilling out the front doors, and at the evening’s end the audience went wild, cheering the performers’ bows forever, then loitering in the building and out on the front steps celebrating the production for an hour.

Then one hot afternoon the summer after the show, the historic Anderson Valley Grange building burned to the ground, cause unknown. Another tragic loss of a historic Valley public venue.

(Next: The evolution of the Variety Show and reflections on Rainbow’s life in Anderson Valley so far.)