A Night To Remember

HarvestFest 2007 at Navarro the late Fall night in 2007 was a huge success. The organizational abilities of Dave Evans, proprietor of the Navarro Store, and co-organizer, Megan Nelligan, in not only attracting big name entertainers to a most improbable rural venue — the bend in the redwoods called Navarro — they managed to do it on the edge of the rainy season without calling down the rain gods for daring. Not a cloud in the skies after a 75-degree late October day.

When I parked just after dark at Chris and Judy Isbell’s house a quarter mile from event headquarters at the Navarro Store, I could hear the music and smell the barbecue. The evening’s sudden chill had just begun to insinuate itself when two women clattered by in an old Mercedes, the lady in the passenger seat yelling at me from somewhere on the other side of Whisky River, “Don’t let the weed eat ya, big boy.” In fact, I had expected marijuana in all its manifestations, from Pebs Trippet, aka Granny Pot Seed, to caroming toddlers in tie-dye, but the crowd seemed comprised of equal parts juicers and Pepsi-Lite senior citizens.

HarvestFest was at least partly convened to celebrate the Mendocino Medical Marijuana Advisory Board (MMMAB) for its work in passing into local law Mendocino County’s very own decriminalization, the 25-plant plus two processed pounds measure, more dope than the most determined stoner could smoke in a year, so much dope per household that it took non-stoners a month to re-group to demand the ordinance either be repealed or modified to an equivalently unworkable twenty-five plants per parcel. Or simply remained illegal.

There was one local pending pot prosecution and maybe a couple more being being prepared in the DA's office while the Robinson Creek watershed seemed on the verge of vigilantism if the transient pot farmers who “have taken over our neighborhood” aren’t expelled. The reality was that in 2007 only the feds were seriously busting Mendo pot ops, and it had remained to be seen if any of those busts that summer would be prosecuted at the federal level.

The harvest having been reaped, and that harvest being valued in the urban markets at the now unheard of price of somewhere between $2500 and $3500 a pound tax-free because Mendo dope had an active stoner quotient great enough to keep a person stupid and silly for five hours per blunt in a country where millions of people feel it necessary to pass at least some of their waking hours stupid and silly. The jubilation that night that this magic weed could generate so much cash was so prevalent that harvestfests were breaking out all over Northern California. There had been two fests and a dance in Anderson Valley alone that year.

But the best one was at Navarro, and it was only partly devoted to a celebration of recent developments in cannabis regulation. Most people were there for the music and the barbecue.

The weed advocates said de facto local legalization meant a giant step forward for America because now Mendocino County could supply millions of sick people who otherwise must break the law to get their medicine. Breaking the pot laws never deterred anybody from pursuing their drug, and it certainly hadn’t stopped anybody from planting it in blatant corn field quantities all over Mendocino County, and who would go on planting marijuana everywhere so long as it brought so much cash money.

The issue remained debatable, of course, but I can honestly say from my direct experience of habitual pot smokers is that they range from a little bit wacky to highly dysfunctional and, in extreme cases, violently paranoid. I don’t know a single heavy smoker who, as they say, “has it together.” If an irrefutable study appears tomorrow that says there’s a direct link between heavy pot smoking and 5150, I’d say, “Yep. I know a bunch of ‘em. Bring the nets, though. They tend to fight.”

The med marijuana gang might want to occasionally concede the obvious — that hang nails and halitosis don’t usually get you a medical prescription. Most people with pot cards just wanted to get loaded, as do most human beings everywhere who look forward to an occasional state of altered consciousness, hence everything from booze to betel nut.

The crowd at Navarro was generally older than I expected, not that I knew what to expect. Guitar Shorty and John Lee Hooker Jr. in Navarro? At the drunk tree? At the Navarro Store where a little bell on the door would tinkle and old lady Zanoni used to come bustling out from her little apartment in the back to wait on you? The Navarro Store where one of the Lee brothers, just out of the state pen, held her up one afternoon with a gun but without a mask, and an unperturbed Old Lady Zanoni called up Deputy Squires and said, “Jimmy Lee just robbed me,” and back to the state pen went Jimmy Lee. He'd been out two whole weeks.

Navarro’s seen some sights. Back in the logging boom days from 1880 up through the 1940s the town was larger and livelier than can be imagined now. Then it slowed down. The mill closed. And the old hotels and restaurants burned, and people moved away, the drunk tree drunks got old and died, the hole-in-the-wall post office over the soda springs closed and Navarro went to sleep, and stayed asleep until Dave Evans bought the store, calling his enterprise The Navarro Redevelopment Corporation, and the town has been jumping ever since.

The music part of the 60s went right past me. I may be the only person my age in Northern California who didn’t attend at least one Bill Graham-produced concert. Pre-hippie, I did once see Miss Peggy Lee at the Masonic Auditorium because a friend had tickets and insisted I go with her. That same year at that same venue I paid my way in to hear James Baldwin speak, and I’m still glad I did because he was the best speaker I’d seen and heard at the stage of my life's odd trajectory. He said there would be fires next time and, sure enough, there were. And are. The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane are still just names to me, and all I know about blues comes from the music of Charlie Musselwhite, which I like very much but never would have known about if I hadn’t happened to meet him at a place even more improbable than a blues night at Navarro.

So I didn’t stay long at HarvestFest that night.

I wanted to get back to Boonville for the soccer play-off game, Boonville versus Branson.

For many years beginning back in the 19th century Branson was a private school for about 200 very wealthy girls. It’s still located in Ross, Marin County, a community which, for years, boasted the highest per capita income of any zip code in America. The famous chef, Julia Child, was a Branson grad. The school used to be called The Catherine Branson School for Girls. The girls were taught the basics of language and math and how to talk without beginning or ending their sentences with prepositions and without talking through their noses, and they certainly learned how to talk without all the affected, neurotic verbal fads inflicted on girls these days by television and fashion.

Of course affectations were different then, but maybe not as annoying. The Branson girls, except for Julia who always did talk like she was being strangled, went out and married rich boys from rich colleges they met at a debutante balls and went on to live the lives of interior desperation most people lived until the beatniks came along and liberated everyone except the Mormons.

Branson went co-ed around the time the beatniks deteriorated into hippies and the school went on to become a high school sports power, thus enraging sports fans throughout the Bay Area because Branson was soon trouncing all the big public schools in sports like basketball and soccer. Branson says it doesn’t recruit athletes, implying that rich kids had suddenly got real good at basketball. It’s possible, of course, because any high school basketball team that plays good defense can beat good teams that don’t play much defense. Before the advent of the shot clock Branson was beating big schools by scores of 20-14, which sent Bay Area sports fans into full rage mode.

Boonville has its share of rich people, some of them very rich, but their children are raised and schooled elsewhere, making our little society here very definitely a two-tier affair. The rich were never much for public schools, or public anything. “We don’t want just any old body getting into the family vault,” the thinking goes, so they pretty much stick to each other when it comes to mating rituals. Anderson Valley’s per capita wealth is hard to estimate because some of our permanent residents have huge incomes while lots more barely keep a leaky roof over their heads. This two-tiered-ness, also known as the class system we are all are taught to at least pretend doesn’t exist, makes everyone want to beat the rich kid schools.

Which our Boonville proles nearly did Saturday night. Branson’s soccer camps, ski vacations and perfect teeth were lucky to escape, 2-1. Their first five, Coach Steve Sparks told me, were considered the best in California, but Boonville’s first five took the big boys back to school, and had them mostly on the defensive.

As the visitors from Marin struggled to overcome the smaller, quicker Boonville team under the Fairgrounds lights, a large crowd chanted in Spanish, “Beat those blue-eyed beasts all the way back down to San Rafael.” Or something like that. (I don’t speak Spanish.) The Branson boys did seem big, but then most young people seem to be bigger and wider these days, if not more, ah, more, uh, more engaging, shall we say. The young 'uns seem generally to lack presence, as my grandmother described the good manners that went mostly extinct among the young in 1967, and we’ll leave it at that, although we all know our battered country has undergone a steady dumbification over the past three decades as personified by our president at the time, certainly a man suited to the zeitgeist but unthinkable in any other.

The Branson boys were a head taller than our boys who weren’t in the least intimidated by the size difference and, it seemed to me, had the better of Branson most of the game, forcing the visitors into two overtimes and then into the high drama of deciding the match by each team’s five shots from a mere 12 yards out, meaning the goal keeper essentially has to guess which way the kicker is going to boot the ball and hope he’s quick enough to get there to block the ball. It’s impossible, like a bull fighter facing a bull head-on without a sword or even a cape.

Our goalie, Eddie Reynoso, laughed as he prepared to fend off Branson’s last kicks when a little kid, one of many hanging every which way from the railing like bats, asked him, “Eddie? Eddie? You want a drink of water first?”

Branson booted four balls into the net, we booted three, and Branson was the winner, and the big boys with perfect teeth ran out onto the field and threw themselves into a big celebratory pile, while the thousands of us Boonville people, a little sad, but a little exhilarated too from having come so far and so close to beating the best team in all of NorCal.