Category: Writing

Bread of Fire

Posted on by Mike McLaren

I saw… The Holy Grail,

descend upon the shrine,

I saw the fiery face as of a child

That smote itself into the bread…

—Tennyson, Idylls of the King, The Holy Grail

Bread king of the Humboldt County Fair in Ferndale, California, two years running, and for my trifecta I had a definitive plan: bake my crowning achievement—a personal Holy Grail that one else could ever achieve—collect another blue ribbon, then promptly retire from breadmaking while I was still on top.

Being raised in the south, I learned to eat spicy hot peppers and love them. All my life I’ve never been able to turn down thick slices of bread. Why not combine my two favorite food groups—fire and flour?

Well I did. My chef-d’oeuvre was to be a white bread with hot peppers, since one of my favorite pastimes is to eat habaneros fresh off the vine. But my wife suggested I avoid habaneros because she thought it best to not incinerate the tongues of the judges.

“That would get you a definite thumbs-down,” she advised, “would probably get you banned from entering anything in the fair ever again. Stick with  jalapenos.”

She had a point, and I almost took her advice. I avoided the habaneros (a Scoville heat unit of 150,000). But jalapenos rate only 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville heat units. I wanted something with a little kick, so I opted for a combination of cayenne and red chili peppers (50,000 to 65,000 Scoville heat units).

I worked my dough like a pro, with my eyes on the prize. I let the dough rise, then I worked it some more. I placed it carefully in the oven, then ran my hands across my face and eyes to wipe away the sweat of a hot summer day.

I never saw the bread. The chili oil on my hands, mixed with salty sweat, swelled my eyes closed. For days I could not stop the blur of tears that failed to soothe the burning embers in my eyes. My wife had to drive me to the fair to deliver my entry.

I did receive my third blue ribbon. But I could not focus my eyes well enough to really see it until the next week.

I retired from breadmaking.

Good Ol’ Gal

Posted on by Mike McLaren

We met, and she bit me. I loved her from that moment. I adored her lumpiness and how her butt drooped more heavily to the right when she walked—pigeon-toed. Her tawny fur bordered near mange, her ears hung in tatters, but a healthy diet would fix all that, and would even stop her seizures. My wife and I adopted Tiva from the rescue service without thinking twice.

The shelter said our Deerlegged Chihuahua was only five years old and spayed. That first week, after a checkup, shots, and the removal of several rotted teeth, the vet said Tiva was probably eleven or more years old. We loved her anyway.

After several months Tiva stopped hiding under the bed, stopped snapping at us, and begged to be held or to sit on our laps.

She slept every night beneath the covers, wrapped in my wife’s arms. We took her everywhere, and on rare occasions when we didn’t, a tiny face with sad eyes peeked just over the sill of the front window to watch us leave. She knew the sound of the car, of our bikes, and the rhythm of our feet. She always met us at the door as if never having gotten farther than a few feet from it during our absence.

Tiva loved the vegetable garden, snorfling for bugs and stuffing her nose into holes. Only once did being outdoors upset her, the day three crows plopped into the backyard and followed like wisecracking teenagers behind her as she skulked away.

On good days, Tiva would laugh.

She loved the beach, the one place on Earth where she would run without coaxing—edging to the water line, racing back before the tide got her.

December 2007, Tiva became lethargic and struggled into the new year. One evening she dropped. My wife and I stayed up all night pumping her with our hands to keep her breathing so we could get her to the vet in the morning. Within minutes of our arrival, Tiva underwent surgery. January 8, 2008: removal of a 1.2 pound infected uterus from a 5.8 pound dog.

Tiva slowed way down, but remained happy.

Six months later, she went deaf, which was actually a good thing. She couldn’t hear the thunder of the Independence Day fireworks, which in previous years drove her into a frenzy and under the bed to disappear for a few. She had finally gained a reprieve. But by Christmas Tiva began to go blind. The vet now guessed that she was no younger than fourteen years old, was lucky to have lived the four years we’d had her.

She made it into the new year, but the last week of January she began screaming incessantly. She paced blindly, ran into walls, doors, and fell over threshold dividers. We didn’t let her on the bed, afraid she would fall. The incessant screaming got louder, and it did not stop. Sedatives did nothing.

Monday, February 2, 2009, the vet gave us a stronger sedative, told me to use as much as I wanted. I didn’t catch the underlying drift because I was adamantly opposed to putting Tiva down; she was not in pain… but the screaming… . 

Wednesday, I realized it was terror in my old gal’s blind eyes. I removed all the furniture from my music studio so Tiva could pace and wander without injury, but she got stuck in corners. Her terror grew even louder.

One of my adult guitar students came in a few days later for her weekly lesson, but she could hear Tiva, though I had shut the tiny old girl in a room at the back end of the house. My student started her finger-picking exercise then looked right at me. “A good friend will have enough love to make the hardest decision anyone will ever have to make.” I deliberated a few days, then my wife and I made a decision on that following Wednesday night. She held Tiva while I pumped our old gal with enough of the sedatives the vet had given us to down a thoroughbred.

It did not work.

Thursday morning, I called the vet and asked to bring in Tiva. I didn’t need to say what for. They knew. My wife and I arrived at the hospital, Tiva screaming in my arms. The vet ushered us immediately to a room, no words spoken. My wife cradled Tiva during the first injection, a relaxant to her get calm. Tiva’s eyes cleared. She went limp. My wife carried our girl to the examination table, laid her down so we both could hold Tiva as she died. For the first time in months, Tiva aimed clear focused eyes at us and smiled. The final injection, Tiva’s body went instantly still. My wife and I stopped crying.

Our old gal found peace—February 5, 2009, 7:58 on a rare sunny morning in Humboldt County.

I regret that we did not relieve Tiva’s pain earlier, wish that I had not held so steadfastly to my vow not to kill in any circumstance. Sometimes death is the only thing in life that will return our comfort and relieve our fear. When it happens to me, I hope my friends and family let go of their intellectualizing and act from their hearts.

Tiva: one cute little piece of stuff.

Canine and the Crone

Posted on by Mike McLaren

He remembers something, but whatever that something is he no longer remembers what. These days the step from the back patio to the threshold into the house seems higher, untraversable in the dim light of a frozen white morning, and it confuses him, so he stands in the center of the backyard and barks, not seeing me until it’s too late for him to escape as I scoop him into my arms. (It’s always best not to sneak up behind him, because that scares him.) Once I’ve cradled him in my grasp, the five-pound Chihuahua immediately relaxes and tucks his head into my armpit. He knew I would arrive. I always do. Safe in my arms, I imagine he dreams of the days when he was the most feared Chihuahua in the redwood forests of northern California. He and one other little dog—his sister-of-another-mother—were the only Chihuahuas in Humboldt County when we rescued them.

Bluto was once a svelte, ten-inch-long Bruce Lee. From the first moment I saw him the little fella dared me to enter his cage. I broke the rules that day and did confront him head-on, where he and a solid black, emaciated female deer-legged Chihuahua huddled in a corner. She was the puppy my wife and I fell in love with after seeing her in an internet ad. In the shelter, Swee Pea was a sad, submissive little waif, but she was damned cute, so much more resonant in person. My wife and I knew we would not leave the shelter without her. 

But there was Bluto. All five pounds of him stood between us and the dog we had come to rescue from a shelter that “terminated” dogs after a certain length of stay. The intrepid tiny boy in the cage who had taken it upon himself to serve as the protector of the pup we had come to rescue held his ground, even as scores of Rottweilers and Pit Bulls paced their kennels with anxiety, wondering whether I would feed them two little snacks. I put my hand on the floor, palm up. Bluto came at me, fangs bared. The moment he clenched his teeth upon my hand I clamped his snout closed, and quickly clutched my free hand around his belly to stuff him into my armpit. Little fella didn’t know what happened. He sat stunned in my arms and stared up at me. At that moment he became daddy’s dog. We both knew it. Still, that awareness did not alter his personality. 

Bluto, for whatever reason, had acquired a testy little temper during his days of living in the streets and redwood forests of Humboldt County, California. Just a few weeks after we rescued him from the pound, the little monster drew blood from the son of our dearest friends. Not a good thing to happen, and several dog trainers suggested that my wife and I put down our recently adopted fella. But that wasn’t going to happen. I had not saved a dog just to kill him. I grew up with Chihuahuas, so his sudden tantrum did not surprise me. The young human had shoved his face too close to the face of a tiny, scared dog, and a dog struck with fear is fierce, particularly a Chihuahua who does not give a damn about the physics of variances in weight, size, and teeth. (I have always thought a Chihuahua would take on a gator in the Louisiana Bayou.)

My mother-in-law does not bite, but she does bark quite a bit, and about a lot of different topics of which she really has no clue. She has a testy little temper, and usually complains about her phone and her tablet. She keeps breaking Google and the internet. Without fail, whenever my wife and I travel two hours down the interstate to visit, one of us is asked, immediately upon entering the door, to reconnect her internet connection, and reset all the sign-in and auto-pay passwords we configured during our previous visit. To elevate ourselves to superhero status in her eyes, one of us resets her hearing aid app so she can once again hear her television. When the repairs are complete, we take her to the grocery store. 

She teeters like a toddler when she walks, and I’m afraid one day she will fall when she turns the corner to wibble-wobble down the baking aisle. Like Bluto, she too gets confused, and sometimes stands frozen amidst the produce and stares at something inside her head, or stares at nothing at all. And as she stands frozen near a bin of avocados, it’s not hard to decipher from her body what’s going on. She harbors a fear that lifts her shoulders to her ears and shortens her breath. She freezes, and stares at nothing at all. When she disappears like that, she trembles slightly, because even after so many years she still has no faith that my wife and I will come to rescue her. I suppose when you’re eighty-nine years old it’s hard to trust anyone, even yourself. One of us, my wife or I, is always there, immediately, because we never let her get more than two feet away from us. We lean her against one of our armpits until she becomes coherent again, and stable enough to begin a new adventure toward the cheese department.

It is necessary to approach her on the right side. She is blind in her left eye, and coming at her from that direction only scares the bejeezus out of her, because it seems to her as if someone has simply appeared out of nowhere. Sometimes, when we’ve returned my mother-in-law to the familiar surroundings of her small apartment, my wife will mess with the old girl and approach her from the blind side. Everybody gets a laugh when my mother-in-law squeaks with surprise. Still, the slight fright takes a little bit out of her; she heads immediately to the bathroom, then heads to her favorite of the two recliners in her living room. If we’ve brought the two Chihuahuas with us, my mother-in-law calls for her “little buddies,” and all three geriatric souls sit together in the old gal’s favorite chair to fart and trade other smells, and then fall asleep in a people-puppy pile.

The only difference between my two Chihuahuas and my mother-in-law is that my wife and I have the means to care for two little dogs. We lack the financial means and the physical property needed to care for a beloved human ― her mother. 

My wife and I lost most everything we had in California trying to stay afloat during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The business lock-downs took their toll on my wife’s yoga studio. Working twelve hours a day, often seven days a week trying to keep a 16,000 square foot, corporate office supply store open seven days a week with nothing left but a skeleton crew of seven employees during the pandemic, I decided enough was enough. My wife and I made a decision. We packed everything into a seven-foot-by-seven-foot POD and returned to Colorado, where my wife was born and where we met. We had to start over. Why not go back forty years and return to our real beginnings.

And now, having moved back to the town where we met, got married, graduated college, and became parents of a now grown and married daughter, my wife and I make just enough to get by. Some months we dip into our decimated savings to make it until the next paycheck. Other months we’re able to return back into our account what we borrowed from ourselves the previous month. It’s always nip and tuck, give and take, sigh a little, sweat a little, enjoy a few more beers at our favorite breweries than we did the month before, or suck up and settle for the six pack of corporate fermentation we can afford this week. When you’re forced to start all over again the flow of money changes like the seasonal current of a river. 

We rent a house at the top end of what we can afford, in the state where my wife’s family lives. The house, however, is not conducive to the needs of a frail, eighty-nine-year-old woman. The bathroom does not have a walk-in shower, and my mother-in-law cannot step high enough to get over the side of the tub in our house. She will never again be eligible for a Colorado driver’s license. All her friends live an hour and a half south of where my wife and I live. My mother-in-law would have to start over again if she moved to Northern Colorado with us. Starting over from zero is not all that easy. My wife and I know that first-hand.

But it goes beyond what my wife and I can afford to take care of her mother. No one can foot the bill to be old in the United States. We throw our elderly to the curb in this country that touts itself to be the greatest in the world. My mother-in-law is close to needing an assisted living facility. Medicare does not cover the cost of assisted living, in-home care, or long-term care. Pathetically, according to Medicare, the average annual cost of assisted living is $48,000 which is nearly a whole year’s pay for too many folks. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2022 that the median annual salary in the country hung somewhere around $53,490. 

The greatest country in the world… yeah, right.

The two Chihuahuas who have enjoyed a life of canine luxury could not care less about political boundaries and delineations, or the state of human turmoil in the world. They have their choice of five comfy beds positioned throughout the house. They get breakfast and dinner every day, and they get to snarf down treats of organic chicken and bison after every visit to the backyard for a poo or a whiz. They have two loving parents to tuck them in every night. They have a trailer attached to my bicycle so they can accompany my wife and me when we shop downtown or visit one of our twenty-four local breweries. I’m not sure Bluto can see where we’re going, but when we arrive at some of his favorite places he barks up a storm until I release him from the trailer and walk him into a store or to an outdoor table beneath a cottonwood tree where he begs for chips while I down a few stouts or porters. He always accompanies me to the tap line for another pint. Sometimes I let out the leash and let him lead the way. When he becomes discombobbled, loses his way, and gets worried, he stops and waits. He knows dad will be there within seconds. 

My mother-in-law was once a teacher, and now she sits alone in her apartment and wonders if and when her second-born daughter and favorite son-in-law will have time to drive more than one hundred twenty miles south on a dangerous interstate to take her grocery shopping and treat her to lunch at one of her “ten thousand” favorite restaurants. She doesn’t trust that we’ll be there, for one because she chose to live so far away that often we are not there, and second because even when we are there she forgets that.

My mother-in-law is adamant about living independently in her own home, which I suppose is all right for awhile longer. But I’m a content marketing writer, and five of my accounts are in-home care facilities. Every so often, when the SEO team loads my work into the back end of a website, I ask one of the folks to check pricing for me. Fifty-five dollars an hour, with a four-hour minimum, that’s $440 a week for two days of care, which is $1,760 a month, culminating in $21,120 a year. Cheaper than the $48,000 estimated by Medicare, but still out of the ballpark for my wife and I. We lose a lot of sleep mulling over how to get my mother-in-law the care she will need very soon.

The town where I live has earmarked tax dollars for a new dog shelter just a mile from where my wife and I now live. The new shelter will be able to house 1,132 animals. It is intended to be a no-kill shelter, so the dogs will live there for free. I’m all for it, because I love dogs. My wife and I can afford to take care of another dog.

My mother-in-law pays rent on her senior living apartment. It’s not expensive, but it’s not cheap either. We doubt the shelter would take in my mother-in-law.

Gone Dead Trees

Posted on by Mike McLaren

How many pieces of paper does it take to deforest a nation… or planet? Long ago, my wife and I managed to get ourselves off junk, advertisement, and other mailing lists. It felt good. The only mail we received was mail we wanted (or needed) to read. We discovered it was necessary to fill out the “cease and desist” junk mail form every year, but the time was nothing compared to saving a few trees. What few bills we have are all set up for electronic billing and payments. For the most part, we were nearly 100% paperless in our house. Then January 2022 came around, and our mailbox got ugly. Of the four places where we’re employed (or were employed) all but one sent our w-2s and 1099s through the paper mail, even though we had downloaded all our tax information from our benefit portals (3-5 pages each).

A few days later we received mail from the IRS, five pages explaining an enclosed reimbursement check. That same day we received mail from the Mayo Clinic―an advertisement dolled up to look like a handwritten letter. (We didn’t fall for it.) It’s the 21st Century, and we’ve got just 41 more years before Zefram Cochrane invents Warp Drive. I would have thought we’d all be paperless by now.

Flaming Wind

Posted on by Mike McLaren

Along the front range of Colorado we wait for snow. We have only wind, the demon that moved the fires swiftly and decisively from August to November 2020, through 625,356 acres of forests, which now stand only as charred splinters. Without the familiar snows of February and March――and sometimes April――the drought will continue, which means the fires will return in 2021. Yesterday, Groundhog’s Day, the sun blared and the outside temperature rose to 61°F. Today, the sun blared again with the same temperature, but the forecast tomorrow predicts cold. The two weather fronts have collided and now blow at 42 mph.

At times the Cameron Peak Fire raged forward on the back of 75 mph winds (Derecho), though during several days the wind surged at 116 mph. When the Mullen Fire (176,878 acres) roared down from Wyoming and merged with the Cameron Peak Fire (208,913 acres), Roosevelt National Forest along the Cache la Poudre River corridor could do nothing but burn to cinder. When the East Troublesome Fire (193,812 acres) jumped the Continental Divide and merged with both, Colorado recorded its worst fire season on record. For weeks on end in 2020, those of us who live in the front-range towns of Northern Colorado choked on the smoke that turned the sky black. There were days when headlights were necessary during daylight driving. Even now, after Groundhog’s Day, I am afraid to wash car; washing off the ash stuck night take away chunks of paint.

So now in the Centennial State we curse the wind and wait for snow, though if we get it the spring thaws will bring what would most assuredly cause massive flooding…

… and I live just a stone’s throw from the Cache la Poudre River.

California lost nearly 4.5 million acres in the 2020 Western United States Wildfire Season; Oregon lost more than one million; and Washington lost more than 700,000 acres. All three states recorded their worst fire seasons on record. All three states, like Colorado, are in danger of a fire season repeat.

The causes of the fires in the western United States are blamed on poor forest management and climate change.

The World That Was

Posted on by Mike McLaren

Think for just a moment… or for even a moment after that first moment. What happened in 2020? Two things made news: the COVID-19 pandemic, and Trump with his Republican Party cohorts. That’s all that made the news. But think; what else?

So much more happened which we can barely fathom, but which never made front page. We heard about a few other things, but not being boisterously apparent like Trump, or as deadly as COVID we probably passed aside those other things that made only the back pages of the newspapers.

The press reported the total number of deaths effected by the virus, but did not publish the names of the 300,000 people who, with their deaths, left at least double that many people grieving and wondering how they would manage to fend for themselves in a world gone haywire. How many of those people were mothers or fathers to multiple children, were aunts or uncles to a multitude more. The unknown number of affected people tears at the heart.

That is news.

In your lifetime, certainly not in what remains of my lifetime, Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado will never display the beauty of their once magnificent forests. The parts of each of those states that we most enjoyed are gone: beautiful lakes stripped clean of the trees which once stood watch among their shores are gone, trees which, if sturdy enough, stand only as charred sticks in the brittle ground that may wash away in the floods which will come with the spring thaws.

How many notable deaths――scientists, musicians, literates, conservationists, proponents of human equality? The list seems longer than those of the previous five years:

• Mario Molina―received the Nobel Prize for his work on the effect of CFCs on the Earth’s ozone.
• Julian Bream―master of the classic guitar.
• Eva Szekley―survived the Holocaust to win the gold medal in the 200-meter breaststroke in the 1952 Olympics.
• Arthur Ashkin―invented the “Tractor Beam.”
• Debra White Plumne―defender of the Oglala Lakota Tribe.
• Barry Lopez―naturalist and conservationist writer…
… and the list goes on: Bill Withers, Terry Gilliam, David N. Dinkins, Priscilla Jane, George Bizos, Charlie Pride… .

How many of us know these names? How many of us understand the significance of these names. They were reported, but only as an afterthought of political spewing and the virus that hacks at the guts of the American Dream――chops away the dreams of so many people on this planet.

But what is it that holds us all together, as one people, stuck on a rock circling a star that glimmers in a universe so infinite that time does not know we exist, never needed a reason to care that we inhabit a mote that has never made the news?

My hope is that the “lock-downs” of COVID have given us enough time for introspection, a study of humanity that reveals each of us is a part of larger whole that seeks to survive amidst the turmoil we inflict upon ourselves.

Santa Clara Valley Wine

Posted on by Mike McLaren

The Ohlone were the orginal inhabitants of the Santa Clara Valley, thriving from San Francisco Bay to Monterey Bay and Salinas. They did not consider themselves a distinct people, instead divided into separate land-holding groups (tribes) which interacted freely in trade, marriage, and religious ceremonies. They suffered an occasional squabble amongst themselves, but for the most part lived peaceably, hunted and fished in what they called “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

Their lives changed forever when the Spaniards arrived in 1769 to construct a collection of twenty-one missions, from San Diego to Solano.

FIRST GRAPES

Over time, history becomes blurred, sometimes becomes legend, and often becomes myth. Not so much with wine, because the grapes and the vines upon which they grow have a documented geographical genealogy, which is often attached to a specific human genealogy. Wine grapes are a legacy passed from one generation to the next, and the bloodlines that link people to grapes remain strong — particularly when the vines are relocated half a world away from their origin.

The Spaniards had mapped and claimed California in 1542, but for nearly two hundred years the entire region remained ignored, left to the indigenous people who had lived here for ten thousand years. But in 1769 Spain decided to expand its colonialism and appointed Franciscan monk Junipero Serra as President of the Missions, and gave him the mission to establish missions in Alta California (land north of Baja).

Serra began in Baja California and walked his way north. July 1, 1769, his expedition arrived at what become San Diego. Fifteen days later he founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá. He also planted mission grapes, California’s first winegrape vines. One year later, Serra founded a second mission — Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Carmelo — on Monterey Bay, and it was there, just seventeen miles west as the crow flies from where some of the richest history of California winemaking would take root, he planted more mission grapes. Over the next thirteen years, Serra founded seven more missions… and planted more grapes. Father Fermin Lasuén, Serra’s successor from 1782 to 1798, also founded nine missions. He planted grapes. Three other Franciscan monks established three more missions from 1804 to 1823… and they planted mission grapes.

With the establishment of twenty-one California missions, the legacy of the Santa Clara Valley wine industry had sprouted in the fertile valley soil.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Spain’s primary control of Alta California lay rooted in the missions, but because the monarchy had no burning desire to expand much farther beyond San Francisco Bay, Alta California remained largely remote, left to its own devices.

In 1821, after an eleven-year struggle, Mexico won its independence from Spain, but the revolutionaries who gained Mexico’s sovereignty had no plan or strategy for self-governance, thus the makeshift governments remained in disarray and in bitter conflict with themselves, unable to effect any substantial political clout in its newly acquired landholding — Alta California.

The Franciscan monks managed to retain control over missions lands, and continued to convert the indigenous people, but the Mexican war of independence changed things. Alta California experienced an influx of immigrants from the U.S., France, and Russia, who began to form trade routes and established permanent outposts and settlements. Those who came were mostly trappers, traders, and more significantly farmers.

Even before the war, secular vineyards were already established in Alta California. Only five years after the war, Joseph John Chapman (a Massachusetts pirate-turned-farmer) planted his privately-owned Mission grapevines to establish the first commercial vineyard in California.

In 1833 the Mexican government managed to effect the Secularization Act, which divided mission lands into individual land grants. Alta California wasted no time with its new mindset of privatization and ownership. Neither did the world. The region experienced an even greater influx of immigration and commerce, and in 1846 — ignited by the U.S. annexation of Texas — formed an army and declared itself the California Republic, independent of Mexico.

Two years later, it was just that. At the end of the Mexican-American War California was an official U.S. territory — and just two years after that California became the thirty-first of the United States.

And just moments after that, California became ripe with the legacies that propelled it to the fourth largest wine producing country on Earth.

THE OTHER GOLD RUSH

The California Gold Rush (1849) proved to be the catalyst for the growth of wine growing and production in the Santa Clara Valley. California was pregnant with precious yellow metal, but not all who ventured west to seek a fortune had the gumption and wherewithal to stick with it. Mining was arduous work, sometimes a crapshoot, and too often involved danger from looters and robbers. Many who came for gold arrived from other countries, and knew how to do more with their hands than slam pick axes into rock and dirt and to sluice rivers. They knew how to farm. Besides fruit orchards and vegetable crops, they understood the cultivation of wine grapes, and they brought with them centuries-old winestock from France and began to cultivate more varietals than the mission grape planted by the Franciscan monks.

They saw another kind of gold in “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

A community of Frenchmen who arrived at the outset of the Gold Rush settled in Santa Clara Valley, because of the comfortable climate and the richness of the soil. Among them was Etienne Thée, who in1852 purchased eight thousand acres of the Rancho San Juan Bautista land grant. He planted vines of mission grapes. That same year, fellow Frenchman Charles Lefranc — who would later become the “Father of California’s Commercial Winemaking” — went to work for Thée. The two formed a partnership and founded New Almaden Winery (what was once the oldest winery in California). Lefranc, unimpressed by the luster-less body of the mission grape, replaced the mission vines with superior French varietals he brought from the “Old World,” and produced California’s first Bordeaux. He married his partner’s daughter, Marie Adèle in1857 and inherited the business. Three years later, New Alamaden was the first and largest commercial winery in California.

Lefranc also instilled innovation into the Growing California wine industry. In particular, he used redwood barrels, which impressed the California Agricultural Society, which reported the barrels were “… half as costly, and will last longer than casks made from the best of oak. Worms never touch them, and they impart neither taste nor color to the wine.”

The wine industry began to ripen into the future.

NO WINE BEFORE ITS TIME

The future of California wine arrived in 1878, when Paul Masson migrated from Burgundy, France, to Santa Clara Valley and became the winemaker for Charles Lefranc at New Almaden — a productive and financially successful, nine-year relationship.

Masson married his boss’s eldest daughter, Louise, in 1887. Two months later tragedy struck. Charles Lefranc was trampled to death in a freak horse-and-buggy accident. That same year, Masson and Henry Lefranc (son of the wine pioneer) formed a partnership, and they began to concoct a bottle-fermented sparkling wine, which they released in 1892 to unprecedented acclaim. With that triumph, Henry sold his share of the partnership to Masson, who took sole control over New Almaden, though the children of Charles Lefranc retained ownership of the winery.

Masson eventually grew dispirited with Almaden, yearned for his own vineyard — one situated on a hillside, which he believed would yield a more crisp, robust grape. In 1896 he quelled his longing and purchased 573 acres acres in the Saratoga hills. He christened his new creation Le Cresta, and planted Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. He aimed to establish a hallmark of sparkling wines, and toward that end formed the Masson Champagne Company.

Masson’s dream became his legacy. His sparklers became what wine expert Charles Sullivan has dubbed “The Pride of California.”

CALIFORNIA CATASTROPHES

The California wine industry shot like a rocket toward success, but when navigating uncharted territory anything can happen, and beginning in 1873 anything bad that could happen did… for the next fifty years.

Phylloxera
Phylloxera is an aphid-like insect that feeds on the roots and leaves of grapevines. The effect on the vine is devastating. The infestation was noticed in California in 1873, ten years after the scourge decimated European vineyards in much the same way the plague wiped out people.

At first not much was done about the blight. Many winegrowers were slow to acknowledge the problem, perhaps not wanting to reveal their vineyards were infested. Whatever the reason, no one could mistake the reddening leaves, the dried bunches of grapes hanging dead on the vines, and the black rotting roots. By 1880, the problem could no longer be ignored. California had already lost acres of vineyards by the thousands.

The blight became such an epidemic that the California legislature created the Board of State Viticulture Commissioners and the Department of Agriculture at the University of California in Berkeley. Both institutions were tasked with finding the means to mitigate the massive destruction wrought by phylloxera. They discovered that vines which grew in dryer climes were resistant to the infestation, and proposed the solution to graft vines onto vines which proved resistant to the nasty bug.

Though not a cure, the technique of grafting gave winegrowers more than a fighting chance to stay in business.

San Francisco Earthquake
Phylloxera claimed many vineyards in Santa Clara Valley, had chewed a large whole in the valley’s wine production, but the fraction of the winemakers who remained began in ernest with the new grafting technique to regain their previous success.

The newfound hope, however, was shortlived. The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake became an even heavier blow to the California wine industry — one which pinned winegrowers to the ropes, and dropped many to the canvas.

San Francisco had become the hub of the wine industry, with warehouses, wine houses, and enough ports to transport California wine toward world recognition, but when the two largest tectonic plates on the planet decided to no longer play nicely together, the city of San Francisco crashed to the ground. What little remained standing burst into flames — dubbed by writer Jack London as the “Great Fire.”

Seventy percent of the city smoldered in ruin.

The earthquake ravaged everything from Santa Clara County to Sonoma. Almost nothing was spared, which brought the California wine industry to just a skinny husk compared to its former rising glory. The California wine Association lost eight million gallons of wine all its own. Hotels, restaurants, pubs… all of it was gone. Fifty million gallons of wine was decimated in San Francisco. Two-thirds of California’s wine was gone. What remained of much of the wine in San Francisco was used to put out fires.

Still, the California wine industry, all but uprooted and completely trampled, kept whatever hold it could on the fertile soil and released new sprouts whenever it could for the next eighteen years.

Prohibition
Wet or dry? During the two years that followed the end of World War I, that question had nothing to do with the weather. It spoke about the heated division in the United States between those who wanted to ban alcohol and those who did not.

On January 1st 1920, the U.S. Congress and the House of Representatives ratified the Volstead Act, to set Prohibition into motion for the next thirteen years. Two days after ratification, the country went dry.

Prohibition made it illegal to manufacture, import, sell, and transport alcohol, though It did, allow the homebrewing of wine and cider, and the use of wine for religious purposes.

It did not, however, provide a means to enforce the law, thus deferred all enforcement and legal aspects to the Individual states.

California, ever a state which loves to enact laws into its books, had its share of bills written to provide the financial means to enact the national law. All but one was voted down by referendum.

It is ironic the one bill California did enact, and which had potential to end winemaking in the State altogether, was authored by T. M. Wright, the assemblyman from Santa Clara County — the same county which can lay claim as the birthplace of commercial winemaking in California.

Almost immediately, the country began to ease the restrictions imposed by The Volstead Act, but turning the wheels of government is a slow process, and by the time the U.S. repealed prohibition, only 25% of California’s previous wineries and vineyards remained.

Yet, a few sparks still glowed in Santa Clara Valley. Paul Masson survived prohibition with great success by making “medicinal” champagne. Some growers made wine for sacramental use, and others dried their grapes into raisins or made juice to ship across the country. A few remained under the radar and bootlegged their wines to any of the speakeasys prevalent in San Francisco.

Emilio Guglielmo made a daring move in 1925, in the belly of Prohibition, and started his 15-acre winery in Morgan Hill because of the rising demand for wine at the time, and because he knew the back-firing law would eventually end.

But though embers remained, only a smattering of wineries still existed in the Valley, and many of those had fallen into disrepair, or were unable in the coming years to reclaim their former glory. It would be another thirty years before the Phoenix of the wine industry rose from the ashes left by Prohibition.

The Dark Age
The Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam… The path to recovery for the California wine industry later Laden with obstacles, and that too many of the post-prohibition wineries grew grapes that could be fermented into what connoisseurs called only belly wash.

But the fertile Santa Clara Valley soil remained just that, and sprouted three significant people with a pocketful of dreams, who kept the embers of Santa Clara Valley glowing through the dark years of rehabilitation.

Louis Benoist of San Francisco purchased Almaden Vineyards in 1941, and with help from renowned wine writer and connoisseur Frank Schoonmaker managed to distribute Almaden wines across the country — enough to make them one of the most popular wines in the U.S.

Martin Ray, a protegé of Paul Masson, purchased Masson Champagne Company in 1943 and wasted no time reinvigorating the stature of Masson wines — even established the Santa Cruz AVA. Ray was a boisterous, egotistical fellow with an overzealous passion for wine. Anyone who came in contact with him became implanted with that passion. It could be said he was responsible for the rebirth of modern winemaking in Santa Clara County.

Emilio Guglielmo, who founded his winery against all odds in the midst of Prohibition, also remained to lay claim as the oldest continuing winery in Santa Clara Valley, and was ripe for the planting of the future.

JUDGEMENT OF PARIS

The defining mark for all of the California wine industry came in 1976 with what is now called the “Judgement of Paris.”

For too many years only three wines existed: the good stuff (French), the very good stuff (also French), and everything else. Primarily the world felt the best wines came from “old world” vines, which remained landlocked in France. What few in the world of wine remembered, however, was that stock from those vines was imported to the US in the mid 1800s, and survived the phylloxera infestation, the San Francisco Earthquake, Prohibition, and more than 30 years of revitalizing the California wine industry.

Good winestock to be sure, but France could not lay claim to exclusiveness of those vines.

Steven Spurrier, a renowned British Wine Cellar and educator, organized a blind wine-tasting competition held in Paris, France. His goal was to pit unlabeled French and American wines against one another, and have them judged by nine French experts. The competition was poo-pooed by journalists worldwide. Only one reporter (from Time Magazine) covered the event. The results of the blind tasting, however, became global news, and tossed the world’s wine market on its ear.

May 1976, ten French white wines were set side-by-side with ten white wines from the United States. Ten French red wines were also set side-by-side with ten American reds.

When the final tastes were spit into the cuspidor and all the scores were tallied, the U.S. wines had bested the French wines. Of course France rebuked the results, and even tried to ignore them. But the results of the competition did make the news, and did more than bolster the continued growth of wineries in Santa Clara Valley.

Even today, new Vineyards appear in the soil which retains a history from before California was even a state.

Personal Accountability

Posted on by Mike McLaren

Trump is whole-handedly responsible for the insurrection January 6, 2021. He is also responsible for the five deaths that occured during the incursion. With his particular phrasing, the worst POTUS in American history purposefully incited violence and “wild action,” and kindled that violence over the course of months. Just as troublesome is that Trump could not have incited anything had he no followers. Thousands of people stormed the United States Capitol and took control of it for several hours. Would they have amassed in what many of them called “revolution” without someone giving them cause, on a specific date, at a specific place, for a very specific reason vocalized by Trump since his failed re-election in November?

Probably not, especially after knowing how the police handled the riots in Portland, Oregon (tear gas, baton beatings and rubber bullets in the eyes).

The ruction at the U.S. Capitol, however, was brewed over the entirety of Trump’s four-year term, his bombastic lies empowered by a political party that refused to uphold its duty to defend truth and the U.S. Constitution throughout his tenure.

The showdown January 6 was bound to happen, because the Republican Congress pushed it that direction. Had our Republican senators and House representatives not willingly acquiesced Trump’s ineptitude in the highest position in the United States, had they not aided him in perpetuating obvious and dangerous lies, and had they stepped up to the plate like Vice President Mike Pence to act contrary to the wishes of their “savior”――to uphold the United States Constitution and American Rule-of-Law――Trump’s ability to “enlist” thousands of people to his personal cause could not have happened.

Trump did lie throughout his calamitous term in the White House; his false claims were exposed day-after-day by reported fact-checks across the country. Statements he made claiming the 2020 election was rigged were determined by more than a handful of U.S. justices to “have no basis in fact and law.”

Still, people followed him, and continue to follow him.

Trump led the charge to “Make America Great Again” during his presidential campaign in 2016. It is ironic that upon his exit Russia laughs and points fingers at us, claims we are now an example of how democracy crumbles. Iran now calls us “fragile and vulnerable.” China touts itself as more safe than the United States. So many other countries have expressed pity for our plight.

Such statements and sentiments are not how other countries refer to “great” countries.

The United States has fallen from its high global perch because so many people allowed themselves to believe Trump’s lies, and too many still perpetuate his latest last-ditch fabrication.

Unfortunately, even after life-threatening sedition at the Capitol, one hundred fourty-seven congressmen still upheld Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, though the United States Supreme court decreed this was not true.

In Colorado, all nine of its congressmen admonished the January 6 attack on the Capitol, yet two of the State’s House Representatives――Rep. Doug Lamborn and Rep. Lauren Boebert――voted to sustain Trump’s assertion of voter fraud and electoral miscounting. Such equivocalness makes no sense; a person cannot condemn that which she or he helped perpetuate.

But that is the state of my country: divided by too many in positions of authority who persist without factual foundation to ignore truth, justice, and the American way.

Personal Cleansing

Posted on by Mike McLaren

It is said fire purifies, and for that my wife and I perform a ritual every New Year’s. We write all the things we want to forget of the previous year on strips of paper and burn them. This year, when we stepped into the frigid cold one second after midnight, my wife held a toilet paper tube crammed with thin strips of denunciations. My tube looked identical.

We stood oblivious to the weather and joined in the cacophony of our neighbors as we all whistled and cheered and yelled obscenities about the previous two hundred ninety-one days. Every few seconds small fireworks blossomed overhead, rekindled our shouts and catcalls, and though all of us appeared as only shadows beneath the streetlights or remained unseen in the darkness of our own yards, we howled united in a common cause–death to the Year of COVID.

I lit a small fire in a small portable barbecue grill. My wife laid her tube in the flames. I laid mine beside hers. We watched the tubes turn to ash, as if the rising smoke could wisp away all we had burned.

Against our better judgment, we stayed up two more hours, hoped the next time we opened the front door the world would be different, like Dorothy stepping into the color world of Oz. My wife and I knew better, but still we hoped.

It is said fire purifies; this year it cannot. Like so many others in the world, my wife and I carry too many unhealed wounds from last year: the loss of her dream, a yoga studio that celebrated its second anniversary only days before California issued “Shelter in Place” directives; leaving thirty years of our lives behind in a move from the West Coast back to the Colorado Rockies; the passing of a dearest friend, and the passing of the cutest little fella we’ve ever rescued from the SPCA…

… and the devastating fires in the western United States, and all over the world; the shooting of innocent people by policemen; the political destructiveness of a madman in the White House and the misguided elected officials who furthered (and for another two weeks will continue to further) his dastard, narcissistic plans…

… and the pandemic which killed nearly two million people, forced too many people into unemployment, has closed so many of the businesses that supported so many people, and which will persist in shutting down so many more as it continues its wave of global depredation into this new year.

The fire did not erase all my wife and I hoped to forget. We knew that as we stepped out beneath a clear blue sky New Year’s day and crunched through snow toward the path which follows alongside the Cache la Poudre River, one of only fourteen wild rivers remaining in the United States. Years ago the river was sacred to us, and once again has become another of our rituals, our stream of hope for the future that flows from the majestic Rockies.

After a thirty-year absence from Fort Collins—the home of our college Alma maters, the town where met, and the birthplace of our daughter–we have returned full-circle to start fresh.

Something inside me says the mountains and the waters of our past will cleanse us. Maybe 2021 will be better than last year.

Coming Upon Winter

Posted on by Mike McLaren

The green of summer is gone, the reds and yellows of autumn faded. All that remains above the Poudre River are brittle brown leaves that await their final fall into the flow. Seventeen inches of snow fell one week ago, but the only the bones of the storm remain in gray piles along the roadside, like roadkill wanting to disappear.

‘Tis the season of change――in the air, on the ground, in our lives.

In Colorado, Hell erupted to the surface of the Earth in more ways than several. The entire West is burned to char, and still burns. Violence among people still boils over the rim of the “melting pot,” and the POTUS proliferates violence and ideas of civil war.

Guns in public, aimed at the buses of a presidential candidate opposed to the maniacal, insane antics coming from our “sanctified”: White House.Who could have imagined that, one hundred fifty-five years after the War Between the States, the modern United States would relive one of the worst catastrophes in its history, a catastrophe indicative of Hitler’s rise, Mussolini’s rise, Qaddafi’s rise… .

Rome burned and lost its foothold on the world because of Nero’s insanity. My hope is that history can repeat itself so many times before people wake up.

My wife and I rode our bikes alongside the Poudre this afternoon, and at the bridge just before the intersection leading into Old Town Fort Collins we heard a steel tongue drum, beautiful and so much attuned to the slow rhythm of the river. I stopped on the bridge to listen, and to watch the fella who sat beneath gray trees and played the music. I stood longer, bowed my appreciation to the player as he bowed his appreciation that I listened. He restarted the melodic enchantment for my enjoyment. At the end, I waved good-bye. He waved good-bye. No sound; only the music.
It could have been an eternity. Maybe just a few minutes. He shared his music, I shared my enjoyment, and together, in silence, we shared our appreciation of one another.

I can only hope the U.S. election a week ago brings our country closer to an appreciation of one another, more appreciation of itself, and more appreciation of other countries.

Vikings and their Historical Footprint

Posted on by Mike McLaren

Vikings — the first images that come to mind are of barbaric marauders ravaging, looting, and terrorizing the coasts of northern Europe. That may be accurate, to some degree, but not entirely. The Vikings gave the world sagas, collections of stories and poems that shaped the way modern fantasy and science fiction are written today. Without the old literature of Iceland, there probably would not have been J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit.

The Vikings also gave the world the enduring legacy of the Alþingi , the world’s first parliamentary government. What we know of Norse mythology and Scandinavian history was written in Iceland.

To sustain themselves with food crops and livestock, they would have needed a calendar, and therefore a knowledge of the stars. To know the cosmos is to also understand mathematics.

Beyond literacy, political savvy, and agriculture, the Vikings were also a people who traveled the globe far and wide, in boats, which could only have been done with their knowledge of the stars and planets, and mathematics. In other words, the Vikings also knew science. To cross the ocean for global exploration and trade, in boats that could also serve as warships in shallow tides, the Vikings had to know more than just thumping people on the head.

And they did.

Fierce warriors, to be sure, they were feared opponents, but they were also sought after for trade, and for imparting their technological advancements. Kings in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe commissioned Viking longships, because in the years between 900 and 1100AD, no one could craft a sea-going vessel to match the Viking longship.

Their art, delicately crafted and intricately tooled, has been unearthed in archaeological sites across the globe. Their literature paved the way for current best-selling books and blockbuster movies. They gave the world a government which serves as foundation for governance in countries all over the current world.

In truth, the Vikings gave to and educated the world as much as the Greeks and Romans.

As you discover Iceland, with its hard, finicky weather, its rumbling mountains and tectonic activity, blue ice glaciers, and its isolation from the rest of the world, you have to image that the people who could settle in such a land, and who could be successful, must have been a bit smarter than the average polar bear.

From any Icelandair Hotel, you can easily tour and explore a world that marries fire with ice, and you can visit museums and landmarks to learn more of Viking history. If you stay long enough, you might even become a Viking yourself!

Currents

Posted on by Mike McLaren

Do not judge these words with spouts of anger. Vizualize these sentences and paragraphs in the way you see water, in all its forms. Go with the flow, immerse yourself in the currents and eddies, linger upon the shore… but do not cast stones, for they cause only ripples, which is karma.

We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same storm, on the same journey toward whatever individual conclusions we want to believe.

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