Welcome to Republican California
You don’t need a passport to get here, but our neck of the California woods may be as strange to Bay Area residents as many a foreign land or fantasy kingdom.
First off, most of the Mother Lode voted for Trump: Seven of our eight counties joined rural voters nationwide in going for the Donald, most by landslide margins of nearly 60 percent.
(Hillary Clinton did eke out a win in Nevada County, perhaps due to Grass Valley backto-the-land enclaves left over from the ’60s.)
As surprising as Trump’s success here in the hills may have been to some, it shocked no one in the Gold Country.
We’ve been part of Republican California (in all, 25 of the state’s 58 counties went for Trump) for decades. Which is kind of like Democratic Utah — apparently populated by Salt Lake City voters who have elected four straight Dem mayors, the most recent of whom is a lesbian.
In the interests of letting The Chronicle’s readers know and understand a little more about their neighbors in the Mother Lode, I’ll be filing the occasional dispatch from my Tuolumne County home.
But first, some context may be in order. Without it, taking in my stories might be like reading tales of orcs, ents, trolls and hobbits without knowing anything of Middle Earth.
Sure, Middle Earth is makebelieve. But to some, life in the Central Sierra foothills might come close.
The California known to the rest of the nation outlaws plastic bags, funds sex-change operations for inmates, taxes root beer, mandates earth-tone houses in upscale neighborhoods, drools over electric cars and sends Governor Moonbeam to Sacramento.
We in the Mother Lode drink ditch water, drive pickup trucks, hang laundry on lines, buy guns and let our dogs run free. Our lawns go unmowed, and rusting cars clutter our yards. You can buy ammo, while it lasts, at a few of our bars.
We poison-oakers have elected congressmen who would rather jump from the fiscal cliff than cooperate with the dreaded Dems. We love the cash that tourists from Los Angeles and San Francisco bring us, but we don’t trust the politicians they send to Sacramento or Washington.
Many of us feel forgotten by big-city lawmakers who don’t know how to tie a fly, fire a hunting rifle or listen to anyone from a county with only enough voters to elect about a 10th of a state senator.
Some of us are ornery, rude and just to the right of Attila the Hun. Others believe in Bigfoot, UFOs and the Democratic Party. We have a lot of bars, a lot of churches, many true believers at each and some at both.
But this isn’t “Deliverance” country. Folks are friendly, and if a neighbor stubs his toe, we’ll organize a benefit dinner. We throw so many fund-raising feeds that a diner with a tolerance for spaghetti could survive for months eating for charity.
We have theaters, poetry readings and writers’ workshops. The local junior college’s debate team has posted better records than its hoops squad.
Visitors are welcome to share our historic towns and spectacular mountain scenery, and often do. Thousands vacation here annually, spending millions of dollars while getting lost on our dirt roads and wondering where their Internet and cell service went.
Ranching, farming, logging and mining were once cornerstones of our economy. Fortune-seekers still dip gold pans into our creeks when the economy takes a particularly bad turn, logging rasps back to life when it takes a good one, and our only remaining cash crop may be marijuana.
The retail and service industries (read Walmart and McDonald’s) now power foothill communities founded by prospectors in the Days of ’49.
Speaking of ’49, most of us in the foothills are that age or older. At 70, I’m firmly within our retirement demographic. For visitors from afar, we graying hill folk can be a fountain of perceived youth: Come up to Geezerville and you’ll at least feel much younger.
The Mother Lode periodically makes the national news, usually for forest fires or sensational murders. Occasionally, however, it’s for something barely believable — like when a sheriff ’s lieutenant shot himself in the foot while showing a reporter his new sidearm. Or when two seniors — he 62 and she 72 — were busted for getting it on in the back seat of a lurching Ford Taurus outside a Sonora barbecue joint. In broad daylight.
We’ve also made the movies, scores of them. “High Noon” was filmed here, as was “Back to the Future 3.” We were also Hooterville (or at least its train station) for TV’s “Petticoat Junction.”
A few locals take exception to any comparison to the 1960s show, reckoning that we’re now far more sophisticated than Billie Jo, Betty Jo, Bobbie Jo, Uncle Joe and the rest of Hooterville’s goodnatured yokels.
But I’ll let you readers decide that one.