An Off-Grid Sort of Town

In a couple of previous blog posts, my dog has advised me on love. He has even shown a reasonable amount of aptitude for the role. With the caveat that he is still a dog and dead skunks in the road are viable objects for him to show a keen interest in.

Lately, I have been kind of discouraged. A love interest of mine proved to be regrettably one-sided, and the side was mine. The other side, well, not so much interest. In fact, I’ll just be honest here: none at all. 

But once again, small fluffy off-white mutt Buddy to the rescue. I didn’t even have to tell him what was going on. Like all dogs, he just looked at me, and he knew. I encountered him at my old house where I was dropping off my daughter, and after he had done the insane body-wagging greeting thing, he stopped and looked carefully at me. You need to get out of town, he said. My thoughts exactly! I replied. But how did you know? He placed one of his grubby teddy paws into my outstretched hand, a trick we taught him so he could get little pieces of reward cheese. I’m your dog, he said. Book yourself into the Mendocino Hotel for a night or two. 

I will, I said. But I’m sorry, I don’t have any cheese.

The Mendocino Hotel was built in 1878 and every single inch of it feels that way. It has the kind of old world charm that you can’t create, it has to have been laid down gradually over 140 years. It’s the only place in town where you can find a double room for $109. Sure, it’s a room the size of a postage stamp, and you share a bathroom, but you also have access to the wraparound balcony that skirts the entire hotel, including its oceanfront, not to mention the hundred cool nooks and crannies around the hotel where you can just sit and soak it all up. Cosy armchairs in front of the blazing fire. Plush barstools in the Garden Room bar, where the sun slants in across the lacquered wood and threadbare velvet upholstery. Quaint wrought iron chairs and round tables on the patio. This place is magical.

Taking Buddy’s advice, I booked myself a single night on a whim. It was indeed time to get out of town. Hospice work had been unusually draining, my daughter was heading to Oregon to see a friend for the weekend, and I just couldn’t countenance two days home alone reflecting on how very disinterested my love interest was.

Friday morning I headed out on my solo roadtrip early. The Bay Area was shrouded in smoke from the Camp fire near Chico. The sun shone weakly orange through the haze and the whole scene looked apocalyptic. I drove north on Highway One and hit Freestone at the perfect time for breakfast. A mid-morning cup of coffee and one of their excellent scones. Meyer lemon, mango, and white chocolate. I’m not making this up! They made this up!  

I was just savoring the white chocolate aspect of my scone and wondering how life could get any better, when a text came in from Jessie. Oregon trip fell through. Can I come to Mendocino with you? I was an hour and a half drive from home. Would I go back and pick her up? 

Two minutes later I was on the road back home. It was a little odd to be retracing my steps, but as my dad would say, all part of life’s rich pattern. And heading to the Mendocino Hotel with Jessie instead of alone? SWEET!

It was an eerily beautiful drive north along California’s most stunning stretch of coastline. The air quality was awful. We could not open the car windows. But the sun shone through the haze with a surreally gorgeous light and we played favorite music and savored the set of random circumstances that had led to us spending two days together on a road trip.

Mendocino, always an understated town, was even more muted than usual. We arrived at dusk, but it was hard to tell, the air was so heavy with smoke. We checked into the hotel and sat together on the high wrought-iron framed bed in our tiny room. I checked the fire news. 70k acres, still only 5% contained. The whole of Paradise town was gone, most of Magalia, burned to the ground. 27k people displaced, having lost everything. We tried to imagine what it would be like to lose everything. People had been found burned in their cars, trying to escape. We tried to absorb this. It was very quiet in our room.

The air quality was too bad to safely go outside, so we ate dinner in the hotel. I went down and secured us a table while Jessie stayed in the room talking to her boyfriend. I sat alone at the table, thinking about how I would have been sitting here alone all weekend, and that would have been okay. But waiting for Jessie to come down from our room and join me? That was much better.

Over dinner, we had fun pegging all of our fellow diners. There was the table of three women, one of whom completely monopolized the conversation. We eavesdropped shamelessly for a minute on her description of a cruise she had been on. I notified my daughter that she should feel free to smother me with a pillow if I ever went on a cruise and then tried to tell her about it. Don’t worry, mom. She instructed me then on the art of scanning a room and immediately identifying the people who were happy. It’s not about smiling or looking upbeat. It’s about who looks genuinely interested in their companion. As usual, she was bang on the money.

Saturday morning, we woke before dawn. I was sure that Mendocino, despite its sleepiness, would have a cafe where I could procure some coffee before 7am. This proved optimistic. It was also 38 degrees and after the weird heat of November in Fairfax, our faces instantly froze when we went outside. However, turned out the hotel provided free coffee and tea in the bar, so we availed and sat by the fire reading and writing until the first cafe opened and we could reasonably expect eggs and more coffee.

My favorite cafe in Mendo is the Goodlife. They have a stunning array of excellent beverages, including one I had never heard of which I will cover in a minute, and an even better array of pastries and healthy type foods, plus all manner of quirky patrons proving that this is the coolest place in town to breakfast because it’s where all the locals go. 

I was standing waiting for our hot beverages when it struck me that the conversation I was having with a bearded stranger in a straw hat was actually a flirtation. Out of practice! His beard was braided and his hair was long and curly and he opened the conversation by asking if my hair color was natural. I laughed and told him that I was touched by his politeness, but that the strange hue of my hair was not intentional. I recounted the circumstances that had led to my hair becoming so unintentionally and, some might say, violently purple. (This was the subject of a previous blog post, so I won’t go into it here.) He laughed at my ineptitude in self-hair-coloring and mentioned that his own hair had a small amount of grey in it but that he was fine with that showing. I didn’t point out that he was at this time covering up said grey hair with a very tatty sort of straw hat. 

We got our drinks and he explained to me that the weird concoction he was purchasing in a jelly jar was known by some Italian name (I have forgotten it now) and it was a shot of espresso covered with quantities of whipped cream. We mused on how this might help him begin his day, and went off to our respective tables. It was nice to flirt. It felt like maybe something had opened up in me. The freedom from longing for something that was never meant to be, perhaps. 

As I sat with Jessie and she ate her breakfast and I drank my coffee, I noticed that straw hat guy kept glancing my way. When I was sure he was deep in conversation with his mates, I glanced his way. As we left the cafe, he caught my eye and waved and wished me a beautiful day. I wished him the same. So it goes. 

Later in the morning, after our tradition of trying to sit in every nook of the Mendocino Hotel that we could, we wandered around town. I didn’t expect us to find anything we could afford, but we were sure to have fun looking. In the basement of a building on Lansing Street, there was a new clothing store called Treasures. As soon as I walked in, I was transported back to Florence, to clothing stores I so unexpectedly found there brimming with lace and silk, all at crazily affordable prices. The owner was a cheery individual called Drea who laughed when I complimented her on her excellent taste and said disbelievingly I get to go around shopping for this stuff...for my work! I picked out about twenty items and had fun trying them all on. 

From the changing room, I could hear Drea giggling softly to herself outside. Turned out she was trying on her own wares: a new pair of pants with lace and flounces at the three-quarter length hems. Too theatrical? She asked me, as she modeled them. I told her they were indeed theatrical but I thought she could more than carry them off. She laughed her infectious laugh. It’s fun to be me! She said, as she rang me up for a madly floppy pale pink fur coat that was only $39. You’ll get lots of hugs in this, she said. I told her how good that sounded to me.

As I left her store, I thought about how, if I lived in Mendocino, Drea and I could be friends. And I could also be friends with straw hat guy! Maybe more than friends! Maybe I should move to Mendocino? Of course, it was four hours from an airport. But I could have coffee every morning in the Hotel. I could live in one of the wooden water towers. An off-grid sort of town, I had heard a resident call it earlier that morning. After a week of mass shootings and midterms, off-grid had a nice sort of ring to it. I could nurse dying folk up there, by the sea, in the maritime mists and fogs.

But by early afternoon, Jessie and I were restless to be back on the road home. We packed the car, and set off for the four-hour drive that, for us, is a large part of the fun. I drove, my co-pilot was on music detail and started creating a suitably awesome queue for the freakishly twilit smoky world outside. Off-grid still had a lovely ring to it, but I put moving to Mendocino in my bag of dreams. Lots to accomplish in Fairfax first.