Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  St. Helena was indeed the poster child of California small towns when he decided to build his house just outside the city limits. He also owns a stunning retreat and even better wine cellar on the coast in Big Sur, and other houses in various parts of the world, being an early rider of the computer syncline (Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Accel) as it burst through California’s cultural crust thirty years ago. Today he belongs to the World Economic Forum, is a regular at Davos, and a man of some global reach and influence, yet in his way indicative of many in little St. Helena.

  Joe has lived in the neighborhood for so long that he has, for California, something close to a historical view. The most important local figure in it, in his opinion, is the deceased former mayor Delbert Britton. “Del had one fundamental, fatal belief: He wanted to pour hot wax over the town and preserve it. I told him he could either grow it or shrink it, but it would take magic to keep it the same.”

  Joe believes St. Helena’s fiscal problems are directly related to thwarted growth. “Now the leaders have panicked and are breaking glass,” a powerful metaphor in this gorgeous transparency, by which he means officials are trying to open the place for business in any way possible, despite the fact that many of the citizens don’t want that.

  We are close to the hard stop. The primary concern of the rich at the end of the day seems much the same as that preoccupying their ancestors back in the Pleistocene: not low-income housing or a new police station or repaved streets, but dinner. “The most difficult question to answer in St. Helena is, ‘Where are we going to eat?’ You have to go down to Yountville or Napa for a really good meal. The only solution to that problem is Uber.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  Bubbly

  The smack of California earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters, 1883

  1.

  For more than a year now his mother had been dying. Although no one put it that way, they dealt with the process as if the end was near, as well as unjust, but he wasn’t ready. He still thought of her as the younger woman he remembered, she of the broad, beautiful smile and wide, pale eyes, a beacon of encouragement and optimism in a body as slight as a child’s, yet retaining iron resolve despite discomfort, and fear.

  Her name was Jamie and he loved her and for most of his forty years had believed that her example would carry forward in one of her three sons after she was gone. He, the youngest, wondered if he had his mother’s strength. He was no longer sure of the rosy future once seemingly assured a family blessed with a winery of its own, re-created out of a ghostly shell, with international renown and set in a valley once thought inviolable and now racked by dissent at the outset of the new century.

  Hugh Davies had, twenty years before and recently out of college, stood before the county board of supervisors and urged them to pass a law that would protect agricultural land. This was a cause his family had long supported, going all the way back to the 1968 law establishing the country’s first agricultural preserve in Napa. This allowed land to be assessed on the value of its agriculture, not its speculative real estate value. Hugh had spoken in the time-honored manner of Davies men: a grin full of teeth, his voice flat, the words coming out Gatling-gun style like his father before him, a midwesterner, with a manner genial, assured, correct.

  His father, Jack Davies, had been better at this, though, capable both of a daunting retort and gentlemanly deal-making mastered in the gentler boardrooms of the 1950s, and corporate to the core. But something had moved Jack to reject the rigidity of corporate ascendency for the impossible dream of making wine. Hugh knew it had been Jamie who had inspired him, being an artist and the closest thing to a free spirit Jack ever knew.

  First Jamie had Bill, then John and finally Hugh, who turned out to be taller than anyone in the family, and given to abrupt, eyebrow-elevating laughter that sometimes caught his listeners unprepared. There had been a lot less of this since Jack passed away ten years earlier and his brothers went off in their own directions, still less as Hugh watched his mother struggle in the grip of advanced Parkinson’s disease.

  He assumed he still had two years with her, six months at the least. What there was left of the family on the old Schram property south of Calistoga—Jamie, Hugh and his wife, Monique, and their two little boys—had spent two weeks together in Puerto Vallarta with Monique’s parents and Jamie’s caregiver. Difficult, but they had done it. The day after their return Hugh had gone off to sell wine to fans of Schramsberg in Florida, command performances being the bane of the latter-day vintner, but he had talked by telephone to Jamie and Monique every day, and learned that Jamie was increasingly in pain. Then the nurse called Monique and asked her to come up to the big house, and when she got there Jamie couldn’t talk for crying. Monique had crawled into the bed and held Jamie in her arms.

  Hugh returned home the next night. The Sunday before Valentine’s Day he and Monique left their little house down the hill and walked up to the big one with the boys, dread in their hearts. They passed the old two-storied redwood barn that formed the corner of the Schram settlement where the road came around, through dense forest, from the highway far below, traveled once by Robert Louis Stevenson when he visited what was then the farm of Jacob Schram. At the top of the property the towering Victorian still reared against the sky, the Queen Anne fretwork on the high porch alight with morning, but the barn below still in shadow.

  Its cornerstone was engraved with the initials J.S. and the year 1884. As a child Hugh had tried to imagine what stories the old barn might have heard: in German, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish, as well as English, a chronicle of hard work and discovery on the east side of the Mayacamas, named for the Indians. In those times springs and creeks ran year-round and brimmed with trout, salmon, and steelhead; redwoods, Douglas firs, and tanbark oaks formed a canopy so dense it maintained rain that soaked the earth each winter. This moisture spread over the vast web of terrestrial life, nurturing flora and fauna in a beautiful, seemingly endless fecundity, but that, too, had passed.

  Built of redwood logged on the property, patched and added to for more than a century, the barn was flanked by ancient coast live and black oaks. After old Jacob Schram was gone various hapless inhabitants had moved in and out, but not the Davieses. They bought the property in the 1960s and used the barn to store earth-working equipment and to house the Mexicans who did the most difficult work.

  The barn still had an earthen floor then, dusty in summer, moist in winter, imbued with the scents of a century of activity, animal and human. Upstairs, accessible by the steep wooden staircase and loft doors, were boxes, old furniture, a clutter of the barely useful and long-forgotten where creatures made themselves at home. The men had believed the loft was haunted because in the middle of the night woodrats raced across the old upright piano’s keyboard, producing wildly atonal music.

  The Davies boys spent a lot of time in that barn. They joined the migrant workers in soccer, baseball, and football games on the open ground between the buildings, long since paved over to accommodate delivery trucks and the rising, ever-present sea of tourists. Some of the workers belonged to a soccer team, and Hugh and his brothers would ride with them down Highway 29 to St. Helena, Yountville, all the way to Napa, to watch them play. Sometimes the flatbed pickup would be stopped by la migra (Immigration officers) and the Mexicans would leap from the truck and flee, and over the next few days trickle back through the forest and reassemble in the barn.

  Hugh had learned to flip tortillas on the gas burner there. He, Bill, and John had enjoyed many a meal, too, and the odd Friday- and Saturday-night card and checkers games. Workdays began at six o’clock when first light appeared and the wheels were set in motion for another day, before the sun rose over distant Howell Mountain.

  Now Hugh and his little family climbed the broad stairs to the house’s deep veranda, set with planters and wooden rockers, south-facing in its grand sweep. It had been built in 1889, so St
evenson had not sat in these bentwood rockers to taste Schram’s wines, but sometimes the famous novelist’s presence does seem to hover there.

  Hugh and Monique were surprised to see Jamie waiting at the door. She had rallied, and they, too, felt their spirits lift. Jamie’s nurse took the boys upstairs so Hugh, Monique, and Jamie could sit together in the living room and talk by the tall corner window that let so much light into the room with high ceilings and exquisite woodwork. Tall wavy panes overlooked the garden below where Jamie had spent many hours over the last forty-three years, and Hugh was determined that she would continue to do so as long as she was able.

  They chatted, the Weber grand piano by the big window part of the conversation. Though fragile, Jamie could still captivate men and women. Her toughness had revealed itself in her grapples with the gorgeous old architectural wreck when in the beginning bats flew down from the attic and animals lived in the walls. Life had since softened, and exponentially expanded. Now Hugh was sure his mother wanted to say something special on this bright February morning and had prepared for it.

  It had always been hard for her to get out intimate thoughts and feelings, a paradox in a woman so warm and outgoing. The tremors didn’t make this easier. She said at last, “I won’t be here much longer, I’ve come to accept that. And I’m comfortable in the knowledge that you two will be able to carry on just fine without me.”

  Hugh’s father, had he been alive, wouldn’t have accepted the suggestion that she was bowing out. A descendant of Welsh coal miners, Jack had passed some of his self-control and determination on to his sons, and Hugh now said, “Mom, you sound like you’re throwing in the towel. You have to keep fighting.” People were known to live with Parkinson’s for twenty years, more, carrying on even when confined to a wheelchair, incapable of speech. But Jamie just smiled. It was a gesture many in the valley knew: She had made up her mind. Unable to breathe comfortably, in need of someone to feed, bathe, and dress her, she was showing another side.

  Hugh dug into the chest of comments his parents had shared over the course of his life: Focus on the positive. Embrace the life in front of you. Above all, live. Jamie had five grandchildren and surely more to come; the business was moving forward, performing better than it ever had. Sickness, loss, uncertainty could all be combated. Instinctively, he and Monique moved closer to her, and Monique said, “Jamie, I’m selfish, I’m not ready to let you go.”

  Hugh never expected someone he loved to say out loud that he or she was simply leaving, foreseeing all that was to happen and having the courage to will an end. He began to talk about all there was to look forward to: the birds Jamie loved to hear singing in the garden, the frogs in the pond croaking at the end of day, the glorious sun that rose each morning. Nature had always been a source of wonder and excitement for her and the whole family, but now even nature wasn’t enough.

  They sat for a while without speaking. Finally Jamie said, “Let’s have some bubbly.”

  2.

  The pine-paneled kitchen was little changed since the 1950s, and there Hugh opened a bottle of Schramsberg Brut Rosé and carefully poured three glasses. He raised his in a silent toast, and the mood shifted. Everybody gazed out at the big-leaf maples in the garden, the old cellar building, and fir-studded hills above. The upper pond visible from the kitchen window had originally been for irrigation and possible fire suppression, and had once served as the family swimming pool, the long rope swing dangling from the big oak on the pond’s bank. The rusty iron wheel valve sticking out of the middle of the pond had long since been rendered useless, but it had provided a fine spot to tie up the wooden raft when Hugh and his brothers were boys. They would mount an old metal slide on the raft and glide down, down into cool green water.

  The memories were coming fast now. When he was growing up there had always been a dog or two, the Labs—Victor, Pinot, Foxy—excellent swimming companions, but the strongest swimmer of all was Cecil, the golden retriever. With dogs, a rope swing, a raft, a waterslide, and a rowboat, it had been the best imaginable swimming hole.

  He gazed around the kitchen. On the wall was the favorite family picture of him, his brothers, and their father all sitting on the edge of the raft. On hot July and August days they would collect pollywogs in glass jars. The ponds were still full of frogs that each night in season conducted croaking choir practice that by late summer was dominated by the bullfrogs’ resonant twang.

  The lower pond had been renovated by Jamie and the gardeners twenty years before to honor the workers who tended each vintage of Schramsberg during its long life in the caves. She commissioned a sculpture called The Riddler’s Night Out, depicting a tuxedoed frog balancing on one foot among lily pads, a bottle of J. Schram in one hand and a glass flute raised in the other. In previous winters the lower pond had sometimes frozen, and one year Hugh and his brothers had played ice hockey there using sticks and rocks. The ice gave way beneath Hugh’s feet and he plunged into the frigidity below. Bill and John were able to pull him out, a story Jamie now listened to him tell again, and after he was done she said, “I want to go outside and have a look around on such a beautiful winter day.”

  Hugh went out and brought back the “mule,” a green off-road vehicle they used to get up Schramsberg’s steep, winding dirt roads. Monique helped bundle Jamie in coat, scarf, and blanket, and they climbed aboard. The sun shone brilliantly against the blue sky as they mounted toward the water tower, and Jamie started talking: about her first ride up in 1965, before the clearing of the forest, when her father got his Jeep stuck.

  Hugh remembered how they had all gone up higher as a family before Christmas, a wonderful time at Schramsberg, full of ritual and celebration. They cut a tree a thousand feet above sea level between steep, redwood-flanked canyons. His father, behind the wheel of the beat-up International Scout, would pass the winery, the former Chinese bunkhouse, and vineyards. The view down-valley included Howell Mountain to the east, Pritchard Hill, Stags Leap, and Atlas Peak farther to the south.

  The Davieses always chose the Douglas fir with the fullest top, a simple handsaw bringing it down, measuring tape at the ready. Later, the ten-foot tree filled the windowed corner of the living room, with more trimmings taken from the forest festooning the house, veranda railing, and fireplace mantel. A dark corner of the attic was dedicated to Christmas decorations, and these descended piecemeal into the light, with each person in turn hanging ornaments: the pointed star, balls of various shapes and colors, elves, the red Christmas doggy, birds, tinsel.

  Hugh drove on with Jamie and Monique beside him, past vineyards infused with these memories though replanted since: chardonnay and pinot noir for Schramsberg’s sparkling wines had given way to cabernet sauvignon for the new J. Davies Diamond Mountain wine. High in a dead fir a red-shouldered hawk perched, and they all sat and admired him. The vineyard was dormant this time of year, the vines and surrounding deciduous trees leafless. The hawk launched at last and they watched in silence as he made wide, soaring circles and vanished to the north.

  Jamie pointed out the place marked on the blueprint map of the Schram property from 1885 that hung on the Tower Room wall in the winery. Hugh parked and they all got out, Hugh and Monique helping Jamie walk into the steeply pitched forest. Hugh said, “Mom, we can’t just charge down there.” If they did, he would have to carry her back, and he was afraid he might not be able to.

  They drove down, passing the spot where a winter landslide in 1995 took out a dozen fir trees. Volunteer maples had established themselves. They passed Jamie’s Block and Jack’s Block, named since the replanting, where the wild turkeys were often seen, and circled back along the lane of olive trees that had been there for more than a century.

  Jamie seemed happy. Everything looked good—the vineyards’ cover crop of clover, vetch, and fescue, the season’s accumulated straw scattered for erosion control. She had worked for over forty years to establish and maintain all this. They passed through Jack’s Grove, with its new growth of o
ak saplings, the trees in the middle of the vineyard the site of countless family gatherings and winery functions—birthdays, Fourth of July parties, promotional Camp Schramsberg dinners, cellar club events. Monique and Hugh had been married here on a wet October day four years earlier, and now they swapped memories of friends and family slurping oysters in the rain and raising glasses to the future while the wild Mexican brass dance band played.

  Jack’s memorial service had been held here, too, in 1998, people lining the vineyard rows all the way up to the forest. One friend after another had recalled his creativity, warmth, and spirit, and the many contributions Jack had made to the valley. Three dogwoods planted not too long before were just flowering.

  Farther down, beyond the McEachron house where Monique, Hugh, and the boys lived, they paused beside the pond. It was full of fish, usually impossible to see, but today they came to the surface in a flurry of life Hugh had never seen, as if they had risen from the depths to have a look. The next stop was the rock wall along the creek next to the driveway, repaired with moss-covered rocks untouched for a hundred years.

  At the bottom of the road, they took in the view of the valley floor and Hugh realized that this was the last time Jamie would cross the property’s edge, that she was here to say good-bye to the world beyond.

  Back up at the house, far from public view, Jamie asked for more bubbly, a tacit acknowledgment of the Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon, who had, according to legend, discovered sparkling wine by chance, centuries before, in Champagne, saying he had tasted “liquid stars” and giving birth to the now ancient tradition in a distant land. Hugh opened a bottle of the Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs, since Jamie rarely expressed a preference and left it to him to decide, just as she had left such decisions to Jack.