Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  Son Mike comes in briefly in his Aussie boots, shorts, and a sweat-stained T-shirt over his barrel chest. He’s headed home. He, Kara, and their kids live on the north end of the ridge and are vulnerable, too, though their metal-roofed house is covered in stucco. “I guess I’ll go back,” he says, almost casually, “and get up there and see what I can see.”

  As he leaves, Brian tells Randy, “If I were you, I’d make a sign and put it up on the road. I’d spray-paint the address and the words ‘Defensible, 10,000 gals. Pond and pool.’ That’s what I’d do.”

  The Dunns’ machine shop and shed is not readily comprehensible to a visitor. Surely any mechanical problem in small-scale viticulture can be solved here, but first you must know where to look: rebar, metal and plastic pipe, boards, enigmatic tools, machines for fixing other machines, a wall of dusty chainsaws, a forest of wrenches both new and grimy, a wall of fittings great and small for every imaginable coupling, and various other mysteries from the deep industrial past.

  Take the drill press that once lived in the hold of a ship—its battered Darth Vader visage towering over a new bit that could drill through a foot of steel. Randy bought that, too, in the 1970s, from thirdhand UC Davis surplus. It weighs half a ton, and he brought it home on the same flatbed that had moved the D4. Ask why and he’ll say, “It was too beautiful to pass up.”

  What the shed and shop don’t have, however, is workable spray paint cans. Randy and I have penciled Brian’s words on a piece of plywood, but the first can he tries is clogged; the second fizzles. The only working one contains orange paint that’s too pale to be seen at a distance, so the letters must be traced again with a succession of parched black Magic Markers. The words go on, but there’s no room for “pond and pool,” so another board is propped up and assaulted with orange paint.

  Randy tosses a hand drill and some sheetrock screws into the back of a golf cart that is now a wheezing farm runabout. We take off, passing the roan gelding on his back in the paddock, rolling in dust.

  White Cottage Road is deserted. We prop the first sign against the mailboxes, and Randy screws the second one high against a runty oak. A sheriff’s cruiser speeds past, and the deputy’s head whips sideways to take in Randy’s handiwork. The next day, Dunn Vineyards is to be visited by the influential wine critic Antonio Galloni, who has come from New York to taste Napa Valley’s best, including a succession of Dunn vintages. Most vintners in such an enviable position wouldn’t want to greet their estimable guest with odd, hand-painted messages in lurid colors, but the signs could give the vineyard a chance.

  Overhanging boughs of live oak, Douglas fir, and madrone might deter a passing fire truck in the heat of battle, so we drive back to the shed to get the forklift, one of the white plastic bins used for hauling grapes, and a chainsaw. Soon the offending, powder-dry branches are exploding against the tarmac, where Randy shoves them aside to make way for possible saviors.

  3.

  The breeze has shifted to the west. Tiny bits of ash alight on car hoods and the lenses of my sunglasses. The odd, unsettling sense of isolation seems inevitable. But meanwhile, trenching is in order—around the main house, the garage, and the two well houses. The implement used for this, the McLeod, is a heavy hand tool with two working edges: a broad, hoe-like blade and a fanged rake. Randy quickly moves earth and needles into rows, creating more firebreaks, while I sweep leaves from low roofs. Soil, systematically exposed in neat circumferential alleys, must be hosed down.

  But most of the hoses are in the big cave next to the “winery,” a collection of eight stainless steel fermenters under arching metal girders, open to the sky. A great rolled sailcloth can be stretched overhead if the sun becomes intolerable, but before the harvest, the sail stays furled. The grape press is parked to one side of the crush pad, and that’s it but for heavy oak doors under a concrete archway that lead to the cave, a world unto itself.

  Fifty-odd gallons of Dunn petite sirah, a hobby pressing that comes before the main event each year and is intended for family and friends only, bubbles in a smallish stainless steel tank on the crush pad. A square of cloth has been duct-taped over the top to keep the wasps out. Randy interrupts his labors and says, as he stands on an empty beer keg, “Let’s make some wine.”

  Using a special steel implement with a canted blade, he punches down the clot of purple skins floating on top, a practical step in winemaking that is thousands of years old and increases a wine’s color and intensity. Petite sirah is considered a lesser variety in Napa today, though it once was a power because of luscious fruit and inkiness that could deepen the color of even endemic wines. These vines were propagated from old stock. After the grapes are picked and crushed they’re de-stemmed and inoculated with yeast to start fermentation. The punching down intensifies color and flavor. After about ten days the wine will be drawn off and the skins put into a small wooden press to recover any remaining wine. The pressed skins and seeds, known as pomace, will be spread in the garden as compost. Says Randy, “The chilis love it.”

  The wine will go into an oak barrel and stay there for two years before it’s hand-bottled, all this the very basis of winemaking throughout history and around the world when wine was primarily for pleasure, conviviality, and conversation, not points.

  At that moment a sheriff’s cruiser pulls up, having passed both the paddock and the house without slackening speed. A deputy gets out in a drift of dust, his belt weighted with a capable-looking automatic pistol and handcuffs. Randy gets down to talk to him, providing, when asked, his name and those of the surrounding neighbors, all of which the deputy dutifully enters into a spiral notebook. When they’re done, the deputy says, “White Cottage Road’s being evacuated,” the second time in fourteen hours.

  Randy says, “Okay.”

  “Are you leaving?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That a yes, or a no?”

  There’s a pause. “No,” says Randy, and the deputy and his partner pull away, leaving a skein of new dust. They’re too busy to bother with a recalcitrant property owner, though they’re unlikely to forget him.

  Randy pulls open the doors to the cave. The dim space is punctuated by winking lamps tunneling toward the heart of Howell Mountain, the corridor lined by French oak barrels like opposing sentinels forming a blond, symmetrical honor guard. He makes his way toward the farthest barrel, collecting a hose here, a hose there. Draped with heavy rubber coils, he ascends to the buildings above and attaches nozzles that can be directed toward embers or creeping ground fire during that short interval when a fire is possibly controllable.

  More water will be needed for an inferno, however—more than is readily imaginable. Thirty feet from where that mountain lion once jumped through the window stands a faded red International fire engine built in 1946 by Van Pelt of Oakdale, California. It’s an elegant conglomeration of red domed lights, old cloth hoses folded and stacked like hundred-foot pythons, rubber hoses on hand-rolled wheels, spiderweb-covered railings, and various other accoutrements out of a Buster Keaton film. Most important, though, the antique fire engine has an eight-hundred-gallon water tank, which Randy now fills using a big plastic pipe from his big well’s concrete collecting tank.

  Randy bought the engine as is from Mike Robbins, the owner of Spring Mountain Vineyard—also known as Falcon Crest on the 1980s television show—when Robbins, despite the success of the soap opera, was in bankruptcy. The fire engine’s transmission was jammed, and Robbins agreed to take just $1,500 for this classic, even on the off chance Randy could get it running. So Randy borrowed a crowbar, fixed the transmission in a few minutes, and hauled the fire engine up Howell Mountain on a trailer. He parked it in the field south of the house, where it has sat ever since.

  When Randy presses the ignition switch, a blast of black smoke erupts before the motor turns over with authority, filling the afternoon with the resonance of old-time vehicles.

  We pull the flat cloth hose onto the grass, up the stairs, and across th
e office porch, where Antonio Galloni will have to step over it the next morning—if there is still a winery here and cabernet to taste. The hose expands as the engine pumps water through it. For one frightening moment, the nozzle—sculpted brass, a work of art in its own right—blasts a barely manageable torrent as thick as a man’s arm before the motor is shut off.

  Fortunately, the smaller rubber hoses emit streams of water less likely to break windows. Their pump runs off the main engine, and Randy gets it running, too. The rubber coils throb as they come off the roller. Squeeze the trigger on a fancy nozzle and a shaft of water shoots half the height of a Douglas fir. The fire engine’s water tank is full, the hoses are ready, and Randy shuts everything off.

  It’s late afternoon and there’s no sound now from the one house visible to the north, no sign of human life in the encircling view. The breeze is undetectable in the trees, but high overhead, curdled clouds move glacially out of the south. Randy walks around the paddock and down to the pond, where a child’s plastic paddleboat sits among the weeds.

  He pushes the two-person boat into the water, then climbs in alone and tests the paddles. The boat lists to one side, so the paddles make it go round in a circle. Randy climbs out and wades in deeper. Here we could stand and possibly survive, although it would be a very long night. We would watch the firs crown in paroxysms of flame, the Dunns’ house following. We would listen to bottles exploding in the cellar, hot embers raining all around as we felt the pressure of lung-collapsing heat. If we had fire suits and gas masks, though, we could contemplate the smoke through a thin sheet of scuffed plastic. But Randy says ruefully: “I’ve only got one gas mask.”

  At dusk we go into the kitchen, where Randy makes margaritas with a single-field tequila called Ocho, for which he trades Dunn Howell Mountain cabernet. This sort of bartering—cab for a case of tequila, cab for a flat of apricots, cab for a reworked airplane part—is as old as agriculture. Meanwhile, I cook hamburgers doused in Worcestershire sauce, and then we devour them, Randy drinking a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and I a glass of a previous year’s Dunn petite sirah from one of the open bottles next to the sink.

  All outside lights are off now, and darkness settles in like a sentence. The thought of dying from smoke inhalation at two in the morning recurs, but Randy has been through this before; he’s no fool. And if I stay, I can have another glass of petite sirah.

  A friend calls from St. Helena: Rumor has it the National Guard is coming to evacuate any stragglers. Randy hangs up. “If we see anybody on the road,” he says, “we’ll just turn off the kitchen light.”

  After dinner, he turns off the light anyway and goes back outside, where he puts on his headlamp. Exhausted, I head for the guest bedroom under the office, where there’s a shower with double glass doors to stop any mountain lion. It occurs to me as I pick my way through the darkness that, in this age of calamity, falling embers are a metaphor for a host of real and possible disasters. We’re all waiting for fire now.

  The last time I see Randy that night he’s back up at the well house. If the National Guard comes, they will see a bobbing circle of yellow light and hear the sound of someone wielding a McLeod, working.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  Wildlake

  1.

  The wind died that night and the fire north of Howell Mountain was finally brought under control. Antonio Galloni did indeed visit the next day, step over the hoses, and taste several Dunn wines, to his apparent satisfaction.

  Also unscathed were the three thousand meandering acres known as Wildlake that once belonged to a hunting club, all just minutes away by pickup from the Dunns’ and the object of much of Lori’s concern. The property was once called Wild Lake Ranch, but its origins reach further back into Napa’s history. Native American grindstones are discernible there along Bell Creek, and remote ruins of a nineteenth-century homestead. Unknown to most people living two thousand five hundred feet below, some of the purest surface water on the west slope of the Howells range begins its descent here and flows down through Dutch Henry and Bell Canyons, the latter feeding into the reservoir from which St. Helenans happily drink.

  Years before, Randy wanted to explore there but didn’t belong to the club. He did know one of the members who, when asked about the possibility of Randy joining the club for access to the land, happily said, “You don’t need to,” and gave him a key to the gate.

  Randy used it, canvassing the property on horseback with his daughter Jenny, in the last years of the American century. They rode Rattlesnake Ridge between the two drainages, and highlands that run all the way up to the boundary of Robert Louis Stevenson State Park. Nimrods only came up from the valley to shoot deer, so out of season the place felt empty of people. The old cattle pond near the property line where calf-and-cow operators in times past dammed runoff wasn’t really a lake, though there were grasses along the edge, and fish in the emerald depths. Sometimes the whole Dunn family came, sometimes just Randy and Jenny, a bright, optimistic girl who loved what they had all come to call, simply, Wildlake.

  Jenny and Randy would sometimes hold hands as they rode through country seemingly without end, full of possibility. When she was twenty and a junior in college she came home sick, and within hours she was in intensive care, having contracted a rare, rapacious virus before which the doctors seemed powerless. Despite everything they tried her condition worsened. She lost consciousness, and finally died, a sudden, terrifying cataclysm that stunned not just Lori, Randy, and the family but all who knew them.

  The pall was so dark, extensive, and weighty that some thought it would never lift. Most affected seemed to be Randy himself who, unlike Lori, could not talk about what had happened. Mention of Jenny, of their time together at Wildlake, of daughters and anything tangential brought instant, total grief, without apology from Randy.

  Their son, Mike, picked up more duties around the winery. Slowly, miserably, everyone there undertook familiar tasks that had been robbed of relevance and joy. Randy still went to Wildlake, not on a horse now but on a mountain bike, or on foot. He drove himself to exhaustion in the far reaches of the three thousand acres, and a day or two later went back and did it again.

  * * *

  In the years that followed the pall slowly began to lift, though not entirely. He and Lori bought a discrete stretch of woods above the town of Angwin, known as Sentinel Hill, and placed an easement on it so it could never be developed. Helping him was the head of the Land Trust of Napa County, the ginger-bearded, loquacious John Hoffnagle. When Randy passed up the opportunity to extract the maximum tax deduction, Hoffnagle thought, “This is different, he really wants to save the land.”

  Occasionally Randy mused about the possibility of preserving Wildlake the same way, but it was too special, he thought, for the owners to ever relinquish it. And if it ever did come up for sale, it would be too expensive for the Dunns anyway. They wouldn’t even get close. Still, he yearned for access, the lock to the gate having been changed. He no longer had a regular ramble in the most—the only—extensive pristine stretch of Napa County.

  He learned that one of the fifteen memberships was being vacated, and tried to purchase it. But Marc Mondavi, a hunting club member, got there first. Marc was the son of Peter and the nephew of Bob, and so belonged to the fraternal line going back to the split between the brothers half a century before, when they had fought in the vineyard and Robert had been kicked off the family’s Charles Krug property. Marc considered himself a mover, and Randy suspected he had eyes on all of Wildlake.

  Then Randy discovered that another club member had simply disappeared. If he could be found, Randy reasoned, he might be able to buy the man’s share.

  Randy’s wide network of friends with practical skills beyond the ken of most vintners and inheritors included an affable neighbor, Bob Lamborn, the maker of a good zinfandel from old vines as well as a crackerjack private investigator. Randy asked Bob to see if he could find the guy, and Bob did—up in Alaska—but M
arc Mondavi picked up that share, too.

  Randy told Lori, “I’m pissed.”

  She was glad because being pissed was good for him. Then their daughter Krissy, attending school down in San Luis Obispo, called to say she had just talked to the son of one of the hunting club members and been told that Wildlake was going on the block. So rapid had been the rate of development, particularly of coveted vineyards lending legitimacy to other activities, and so enormous the fortunes pouring into the valley from elsewhere, that no pristine parcel was safe.

  Randy learned that many members had lost interest in the place over the years. He later examined hunting club documents and a list of the number of bucks killed there. The tally went from forty deer one year to thirty the next, and so on down to less than twenty. Members said they didn’t much want to hunt there anymore because mountain lions were eating all the deer, when in fact it was they who were eating them.

  He still didn’t know the price. That was because there wasn’t one. So he arranged to meet with a couple of club members—not including Marc—and talk about it. Randy asked them, “Can we say it’ll be somewhere between five and fifty million dollars?”

  They said yes. They did not give him a formal first option on the property, but it seemed that an option was what he had. The property was not listed as for sale, and the price finally arrived at was near $20 million. He had six months to put it together. Everybody but Randy thought—but didn’t say—it was impossible for a small-production guy like him, so far outside the local pool of Napa’s astonishing real wealth, to succeed. As Randy told a friend, “There are people in this valley who can write a check for twenty million with no more thought than taking somebody to lunch. Any one of them could buy and hold on to the land while they figured out how to fuck it up.” But he wasn’t going to allow that.