Seattle to HealdsburgMichael wakes me up at 7:30 in the morning. “You gotta go now. If you go back to sleep, you’ll never wake up.” I close my eyes. But I know he is right, and suddenly I am picking up my clothes from the night before off the floor, dressing, and walking outside into a gray Seattle morning—three days after the summer solstice. By 8 a.m. I am headed south on I5.
I chew sunflower seeds incessantly to stay awake as I drive through billowing, gray clouds that pelt my car sporadically with rain. I eye the car radio’s electric clock constantly, my sole meter of progress. Luckily, two hours into the trip, my gas meter hits E. I am allowed a stop.
I turn off somewhere outside of Kelso, lured by a sign depicting the outline of a gas station. I suddenly have an immediate need to shit—the sunflower seeds playing tricks on me—and, the advertised gas station not in sight, I slip down a damp, vegetal embankment and drop my pants.
Tego Calderón’s reggaeton rattles the rearview mirror. I finally drive out of the clouds about halfway through Oregon. I stop in Ashland. Adolescent hippies play in the sun on a patch of lawn. I walk into a sandwich shop and discover that the entire menu is vegetarian: veggie burgers, veggie wraps, and salads. I order the salmon burger with blue, cracked-corn tortilla chips and homemade hummus. At the neighboring espresso cart, I order a double short latte, and on the way back to the car I realize that it had been made with soy milk. I dump it out.
Pine trees and rolling, yellow-brown hills, then Mt. Shasta, barren and white in the distance. I drive towards it and around it, past Shasta Lake, and drop down into the Sacramento Valley. No more clouds. I count off the towns on the road atlas that lies on the seat next to me: Red Bluff, Corning, Orling. I turn off the interstate at Williams after twelve hours of driving.
The sun sets in front of me as I drive west out of the valley and into the hills; it is dark by the time I turn south towards Calistoga. The envisioned climax of the trip—winding through Napa Valley’s vineyards at sundown—is lost. Instead, I battle oversized SUV’s up and down overgrown, tunnel-like switchbacks. I arrive to Gretchen’s house—where I am to rent a room for $420 a month—in Geyserville at 10pm, fourteen hours after leaving Seattle.
Gretchen is older than my mother. She has short, gray hair and is slightly lumpy. “When my husband died in 2003, I started housing winery interns. I didn’t want to be alone.” Her middle-aged Dalmatian, Ozzie, jumps up my leg and whines. She asks if I am hungry and takes four Tupperware containers out of the fridge. “Grilled, rosemary chicken, steamed broccoli, garbanzo beans with onions and garlic, and chocolate pudding.” Yes, I am hungry after a day of sucking on sunflower seeds. I eat.
Pippen Winery requires a mandatory physical and drug test (UAV as those in the know say), and at 11 a.m. the next morning, I report to the Healdsburg District Hospital. I am directed to the emergency wing, and I sit down next to a Latino man with a distressed look and a bandage over his left hand. I am called and sent to another wing where I am given a small, plastic cup. “Go into the bathroom and urinate in the cup, but don’t turn on the water or flush the toilet,” a young nurse tells me.
Later, I am back in the emergency ward where another nurse questions me about existing pulmonary and cardiac disorders. The phone rings, and I am sure that it is the urine testers calling to tell her that my pee is dirty with drugs. But she doesn’t kick me out. Later, a third nurse enters and hands my current nurse a Xerox copy that appears auspiciously to be test results. She buries it in her clipboard and shows me how to properly lift heavily objects using my legs.
Pippen Winery is on Alexander Valley Road, just north of Healdsburg. The property itself is a dream and a testament to the virtues of being a multimillionaire: Peter Pippen bought the land and built his winery with oil money in the mid-1970’s. The road to the winery winds around hills for two miles: through Sonoma’s signature (and highly flammable) yellow-burnt grass and the gnarled live oak trees adorned with hanging, turquoise-green Spanish moss. Not a vineyard in sight, and then I arrive to the winery—a massive, manicured, California ranch house meets French Chateau in the 1970’s. Suddenly, a wave of deep green sweeps me up—the lawn and ivy-clad winery walls. The wonders of irrigation.
I am greeted by the assistant winemaker, Donald, who is South African and sounds like Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond, although I avoid pointing this out to him. He towers over me. His height makes me nervous, so I fold my arms across my stomach and square my shoulders to him as if he might tackle me at any moment.
I am also greeted by April, who is, apparently, my supervisor in corporate winery talk. She asks me how everything went at the hospital. “Fine.” “Well, I guess we won’t really know until we get the test results in. Do you use drugs?” “Of course not.” “Then you have nothing to worry about.” She hands me a movie script-sized pamphlet of papers—confidentiality agreement, arbitration information, permission to perform a background check, among other things—that I am to read, sign, and return the next day. I feel like I am making the biggest commitment of my life. My contract ends December 20.
In Healdsburg, I eat a turkey sandwich at Les Costeaux, the neighborhood French bakery. I am alone, faced with an afternoon alone in sweltering heat in this Disneyland-for gray-haired-epicureans. A few of them sit at scattered tables around me, silent, sweating, and seemingly exhausted.
At every corner, signposts mark the direction of dozens of shops. At any one intersection, a store will have two signposts (one on each of two adjacent corners), so you are sure not to lose your way. I follow the sign toward the Toy Chest. This is where my landlady works alongside her son, who, on my landlady’s suggestion, will be happy to give me the low down on what young people do in Healdsburg.
The store is packed with toys, as toy stores are, and I recognize the red-haired young man behind the counter. I have seen him as a mulletted 15-year-old high school basketball player in the pictures on Gretchen’s walls.
“You ate there?” He asks me incredulously. “Not exactly what you’d pay for a sandwich anywhere else, huh?!” I agree—nine dollars for a turkey sandwich. “Try eating a meal out on the square! But there are some local burgers around that aren’t so pricey.” The conversation quickly jumps to girls—to his 18-year-old girlfriend (he’s 33), to the crop of young, international women that fall onto Healdsburg during harvest (last harvest his roommate dated a “Portuguese chic”), and to the best towns in the area to party in. Cloverdale, he explains as his 16-year-old employee, Page, smiles nervously, is not hip.
It is refreshing to find a local, an honest observer of Healdsburg’s, and Sonoma’s, gentrification. The benefits to him are not the new, kitsch boutiques or world-renowned restaurants, but the young girls and the boost in toy sales. “Grandparents are our best customers.”
The next day at the winery, I watch VHS’s of mustachioed men with mullets lifting heavy objects with their legs. A pock-marked 70-year-old man talks to me about ergonomics, followed by an overweight safety consultant, who expounds from behind his desk on the dangers of twisting your back while lifting. I am very drowsy and must stand up to stay awake. My mind wanders, and I realize I’ve completely missed the section on flammable goods. I have no idea what the difference between combustible and flammable goods is. The narrator asks me this during the workbook examination period at the end of the chapter. Luckily, I don’t have a workbook, and I fast forward to the next section.
I am introduced to the other employees. Topher is a lab intern from South Africa. He tells me that he has been in wine school in Stellenbosch for nine years. His arms are the size of my legs, but no, he does not play rugby, and he otherwise seems very gentle. He nervously pinches at the belly of his navy blue polo shirt as he talks to me.
Judy is a roly-poly girl from Wisconsin with a big smile and a cheerful, chirpy voice. She is quintessentially, charmingly Midwestern. She recently graduated from U. C. Davis and has been working in Pippen’s lab for a year.
And there are the Mexicans. Eduardo is the cellar foreman; Chito, Mateo, and Chris his crew. Julio, Vato, Lento, Pepe, Vago, and Gordo are the bottlers. I am excited to speak Spanish with them. The work force seems to be divided between upstairs and downstairs, the Mexicans doing the physical work downstairs and the “güeros” in their offices and labs upstairs.
Yet there appear to be a few bridges between these two worlds. Topher has already learned a couple naughty phrases in Spanish, and he has written a few phrases in Afrikaans on note cards in exchange. April speaks surprisingly good Spanish, which has helped her develop a special rapport with the “downstairs” workers.
I observe throughout the rest of the day. In the lab, I watch Topher squirt something into a beeker. On the “line, I stand with ear muffs over my ears watching bottles twirl past, first empty and naked and finally full, corked, sealed, labeled, and boxed—a dizzying exposition in the magnificence of machinery.
By 4:30 I am exhausted after my first full day of work in almost a month. I am too tired to stop by Big Joe’s supermarket (the ultra-flash Healdsburg supermarket where every ingredient is labeled as organic, local, fresh, or low-cal) or to think about preparing dinner. I drive north on 101, hoping that Gretchen hasn’t finished he Rosemary chicken. At the Geyserville turn-off, I propitiously discover the local taco truck and immediately pull over.
Alberto has a shaved head, goatee, and wears a white t-shirt. He is the stereotypical Mexican hired by Hollywood to play the East L.A. gangster. He smiles and greets me, “Buenos Días.” I ask him what I should have for dinner, and he suggests four tacos; dos con carne and dos al pastor. I stand in the gravel in front of his caravan, surrounding by the evening sun and Sonoma’s ever rolling hills. “Where are you from?” He asks me. “From Seattle.” “So do you have papers?” “Yeah, I was born in America. You?” “No, I’m illegal. I’ve been here for a year now, but I haven’t had any problems. Except for when the police took my pick-up. They can do that if they pull me over since I don’t have an American license.” I eat the tacos—four bunches of meat, each atop two small tortillas and adorned with jalapeños and radishes—while I talk to him. It is nice to talk to someone before going home to spend the evening alone. I grab a Jarrito from his now melted ice bucket, and he gives me a slice of lime to dribble into it. He orders me to hand him a Jarrito, too, and he shows me how to put salt into the Jarrito to make it fizz; the ultimate hangover cure.
Two black men drive up in a caravan. One gets out and orders a taco and a beef quesadilla, “You know, with rice and all the fixins. What do you want to drink?” He asks his friend. He sticks his hand in the melted ice. “All your ice melted! All his ice melted. Oh, man! What you want?” His friend climbs out of the caravan and discovers the tootsie roll pops. “I’ll take four tootsie pops. Four!” He gets Alberto’s attention and shows him his four fingers.
Another car arrives and two Mexicans—dust-beaten jeans and heavy, dirty boots—approach the caravan. But Alberto is busy cooking, so they wait patiently. “Mucho trabajo?” The black man asks new arrivals. “Mucho worky? Much dinero? Mucho monee?” The Mexicans latently nod. One of them leans purposefully against the caravan.
I wasn’t sure that Alberto spoke English, but he produces two heaping portions for the black men, and they are noticeably eager and excited. They leave. I quickly pay Alberto. He only charges me five dollars.
