Valley People 11/16/2024

BILL KIMBERLIN: I am doing a display of some of my photos at Mosswood Cafe in downtown Boonville. Drop by if you have any interest. Here are a few of them.

JUMBO'S WIN WIN, the booming Philo restaurant, is the work of a young guy who's obviously a kind of marketing genius. Scott Baird has quickly won over Anderson Valley with the quality of his basic Americano menu, the very cool re-design of the Philo Cafe, the zippy service, and his brilliant recent public relations coup by recognizing the annual Day of the Dead with free food for all comers. Prediction: Jumbo's will become a national franchise, and us rustics will be saying, “I knew that kid when…”

BACK in the day, long before sentences began with prepositions, I lived in a residential hotel at Fifth and Brannan, $25 a week, bathroom down the hall, clean sheets and pillow cases every Tuesday, drunks and lonely old guys with interesting stories for neighbors. A gypsy lady told fortunes out of the downstairs store front while her husband hustled transmissions and other large car parts that took up the large part of their living space.

OUR BUILDING listed westward toward the Pacific. When we met on the street, instead of saying hello we leaned one way or the other, at each other, a kind of brotherhood of the off kilter, you could say.

MY GIRLFRIEND at the time visited once only to burst into tears. “This is the most depressing place I've ever been in in my life!” (In my youth, I seemed to attract the high strung types.) I was very happy at 5th and Brannan with a high-ceilinged room overlooking the intersection.

I'M NOT SAYING Frisco was a better place then because it wasn’t, what with seriously estranged citizens recreationally shooting out the top lights of the Yellow cabs, but I think it had more personality, more sense of place, now lost to high rises, gadget heads, free range mentals.

CLOVERDALE is the only Sonoma County town of the incorporated type without an “urban growth boundary.” Most Cloverdale people agree on the north boundary. It would be placed right about at Preston, or McCray Road, which is known to Anderson Valley people simply as the Boonville turnoff.

PRESTON was once a thriving little community centered upon Madam Preston, a charismatic crank whose devoted followers supported their guru by manufacturing Ms. Preston’s magic cure-alls whose contents were heavy on alcohol and cocaine depending on one’s ailment — alcohol for back pain, cocaine for energy.

THE PRESTON-ITES shipped their popular remedies all over the United States from their own railroad spur north of Cloverdale. The community of Preston died when Madam Preston, along with Madam Blavatsky and her baboon, moved on to “the next plane,” as the two mystics explained their deaths.

MOST of Preston has been destroyed — after Madam Preston they were unoccupied, then occupied by hippie squatters, then bums, then arsonists — but the few buildings that remain, still visible from Highway 101 give the passerby an idea of how beguiling the hillside village once was. Whatever else one might say about Madam Preston, she took great pains to place her cult in beautiful surroundings. If the old girl were with us today her elixers would surely be big sellers, laced with the magic herb, today’s cure-all.

SMALL TOWN IDENTITIES are slowly but surely being chipped away. We used to enjoy the tiny satisfaction of knowing that each piece of personal mail leaving Boonville, Philo, Navarro, and Yorkville was so stamped. And Navarro had its own postmasters, a series of vivid locals who made each transaction something of an adventure. Now the outgoing mail is simply marked “North Bay,” which is where? No place in particular.

WE ALL USED to vote at our local precincts, now a lot of us vote by mail, me included, and I can’t give you a good reason for signing up to vote absentee other than I wasn’t sure where I would be living in Boonville and didn’t want to miss out on being registered to vote somewhere in the vicinity of my work place.

WE USED to have a justice court where local matters were heard and judged locally, right here in the Veteran’s Building, lately our Senior Center. Anderson Valley’s disputes are now heard in Ukiah where the court people tell us it's more efficient this way. For them, it is. Add it all up and it means less community for the community.

AND YOUR LOCAL paper used to go to some trouble to decode the ballot measures so we could pass along our recommendations to our readers, enabling them to say to themselves, “The AVA’s for this so, naturally, I’m opposed.” Or vice versa. But so many people are voting early via absentee ballots that our recommendations are either too late or too early, and even more irrelevant than they were when we all voted on the same day.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS HAPPEN. One day I stepped out of my apartment front door in the City to find a plump, fifty-ish Russian woman complete with a peasant head scarf holding my neighbor’s potted flowering cactus.

Russian? I assumed so because there were lots of Russians in the Clement area at the time, and she somehow looked like the Russians I'd seen in movies. Not much of an I.D. but I went with it.

The cactus had been half-way up the stairs, placed there by my neighbor to enhance the building’s gloomy entrance. The Rooski’s back was to me because she was in the process of walking back down the stairs with the cactus, appropriating it for herself, stealing it.

I didn't know she was from the land of the bear until she started to talk, which she did, frantically, when she saw me looming above her, five stairs up from where she stood. She said she’d never seen a cactus like this one, how sweet its blossoms smelled, how beautiful it was. The reason she was now on the bottom stair with it in her hands was because she wanted “To smell da little flowers better, see dis beautiful ting better in da light.”

I felt like applauding.

As she was explaining her aborted theft she looked up at me, smiling, turning on what I guess she thought was old world charm. I smiled back, thinking to myself, “There, there, Little Babushka. Just put the plant down and hurry on home to your samovar.” Would I, an internationalist, a liberal, deny an immigrant, a new American who'd fled Stalin's terror the simple pleasure of smelling cactus flowers? Of course not. My general attitude is that if people want something bad enough to steal it, take it.

Except my stuff.

Babushka put the cactus down on the lowest step, still crooning over it, and I walked on, thinking maybe I was wrong. Maybe the covetous Slav had come all the way up the stairs off the street simply to enjoy the plant. An old world aesthete!

But cactus blooms had never emitted any fragrance that I could detect, and a block away a florist had about ten flowering cactuses in his window. I left the would-be thief still crooning over the cactus, rocking it like a baby, and walked on down the stairs and on down the street, turning once to look back to see if my assumption was correct, to see if my little babushka, now that I was fifty yards away, would snag the plant and scurry off with it.

As I turned to check on her, Babs was still lingering at the foot of the stairs, looking down the street at me to see if I was as oblivious as she hoped I might be, checking to see if she could make off with a WalMart plant only slightly less common than a primrose at that time of year.

But when she saw me look back at her she gave up. I watched her totter off without her heart’s desire, kicking myself for not giving it to her, not that it was mine to give.

When I got back an hour later, the cactus was still there. I moved it back up the stairs, still unable to smell its alleged fragrance but hoping Babushka would make a night raid for it.

ANDERSON VALLEY FFA

Monday was Veterans Day! Thank you Veterans!

On Monday 13 FFA members came together to do something for their community.

This weekend with all the donations from our awesome contributors, FFA members went shopping for food for our Thanksgiving Dinner Boxes. The members thought they had enough money to fill 56 boxes. They were really able to purchase items for 90 boxes! The boxes will be given to the Anderson Valley Food Bank for distribution.

FFA members unfolded and taped all the boxes. Then they began to fill them. Great teamwork and organization by the members made the process go quickly. Besides the boxes the members are donating 2 boxes of mixed winter squash grown in the school garden.

After the members were finished Ms. Swehla asked each member to talk about how they felt about this activity. It was unanimous. They all were so happy to do real meaningful service for the community. They were also grateful for the things they have at home.