Heimatkunst: California

I was born and raised where the mountains meet the sea, beneath the cathedral canopies of the world's tallest trees.

The landscapes and communities of my childhood on the rural coast of Northern #California have a profound impact on my research and creative work.

Mendocino County was first home to the Pomo Nation and later hedged by rough-hewn Russian trading posts and the frontier missions of Alta California to its South. Even today, its rugged sea cliffs divert Highway 1 inwards here, dissolving the coastal highway into a labyrinth of impenetrable, dirt road wildernesses along its northern coast. This is a place of contrasts and superlatives. Remote, yet less than four hours' distance from the San Francisco Bay, it's guarded on the East by serpentine country highways and to the West by the incessant roar of the North Pacific's waves.

The hometown of my childhood was named for a now defunct U.S. military outpost built during the so-called Indian Wars to contain potential uprisings as the Army curtailed the Pomos' seasonal migrations from the coast to inland valleys: enforcing sedentary life on reservations. This paved the way for the company lumber towns which would later clear cut large swathes of the primeval #redwood forest. Leaving only here and there a few final groves of old growth standing, early lumberjacks floated their profit margins in roiling masses down the county's many rivers. Piling logjams in protected coves and processing impossibly vast redwood timber in coastal mills, they left behind abandoned gravel superhighways and the broken traintrack lines where steam donkeys once roamed.

The stagnating logging trade found itself straddling one of the largest commercial fishing harbors on the West Coast of the United States sometime in the early-twentieth century. But the #sea is an unpredictable and unforgiving mistress. Today's commercial fishing industry survives in name -- and increasingly in memory -- only. Local fishermen oscillate for ever-longer seasonal runs in the wilder surf off Alaska.

Yet Fort Bragg's #history is that of a melting pot where something melted: Successive generations of #migration created a still-thriving #multilingual community with roots stretching from Finland to the Azore Islands, and across the marches of the former Spanish Empire from Jalpa, Zacatecas to the Philippines.

While its two primary industries were already building the trajectories for their eventual declines, the Mendocino Coast became a refuge of communes and homesteads for the back-to-the-landers who relocated en masse from their urban communities in #SanFrancisco and #Berkeley in the early 1970s. They brought with them their left-wing politics and a propensity for the consumption of illicit substances the cultivation of which meshed well with the libertarian ideals of many of the region's more fiscally conservative inhabitants.

[for a good book on the subject from a great Bay Area-based independent press...]

Alongside Humboldt and Trinity, Mendocino forms the southern corner of California's infamous Emerald Triangle, and the current process of (increasingly corporatized) cannabis legalization in California has far-reaching implications for the county's more than half-century of cultivation history and the multimillion-dollar grey market this modern bootlegging has flooded into an otherwise impoverished local economy.

Settlers from the 60s generation established artist communities in the whimsical Victorian houses and wooden water towers of historic #Mendocino village alongside a small, inconspicuous building with faded, salt-stained, and perhaps once-scarlet wooden siding. The Temple of Kwan Tai is the final remaining witness to the mid-nineteenth century home of one of the largest rural Asian-American communities in California. It remains home to the oldest Chinese Taoist temple in rural California (recently restored).

Along the patchwork of Mendocino County's old logging roads, rose briers and abandoned apple orchards sprawl among the stands of California bay laurel, tan oak, and second-growth redwood. Remnants of all-but-forgotten ghost towns and the dry bones of onetime logging camps bear testament to an unbridled industry that in my own childhood still inspired the local banning of Dr. Seuss' picture book The Lorax.

Life finds a way. A garbage dump in living memory, Glass Beach is now a premier social media destination. It suffers, through recent renovation and expansion, from the same woes as more accessible mass tourism locations: the erection of protective fences by necessity now restricts access to many of its most pristine coves. As holidaymakers cart away pocketfuls of stolen sea glass, ever more sand shows through nature's carefully polished solution to another of humanity's many excesses.

Try appreciating the splendor without lining your pockets, too. Someday maybe you can show your kids. We've all done things that we regret. Like my kindergarden teacher said: look with your eyes and not your hands here:

We've already left our trace.