My Journey To Nicasio

My Journey to Nicasio

The alarm clock jarred me out of a dreamy slumber. I yawned, stretched, and gazed at the lazily spinning ceiling fan before tossing off the quilt and pushing my bony feet into cushy lambswool slippers. Using a cane I walked warily across the carpet to my veranda where I drew a long breath of honeysuckle-scented air and viewed the radiant sunrise. Today, September 2, 2006, is my birthday. I’m one hundred years old.

It’s a serene morning, but a century of calms before storms brings a flurry of pins and needles. Later today I’ll be surrounded by my four daughters and their husbands plus three more generations of family. Sixty-five years ago when I designed and built this rambling Marin County abode I envisioned family gatherings, but I could never have imagined one hundred flickering birthday candles casting shadows and memories that stretch across so many years and shape the lives of so many souls.

Missing is the love of my life. She’d have some zinger about being a hundred years old that would have everyone laughing. We met in the tiny town of Nicasio when we were thirteen years old, and we said our “I do’s” there ten years later. Cows mooed in the meadows and fields that bordered the old church and the distinctive sound of the crack of a bat and rousing cheers rose from across the narrow, unpaved street.

My bride later said, “On our wedding day my husband presented me with a diamond so large you could play baseball on it.”

Ha, ha. Oh, I miss Julia.

Uncle Nels, my mom’s brother, gave us his ten-year-old Packard convertible as a wedding present. We dashed to the revered luxury convertible through a hail of tossed rice, laughter, and good wishes then sped off into our life together.

Julia died in my arms almost seventy years later. Her laughter and wisdom are etched onto these walls and into our hearts and souls - our family is her legacy.

 But today is today. Around noon a crew from KPIX will arrive to record an interview for a human interest segment on the evening news. The camera will record me strolling (or shuffling) around the garden with my dog, Dinah, and then we’ll go to my living room for the dialogue.

I’ll be asked about my boyhood in post-earthquake San Francisco, my college days at the University of California, and my career as a structural engineer. I’ll proudly mention the dams, irrigation systems, and bridges, designed by my company, Martin Engineering Solutions. 

I’m sure she’ll ask for my sage advice about living a long, healthy life. A glance at the clock tells me I have four hours and fifty-one minutes to come up with something besides don’t blink.

Thinking more deeply about the events that determined my life’s path I remember a motor trip that shaped my destiny and the fate of this family in ways I could never have imagined. It was September 1919. I was thirteen years old. My mom and I lived in San Francisco. We had a dog named Dinah back then too.

In January 1906 my newlywed parents bought a house in a diverse and vibrant neighborhood in the Haight Ashbury District. “The Haight” was one of the few neighborhoods spared from the fires that followed the earthquake that happened four months later and just shy of five months before I was born.

I was delivered in the new home by a midwife and caring neighbors. The hospitals were overcrowded but the babies just kept coming; earthquake or no earthquake.  

My boyhood haunts included an amusement park, a baseball stadium, and Golden Gate Park. We were connected to downtown by a cable car line that took my dad to work at the Metropolitan Life Building on Stockton Street.

Over the years many people have regaled me with stories about my charismatic father. No wonder he was the best salesman in the Western Region for Metropolitan Life, the largest life insurer in the world at the time.

In 1917, when I was twelve, the company hosted a dinner at the Palace Hotel Garden Court on Market Street. Dad had earned huge commissions and bonuses and received an accolade from the Vice President of the Western Region that night. I still have his framed certificate around here someplace, I’m pretty sure.

We sat on the dais while the Vice President spoke to the stylishly dressed guests seated at round tables in the historic dining room. My father wore a midnight blue Edwardian-style suit. He was the handsomest man in the room and Mama was beautiful. I recall her look of love and admiration when Dad stood with style and grace, to accept his applause. He was thirty-four years old.

Two months later he died at St. Mary’s Hospital – a casualty of the pandemic known as Spanish Flu. Because of quarantine, there was no funeral or life celebration and his final resting place remains unknown. In 1918/1919 three thousand other San Franciscans succumbed to a similar fate. I was twelve years old going on thirteen. My life was put on “hold”.

Mama and I tried to pretend that things could be okay again, but I saw her tears during the day and heard her crying at night. I’m sure my sorrow and gloom were added burdens to her. She must have felt guilt for my unhappiness and loneliness. I missed my dad, but I missed Mama’s untroubled, breezy, lightheartedness, and reassuring presence even more − we didn’t know how to relieve our grief by sharing our sadness and the specter of the flu loomed over us. For the next nine months, our home was our sanctuary. We didn’t dare step beyond its walls. Mandatory gauze face masks hid the depth of our emotions from each other.

When the schools closed Mama tried to teach me at the kitchen table. All I remember from those lessons is her voice fading and her staring at the walls as if she were in another universe.

The one bright spot in our lives was Mama’s brother. Uncle Nels was our link to the outside world. He came for dinner at least three times every week. He always brought a box of groceries, straightened the house, removed the trash, and made me laugh.

The story I’m now sure I want the world to know begins on one foggy autumn evening when Uncle Nels’ visit put our tiny, bereft family back on the road toward the huge, happy throng it is today. It was my thirteenth birthday, but there was no party.

Mama cooked dinner. All through her melancholia, she found solace in our small kitchen. Her brother was a gourmet. Mom and Uncle Nels inherited their Epicurean gene from their mom – my grandma, or so everyone said.

After we ate, Uncle Nels smoked his pipe and told stories about the guys he worked with at Union Iron Works where he was a Mechanical Engineer helping design steamships and ferry boats.  

To hear him tell it everyone at the shipyard was a character out of the funny papers and he talked about the projects he was working on which kept me fascinated. Mama drifted around the house distractedly.

On a bachelor’s budget, Nels could afford suits, shirts, and shoes from the swankiest men's wear shops. His neatly trimmed hair and mustache were almost black - his eyes were ice blue. He’d graduated from Cal six years earlier but he still played on the U.C. alumni rugby team.

What set Nels apart from the crowd was his talent for fixing things. My dad had said that even as a kid he was on the lookout for anything that needed repair. I think of him whenever I hear James Taylor’s “I’m Your Handyman” – especially when he sings, “I fix broken hearts”.

 When we finished dinner I cleared the table, carrying the dinner dishes and tableware to the sink, Uncle Nels pushed his coffee cup to the side and with a practiced hand, he filled his pipe, used his thumbnail to ignite a wooden match, and lit up. He doused the match with a snap of his wrist, discarded it in the ashtray, and began unfolding a road map of Northern California.

The spicy scent of tobacco smoke filled the room as he caught my eye and tilted his head toward the wooden chair next to his as a summons. Mama tied on her apron and created a clatter setting a pot of water on the wood stove. When I got settled at the table, Nels announced that he was taking delivery of a new automobile and he wanted to talk about a motor trip to a place in West Marin County named Nicasio. It was a day-long trip and he needed company.

Mama, lifting the pot of now boiling dishwater from the stove and carrying it toward the sink said, “Nicasio? Where’s that? I never heard of it." Her tone was weighed down with loss and loneliness, but my heart leaped. Mr. Fix-it was on the case, and things were about to take a turn for the better –Nicasio or Timbuktu, I was on board.

As she poured the hot water into a scouring pan filled with the dinner dishes Mama continued, “Why don’t you motor down to San Jose? They keep the roads up, and there’s help along the way if you have trouble with the machine. I don’t want Willy going outside. Some people are refusing to wear masks!” The wash pot clanked down on the wooden kitchen countertop when she used the back of her hand to mop her eyes.

Uncle Nels furrowed his brow. “Let me show you something else.”

Reaching into his briefcase he took out the Official Automobile Blue Book of 1918. The travel guide listed places to stop and refuel. He’d prepared an itinerary that included a phenomenal ferry ride across the Golden Gate, and overnight in a San Raphael hotel before heading for Nicasio.

The Blue Book said the tiny town had a hotel with a restaurant. The menu listed hors d’oeuvres that included locally made Alpine Style Tellegio cheese which Uncle Nels had heard about but never tasted.

He said, “I started thinking about the new car when one of the machinists at work put me on to this place. Some of his relatives from Switzerland bought a ranch not far from town. They run a dairy herd and make cheese…and by the way, they need a shepherd dog.”

Nels said he’d paid $2,950.00 for a reliable, first-rate automobile. He had already motored all of the tours in the Bay Area in his 1909 Hupmobile Roadster, and he wanted to go places he’d never been, do things he’d never done, say hello to folks he’d never met…and explore a possible business opportunity.

 “The folks up north don’t worry as much as we do about the flu. They aren’t crowded together so they’re not breathing each other’s air. You gotta be smart and you gotta play it safe, but you can’t just sit out the whole game. There’s a beautiful, time-honored church near the hotel. We can walk to Mass on Sunday morning. How long has it been, Clair?” 

He said the trip itself would be a safe, energizing holiday and a fun-filled adventure. It would get Mama out of the house and away from her imagined fears, as well as her guilt for unfulfilled responsibilities, and tortured memories “…which are just as dangerous to the body and mind as the damned flu is. I plan to shove off one week from tomorrow and I can’t change the date.”

Nels’ voice was comforting, reassuring, and persuasive. His mustache suggested authority. As a final point, he said the trip would serve the practical purpose of delivering our once cuddly puppy, and now grown dog, to the Lafranchi ranch.

“You can’t keep a Border Collie cooped up in the city. Dinah needs to be in the country, doing what she was born to do, herding farm animals.”

 Dinah, hearing her name, scrambled off the rug in the foyer and stood between the table and the sink; one eye blue, and the other one brown - both of them focused on Mama, The Superintendent of Table Scraps. 

As she raised her ears, tilted her head back and forth, raised her eyebrows, flopped her big tongue, and wagged her tail Uncle Nels chuckled, “See Clair? She’s begging you not to spoil her career opportunity of a lifetime.” Nels and I laughed as Dinah bounded toward me for a scratch, a pat, and a pet.

Mama wiped her eyes smearing salty dampness across her reddened cheeks. Her lips quivered, and her shoulders sagged. She extended her moistened hands toward her brother. Rising from his chair, he enfolded her in his sturdy arms and she buried her face in his chest. They hugged and swayed. The sound of her sobbing filled the room until she gently pushed him away, revealing his once-impeccable Van Cleef and Arpels shirtfront, now damp, wrinkled, and streaky. With my eyes closed, I can hear Mama’s tear-choked question: “Did you say one week from tomorrow?”

My mom, my dog, my Uncle Nels, a 1918 Packard, Twin Six, 3-25, Salon Phaeton, convertible, and the open road. What more could a disheartened thirteen-year-old boy dream of?