Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  3.

  Piña has an office on Silverado Trail, in Rutherford, and is the vineyard developer who would eventually be chosen to plan Mike Davis’s new vineyard up on Howell Mountain. An old-line presence in the development community, Piña had several clients whose vineyards bordered the river. Flooding from broken levees had caused them all problems, and Davie listened with interest the day John brought a stranger to a meeting of Rutherford growers.

  His name was Phil Blake and he represented the Resource Conservation District, the county agency dedicated to helping property owners conserve land and protect agriculture. The RCD, as it’s called, represented “government,” the widespread bête noire already being reviled in political clashes around the country by those who would coalesce into the Tea Party. Extreme property rights proponents were well represented in Napa Valley, and energized in the late 1990s’ epic clash between the vintner Jayson Pahlmeyer, environmentalist Chris Malan, and the Sierra Club.

  One of the Rutherford group was also a member of the Winegrowers, which opposed government involvement in property management decisions, particularly when related to the environment. Since everything did relate to the environment, the position was increasingly untenable. Yet the vociferous Clarke Swanson—inheritor of the frozen food empire—was unfriendly, as were the owners of the Caymus and Round Hill wineries.

  The group drank a few bottles of zinfandel while Blake showed slides he had brought along. He was known for an extraordinary knowledge of land use that cut across disciplines, for his luxuriant mustache, and his penchant for “anywho” as a substitute for “anyhow.” Blake offered the services of the RCD to help restore the riverbanks to anyone who might want them.

  Other neighbors insisted that “the river’s something you don’t want to touch.” The collective lore about the river’s power and mysterious ability to confound the plans of human beings was rich and went beyond dumping in wrecked pickup bodies to teach it a lesson. “Flood control once meant putting a Caterpillar D8 on the riverbed in summer,” someone said, “and driving south.”

  Some at the meeting insisted that the river didn’t belong to the county, but to those whose property it flowed past and who could do with it as they pleased. In reality the river belonged to everyone, though it remained a notional no-man’s-land in some minds, masking a fear of rules from the county that required effort and lucre. But evidence mounted that such rules and subsequent action could save property owners money, and spare them grief. Davie Piña would later admit, “I had expected people to say, ‘What the hell is this? No!’ Instead, I saw heads nodding. They knew something had to be done.”

  Building levees, the usual solution to flooding, was ultimately useless without riverbank restoration because water would forcefully eat into the levees and cause them to fail. Even if the Rutherford group proceeded as suggested, it would take at least three years for the studies and actual work to be done. It would also cost a lot. Some money would come from the county, some from the property owners, but the latter would have to come up with theirs first.

  The eventual cost was reckoned at two dollars a running foot, which for Piña Vineyard Management clients was about $7,000 apiece. But this was a lot cheaper than the possible loss of an acre of land valued at $150,000 or more. There were other benefits: a reduction of riverbank growth that harbored the dreaded insects, and levees that could be permitted instead of the current makeshift ones that had to be built without permits.

  It was all pretty low-key, John thought, to his surprise. His rebuilt riverbank served as a demo plot, helping convince others to follow his example “even though I was already considered a communist by some because I dry-farm and recommend that Rutherford become a herbicide-free zone.”

  Most of the property owners eventually agreed to the joint effort, while others undertook the repairs on their own. Someone had to oversee this creature, and it was agreed on that the person to do that should be the one who came up with the bright idea in the first place.

  But when people turned to John Williams, he said, “No, not me, Davie.”

  * * *

  Piña was soon learning that rivers are a great deal more complicated than he had imagined. Also that he needed help answering clients who called and asked whether or not progress was being made, and whether or not funding would come from the county, and what the exact rules were, and what their effect might be. “I just told them the positive stuff,” Piña says, “trying to move the project along.”

  The technical side he could handle. The scientific and political questions were something else again, but slowly, against steep odds, the snowball in hell grew.

  * * *

  Many years and $21 million later, almost five miles of the Napa River in the center of the valley have been more or less restored. Almost twenty acres of vineyard land were given up to improve the river corridor, an act of generosity by those recognizing the joint roles of science, government, and landowners. Flood damage has been greatly reduced on these stretches, with habitat restored, and work on another three miles, from Oakville to Oak Knoll, is under way.

  At the river’s south end, after decades of discussion, controversy, and scientific consultation and help in flood control from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, new wetlands have appeared. Wilder habitat has brought new wildlife, including otters, but not many salmon, and steelhead are still rarely seen. Other aquatic species continue a desperate struggle going back to the limits of human memory in Napa Valley.

  Most of the river channel remains a degraded sluiceway for dirt washing down from on high. Despite mitigation methods that slow this exodus of soil, the dwindling rain still brings with it fine soil, including fertilizer and other chemicals, that cover any eggs that might have been laid, the direct result of vineyard development.

  This hasn’t prevented the industry, which has collectively done little to help the river, from pointing out that it has gotten healthier. Though demonstrably true, this is practically meaningless ecologically since so much of it remains degraded, and the spotty improvement has been used as an excuse for more development higher in the watershed. Vineyard developers have proposed eradicating trees at the very time the valley—and the earth—require more both for immediate well-being and for mitigating climate change.

  The water question was given new urgency in 2016, when out of the lumpenproletariat—Napa-style—rose some of the same discordant voices that had split the valley over Walt Ranch. What they called for were some limits on development, neither new nor radical, but no observer would have guessed this from the industry’s unhinged reaction.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:

  Fifty Feet from Forever

  1.

  Thomas Jefferson’s faded agrarian dream had devolved into a celebration of commerce as the ultimate expression of democracy, just as the notion of enlightenment had devolved into tourism. In Napa, a class system based on wine as the generator of wealth encouraged economic inequality and social isolation and skewed once-venerable institutions and ways of life. Claims of just how much was being made in the valley varied and were often unreliable, but it was estimated as an $18 billion economy. The effect of this aura was alternately inspirational, disruptive, and increasingly unreal.

  The prospect of hundreds of new event centers in a narrow valley thirty miles long beggared agrarian values and threatened to spoil a local record of accomplishment. Public discussions were held on whether or not wineries and developers should obey the law, a distinctly odd convention by American standards. Public grievances were aired before safe collections of interested parties, the names of the groups utterly anodyne and the participants complicit.

  The Agricultural Protection Advisory Committee was one, though a more appropriate name would have been the Vintners’ Liability Prevention Committee. In 2015 the committee was presided over by the same stentorian corporate oracle in a voluminous polo shirt who facilitated the takeover of the Robert Mondavi Winery by the colossus Constellation and earned $6 mill
ion for his trouble. Now an aspiring St. Helena hotelier, he deftly let the steam out of the kettle of public disgust without requiring vintners to actually do anything. This was proclaimed an accomplishment by corporate peers and senior county staff, whereas the many citizens who took time off to testify were left slack-jawed by the committee’s ineptitude.

  Brave affirmations of the status quo ante would have been amusing if the lack of so-called code enforcement hadn’t remained shockingly weak. Vintners would now be asked to file reports of compliance with the production levels they had been granted, a kind of self-audit, but they would not be required to actually sign these documents because that would put them within reach of the law, had the law been reaching.

  The supervisors continued to legalize illegal construction and other amenities after the fact, so winery owners might sell these properties with legal-by-fiat additions, similar to developers illegally bulldozing trees in the hills for projects that were then deemed legal. And individual supervisors, out of indifference, self-interest, or whim, looked kindly upon applications for expansions that by law should have been disallowed. The county’s conduct in the new century was in stark contrast to the previous one, when office-holders for the most part acted with respect for history and public institutions and displayed rigor that in retrospect seems quaint. Electing candidates dedicated to maintaining the integrity of the watershed and agriculture at the expense of real estate development remained difficult, and costly. Officials and corporate spokespeople lauded these things in the abstract, and violated them in practice; sums large enough for environmentally minded candidates to compete electorally with the wine, tourism, and real estate engine remained practically unreachable for grassroots organizations to raise, another condemnation of the effects of the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court.

  The fractured environmental movement had cluttered its own path to office with competition from within; self-interested professional organizations paid homage to agriculture and tradition while backing candidates who undermined both. Increasingly citizens believed that another way had to be found to bring governing bodies into alignment with common desires and the law.

  * * *

  Mike Hackett grew up playing in the woods behind his parents’ house, halfway between Seattle and Portland. He and his friends made forts and generally lost themselves in early-American fantasies, but home life was different. His father, a railroad engineer and both alcoholic and workaholic, urged his square-built, athletic son into tennis and other sports and lived vicariously through him. But he also brought grief, casting Mike as the ameliorating force between him and Mike’s mother and three sisters. This left Mike, in his own view, “pretty good at reading people, particularly when they’re being disingenuous,” a talent that would one day come into play in a very different place.

  Like a lot of westerners, Mike ended up in a profession tinged with romance—flying—and while in the navy lofted P-3s out of Moffett Field. When he got out he went to work for Hughes Airwest, then for Northwest. When that airline was taken over by Delta he retired while still a relatively young man, and he and his wife, Carolyn, moved to Cupertino, south of San Francisco Bay.

  They visited Napa, were overcome by the physical beauty, and like so many other couples decided to move there, buying a “view” house above the valley in 1976. Mike planted three thousand Douglas firs to sell as Christmas trees and then, at the height of the dot-com boom, sold out and bought a more modest house outside Angwin, high on Howell Mountain, which still had the cheapest real estate overlooking the valley. He thought of this as their final resting place, “the High Sierra with vines,” and settled in to play tennis and enjoy the proximity of not-quite-unspoiled backcountry.

  Also in Angwin was Pacific Union College, a small Seventh-day Adventist outpost possessed of a lot of real estate. Mike watched as the school “bled red for years,” and then an absentee board of directors decided to sell off some of its land. The easiest way to do that, in strict accordance with American business scripture, was real estate development—in this case using a loophole in the law that allowed some new residences in the restrictive agricultural watershed.

  Mike hated politics but wanted to leave a legacy, and the best way to do that, he decided, was “to save Howell Mountain from destruction.” He and like-minded neighbors, some distant, formed Save Rural Angwin, adding a new tribe to Napa’s broadening grassroots community. With the help of Volker Eisele he told people, “We need to be able to stand up to the developers,” particularly “one of the richest men in the world who doesn’t need the money” (by now a too-familiar living caricature in Napa), and their elaborate proposals for an urban bubble in the woods.

  The county board of supervisors hadn’t yet become the recognized graveyard of conservation dreams, and it had put off ruling on clear-cutting parts of Howell Mountain, distracted by destruction on the valley floor caused by the 2014 earthquake. Save Rural Angwin joined the larger anti-growth group Vision 2050, with the knowledge that small communities all over were struggling against superior forces. At that early-2015 meeting down at Napa High, Mike saw that people were generally angry about rampant development and the complicit board of supervisors. He thought the departing planning director had “left a legacy of saying yes to development first always,” justifying it by citing the recession, and thus contributing mightily to the ongoing disaster.

  Claims of lost revenue were used to justify lax law enforcement that continued, and direct-to-consumer sales had become the business model even though abhorred by all but wineries and banks. Day and night the county reverberated with powerful machines as wineries rose, expanded, burrowed into the earth, raised up monoliths to their owners, ran giant fans to cool themselves, dipped hoses illegally into nearby streams, and otherwise opened the throttle on the machine in the garden.

  Big trees came down all around Angwin, on other ridges, and in steep terrain on both sides of the valley, largely out of sight because they were high up and screened by the very trees destined to come down. Prospective small and gargantuan planned vineyards that rocked the natives north to south, west to east, Walt Ranch being the big one. But lots of competitors waited for more hemorrhaging of the regulatory dam, most hoping for a washout.

  2.

  Back in 1991, Napa County had passed the hillside ordinance requiring growers to obtain county approval for vineyards planted on steep slopes. A decade later Chris Malan and the Sierra Club’s lawsuit victory over Pahlmeyer forced growers and their vineyard “managers” (read: proxy dynamiters and bulldozer operators) wanting to develop new hillside vineyards to subject their plans to the California Environmental Quality Act. This was a much tougher and more expensive standard, justified by abuses in the past, but it enraged vintners and potential growers accustomed to doing as they pleased in the hills. The legal victory of the heirs to John Muir’s passion consolidated industry groups that in the past had found less in common.

  Clearing and building continued in the hills on both sides of the valley, ill regulated, increasingly alarming. Those cutting trees up in the watershed were already required to spare at least 60 percent of the tree canopy and replace any oaks cut with twice as many planted elsewhere. But this, too, was difficult to monitor and meant an enormous, ongoing diminution of canopy for a generation and more, at a time when action on climate change was being stymied by politics.

  Jim Wilson’s proselytizing on behalf of living trees was powerful and persuasive enough to convince most within earshot. He convinced Mike Hackett, and they teamed up in early 2016 to put together what became the Water, Forest and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative. Included was a requirement that any landowner wanting to remove oak trees from plots of five acres or larger had to first get county approval and then preserve at least 90 percent of the canopy, as well as plant substitute oaks elsewhere at a ratio of three to one. And buffer zones around all streams would be increased.

  Mike, who had previously known little about land use, no
w knew more than he ever thought possible. Talking to Volker and Randy Dunn had been part of it, but so had reading agricultural reports and propositions and attending meetings all over, which meant long drives in mountainous country. His and Carolyn’s style of living changed radically, and though she supported his efforts on behalf of Save Rural Angwin 95 percent of the time, the other five percent she just wanted to pick up and move.

  When Randy asked Mike to run the meeting on the Eiseles’ front porch, up in Chiles Valley, to organize opposition to Mike Davis’s vineyard next to Wildlake, he readily agreed. The preservation of trees and streams became the last thing he thought about when he went to bed at night and the first thing he thought about when he got up in the morning.

  A lot of insight also came from Jim Wilson over on Capell Creek. Wilson was obviously an idealist and far removed from the realm of vintners, both geographically and spiritually. Deeply and adamantly opposed to Walt Ranch, he was equally devoted to the basic, a priori notion that human beings should be planting trees nonstop wherever possible as a bulwark against looming climate change, not the opposite. Cutting them down for vanity vineyards and ranchettes was not just shameful but also stupid in the light of global warming, and the refusal of those in titular control of the valley to recognize this was the signal failure of his time.

  Oaks were Jim’s thing: colossal spreading canopies of great natural beauty and function, miracles of transpiration in an incipient desert, mighty vertical reservoirs and anchors of shifting soils and whole hillsides that without big trees would run straight down and into the waterway—all justification enough for saving them.

  But oaks also served as harbors for wildlife, leafy, oxygen-expiring ganglia enduring with difficulty a now century-long invasion of determined realtors in the making and their enablers. The arboreal and the human, one beneficial, the other reductive, were locked in a desperate race for dwindling viable land and a chance to save, or use up, the most essential resource: water.