Synopsis
Book by Herzog Brad
Extrait
Chapter One: Harmony, California
Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning.
John Steinbeck
The search began in Malibu, of all places, on a mist-shrouded Tuesday morning in January. It was the kind of coastal phenomenon in which the sky becomes darker and the sea lighter until they blend into a gray void where the horizon is supposed to be. The horizon is perspective, and already it was gone.
We had started in late December, heading from Chicago to Los Angeles along the bastard sons of Route 66 -- I-55, I-44, I-40, I-15, and I-10, a new generation of interstates with almost no romantic folklore. Steinbeck described the Mother Road as "the path of a people in flight." Nowadays, you see more of America by actually flying.
We planned to make it past St. Louis on the first day of our journey, but our plans were derailed by the infamous Auspicious Beginning. We had a decent excuse. An apparently mild morning turned into an abnormally gusty afternoon -- and this in the Windy City. Suddenly, there were forty-five-mile-per-hour winds and a trailer advisory. I had test-driven the RV exactly once and had never otherwise steered anything larger than a sedan. The Rolling Stone was as aerodynamic as it was compact, so I did what any sane adventurer would do. I panicked. We spent the rest of the day and the night in Joliet, one hour south, a city of gamblers and maximum-security prisoners. Camp was a corner of a Kmart parking lot. Frost gathered on the inside of our bedroom window, and a parade of windblown shopping carts slammed us to sleep.
We contemplated our next move for fear of regretting our prior one.
Over the next few weeks, we made our way through Missouri, Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, New Mexico, and Arizona, finally arriving in Malibu on New Year's Eve. And why not Malibu? If you're going to embark on a journey to find the real America, why not choose as a jumping- off point a place where reality is obscured by silicone and sunblock? Driving through Los Angeles in a thirty-four-foot motor home was a bit like shuffling along a fashion runway in overalls. It felt good.
On a January morning, we headed north on Highway One, dwarfed on our right by the Santa Monica Mountains and on our left by the Pacific. Far in the distance, a vessel drifted through the grayness at a ghostly pace. It appeared to be a ship riding high in the ocean but turned out to be a blimp riding low in the clouds. The heavy air hugged the coastline, which revealed itself only gradually with each curve of the highway.
We took the Pacific Coast Highway to U.S. 101, which we then followed back to the Pacific Coast Highway. There was an international flavor to the journey. Our route took us past Goleta Beach, where the Japanese attacked in 1942 -- the only attack on the continental United States since the War of 1812. We drove through Santa Barbara, rebuilt in Spanish Colonial style following a devastating 1925 earthquake, and past the mock-Danish town of Solvang. We rolled by Santa Maria and Nipomo and San Luis Obispo.
But the road doesn't just take you through places, it takes you past thoughts and themes. On this day, this particular highway took us past surfers shooting the waves, a film crew shooting a movie, and soldiers shooting rifles at a practice range; past orchards, vineyards, graveyards, and a banana garden touting fifty exotic varieties; past windblown telephone poles bending toward the sea; past a sign for Santa Claus Lane in a town called Summerland and another shouting Buellton: Home of Split Pea Soup, where the landscape suddenly changed to rolling countryside; past a white stallion prancing proudly in a mud-brown stable, ignoring his ignoble surroundings, a unicorn amid trolls; past plowed fields resembling corrugated paper and sharp peaks surrounded by harmless foothills; past three huge smokestacks hovering over a rumbling bay like a polluted candelabra. One can think about such nonsense forever, until it is not nonsense at all, but a kind of language of observation. This became my language.
All the while, the ocean dodged in and out of view according to the whim of the road and the lay of the land. And all the while, there was a nagging fear that, this being our first destination, we might never find what we were looking for -- until we did. I stopped the Rolling Stone, having arrived at a coincidence of time and place, and we ran to the shore just as the dying sun tossed its parting rays against feathered clouds and exploded in a pink frenzy. We were in the vicinity of Harmony, at a place called Morro Bay, which would be our base camp.
Harmony and California don't normally go hand in hand. Yes, three Olympic Games have been held here. Yes, the United Nations Charter was drawn up in San Francisco in 1945. Yes, it became the thirty-first state as part of something called the Compromise of 1850. But this was also a place claimed by Spain, England, Russia, and Mexico before a war with the latter officially brought it into American hands. California was where the gold rush began at Sutter's sawmill in 1848 and ended with Sutter's bankruptcy four years later, where Japanese Americans were imprisoned by their countrymen in World War II internment camps, where the no-fault divorce originated, where Sirhan Sirhan altered history. It is a state where lumber companies and naturalists scuffle over redwoods and spotted owls, where immigration battles and labor conflicts and race riots are as common as earthquakes and wildfires and mud slides.
But the following morning, we saw a promising sign. If we couldn't find what we were looking for here, we might as well turn around, pack up, head home. Town of Harmony, turn right 1 mile, the billboard alongside the highway explained. Working artists, restaurants, arts, crafts, wine tasting, wedding chapel, it announced. Population 18, it nearly shouted.
I imagined a throwback commune, a patchwork family, a son named Earth, a daughter named Rainbow, two dogs named Steve. I expected art for the sake of creativity, or maybe creativity for the sake of art. What is harmony? Something more than accord, perhaps a melodious understanding. Is it the same as peace? Absolutely not. Peace can be passive. It seems to imply something thrust upon us rather than achieved, with tension and force as prerequisites. In a continuum with harmony on one end and disharmony on the other, peace is in the middle. Harmony is actively bettering the world; peace is just not making it worse. Harmony is the opposite of war; peace is merely the absence of it. Certainly, harmony is easiest to find in manageable quantities of humanity. Harmony among the masses is unimaginable. Harmony among eighteen is not.
We turned right on Harmony Valley Road and then left toward a half-dozen buildings of various sizes at the end of a dead-end street -- the town of Harmony. Our first sight at our first stop was a gold banner on a rust-colored fence adjacent to a sky-blue house: TOWN FOR SALE, it said in big red letters. I checked my wallet. Twenty-four bucks. Three hundred years ago, that was enough to get Manhattan. I had learned my first lesson: You can buy Harmony. By the end of the day, I also learned that you can't.
Because the town, ten miles south of Hearst Castle in San Simeon, is just off the Pacific Coast Highway, I had expected it to cozy up to the ocean. The map suggested it. For some reason, so did the name. Instead, I found myself surrounded by waves of pastureland, the vague smell of the sea the only reminder that it was close.
We escaped the Day Tripper and encountered more signs. The wine shop was this way, the glassblower that way, the restaurant here, the post office there. Arrows pointed the way. No one place of interest was more than a hundred feet in any direction. On the side of the post office was a painted scroll five feet wide and eight feet high, flowing with calligraphy like a medieval proclamation. It was an explanation of Harmony's origin.
The name sprang from discord. The area was settled in 1869 as a collection of dairy farms but something less than a community. Rivalry spawned feuds, and on one occasion, a feud led to a fatal shooting. But a Signs of Harmony truce was called, and shortly thereafter, the hamlet was named Harmony. The cynic in me whispered that it was a tourism trick as old as Eric the Red's giving ice-layered Greenland its name, shortly after being banished from Norway for manslaughter. I read on.
At the turn of the century, twenty local farmers incorporated the Harmony Valley Creamery Association, which was soon producing some of California's finest butters and cheeses. The town grew around the company. At its peak, Harmony boasted a large residence for management, a bunkhouse for employees, a schoolhouse, a livery stable, a blacksmith, a general store, and a post office. The highway ran directly through town, and William Randolph Hearst himself was said to have stopped here often on the way to his ranch, which was far larger than Harmony. Prosperity in Harmony lasted nearly half a century, until the dairy business moved thirty miles south to San Luis Obispo in the 1950s. The creamery closed its doors, and except for the post office, Harmony was abandoned.
In 1970, however, the ghost town amid ranch land was purchased, appropriately, by people named Casper and Fields. Ralph and Janet Casper and Paul and Doris Fields bought the two-and-a-half-acre plot on which the creamery stood and began the restoration of Harmony, drawing artists and shopkeepers to the forgotten village. There were now several shops in the old creamery building, a brick walkway leading to a potter's studio and shop, and a gallery and a glassblowing studio in an old rust-roofed barn across the street. Harmony had been reborn and recast.
Were the town's saviors still around? We went searching. Steinbeck believed that the best places to eavesdrop on a local population were bars and churches. The Harmony Chapel consisted of four pews and two stained-glass windows in an area the size of a large walk-in closet. It was empty except for windblown leaves. We tried the saloon.
The Harmony Saloon was a bar, literally -- five stools and a wooden counter. I sat on a low-backed stool loose on its hinges. Amy sat next to me, and we ordered sandwiches and drinks from the bartender. A woman, fortyish with a sun-creased face, sat at the other end of the bar conquering the local newspaper. "Hmm. There's an article in here about caffeine," she said to no one in particular. "I can't drink coffee or Pepsi anymore. I get so I can't concentrate on anything." She walked out of the saloon for a few seconds, came back, and read some more. "Hmm. Can't even eat anything anymore -- chocolate, pain relievers. Do you believe they put caffeine in pain relievers? Says it right here."
Amy responded by saying she found it hard to believe and by posing a question: "Do you live in Harmony?"
Were we anywhere else, it would have been a rather loaded inquiry. The jittery woman shook her head and said she lived in Cambria, a whaling center turned artist colony four miles up the highway. "We don't know who lives here. There's eighteen people. We don't know who they are." She paused and then added, "It's for sale, you know. The owners live in that blue house across the street."
I asked the obvious: "How does one get to own a town?"
She answered the obvious: "Just buy it, I guess. They're just common folk, but they bought it." She shouted into the kitchen, "Bill, how did they get to own the town? That's my husband, Bill. He's the bartender."
Bill the Bartender appeared with our turkey sandwiches. "Just bought it. It's not incorporated or anything -- it's a township, I guess." And he left it at that.
The voice of Eric Clapton rose from the radio, spicing up a Dylan tune. "I ain't saying you treated me unkind. / You could've done better, but I don't mind. / You just kind of wasted my precious time. / But don't think twice, it's alright."
Our eyes drifted as our stomachs filled. Mine wandered to old steel barstools in one corner, the kind that were intended to be shaped for rear ends but resembled some sort of torture machine. Amy's roamed to the photographs on the wall. There were more than a dozen portraits, most of them awkward class photos from the 1960s, complete with bee-hives, flips, and other prehistoric designs. The Bartender's Wife explained that some of them were waitresses in the adjacent restaurant and some were customers.
"That one on the left, near the bottom, is a singer here in town." She meant Cambria. "That one on the right, her teeth are usually blackened because her ex-boyfriend always comes in and draws funny glasses and stuff on her. I can see he hasn't been here in a while."
I turned to Bill the Bartender and asked how he came to be behind Harmony's bar. "Well, I was on the other side of the bar for a long, long time. I just got drafted, I guess."
And again, he left Eric Clapton to do the talking. "I wish there was something you would do or say / to make me change my mind and stay. / But we never did too much talking anyway. / Don't think twice, it's alright."
Another customer strolled in, a likable-looking fellow with a ruddy complexion. Conversation soon revealed him to be the owner of the winery up the road, Harmony Cellars. We were five now -- Amy and I, Chuck the Winemaker, Bill the Bartender, and the Bartender's Wife. Amy inquired about another photograph, that of a large brown animal with a thatch of white on its neck. That's when we learned about Freddy the Cat.
Six months earlier, Freddy had been Harmony's most renowned citizen. He was a Maine Coon cat, and the best anybody could tell, he was in his twenty-second year when he finally expired. According to Harmony lore -- and there were photographs to back it up -- he was big enough to catch squirrels and send St. Bernards whimpering in retreat. He was beloved enough to have the run of the town, with food and bed in every shop and the occasional cat cocktail -- milk with an umbrella in it -- in the saloon. He was famous enough to have shirts bearing his likeness sold in a local shop. And he was revered enough, according to Bill the Bartender, to be Harmony's honorary mayor.
"When it was time for the election, he just ran unopposed," he said, refilling my water glass. "He was deaf the last couple years, so people would write him notes to communicate with him. But I don't know if he read them himself or if someone read them to him and he read lips."
We laughed. The Bartender's Wife shook her head. "It was devastating when he died." She pointed her thumb to the rear of the old creamery. "He's buried out back."
I peered at a sign posted above the bar -- Friendly Henry, it said -- and the talk turned to Hank, the owner of the Harmony Saloon and the Old Harmony Pasta Factory next door. Hank, the bartender explained, had been neighboring Cambria's honorary mayor. He thought for a second. "In fact, it was about the same time Freddy ruled Harmony. I never thought there might have been a conspiracy between the two." He cocked a mischievous eyebrow. "But it's possible."
Chuck the Winemaker joined in. "If you dig deep enough, you could come up with some dirt, I'm sure."
"I can show you where to start," laughed the bartender, nodding to-ward Freddy's grave. "You'd definitely come up with something."
Outside the saloon, a golden retriever wagged his way past us, followed by a large cat, perhaps the new mayor. A wedding party had arrived at the ch...
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