645 Adobe Canyon Road
My childhood home is surrounded by flames. And maybe gone
From here in Pittsburgh I don’t really know how much of Sonoma County has been swept away by the fires. Aerial maps in the paper put it close to my high school in the middle of Santa Rosa. A separate fire sits square atop Adobe Canyon, where I swam, rode horses, raised livestock, learned to play the guitar, found religion and lost it again as I came of age and fell in love in a handsome land of grapes, blazing sun and Tuscan terrain.
Rod Lund, a friend from those days, wrote yesterday on Facebook that the home he grew up in has been swept away. It was a half-mile from our place, on the other side of the Goff Mansion, now a winery (Chateau St. Jean) that has also burned. I assume there’s a chance that our home, a homestead built in the days of Jack London, has survived, but possibly it is gone, too.
645 Adobe Canyon Road was built by Milo Baker, an agronomist who taught at Santa Rosa Junior College. He was a contemporary, and, I believe, a friend of his more famous colleague, Luther Burbank. I suppose the timing in history was such that he would have commuted the 12 miles from Kenwood to Santa Rosa in a Model T rather than a horse and buggy.
The homestead was a modest arts-and-crafts design; it could have come off a truck from Sears Roebuck. It had plain casement windows, some with leaded panes. When we moved in, the upstairs was still furnished with shelving for seed specimens.
Sonoma Creek ran through the property. Milo rerouted it a hundred yards to the south, cleared the creek bed of stones (which he may have used to build his foundation and chimney) and used the 2 acres of fertile, wet creek bed for crops. He left the patch between the now dry creek bed and the new creek bank wild, fenced off from deer and other marauders to preserve native plants. It had an enamel sign that read “Baker Park” when we lived there, and it was still fenced off, and there were plants inside the fence that I never saw anywhere else in the canyon.
The homestead was at the mouth of the canyon. To the west was a 30-acre vineyard surrounded by an 8-foot deer fence. Its owner, Frank Gemini, once told us that he had never taken a vacation in all the 30-plus years he worked the place, and never wanted to. To the east, the canyon disappeared under oaks, madrone and chaparral as it narrowed and wound its way up to Sugarloaf ridge. A cinder cone from an ancient volcano gave the ridge its name, towering sweetly over the canyon when the sun rose behind it.
In 1967, when my father found the place, the ridge was still charred from the Sugarloaf Ridge Fire, a multi-day fire that had surged over the ridge top three years before. You could see where the fire had burned itself out as it crept down the brushy slope, nearly reaching the cabins and homes lining the canyon. Folks talked about the terror, especially at night, and the narrow escape.
• When my dad decided to buy 645 Adobe Canyon Road, it was the end of a long quest of his to leave the crowded, smoggy Bay Area and live a gentleman farmer’s life. It was an obsession shared by my mother and at least four of his five children, including me. We dreamed of owning horses and riding horseback, and we saved coins and bills in a piggy bank to buy a family horse when we could.
I believe Dad’s desire for fresh air grew up with him in the stockyards of Chicago, where his father worked as a meat packer. He never spoke well of the slaughterhouse life, other than to say that they made it through the Depression and usually had good meat on the table.
His father was in some level of management at the plant, and didn’t get his hands dirty at work. My father and my uncle Ray worked occasionally in the yards, and hated it. I think that experience, combined with a wartime friendship with a Texas cowhand aboard Dad’s carrier in the Pacific, put the desire in Dad’s heart to seek the fresh, green life of the rural West. The cowhand, who I would come to know as Uncle Harold, introduced his shipmate to his redhaired sister as the war ended, and nature did the rest. A Navy wedding was held, followed by a honeymoon in Big Bear, and my brother Dave was born 10 months later.
This was dim family history by the late 60s, when we were living in Cupertino and my father was traveling northern and central California selling floor covering. Still, it drove a growing family obsession. Dad saw the beautiful land from the windows of his station wagon every day. He suffered through office days at the Merchandise Mart in San Francisco. We took mini-vacations to visit Uncle Harold on a ranch he worked in Red Bluff, Calif. Like his brother-in-law, and like the hippies we were seeing on TV and in the news, Dad wanted to spend his free time with his family on the land.
So we found the Adobe Canyon place in the want ads. We couldn’t afford it, and in 1967, there were few financing options. But the owners were motivated; it was a divorce. My dad negotiated a second mortgage with a five-year term in order to close the deal. As it turns out, those five balloon mortgage years were all we were to have of the life we wanted so much. They wouldn’t be enough, by a long shot. But they would be full.
• Dad had to sell the place while I was in college. Oil shock, economic downturn and Richard Nixon all had a role to play. But the real reason was the accident that happened one bright Saturday morning that nearly killed my brother Paul, who was 5 at the time. Trotting up to help hold a horse for his older sister (what parent would allow a 5year-old to do that these days?), he was struck squarely in the side of his head when one of the horses spooked and lashed out with a muscular hind leg and shod hoof. Paul came out of it with several rounds of head and brain surgery, months and months of recovery, and ultimately an altered life with a weakened right side.
The accident shattered Dad’s will to hold on to the place. He’d changed jobs a couple of times, had kids (me and my sister) in college, and needed to refinance at a time when that was not easy. Money aside, all he could see anymore when he looked out the kitchen window was a little blond boy, his son, lying still and bleeding in the gravel of the driveway.
Adobe Canyon was a reach for my family in the ’60s. Fifty years later, it’s a place we still reach for. I go back when I’m chopping firewood or tinkering with a twostroke engine. I go back when I hear hunting guns on the hillside, when I see the light of a full moon silver the landscape, and when I see horses running a pasture at full gallop for no reason at all other than mysterious, unfettered joy.