Willits: a small town in Mendocino County on Highway 101, about 100 miles north of Petaluma. My friend Will is living here part-time, in a hand-built house with lots of stained glass windows, off the grid on a dirt road—and this week, so am I.
I arrived one hot afternoon, just in time to jump in the pond to cool off after the long drive. Later we watched the full moon rise orange through the haze of distant wildfires, and I set up my “office away from the office.” I’m not totally on vacation here; with a music camp coming up, I spend some time each day at my desk. But I’m not a nine-to-five kinda girl. During the course of the week we found time to drive to the coast, visit friends, hike through old growth redwoods at Montgomery Woods, soak in the pools at Orr Hot Springs, take a scenic bicycle ride on a beautiful back road and a scenic motorcycle ride to watch the sunset on a ridge from which we could see to the ocean, pick blackberries, swim, work on the pond-weed eradication project and cook lots of delicious meals for each other.
Will is an excellent friend, and also one of my favorite DJs. Staying at his house is like having a great radio show going all week long. Staying two miles up this dirt road is also relaxing, complete with regular sightings of deer, rabbits, woodpeckers, wild turkeys, squirrels and elk. I noticed that here, like in Alaska, the neighbors all smile and wave when they drive by. I remarked on it, and Will said yes, people are friendly here. I wonder if their friendliness might stem from the likelihood that they’re all stoned. I mean, most of the neighbors here are pot growers; I’m a bit astonished at how little they try to hide it. Back in my pot-growing days, we went to great lengths to be extremely discreet, but here they are nearly flagrant. Enforcing the law on the issue is obviously not a big priority, and with good reason: along with tourism and logging, marijuana is a major part of the local economy and everyone knows it, including the cops. Life here would be harder for everyone without the cash flow the industry provides, and for the most part the growers are left alone.
But all Will grows is a beautiful garden, out of which we ate daily. I have to say, aside from the motorcycle ride, my favorite part of the week was making grape juice. Yes, ma’am. First, we went out to the garden early one morning while it was still cool and pleasant, and picked the grapes. Twice we filled a five-gallon bucket with ripe, tasty, sweet Concord grapes—a bumper crop this year. Then we discussed what to do with them, neither of us ever having had such a bountiful grape harvest before. “Juice,” Will said. “Okay, juice,” I said. But how? We didn’t have a juicer or a grape press, or whatever you’re supposed to have. But I thought of stories I’d heard about making wine by putting grapes in a bathtub and stomping on them barefoot, which had always sounded like fun to me. Let’s try it! Okay, not in the bathtub, but right in the bucket, so we can pour out the juice easily. We washed out the bucket nice and clean. My feet were also nice and clean after hours of soaking in the hot springs the day before, but I washed them some more just to be sure. We cleaned up the grapes and put them in the bucket, and I stepped in and began stomping. Ooey, squishy fun! (My feet, it turns out, are just a couple inches shorter than the diameter of a five-gallon bucket—perfect!) And hey, it works. From each bucket, after about 10 minutes, we filled up five quart jars with delicious grape juice—yum. If I could choose a new career, I would be a grape-stomper.
Ingrid Noyes, a musician and the director of the Walker Creek Music Camp, is formerly from Marshall and currently makes her home wherever she happens to be.