Long-shot Candidates

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Long-shot Candidates

Dark Horses


Michael Amsler

On the bandwagon: Allen Barreca, left, Bill Patterson, and Pia Jensen say they’re in the election race for the long haul, despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

Why do they run?
Shedding some light on long-shot candidates

By Janet Wells

Dark horse … (b) an almost unknown contestant regarded by only a few as having a chance to win.– Webster’s Dictionary

When Cotati City Councilwoman and college student Pia Jensen, 36, announced her candidacy for governor a couple of months ago, she was told by local Democratic Party leaders that she hadn’t been around enough to “rub elbows and earn Brownie points.

“I was immediately put off, so I struck out on my own,” she says.

Jensen took out a loan to pay her $2,621 filing fee, and has raised another $2,000–petty cash to frontrunning candidates that include a couple of deep-pocket millionaires. “If you look at what constitutes a viable candidate, it doesn’t mean you have to have a lot of experience if you have a lot of money,” Jensen explains.

So is Jensen now taken seriously as one of 17 gubernatorial candidates? At the state Democratic convention in March, she was invited to speak at a Friday evening caucus meeting. Airline tycoon Al Checchi didn’t recognize her. “[Congresswoman] Jane Harmon shook my hand and said something supportive and brief. [Lt. Gov.] Gray [Davis] was nice, shook hands. None of them really wanted to talk to me,” she adds. “They know who I am, but … they appear to think that I’m not part of their structure.”

With a shoestring campaign and a progressive agenda pushing for population control, sustainable resource programs, and more stringent energy efficiency standards, Jensen knows that, though she’s a member of the Democratic Party, she won’t exactly be welcomed into the inner circle.

“My intent is that whoever makes it through the primary will take a serious look at the issues I’m raising, because I represent a large constituency.”

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like a cruel year for dark horses. Judging by the Titanic sweep of the Oscars, it’s pretty clear that winning isn’t just about talent and substance. To win you need the ol’ familiar triumvirate: big money, connections, and a glossy advertising campaign (dazzling special effects don’t hurt, either).

While a few dark horses surprise everyone by leaping out of the starting gate and maintaining their lead, or sneaking up gradually and overtaking the frontrunner, it doesn’t usually work that way, in racing, Hollywood–or politics.

So why do people bother to run for elected office–waging an uphill battle against incumbents bolstered by name recognition, going into debt, knowing that their lives will be open to scrutiny and ridicule?

Few dark-horse candidates are wackos. They are committed to their campaign: right off the bat they have to pay filing fees ranging from a several hundred to a few thousand dollars. Most have good ideas. Almost all are serious and sincere.

Some people run to put a spotlight–however dim it may be–on their pet issue or political party platform. Some want to get rid of the incumbent. Others believe it’s their duty to participate in the democratic process, to offer more than the bland choices of the major parties. And of course, there are some who run to win, pure and simple.

Bill Patterson filed to run for the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors for one reason: To eliminate incumbent Paul Kelley of Windsor.

“[Kelley] demonstrates an appalling lack of fundamental understanding … about humanity and other life forms on earth,” says Patterson, a community activist and secretary of the Sonoma County Green Party. “Kelley seems to think we’re at war with nature.”

Patterson, also a Windsor resident, says that he and his political cronies have been looking for a candidate to oppose Kelley for a year. Patterson felt that Kelley’s sole challenger, Greg Wonderwheel, didn’t have enough support to win. So 24 hours before the March 6 filing deadline, Patterson submitted his papers. A third challenger, attorney Bill Smith, filed just hours before the deadline.

“Mr. Kelley does not have a clue,” Patterson says in summing up the catalyst for his campaign. “We are opposed to pumping wastewater in the ground for energy. We want to use it for agriculture and tree farming. Tree farming is a recent concept for a use of secondary-treated water that can use this valuable resource. Timber is amazingly profitable. If Windsor can grow its own timber through using wastewater, it will mean an enormous savings for people and taxpayers.

“Shall I go on? You’ve got me on the soapbox. I feel impassioned about this.”

Patterson pauses just long enough to take a breath. “Incorporating wastewater into tree farming will bring $1 billion [to public coffers]. It’s a staggering concept. I want to see that happen … and be a part of the transformation,” he continues. “If I’m not elected, yes, that message will have gotten out there and hopefully others will take it up. If I’m not elected, I will be pounding on the doors of the supervisors and Windsor to pursue these options.”

Patterson is not alone in using the campaign trail to get his message out.

Rig(gs)marole: Why is Rep. Frank Riggs running for Marin Democrat Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat?


Miles Everett, a Healdsburg resident making his first bid for public office by running for state superintendent of public instruction, doesn’t have a big beef with the incumbent, Delaine Eastin. But get him started on education reform, and he’ll send you position papers, ready-made OpEd pieces, or, for $12, his analysis “How Television Poisons Children’s Minds, Undermines Schooling, and Threatens American Civilization.”

“The thing that brought me into the campaign initially is the concern of the effects of electronics on children,” Everett says. “Children in school spend about 12 percent of their waking hours in school, and 30 percent of their waking hours on electronic entertainment. Electronic entertainment is anti-everything school is trying to accomplish: rational thought, knowledge, authority.”

Few educational organizations dispute Everett. “It’s kind of like the smoking situation,” he says. “The science is clear. Every major professional organization in this country that deals with children has taken the public position saying that the kinds of TV viewing kids are doing is bad for them.”

With three additional challengers, Everett knows his chances of beating Eastin are limited. So what’s his goal? “To bring [the issue] to people’s attention. The bulk of Americans don’t know, and a good many of them don’t want to hear it,” he says.

“The media pay no attention. If I had a chance to go head to head with Miss Eastin before a variety of audiences, I bet anything in the world I’d win. When I talk to people I convince them. Nobody can refute my argument, but it’s hard to get the chance to make it.”

Coleman Persily, a candidate in the last four elections for the state Assembly seat currently occupied by Novato Democrat Kerry Mazzoni, running for office is a chance to express the ideas of the Peace and Freedom Party, which seldom get much ink.

“It’s obvious that I’m not going to get elected,” says the 82-year Marin County resident and retired insurance agent. “But if you don’t run, nobody will understand some of the issues we’re trying to bring out, so I run.”

Persily’s agenda includes building more affordable housing, getting rent control for mobile homes and apartments, abolishing the three-strikes law, and opposing the proposition to teach only in English in the classrooms.

Persily doesn’t raise money; he hasn’t written a position paper yet. He’s happy to debate anytime, but suffice it to say that the other four candidates for the office probably aren’t worried. “They enjoy me because I’m the only one who can say what he thinks without having to worry if someone’s not going to agree,” he says. “They play the game. I get up and talk on the issues.”

Alan Barreca, a candidate for Rep. Lynn Woolsey’s 6th Congressional District seat, is out doing the same thing, stumping for the Natural Law Party. “Third parties do have a very profound effect,” he says. “I’m happy and proud to be able to stand up with the Natural Law Party, especially in regard to its platform.”

When asked if he’s running for office to win, Barreca responds, “Your question points out the problem. Elections are not a Superbowl. … Come out and say, ‘We’re going to win,’ and then the candidates start doing whatever it takes to win. [Candidates] see which way the wind’s blowing, then decide what [their] position is on the issue.”

The Natural Law Party, according to Barreca, offers solutions to “virtually every problem in the country,” ranging from crime and health care to education.

“I don’t need to win to feel gratification,” he says. “I want to influence the process of the election and raise the awareness of the people in this congressional district. In those aspects, I’m already a winner.”

Al Liner, a homeless-shelter coordinator who was a Peace and Freedom candidate in 1996 in a race to unseat state Assemblywoman Valerie Brown, D-Sonoma, agrees. “For most, when you talk about winning, you mean getting the most votes. When I talk about winning, I talk about trying to get my point across.

“That’s one of the problems with our entire system,” adds Liner, who used his campaign to promote the legislative concept of proportional representation in which each party wins representation, in the Assembly proportionate to the number of votes. “Winning has become the paramount thing rather than leading. There’s a world of difference.”

For candidates like Sam Crump, winning isn’t nearly so conceptual. Crump, a 33-year-old Sebastopol city councilman and judicial legislative adviser running for state Assembly, doesn’t consider himself a dark horse. He certainly has that groomed-for-politics look: Republican, married with four kids, former military prosecutor, student body president at Montgomery High School–all outlined in an easy-to-digest one-page campaign profile.

Crump is the only Republican running against Assembywoman Virginia Strom-Martin, D-Duncans Mills, so he’s looking at the June primary as a litmus test for November. For people who say he doesn’t have a chance or the experience, Crump is quick to point out that both the incumbent and Rep. Woolsey were quick to jump from local politics to the bigger arena.

“This one seemed very appropriate for me,” he says. “I think I’ve got a great shot.”

Crump’s party line of “[Strom-Martin] is out of step with the district” may or may not be true, but he certainly offers voters a choice. Crump is hardline get-tough-on-crime: He’s pro-three strikes and pro-death penalty; and for juvenile offenders, he’d like to see wiretaps, stiffer criminal sentences, and penalties for truancy. He wants to attract business to the North Coast by “rolling back oppressive regulations and taxes.”

“There’s an economic recovery in California, but it hasn’t visited the North Coast,” he says. “We need to foster an entrepreneurial climate in California. This used to be a state where people felt good about taking a risk, starting up a business in their garage. Now it’s a bureaucratic nightmare of taxation.”

Most underdog candidates–if they do any fundraising at all–are grassroots all the way: They shy away from PAC money and eschew ecologically wasteful and expensive campaign signs and mailers. Not Crump. He’s going for it with gusto: “Virginia Strom-Martin raised over half million in cash for the last election. I don’t see any reason why this should be less if I plan on winning,” he says. “I plan to match her dollar for dollar.”

Many candidates are intimidated and dismayed by the specter of campaign fundraising. “It’s excruciating to raise money,” Everett says. “A lot of people won’t even put $100 where their mouth is.”

Barreca isn’t accepting any contributions. “People like Dianne Feinstein bowed out [of the governor’s race] simply because some well-heeled candidates showed up and there’s no way to compete,” he says. “The electoral process should be overhauled. It shouldn’t be the case that you can buy office.”

Patterson was reluctant to enter his race because of money. “I feel a little sullied by going around begging for money. The Greens are calling for public funding of campaigns,” he says. “People stepping forward to run for office need to be helped. We should receive assistance from the general public. That’s the problem: money, money, money in politics,” he continues. “In the past it has been a corrupt process, corrupted by money. Good people are refusing to run for office, and those good people who are in office are retiring from office early. We are faced with a crisis in our democracy.”

Candidates, even by losing their race, can still have a profound effect on the outcome. Consider Darlene Comingore, the Peace and Freedom congressional candidate in 1990: she siphoned off 15 percent of the liberal votes from Democratic incumbent Doug Bosco. The benefactor? The winner, Republican Frank Riggs.

Patterson is expecting that he and the other two challengers will leave Kelley with fewer than 50 percent of the votes, forcing a runoff in November.

Liner lost his state Assembly race in ’96, but says he was successful enough in his campaign for “a Republican who’s running in the current election to offer me $35,000 to run again to pull votes away from his main party opposition.” (He declined.)

Meanwhile, Jensen, one of six Democratic candidates for governor, doesn’t hold any grand illusions of winning the primary. But she does hope to take away some of Rep. Jane Harmon’s votes.

“She has been touted as a fresh face, the only woman. I take umbrage with that,” Jensen says. “She’s very conservative. Most people heard that she is pleased to be considered the best Republican in the Democratic Party. I find that problematic, being a Democrat myself.”

Many third-party candidates talk of the frustration of running for office, of the difficulties getting heard by the voters and the media. But just as many throw their hat in the ring again.

Jensen plans to use her first experience running for statewide office as the basis for a book on the campaign process and political reform, and to bolster her bid for state Assembly in the year 2000.

For candidates like Persily, running for office isn’t really about winning, losing, or even making a career move. It’s a way of life.

“I’ll keep doing it until I croak,” he says.

And why not? After all, long odds, when they pay off, pay the most.

From the April 9-15, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Biotechnology

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Biotechnology

Germ Warfare


Michael Amsler

Bio tech: Ecologists Dan Wickham and Bob Rawson used a bacterial formula to cleanse the Laguna de Santa Rosa.

Turning crud-devouring bacteria into gold

By Stephanie Hiller

WITH the ease of PacMan, bacteria naturally found in soil can gobble up unwanted organic material: manure leaching into streams, oil spilling in soil, and even human waste clogging up the filters in sewage treatment plants. “We call it the Chinese infantry principle,” says Occidental ecologist Dan Wickham, one of the owners of International Organic Solutions, which cleaned up 5 million gallons of black water in the Laguna de Santa Rosa last fall, when a pipe from Barlow’s apple processing plant developed a hidden leak.

“You start a culture in a porous ‘tea bag’ and the hungry bacteria start eating up the gunk. They all die off in the process, but these bacteria are so cheap, you just send in another wave of Chinese infantry. It’s very, very effective.”

Alyssa Barlow, IOS vice president, agrees. “What better way than to do it organically?”

That’s exactly Wickham’s point. This bioremediation process–which has been widely used to break up oil spills from the Alaska coast to the Gulf of Mexico–mimics the action of nature, and leaves no residue of human intervention. “Prior to the arrival of the [settlers], the Laguna’s banks were all forested. There was a huge amount of leaf litter all around it. You would have had a normal organic load going into the Laguna, and these bacteria from the leaf litter washing into the Laguna would have cleansed it.

“It was a natural balance.”

But now, that balance has been upset. “You have an increase in the load–from cattle, human activities, storm drains, and treated wastewater–and instead of forests, you have pavement, rooftops, dairies, baseball fields using nitrate fertilizers,” Barlow observes.

The IOS 500 formula uses enormous numbers of bacteria of the same kind as those that have been devouring all the leaf litter falling on the earth for hundreds of millions of years. “This type of bacteria has a huge appetite for organic material. It can live with or without oxygen, so it can survive on top of the leaf pile as well as underneath, and it has a wide range of tolerance to environmental conditions, particularly temperature,” she adds.

Freeze-dried enzymes like protease and amylase are added to the mix to accelerate the process–removing the odors–as well as sufficient humic material to spur explosive bacterial growth when the bag is immersed in water. Aeration assures that enough oxygen is available to keep the process bubbling.

In the case of the Barlow leak into the Laguna, the water cleared up in just a week. “Bioremediation works pretty well,” confirms Mike Rugg, water quality biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game, who calls himself a “strong advocate” for this method. “It has great applicability to a whole host of situations where we’re trying to restore the environment.”

Wickham says the inexpensiveness of the treatment makes it much easier for Fish and Game to enforce water-quality rules. “One problem for regulators,” he says, “is that they may cite somebody who will be forced out of business as a result. He’ll sell the property and turn it into a housing project, which will deteriorate the environment even more.”

In such cases, Fish and Game may be tempted to overlook infractions rather than lose farmland.

A former winemaker (he was the owner of Sea Ridge Winery in Occidental), Wickham notes that biotechnology industries like cheesemaking and baking use commercially controlled, dependable forms of bacteria in their processing. “But wastewater treatment, probably the biggest microbiological industry on earth, uses the most ineffective type of bacteria–those from fecal material. They are the worst possible kind of bacteria because they come from human stomachs. We have an immune system.

“The minute bacteria strong enough to defeat the immune system got in there, you’d be dead!”

The bacteria used in wastewater treatment survive potent stomach acids because they are coated with mucus. “They produce a huge amount of slime, which causes all kinds of problems in sewage treatment.”

And the bacteria, as Wickham’s partner Bob Rawson points out, “are no more efficient in the treatment plant than they were in humans.”

Rawson once ran all the treatment plants in the west county. “Our current treatments are capital, technology, and energy-wasteful methods of purifying water, producing large quantities of sludge and greenhouse gases,” he says. “The world needs simpler technologies.”

ANOTHER biotechnology employed by IOS is being tested by Santa Rosa’s city water department at Sonoma State University. It’s called transpiration, and involves drawing the treated water under the ground and directly to the roots of giant water consumers: redwood trees.

“Redwood trees are the fastest-growing trees on Earth, and they consume huge quantities of water,” says Rawson. “Using the bacteria is better than wasting electricity to run advanced treatment systems, but growing redwood trees is better than the [bioremediation] formula.”

Restoring forests in the area surrounding the Laguna would complete the cycle native to the region, simultaneously consuming wastewater and generating bacteria to gobble up pollutants.

What Rawson envisions is a combination of the two techniques. “If the town of Occidental were to set up a community septic system using IOS 500 as the primary treatment, that would reduce the amount of solids to be pumped and hauled to the landfill, and break down the grease to sugars and alcohols that trees could use.

“The effluent could then be disposed of [by delivering it] to the trees in a transpiration leach field.”

Camp Meeker could solve its sewage problem by joining forces with Occidental, he adds. Pat Aho, whose family owns substantial acreage at the top of Camp Meeker, is considering making some of her property available for that purpose, he says.

Back at Barlow’s, Rawson is working with Lescure Engineers to create a new treatment system combining several technologies. The IOS 500 will be added to a 50,000-gallon tank to ferment the waste. The solid material floating to the top will be skimmed off and sent to Dei’s Dairy to be used for compost.

The liquid that remains will be clarified to 80 parts per million and sent to the Santa Rosa sewer.

In the summer, Barlow will use that water for irrigation. “High-strength streams–low volumes of fairly concentrated sugars–will be used for transpiration to grow trees and landscaping year-round.”

From the April 9-15, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Strictly Roots

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Strictly Roots

Riddim King


Michael Amsler

Some father’s son: Strictly Roots frontman Rason Jahmal carries on the legacy after his father’s untimely death.

Strictly Roots regroup after leader’s death

By Charles McDermid

Rastafarian reggae is triumphant, the heartbeat call to consciousness. It is a call that can be as deep and spooky as a bad dream: as loopy and leering as Redd Foxx after hours; ethereal and eternal. As understated as a pause and as robust as a rocket. This is the music of the movement of Jah people, future folk who know God is a living man and that paradise is right here right now. It is Jah love made manifest. –Reggae scholar Roger Steffens

WHAT’S MORE NATURAL than sons carrying forward the work of a father?” says Rason Jahmal, the new leader of Sonoma County’s flagship reggae band Strictly Roots. “The music is a living entity, it must move forward.” Jahmal’s confidence is a necessity in the face of the tragic Jan. 25 death of his father, Ras Jahson, the founder and lead vocalist of the Roots, whose heart failure after a show in San Francisco left the group and its fans in an understandable quandary.

“He just fell asleep on me,” shrugs the 21-year old Jahmal somberly. “It was a very peaceful, heavy thing. After this really good show, he just passed away.”

Before becoming a fixture on the West Coast reggae scene, in the early ’70s Jahson was a New York City drug counselor, who, intending to stay only two weeks on vacation to Jamaica, fell in love with the island’s most representative feature, its music, and ended up staying for three years.

“He was heavily into jazz in New York, [he was] not a musician really, but a vocalist, you know; he scatted around a little. But reggae became the love of his life,” explains Jahmal. “He truly felt it was his duty to expand it to America. He invested all his money into records and dub-plates and came here. Actually,” his son laughs, “he was escorted right to the plane because of faulty papers.”

Upon returning stateside, Jahson, whose Christian name is long lost in that great tradition of exchanging a tired life for a more native persona, formed the first incarnation of Strictly Roots. “He just started a band with the eight or nine people he was living with at the time in New Mexico. They all played terribly,” says Jahmal, rolling his eyes. “The drummer had never played at all and none of them had ever been to Jamaica.”

Arriving in Sonoma County in 1986, Jahson and Strictly Roots honed their chops locally and on the festival circuit, adding considerably to the perception that Northern California is perhaps the most fertile region in the country for launching the careers of reggae acts, Big Mountain and Inka Inka being the most recent and noticeable phenomena.

“Santa Rosa is where it all came together for us,” says Jahmal, whose brother Don Juan, 19, plays keyboards for the band. “We’ve been lucky to find an audience that accepts a message band that is spiritual.”

Jahson’s penultimate performance was at the 1998 California Music Awards–formerly the Bammies–where this white, dredlocked performer and his Roots were named Outstanding World Beat Band of the Year. This statewide recognition, together with past shows alongside such reggae luminaries as Burning Spear, Steel Pulse, and the cool ruler himself–Gregory Isaacs–has led to a recent record deal with Neil Schon’s Piranha Lounge label out of Oakland.

“We were playing one night in San Rafael and this cat comes up with a guitar and asks if he can sit in,” recounts Jahmal. “He said his name was Neil Schon of Journey, and at the time I was thinking, ‘Who? Who’s Journey?’ Somebody must’ve recognized him and he ended up playing two one-hour sets and told us to give him a call.”

The resulting disc, Jah Children Rising, is set for an early May release.

Michael Amsler


MUSICALLY, the post-Jahson Roots shows have featured the same deep rhythms and tight musicianship as before. The music bounces along wonderfully, and the audience is aware that they are in the hands of professionals. However, with Jahmal stepping from behind the drum kit to take the helm, the band now offers a slightly different vocal approach.

“I’ve been in front of a mike since I was 13,” he explains, “so I can remember people being blown away when Pops would let me get out there. Here’s this young, white kid out there freestyling. My style has always been more DJ [Jamaican rap].”

A DJ, or “toaster,” half-sings, half-chats over the top of a driving, usually improvised groove. This is an exciting prospect for reggae lovers who recall the likes of Big Youth and Brigadier Jerry expanding this exact setup into ingenious wordplay.

When asked why he has yet to address his father’s death on stage, even in the benefit shows in Jahson’s name, Jahmal answers slowly. “That’s my most vulnerable emotional time,” he says. “It’s very hard for me. Guys say, ‘Do this one to your Dad,’ but, man, I’ll be sobbing through the whole show. I do know that the emotion we feel has taken the music higher than it has ever been before and I know it will continue to.”

From the April 2-8, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Art in Bloom

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Art in Bloom

Pistil Packin’

Michael Amsler


Flower arranging from the inside out

By Bruce Robinson

IS THIS JUST some of whatever you saw?” Caroline Rousset asks incredulously. Rousset appears less than pleased with the array of flora I have laid on her worktable. We have met in her downtown Santa Rosa floral studio, where I am to get insights into the art of flower arranging by observing her process as she composes beauty from the decidedly eclectic raw materials I have provided.

Thus will we collaborate in calling attention to “Art in Bloom,” the Sonoma County Museum’s annual celebration of the floral arts, slated for April 2-5.

Beginning close to home, I have gathered several branches of deep pink flowering quince, a cluster of mustard, a plume of pampas grass, a long-needled pine bough, three dry and prickly thistle stalks, and a single smallish peacock feather. Then with a stop at a wholesale flower dealer, a bunch of magenta gladiolas, another of frilly, pale yellow Fuji mums, and a cluster of something lavender (which turns out to be dyed Scotch broom).

Rousset, a native Frenchwoman who has lived in California for the past 13 years, is not much impressed with my collection. “It’s not working well together,” she says, dismissively pushing aside the thistle, pine, pampas grass, and peacock feather. “You have to match things together. They have to complement each other; it has to have harmony.”

Looking at what remains, she declares that a little additional greenery is needed “to mellow out the colors,” and quickly clips a handful of tendrils from the jasmine and trumpet vines growing in large pots outside the shop doors.

“Men love stronger colors,” Rousset explains as she begins briskly stripping leaves and branches from the stalks of the various flowers. “Apparently men are a little more colorblind than women, so they always go with stronger colors.” Manfully, I swallow a snide comment about wimpy pastels, while recalling the scarlet carnations I set aside in favor of the decidedly feminine mums. This, after all, is opinion–not science.

It’s not readily apparent, but flower arranging is labor intensive, and Rousset’s fingers fly, busily stripping and clipping as she speaks. “When people come into the shop, they see everything is done. They don’t realize how much time we put in on that.”

HAVING LEARNED the florist trade while an art history student in Paris, Rousset is adept with European techniques, demonstrating for me a type of hand-held bouquet called a “freestyle Biedermeier”–freestyle because it will blend multiple colors and types of blossoms, as opposed to a formal version, which is uniform in color and flower type.

“The old-fashioned way, you use an oasis or a vase and you do stem-by-stem arrangement,” she elaborates, her French accent only partially softened by time. “With this, you prepare everything in your hand. When you are done, you have the whole shape in your hand, instead of in the vase. It’s much quicker.”

When all is ready, she picks up three of the long glads, intersperses several shorter mums between them, and within moments the bouquet is taking shape. “Start with the biggest,” she says as she works, “You always go with the line–we call it the king–and then we have the queen” (that would be the mums), “which is almost a focal point. And then you have the ‘little soldier,’ which is the filler.”

It appears that the basic poker principle applies to flower arranging, too: jacks or better to open. In this case, the purple-dyed Scotch broom ranks somewhere around a 7.

As Rousset adds royal and military elements, each stalk is kept parallel with the others in a growing spiral with its fulcrum in her left hand. “You always go in one way and the stems always go in one direction,” she points out. “If you don’t go in one direction, when you tie it, it can break inside and you wouldn’t know it.”

Having used the more traditional cut flowers for the core of the arrangement, Rousset adds the mustard and quince around the outside, finishing the bouquet with trailing wisps of jasmine and trumpet vine “just to soften up the lines a little bit.”

Quickly snipping off the ends of the stems to create an even base, she sets the completed arrangement down on the tabletop, where it stands without additional support as she evaluates her work. “It’s shaped. It’s designed. It has depth. It’s natural looking,” she concludes, apparently satisfied.

“You don’t have to use a vase,” she observes of the tightly bound cluster of stems that is nearly three inches in diameter. “You can also use a dish and stand it, Japanese style.”

The finished product should last seven to 10 days with proper care, and had I been a more conventional customer, it would have set me back $60 or more.

Discreetly retrieving the peacock feather for my young daughter, I carry the bold arrangement out proudly, disregarding the rest of my carefully gathered castoffs, some already wilting on the cold concrete floor.

At last, Rousset and I are both pleased.

Art in Bloom returns April 2-5 to the Sonoma County Museum, 425 Seventh St., Santa Rosa. For details, call 579-1500.

From the April 2-8, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Calvary Chapel

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Calvary Chapel

Losing My Religion


Photo Illustration by Magali Pirard

Confessions of a backslidden Christian–
a prodigal son returns to the ‘fast food’ church where his faith in Jesus began . . . and ended

By David Templeton

I CONFESS right from the start that I am–and for 17 years have been–a backslider. If you’re in the club, you’ll know what this means, and you’ll know how bad it is to be a backslider. For those not aware of the term–or who think it has something to do with ice skating or mountain climbing–allow me to explain that “backslider” is born-again slang; it means ex-Christian.

It’s not a compliment.

I have officially been an ex-Christian–a backslider–since the day I handed in my keys to the front door of Calvary Chapel of Downey, in Southern California, walking away from what surely would have been a notable, if controversial, career as a minister of the Gospel. But far from the easy, slippery skid that the word backslider implies, my own tumble from grace had not been a gentle one.

No doubt about it, Calvary Chapel–along with such similar non-denominational, “New Wave Christian” groups as The Vineyard, Maranatha, and Warehouse Ministries–is some dangerously rocky territory if you happen to harbor any theological questions or liberal interpretations of Scripture. Take my word for it, you’ll stick out like a leper at a tanning salon. The dynamic, ever-expanding chain–three of the affiliated churches now operate in Sonoma County(Santa Rosa, Sonoma, and Petaluma)–stands apart from more traditional Christian churches by fostering a maddeningly upbeat, pep-rally atmosphere in which anyone experiencing a crisis of faith must either cover it up, shape up, or ship out.

After seven intense, often exciting years spent examining the “unconditional love” of Jesus–what we all called “God’s free gift”–I’d finally concluded that too many conditions and rules had been placed upon that love for it to qualify as either unconditional or free. After all, if God loves us all exactly as we are, I wanted to know, then doesn’t that imply some intrinsic human worth? Why, then, had I and my fellow teenage converts been so firmly trained to despise every last nook and cranny of our nature, beaming a patented Calvary Chapel smile while proudly proclaiming our staunch self-disgust?

The bottom line that led to my escape, however, is a less philosophical question: If Jesus truly lives in my heart, I asked, why do I still feel so god-damned empty? And if he does not, if it is all a game, what damage had I done to myself by conforming so utterly to the simple-minded, robotic, dogma-spouting mindset modeled by the elders of the church?

Terrified of what waited out in “the World”–our word for the supposedly empty, nightmarish, despair-filled existence that waited outside the church–unable to continue pretending, I closed the door on Calvary Chapel, knowing that I was doing more than just losing my religion; I was also stepping away from the vital and intimate social circle that had provided a sense of family all through my adolescence. I had just turned 21 and I was turning my back on everything I’d believed and worked for, betraying the only group of people to which I’d ever felt I truly belonged.

THERE IS A TENDENCY among New Age, born-again Christian groups to promise people that if they dedicate themselves to Jesus, their lives will suddenly be better,” comments therapist Francis Dreher. The director of the Institute for Educational Therapy in El Cerrito, Dreher is an experienced marriage, family, and children counselor, with a distinguished track record working with former fundamentalists.

“In these churches you often end up placing your whole life and belief on this one single idea,” he further explains, “the idea that you will receive redemption here on Earth, along with all the love and the sense of family that you desire, simply by focusing on Jesus. When that doesn’t happen, people can tend to sink into serious depression.”

Dreher suggests that those attracted to such high-control, authoritarian groups are trying “to make sense of a world that doesn’t make much sense, a world full of violence and broken families and broken communities.”

Once a member has left the church, Dreher says, the letdown can lead to serious psychological scarring. “Almost always there is a … lack of self-confidence in making your own decisions again,” he adds. “Often it takes a lot of work to make those abilities strong again.”

Every organization, occupation, or social group tends to develop its own peculiar lingo, a unique glossary of colorful expressions that rise up from the collective ideas, habits, and personalities of the club members. To insiders, it provides a feeling of unity within the group, while distancing the members from the unwashed outside world.

After my spiritual rebirth at the wobbly age of 14–amid the cultural wasteland of the 1970s–I clung to such distinctions as if my life depended on it. The Jesus Movement was in high gear and I relished using the lingo that identified me as a participant. When we approved of something, we’d say, “What a blessing!” or “Praise God.” When we told each other goodbye, we’d invoke, “God bless.”

I even enjoyed that word backslider–taken from Proverbs 14:14: “The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways.” We had other words for those ex-Christians: they were “strays,” and “exes,” and “prodigals,” and “blotmarks.” That last epithet is taken from Revelations 3:5, in which the apostle John describes a vision of Jesus, who says, “He that overcometh, the same will be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name from the Book of Life.”

The message was clear: to “walk with the Lord” and then slide back from salvation was to embrace a fate even more fiery than the one awaiting those who’d never been saved in the first place.

WHEN I FIRST walked into a Calvary Chapel, I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I knew that Calvary, already a certified phenomenon, was a chain of ultra-casual Protestant-fundamentalist churches that had been strongly influenced by the California hippie culture. It had grown in leaps and bounds ever since Pastor Chuck Smith positioned his once-foundering, Costa Mesa–based church as a kind of jumping-off point for the Jesus Movement. I’d never seen any group of people so fired up, so magically set apart from the norm.

Desperately unhappy–the product of a broken home and an alcoholic, suicidal mother–I was ripe for the picking. At Calvary–named for the hill on which Christ was crucified–I all but salivated at the promise of a savior who could love me on an as-is basis. I prayed and invited Jesus to take up residency in my heart.

Soon thereafter, I joined a feverish Bible-study club that met during lunch breaks at Downey High School. I developed a strong cadre of friends, all focused on becoming ministers. We even held communion services, using peanut-butter sandwiches and grape soda for the sacraments. Whenever we felt that the “fullness of joy” we’d been promised was somewhat less than advertised, we’d blame our own weak faith and turn up the religious fervor even higher.

Saturday nights, we carpooled the 50 miles to Costa Mesa for intensely emotional, jam-packed rock concerts–featuring such classic Jesus-rock groups as Maranatha, Mustard Seed Faith, Petra, and One Truth–whipping ourselves into imagining that Calvary Chapel was ground zero in the great war against the devil. We sang, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me”–but we sang it to the bouncy tune of “The Happy Wanderer.”

“This is not religion,” we were told, and quickly parroted to our wide-eyed friends and family, “this is a relationship!” That relationship with Jesus was further expressed, and distanced, from the incense-and-icon atmosphere of Catholicism and other formal expressions of divine longing by the instantly recognizable symbol that had become Calvary’s logo: not a cross or crucifix (too negative, too brooding), but a dove, an oddly misshapen outline of a descending dove that resembled a melting B-52 on a suicide dive. We loved it, dutifully scribbling the shape in the margins of our Bibles, wearing it on T-shirts, and dangling it from chains around our necks.

Since we were a bunch of ugly-duck, marginalized teenagers unaccustomed to feeling any sense of belonging, those early days were almost too heady an experience. Marlene Winell, in her book Leaving the Fold (New Harbinger, 1993), describes her own Calvary Chapel experience as a tremendously exciting one, of being surrounded by “the Christian version of flower children” and of being filled with “a sense of cosmic purpose.” Charged up with that sense of cosmic purpose, my friends and I would cry, hug, proclaim our love for one another, praise God, and reiterate our promises to never betray him. We’d close our eyes to pray and actually conjure up the smiling face of Jesus in our minds. Then we’d go out for coffee and badger the waitresses with our wild-eyed enthusiasm.

CALVARY CHAPEL, in retrospect, seems addictive to certain personalities the way alcohol is addictive to others,” says Larry Fike. “If you have certain kinds of hang-ups or problems, Calvary can act as an addictive kind of salve.”

Fike, a professor of philosophy at Cal State in Irvine and another graduate of Downey High, also once assumed his faith was unshakable. After a short sojourn at Calvary, he moved on to an even stricter, Calvinist sect before abandoning Christianity altogether. “It fits well into a consumer-driven culture, Calvary does,” Fike observes. “It shares a lot with McDonald’s. You go in, and though you’re never quite satisfied, there’s this strong, advertisement-like appeal to it. You stand there chewing, going, ‘I don’t quite get this, but everyone else looks satisfied, so I’m going to keep coming back until I’m satisfied.’

“Calvary is selling a product,” he insists. “A mass-produced idea of Jesus and salvation and everlasting peace that is constantly wagged before you while you’re there. It’s like buying a brand of uncomfortable shoes, but then you’re afraid to admit that they’re uncomfortable, because everyone else is wearing them. So you go on wearing them, hoping you’ll finally break them in enough.

“But you never do.”

I WAS 15 WHEN Downey gained its own Calvary Chapel, a tiny storefront operation pastored by a sincere and affable guy named Jeff Johnson. A disciple of Chuck Smith, Jeff seemed seductively cool to my new teenage friends. Intense, bearded, muscular from years working as a welder in the construction industry, this charismatic, drug-dealing-surfer-turned-Jesus-person caused an immediate stir throughout the strait-laced environs of Downey, following the established Calvary Chapel format of oratorically low-key preaching, a de-emphasis on the trappings of denominational religion, and a shockingly casual dress code.

At Calvary Chapel, even today–at one of the thousand-plus affiliates spreading across the country–jeans, T-shirts, and tennis shoes, or bare feet for that matter, are acceptable Sunday dress. The theology is basic foursquare Protestantism with a Pentecostal twist: an emphasis on love, joy, peace, and goodness with an undercurrent of fundamentalist didacticism and an unswervingly literal approach to the Scriptures. We were encouraged to go out “harvesting souls” in order to bring new converts to Christ; we pored over our Bibles, scribbling notes in the margins, underlining important passages.

The congregation grew; a larger church was built, but was soon too small again.

By the time construction began on a new church–building a sanctuary in one quarter of an enormous former White Front department store, the floor of which I camped out on every other night for six months as a volunteer guard of the site while building commenced–over 1,000 worshipers, many of them under 18, were attending every Sunday morning. Similar events were occurring across Southern California, as Smith’s burgeoning Bible school churned out dozens of freshly ordained ministers, all male (unlike most Protestant-based faiths, Calvary Chapel expressly forbids women from holding leadership status over any man), all trained in the biblical interpretations favored by Smith, all hot to start their very own Calvary Chapel franchise, taking over storefronts, movie theaters, and tire stores, seldom in a building that actually looked like a church.

In Downey, leaders of other churches–particularly at the First Baptist Church–began to grumble that the glittery newcomer was taking away members by offering “easy” salvation and “worldly” entertainment. In truth, the demand we felt to prove our worthiness has becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. I myself now went to church five or six times a week, and–encouraged to stay away from non-believers–resisted friendships with anyone outside the church.

I organized an offbeat performance group, touring the Southland with a seven-person team that used puppets and pantomime to sell the message of Jesus. Supportive of my dedication and “childlike faith,” the Rev. Johnson offered the troupe a workshop/studio behind the newly opened church. I was given a key and “executive privileges”–I was allowed to use the staff kitchen–and began the process of studying to become an ordained minister of Calvary Chapel.

Then things began to get weirder. As the intensity increased, our willingness to debase ourselves in God’s name led to unhealthy extremes.

I remember Sandy, a fierce 10th-grade convert. While out on a “harvesting trip” at the local mall, she once chose to literally soil herself rather than locate a restroom and risk letting the couple she was preaching to escape. Later on, during an emotional prayer meeting at the church, she stood up to testify, stating ecstatically, “I wet my pants for Jesus!”

Not once did anyone suggest that perhaps she was losing perspective.

Two other high-schoolers, Laura and Julianne, eager for a juicy mystical experience to tell the congregation, insisted that they’d witnessed the love of Jesus materialize before them in the form of a glowing ball of energy dancing before their eyes. They later realized it was a only a halo of light around a street lamp outside.

Then there was Jeff Johnson himself, our leader, who would tell us that before converting to Christianity and while tripping on acid, the devil appeared to him in a tent in the jungles of Hawaii, and, Johnson insisted, granted him the power to control the elements. After experimenting with the flies in his tent–making them do backflips with the power of his mind–he wandered to a cliff overlooking the ocean. There he summoned a tsunami that drowned all the sunbathers on the beach. He did not tell this story as that of an imagined vision during a bad trip, but as an event that he apparently believes actually took place, an occurrence so unsettling that he had no choice but to turn to Jesus to escape the devil’s temptations.

We all prayed that an experience that overpowering, that mystical, that cool, might someday happen to us.

Further swayed by Johnson’s jaunty sermons encouraging our “servitude” to God and his insistent admonitions not to trust our “worldly desires,” we became convinced that we were incapable of making decisions without God’s help. We would pray desperately about everything: whether to go to college, which car we should buy, which person we should date. We even prayed at the counter in Burger King that God would guide us order the entrée he knew was best for us.

I myself, after years of gaining only intermittent flashes of anything approaching peace, joy, or happiness, began intense 30-day fasts in order to open myself more fully to Christ. At the end of one such starvation-fest, I passed out cold at church, as everyone smiled and praised the Lord, supposing that I’d been knocked out by the power of Jesus.

I began to have doubts. I became depressed. My doctor suggested that I was carrying a stress load that could kill me if I didn’t make changes soon.

Johnson–apparently irritated that my doubts weren’t dispelled by his prayers–had less and less time to devote to one-on-one counseling sessions with me or any of his other “sheep.” That’s more lingo: Since Johnson was “the shepherd,” we were all “sheep,” a hand-me-down idea from Chuck Smith, who, in his biographical book Harvest (Calvary Publishing, 1984, which also contains Jeff Johnson’s Hawaiian devil story), tells of abandoning traditional denominational structures after years of pre-Calvary frustration that any church board of mere “sheep” would dare to vote down the plans that he, “their appointed shepherd,” had been given from God.

Apparently overwhelmed by the growing demands of running what had become a multimillion-dollar organization with almost 5,000 members, a bookstore, a full-time Christian school, and numerous ancillary ministries, Johnson began to refer certain mundane matters–explaining contradictions in Scriptures and your basic crises of faith–to his associate ministers. Often he’d suggest we get in line with the other sheep waiting to talk with him after Sunday morning services.

I stood in that line to say goodbye on the day I walked away.

I’d long since abandoned the puppet ministry, shortly after the church took back the studio to convert it into restrooms for the school gymnasium. Lastly, with only a shred of belief left, I had even called a stop to my ordination process. With the last of my childhood faith now fading away, I shook hands with Johnson, exchanged God-bless-yous, and drove away from Calvary, away from Downey, away from Southern California, and away from Jesus.

I vowed I’d never return.

Last Thanksgiving, after nearly two decades, I finally broke my promise and returned to Calvary Chapel.

RICK ROSS is an “exit counselor,” a world-renowned psychologist specializing in the psychology of destructive cults. As a “deprogrammer,” Ross aids former members of cults and their families to make the difficult transition to life outside of the controlling group. Working from his office in Phoenix, Ross has assisted members of the Davidian cult in Waco as well as members of Heaven’s Gate in San Diego. His website www.rickross.com–a resource center for cult watchers and families of people who have disappeared into cults–includes a long list of reports on various cults and groups suspected to be cults. Calvary Chapel is on the list.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call them a full-on cult,” Ross says. “But I will say that Calvary Chapel is an extremely authoritarian group where lots of control is exercised over the members. They treat Smith as if he has some special revelation, an elite calling from God. The churches under Chuck Smith all foster feelings of spiritual elitism. They are typical of a lot of groups who think they are God’s Green Berets, the epitome of God’s best.”

Ross has twice been involved in transitioning clients away from Calvary chapels, each time contacted by parents who were alarmed at the intensity of the personality changes and frightening mood-swings their children experienced after joining Calvary.

“The promise of unconditional love is hard to pass up,” Ross agrees. “But in my experience, what Calvary offers is the most conditional love I’ve ever known. People who leave feel that they could never be good enough. The clergy at Calvary don’t wish to admit it, but they push their members very hard. No one can live up to those expectations.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he adds, “I’ve seen some of the worst cults ever. By comparison, I don’t see Calvary Chapel as being nearly as extreme as others. But does that mean Chuck Smith is a nice man or that his churches are a good place to go? No.

“The Bible says you will know them by their fruits, doesn’t it? Well, Chuck Smith’s tree has dropped some pretty damaged fruit.”

Repeated phone calls to Chuck Smith were never returned.

Others are more inclined to classify Calvary Chapel as a full-blown cult. “Cults, in my opinion, are about behaviors, not beliefs,” explains Janja Lalich, an expert on cult systems and mind control and the director of Community Resources on Influence and Control, in Alameda. “Cults aren’t always tiny religious groups off in some compound. I think anyone who says they have the answer, the one way, whatever it is, is potentially dangerous. Whenever questions are not really answered but always turned back on you like there is something wrong with you for asking them, that’s a sign that something is wrong.”

And though cults are often identified by the influence of one charismatic leader, there is such a thing as a cult of consensus, she says. “Often it’s not direct orders from the leader at all but a group dynamic and a process that gets put in place,” explains Lalich. “It’s the peer pressure that can end up being even more important than the relationship with the leader. As human beings that’s what we respond to. You’re just going along with the norm and modeling yourself after the other members, and suddenly you are unable to think for yourself.”

DON MCCLURE is the pastor of Calvary Chapel in San Jose, another growing franchise in the Calvary chain. Its membership, like most of the urban-based Calvarys, has been steadily growing for years. Clearly, there is something at Calvary Chapel that people want.

“Calvary chapels are among the least judgmental, most easygoing churches I’ve ever seen,” he gently insists, calmly resisting my assertion that past members have claimed emotional wounding. “We have no ego here. The shepherds have just one job, and that is to feed our sheep. We get accused of things from time to time, but our message is pretty simple: Come to the Lord and be saved.

“I guess if someone’s calling us a cult, then they don’t understand what we’re really all about.”

There is no doubt that Calvary Chapel–and other non-denominational churches of its kind–do a tremendous amount of important charitable work: assistance to the homeless, outreaches to the poor and to immigrant families. But what of the wild extremism I experienced in Downey? The constant fasting, the feigned visions–the pants wetting? Isn’t that a sign that all is not well?

“Well, I never heard about any of that,” McClure chuckles. “But I guess it goes to show that some people will do just about anything.”

AFTER MANY YEARS spent living in “the World,” I have learned that there is such a thing as happiness, peace, and even unconditional love, and that Calvary Chapel–religion in general, for that matter–holds no monopoly on it. Though it’s taken almost half my lifetime–and endless hours of therapy–to shed the anger, guilt, and self-hatred that I inherited from my tutelage under Jeff Johnson, my new life is demonstrably richer, fuller, and more meaningful than my narrow, fear-driven experience, intoxicating though it was, within the inner circle of Calvary. I am not alone.

Of my old friends, only a handful have remained believers. And–true to their training–have made it clear that my blotmark status makes it impossible to sustain any further friendship. A surprising number of them, however, are now confirmed backsliders like myself.

“It would take an act of God to get me back to any church with the name Calvary on it,” jokes Laura Hoffman–she of the aforementioned mystical street-lamp experience. “I’m embarrassed to think about the things I did and thought. It took a long time to stop feeling stupid.”

Laura, by coincidence, is now married to another former member of Calvary Chapel, whose son attended Chuck Smith’s Calvary School in the 1980s and suffered recurring nightmares for years. “I do look back on my experience as that of being in a cult. It’s left me with little tolerance for people who won’t think,” she says. “It’s easy enough to live in a closed system where all the answers are fed to you, but it’s laziness. If you have an original thought, I can respect that, but to be a sheep just sitting there gobbling up the pabulum, I have no tolerance for that.”

Jeff MacSwan, a professor of linguistics in Los Angeles who attended Calvary off and on during his high school years, adds, “Let’s face it, a lot us who got involved with that conversion-style religion were pretty screwed up to begin with, right? You get people going in who are screwed up, and they are likely to be screwed up even more.

“I wouldn’t say they’re a cult, though,” he cautions, “because then you’d have to say that 12-step groups are cults, or even the Marines, which all depend on hyped-up emotionality and psychological control. I guess it’s a matter of which groups do the most damage.”

“I’m still pretty banged up by it,” admits another escapee, requesting anonymity. “I don’t want any of my colleagues to know about that part of my history, that I was suckered in by a ‘bait-and-switch theology,’ which I was, with Calvary telling me I was saved only to insist that I was barely worth saving.”

He’s now a science writer at a major northwestern university.

“When I was 17, and a part of that group, I thought I understood everything,” he says. “And when I was 25, I realized that when I was 17 I was full of shit. Now that I’m even older, I’m sure I was full of shit. That Jeff Johnson and Chuck Smith are standing up there telling a bunch of kids that, as Christians, they really do know everything is beyond frightening–it’s deplorable.”

Sandy, at last report, had traded in her pants-wetting zeal for something more personally rewarding; a Berkeley newspaper a few years back described a massive, universitywide protest that she led against an anthropology professor who’d been teaching that white races were mentally superior to people of color. She shut down his classes for weeks.

IT WAS A DESIRE for a sense of closure–coupled with a growing bewilderment and curiosity about the organization that once so thoroughly dominated my life–that led me, one Sunday last fall, to return to Calvary Chapel in Downey.

My e-mails to Pastor Jeff, suggesting a sit-down meeting, are ignored and his secretary politely insists that I should not expect to be granted such a meeting if I arrive. The same huge parking lot–which once seemed unfillable, even by the large numbers of people attending services 17 years ago–is packed with cars bearing anti-choice bumper stickers and glib slogans: “Life without Jesus is Hell.” I find a parking space in the back, near the site of my old studio.

True to Jeff’s promise, I had been replaced by a restroom.

The old sanctuary–the one I helped build and slept in all those years ago–is now used for the youth ministries and Spanish-language services. To accommodate the growth in attendance, a gorgeous new sanctuary has been built in the three-quarters of the building that had once stood empty. Standing inside the cavernous new lobby, as the first service lets out, I immediately catch an unmistakable whiff of that good old “cosmic purpose.” Though I recognize none of the faces–a huge percentage of them still under 20–I recognize the look, the radiant smile, the glowing features, the tear-stained cheeks.

I also recognize the line of people that leads to where Jeff Johnson stands, still bearded, his hair gone white.

I take my place in line.

“Remember me?” I eventually ask.

“Of course!” he exclaims, grasping my hand. “Good to see ya. Lord bless ya! Where are you living now?”

“Northern California,” I reply.

“Heavy. Married or anything?”

“Uh huh.”

“Praise the Lord! Any kids?”

“Two.”

“Wow! What a blessing! Are you going to fellowship up there?” he wants to know.

“Actually,” I answer truthfully, “since Calvary, I haven’t found any church I’m comfortable in.”

“Oh,” he answers, nodding slowly.

“The place has grown,” I say, glancing around and back at the line that’s formed behind me.

“Awesome growth,” he agrees. “But more than the quantity, there’s a whole new quality of believers coming in. They’re getting rooted in, grounded in God’s word, and staying rooted in it. They’re bringing in others. Healthy sheep beget healthy sheep, of course. Are you staying for the next service?”

I say that I am and reiterate my request to meet with him later.

“Wow, I’m all scheduled up,” he says. “But maybe after Thanksgiving.”

He extends his hand again. “God bless.”

Sitting toward the front of the 4,000-seat sanctuary, I am suddenly overwhelmed by the tremendous emotional distance I have traveled since the last time I sat listening to my one-time shepherd. His words still awe me, though in an vastly different way.

“Don’t bother watching the news, people,” he says from the stage at the end of his sermon. “Don’t waste your time reading newspapers. The Bible says that the devil is ‘the prince of the power of the air.’ What do you think that means? Air? God’s talking about the ‘airwaves’! The devil controls the media! So take your news from the Bible only. It’s all you need.” The sheep smile. They nod. They agree with whatever he says.

“Out in the world, people have no guidance,” he continues. “If someone smashes their car, what do they say? They look at their car and say, ‘Oh my God!’ because their cars have become their gods. Weird gods.”

And so it goes. Finally, he winds it up. “Let’s pray,” he says as heads bow all around me.

“Thank you, God, for the assurance of your glorious Word,” Johnson prays, as I continue to watch. “We pray for those who don’t have this assurance. We pray for those who are backsliders. You know who you are.”

I look up at the pulpit. Though 4,000 pairs of eyes are closed all around us, Jeff Johnson is pointing directly at me.

“Pull them out of the world, Lord,” he prays. “Bring them back into your Light.”

I close my eyes, trying to imagine the face of Jesus calling me back to the fold. Though I will always love that face, and will honor the wisdom, understanding, and love that it represents to me, I can no longer see it as the face of a savior, offering to transform my wretchedness into a thing of worth. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me … . I may someday find a church in which I feel comfortable, perhaps I’ll even call myself a Christian again. But I will never again believe that I am so wretched that no one but Jesus can love me.

I look back to Johnson.

“Come home,” he is offering, his voice lilting and soft. “Come back. It’s never too late to reclaim your salvation.”

Perhaps he’s right. Maybe it’s not too late.

But for this particular backslider–having finally grown up out in the big wide messy world–nothing I once clung to within these very walls could ever again be enough.

From the April 2-8, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Ferry Service

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Ferry Service

Making Waves

Michael Amsler


County and local officials question plans for Petaluma commuter ferry service

By Paula Harris

SCOTT TREE has nervous energy to spare. Slender, bearded, and with an intense gaze, the 44-year-old local entrepreneur dashes rather than strolls. In one hand, he carries a sheaf of elaborate plans for a local ferry service to San Francisco; in the other he grips a miniature black cell phone, which he promptly drops in all his frenetic haste. “Smallest on the market,” he mutters, retrieving the high-tech toy and rapidly reassembling it.

The fast-moving businessman–one of the original founders in 1971 of the now-defunct Rent-A-Wreck car rental company and now CEO of the holding company International Seabridge at Port Sonoma, a marina at the mouth of the Petaluma River–has some lofty goals. By mid-to-late summer, he says, his plans to implement a high-speed ferry service between Petaluma and San Francisco will change life for North Bay commuters.

Some city and county officials are skeptical about the plan.

Time will tell whether this ambitious project will ever come to fruition, but the possible implications of the $40 million project are certainly tantalizing.

The service will consist of a fleet of French-designed, U.S.-built quadrimarans–sleek- looking four-hulled vessels capable of gliding over the water at speeds of 60 knots or more, with, according to Tree, little noise and virtually no wake. “They look like spaceships,” he laughs, gesturing to an artist’s rendering of the futuristic-looking vessels that, he says, are under construction in Maryland.

Tree declined to name the shipyard, but says he has international licensing rights for building the quadrimarans.

He envisions the ferries serving Petaluma (from the Petaluma Marina), Port Sonoma, San Francisco (at the ferry building), and San Francisco Airport (at the seaplane terminal). A trip from Petaluma to San Francisco would take less than an hour, he says, and would solve the Highway 101 transportation problems facing voters–and taxpayers–this year.

“The biggest effect [of the ferries] will be on the Highway 101 traffic, and it won’t cost the taxpayers a nickel,” he says. “Commuters would get off the highway before the Petaluma Bridge.”

The service will consist of a fleet of French-designed, U.S.-built quadrimarans–sleek-looking four-hulled vessels capable of gliding over the water at speeds of 60 knots or more, with, according to Tree, little noise and virtually no wake. “They look like spaceships,” he laughs, gesturing to an artist’s rendering of the futuristic-looking vessels that, he says, are under construction in Maryland.

Tree declined to name the shipyard, but says he has international licensing rights for building the quadrimarans.

He envisions the ferries serving Petaluma (from the Petaluma Marina), Port Sonoma, San Francisco (at the ferry building), and San Francisco Airport (at the seaplane terminal). A trip from Petaluma to San Francisco would take less than an hour, he says, and would solve the Highway 101 transportation problems facing voters–and taxpayers–this year.

“The biggest effect [of the ferries] will be on the Highway 101 traffic, and it won’t cost the taxpayers a nickel,” he says. “Commuters would get off the highway before the Petaluma Bridge.”

He says the ferry service would begin with one or two 30-meter boats that could carry 250 passengers and eventually add more vessels to the service, including drive-on-drive-off ferries that could transport vehicles. He also plans to have bus-shuttle services to the Petaluma Marina.

A one-way fare would cost $10, but there would be a greatly reduced commuter subscription package.

According to Tree, the project does not require much approval from regulatory agencies, and no EIRs are needed, because he plans to use existing terminals. “All we need is approval from the U.S. Coast Guard and California Public Utilities Commission,” he says. “There’s virtually no shore erosion and less wake at 60 knots [from a quadrimaran] than with a conventional ferry at 12 knots.”

But Mitch Matsumura, transportation analyst with the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco, says Tree has yet to file an application with that state regulatory agency. When he does, there is a 30-day period for public comment. If there’s no protest, an administrative law judge will be assigned to the application and make recommendations to the commission. “He’d need to file insurance information with us, and the vessel needs to pass safety inspections by the Coast Guard, and the commission staff needs to inspect the docking facilities,” explains Matsumura.

“But the environmental impact may be positive because there would be fewer people using the highways. If the public is not behind it, if there are protests, that would slow the process down.”

REACTIONS to Tree’s vision are mixed. “He’s got a long way to go,” comments Sonoma County Supervisor Jim Harberson, who represents Petaluma. “I urge him to start doing some research. There’s been a series of failed proposals at Port Sonoma. There are going to be all sorts of land-use and traffic problems. It’s a very detailed process–you don’t just come roaring in and set this up.”

But fellow county supe Paul Kelley says the project sounds like “a great addition to the commuter services in Sonoma County.”

“It’s very exciting,” enthuses Jessica Vann Gardner, director of the Petaluma Visitors’ Bureau. “It would be a great opportunity to get commuters off the freeway and more visitors into Petaluma.”

Shawn Cox, operations manager of the Blue and Gold Fleet, says that while the idea is in preliminary stages, Blue and Gold would consider operating the quadrimaran service. “I don’t know what kind of ridership [Tree] hopes to get. The fare would be expensive, and he needs to get subsidies and community support, but if he’s going through the proper channels and if he gets it done, we’d be happy to put in a competitive bid to be the operator. We’ll see what he comes up with.”

However, Cox questions the quadrimarans’ high speed. “If a couple is out on the Petaluma River on their houseboat and there’s a boat coming at 60 knots, there’s the potential for a seriously dangerous situation,” he says. “There’s no speed limit in the river, but once people find out, I’m not sure they’d want a 60-knot vessel blowing by.”

Petaluma City Councilman Matt Maguire also wonders about safety and environmental concerns. “The ferry could create a wake that erodes the banks and affects the wetland areas,” he cautions.

Petaluma Planning Director Pamela Tuft says she met with Tree last November to discuss these issues, but hasn’t heard much from him since. “[Tree] needs to start the process,” she says. “This project will be subject to conditional-use permits and environmental review. He’s very energetic, and I was impressed with his enthusiasm, but he still has to go through the process.”

Tree is undeterred by a possible drawn-out procedure and vows to go ahead with his plans. “This will change the whole dynamic of commuting,” he says, and with that he grabs his cell phone and dashes out the door.

From the April 2-8, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Talking Pictures

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Talking Pictures

Line of Thinking


Presidential pardon: John Travolta and Emma Thompson star in Primary Colors.

Political satirist Paul Krassner gets primary with ‘Colors’

By David Templeton

In his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation, David Templeton calls up infamous political satirist and publisher Paul Krassner to gauge his reaction to the much-hyped film version of Joe Klein’s insider novel Primary Colors.

LAST WEEK IN VENICE, Calif., renowned comedian/ publisher/prankster/counterculture hero Paul Krassner was in a playful, spontaneous, court-jester kind of mood. He’d just seen –the much-hyped political satire about a Clinton-like governor (John Travolta) running a rough-and-tumble race for the presidency. Upon leaving the theater, he was inspired to see a long line of filmgoers waiting to see the movie.

“So I just went along this enormous line,” he happily explains, “telling everyone, ‘He gets elected. He gets elected. He gets elected.’ It was my takeoff on those famous protests that Act Up! led against that film Basic Instinct–remember? They did the same thing; they wandered up and down explaining the surprise twist at the end of the movie.”

After a short burst of laughter, Krassner adds, “Though it’s not like I really ruined anything for anyone. Everyone knows the film is based on Clinton. And everyone knows Clinton got elected!”

Since 1958, when Krassner first began publishing the legendary satire magazine The Realist, he has been gleefully working the line of the American consciousness, irreverently daring to point out the truth as he sees it, in spite of the consequences. Unapologetically progressive, Krassner holds the happy distinction of once being labeled “a raving, unconfined nut” by the literary critics at the FBI. As he prepares to discontinue The Realist at the end of the century, he’s been busy writing and performing. His most recent book, The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race: The Satirical Writings of Paul Krassner (Seven Stories Press, 1997), is classic Krassner: sharp, funny, and outrageous. He’s just finished a non-fiction book, The Trial of Peter McWilliams, and continues to record his infamous spoken-word comedy albums such as Brain Damage Control (Mercury Records).

AS ONE SATIRIST judging the work of another–in this case, Washington columnist Joe Klein, the formerly anonymous author of Primary Colors–Krassner enjoyed the movie’s fable of a donut-chomping, hormone-driven presidential candidate willing to give up all his ideals in order to win his way to the White House. On the other hand, he suggests that the recent events in the real Washington are actually a whole lot funnier than anything in the film.

“Reality keeps nipping at the heels of satire, and in this case overtook it, I think,” Krassner says. “To me it’s anticlimactic to what’s going on in real life, which is just incredibly entertaining. It’s better than any soap opera.”

“There are those,” I remark, “who wish we’d all stop wasting so much time on the president’s sex life and turn our attention to serious matters, like the expansion of U.S. military actions.”

“Face it, we can identify with the sex stuff better,” he replies. “The public can’t identify with the incredible slaughter that’s going on in Uganda, for example. It’s just beyond our ken to think of drafting little kids into the army and killing them if they won’t cooperate. But this–this they can identify with because it’s just simple horniness.

“I just wrote, for The Realist, a sneak preview of Monica Lewinsky’s memoir,” he continues. “And of course this is an extension of my own explanation of why Clinton’s popularity remains so high–I have her write, ‘Remember when Jimmy Carter said, “I have lust in my heart,” and he won? He got the adultery vote. But Carter only had lust in his heart while Clinton is a full-fledged activist.’

“But it’s true of power,” Krassner adds. “You can be a rock star or whatever–every camp has its followers, and there are always groupies. People in power expect to get laid. It’s one of the perks.”

“As far as the film goes,” I wonder, “aren’t we putting unnecessary emphasis on the sexual aspects of the story? At the core, the main question of the film is, How can we know that a person who steps on people on the way to the presidency is necessarily going to be a bad president?”

“Yeah, that’s the basic question, isn’t it?” Krassner answers. “Nobody’s all good or all bad. We’re the only species that rationalizes. So politicians can rationalize what it takes to get into office, in order to do good things once they get there. That’s always been the case.

“I go back to the Indian guru Sri Ramakrishna, who, when one of his disciples asked, ‘Why is there evil in the world?’ said, ‘To thicken the plot.’ It’s part of the human drama that there are these imperfectionist streaks in us. And, you know, the desire to become the leader of the Western world can be a pretty strong motivation to rationalize minor infractions of ethics.”

Krassner pauses a moment, then says, “The movie did give you a flavor of that conflict, I think. You saw that people are this weird mixture of idealism and pragmatism. That the John Travolta character–and Clinton in real life–have a real desire to do good, but that they are willing to sacrifice a little of that in order to gain the power to do good.

“And that the truest idealists often end up bitterly disappointed,” he adds.

As for the national pastime that is the current White House sex scandal, Krassner feels it is reflective of our evolution as a nation.

“I think that this is all a kind of national coming of age,” he observes with a laugh. “America is a sort of adolescent country, still. Complete with an obsession on locker-room humor. I guess the theory is that we’ll someday grow out of it.”

From the April 2-8, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Artrain

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Artrain

Horse Power

Michael Amsler


Smithsonian’s Artrain rolls to Healdsburg

By Gretchen Giles

TO REACH Elizabeth Candelario, it is necessary to clamber up an old redwood beam, balance on an ancient railroad tie, and make a final scramble onto the none-too-clean floor of the building in which she is standing. Candelario, the executive director of the Healdsburg Arts Council and the spry mother of two young children, has easily leaped from beams into this abandoned railroad depot. The reporter, woozy with flu, has less luck. So do the bats that have fallen from the rafters when the sliding doors were opened and are now flailing on the depot’s filthy floorboards.

But in less than one month, this old building in Healdsburg will present quite a different visage. The depot, which has been unused for some 20 years, will be yanked up, the rotten redwood foundation replaced, ramps erected, exit signs installed, and a train once again make this more than 100-year-old structure a stop. However, this won’t be one of the lumber, freight, or refrigerator cars that twice daily passes through Healdsburg. The cargo in this three-car train is far more precious, containing works by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, Georgia O’Keeffe, Wayne Thiebaud, and other noted artists of the 20th century.

Known as Artrain, this chug-a-lug has been traversing the country since 1971 under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, bringing museum-quality art to areas that are situated far from museum-quality museums. Having hosted 13 exhibitions in its cars since its inception, Artrain currently carries an “Art in Celebration!” exhibit of work that represents American life since 1972.

Artrain literature boasts that the arrival of this iron horse often causes communities to form arts councils, plan celebrations, and steep their children in artistic techniques and history. Artrain literature must have been talking about Healdsburg.

Although this town’s arts council has been extant for several years, the arrival of the Artrain (at the bequest of council founder Jane St. Claire, who read about it in Smithsonian magazine and with her usual energy convinced Artrain schedulers to plan their entire western itinerary around Healdsburg) has spurred the council to develop its own center for exhibitions and classes. Once it can shoo away the bats.

“I think that the most important part of this whole project is that the community gets to recapture a historically significant building,” says Candelario, squatting next to the last existing depot bench. “The fact that this is in disrepair has an impact on the neighborhood. And it’s a wonderful metaphor, because it literally straddles the tracks. I sit here and watch the kids coming home from high school, and all of the Mexican kids are walking and all of the white kids are driving by in their cars. This is the spot where we hope to put them in the same room.”

Set to arrive on Wednesday, April 29, Artrain will be open to the public Saturday and Sunday, May 2-3, after two days of school programming. In fact, each and every schoolchild from kindergarten to sixth grade–home- and private-schooled included–has had a chance to benefit from an artist-in-the-classroom experience to prepare for the train’s arrival.

Planned as the keystone event in a weekend that celebrates the fifth annual Art on the Move visual exhibition (Sunday, May 3), Artrain’s arrival signals the beginning of a new era for the north county. Healdsburg’s efforts to recapture the train depot will result in a permanent cultural center and train museum, and the event has literally galvanized community effort.

“There are 23 committees,” explains Candelario, whose wine consultancy business is on hold while she feverishly prepares for the depot’s reopening. “Over 200 people in the community are involved in one way or another in this. When I was working with the artists for Artrain in the Schools, they kept reminding me, ‘Don’t focus on the product; focus on the process’–and that to me is the beauty of this whole thing. The process of the community coming together. Not just for this one week, but for the cultural center.”

And just exactly when does Candelario–who is helping to coordinate the release of Welcome Iron Steed, a historical book on trains in Healdsburg by author John van der Zee, and has planned for an international dance, a bluegrass band, a youth cafe, an opening ceremony, the artists in the school program, and the overhaul of the building–plan to sleep?

“After it’s over,” she grins, hugging her knees. “It’s just so much fun. I don’t need to sleep right now, this revs me up so much.”

Moveable Feast

IN HONOR OF ARTRAIN’S arrival, and in conjunction with the Art on the Move exhibit, Healdsburg is going culture-crazy. Here’s what you can do about it:

Tuesday, April 28: The Train, a film about the efforts of the French Resistance to export works of art out of the country by rail, is shown at the Raven Theater, 115 North St. Tickets to any other priced event give free admission to this $2.50 showing.

Wednesday, April 29: Opening-night festivities at Harmon Street Depot. Local performing groups. 6:30 to 8 p.m. Free.

Thursday, April 30: Camp Rose Players perform Josefa and Captain Fitch. 8 p.m. at Harmon Street Depot.

Friday, May 1: Youth Cafe at Harmon Street Depot. Multimedia cafe for teens to discuss and plan how the center can be viable and exciting to them. 7 to 11 p.m. Free. String Creek Band performs at Bear Republic Brewing Co., 345 Healdsburg Ave. 8 p.m. Free. 433-2337.

Saturday, May 2: Evening of International Dance at Raven Theater, 115 North St. 8 p.m.

Saturday-Sunday, May 2-3: Artrain open to public at Harmon Street Depot, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free.

Sunday, May 3: Art on the Move exhibit of visual arts in four separate locations. Shuttle service, food, wine, and beer. Noon to 5 p.m. $10.

The Harmon Street Depot is on Harmon near the Memorial Bridge. For ticket information or details on any event, call 707-433-3064.

From the April 2-8, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

R&R

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R&R

Easy Does It


Michael Amsler

Wood, I could: Packed in hot wood chips and enzymes, Lisa Santos discovers that bark is better than bytes. After a week at the computer, Santos relaxes at the Osmosis spa, in Freestone, picked by you as the best local getaway.

‘Best of’ local recreation–
playing hard couldn’t be any simpler

SIX A.M.: Get groggily out of bed, pull on filthy comfortable clothes, and begin a walking slog that encompasses three miles of pastures, rolling country lanes, flower gardens, at least one dead skunk, a poultry farm, two baby black goats pulling on their mothers, and the delicate pink of the eastern sky. Ten-thirty a.m.: Drive the Stony Point backroad through Sebastopol, past junk sculpture, the brotheled elegance of the Washoe House, past orchards, and into Forestville, turning toward the river. Stop at Speer’s Market for treats and cheeses and wine. Noon: Arrive at Armstrong Woods. It’s Mother’s Day and hot and packed as hell and dust rises from the car lot as from a cloak in Miss Havisham’s closet and settles over the hundreds of hikers and picnickers enjoying the shafting light that tricks its way through the tall redwoods. Find a table, spread out the food, and sip expensive-tasting inexpensive local wine from paper cups. The women in the large Hispanic family gathered around three tables nearby set out food and talk while the men play guitars and sing. One-thirty p.m.: Hike upward slowly, point out mushrooms and butterflies. Two p.m.: Go to the Russian River, strip down to a suit, and swim once the shriek of the cold wears off. Lie on the warm stones and dry. Four p.m.: Drive home through more woods, pastures, and fields. Midnight: Before sleep, consider the lovely simplicity of such a day spent in such a place.



Best Slice of Heaven on the Cheap

You got your heat. You got your beer. You got your dogs. You got your ball. You got yourself a little slice of heaven on the cheap, right there under the summer sun at the Rohnert Park Stadium–home of the Sonoma County Crushers. Fans who felt slighted by the baseball strike a few years back know that the spirit of the game is alive and well at this hum-baby haven. On the field, the play is fast-paced and exciting. Kids love it. Grownups love it. And the Crushers–one of eight professional teams in the Western Baseball League, stretching from Mission Viejo, Calif., to Grace Harbor, Wash.–are coming off their best year yet. The team, now in its fourth season, finished in first place in 1997 under the gentle guidance of manager Dick Dietz, one of the best catchers the San Francisco Giants ever had. And there’s lots of local flavor gracing this relaxed outdoor experience. Of course, the outfield also hosts the campy 20-foot-tall Korbel champagne bottle that pops its cork every time a Crusher bangs a home run. No wonder the late, great newspaperman Herb Caen likened the stadium to “shades of Bull Durham.” The Sonoma County Crushers open at home May 29 at 7 p.m. with fireworks and the whole bit. Rohnert Park Stadium, 5900 Labath Ave. (two blocks west of the Rohnert Park Expressway; just look for the 100-foot-tall light towers). Tickets are $3-$10. For ticket info and game schedules, call 588-8300.
G.C.


Best Place to Just Coast

Getting away from it all needn’t mean a long trip. Beyond the physical barrier of Highway 1’s hairpin switchbacks north of Jenner, the near north coast seems a world apart. And where better to savor it than the Fort Ross Lodge, an unpretentious hostelry perched on the headlands two miles north of its historic namesake. Each of the 24 rooms comes with its own mini-fridge, VCR, microwave, and barbecue kettle (charcoal included). Many have individual hot tubs (a central Jacuzzi and sauna is open to all guests), but none have phones. Pack groceries (or stock up at the small store across the road), walking shoes, a good book, a favorite movie, or other diversions, and settle in. Who knew nirvana was so close at hand? Fort Ross Lodge, 20705 Hwy. 1, Jenner; 847-3333.
B.R.


Best Way to Turn Your Crank

Serious bicyclists barely hesitate when asked to choose the best local bike ride. Pedal from your front door past Monte Rio (getting there will be half the fun), take Austin Creek to Cazadero, roll down King’s Ridge Road to Hauser Bridge, pound up Seaview Road and fly along Meyers Grade to Highway 1 north of Jenner. Return through Duncans Mills. The 95-mile loop offers panoramic views, 50-mph descents, and long, sustained climbs. “You are rewarded for every foot of elevation with super descents and vistas,” philosophizes one experienced cyclist, who compares the bright-blue ocean vistas and verdant landscapes to northeastern France. This tremendous ride requires respectable fitness and the psychological ability to share narrow roads with speeding cars.
D.B.


Best Place to Buy Tie-Dyed Undies

Looking for a pleasant way to fritter away an afternoon? Try the Gravenstein Apple Fair, the sweetest little harvest festival around. It’s fresh air and newfound friends. Cabaret denizen Tom Waits strolling under the oaks with his family. Exotic birds and swampy Cajun music best experienced while teetering atop a bale of fresh hay. Honey sticks and apiary exhibits. A sinewy blacksmith (once a college professor) demonstrating his gritty craft amid a cloud of soot. The mesmerizing whir of vintage farm machinery–who would have thought an oily 10-horsepower water pump could be so much fun? And, of course, the hottest apple fritters and coldest homemade vanilla ice cream this side of your fondest dreams. The Gravenstein Apple Fair is held in mid-August at Ragle Ranch Park in Sebastopol. Admission is $1-$5; children under 5 are free. 571-8288.
G.C.


Best Use of Warehouse Space

Like the oversized practice garage for some punk-rock band, the indoor-soccer complex called Sports City blends into the urban landscape as a nondescript, windowless, steel building the size of an airplane hanger. But inside the plain Piner Road warehouse, there’s no surly band of angst-ridden musicians, just a powwow of soccer tribes. On Sunday morning, literally hundreds of soccer players in bright colors run their asses off in a fast-paced, wall-banging version of the world’s most popular game, complete with penalty boxes for rough play. Sports City attracts dozens of soccer teams that book the joint solid. From the old, stiff, and decrepit to the young, swift, and powerful, men and women and boys and girls of all ages gather for an all-weather soccer fix at this veritable Church of the Spotted Ball. Sports City, 921 Piner Road, Santa Rosa; 526-1320.
D.B.


Best Place to Rise Above It All

Climb the rickety wooden steps of the two-tiered observation platform at the overlook above Lake Sonoma and drink in the panoramic views from on high. Who needs the Italian Riviera? From your vantage point, 1,000 feet above the elevation of the lake, you can see Dry Creek Valley, a patchwork of vineyards, and the Mayacamas range. If it’s clear, the small plumes of steam rising from The Geysers may be visible in the distance. The picture is serene. The spell of stillness and silence is broken only by the cry of a redtail hawk and the occasional whine of a jet ski skimming the waterway below. Eleven miles northwest of Healdsburg at 3333 Skaggs Spring Road; 433-9483.
P.H.


Best Place to Fling a Nocturnal Thing

The main parking lot at Santa Rosa Junior College, adjacent to Santa Rosa High School, serves admirably as a late-night, after-hours Frisbee park. The lights are free, the course is creative, and the cars are gone. Select an oak tree or lamppost in the distance, call “par”–about three or four throws–and let the disc fly. You can’t hurt anything: not the oak tree, the parking lot island, or the ticket dispenser. Make up your own games. Or try this one: In the lot directly adjacent to the high school, stand on the west traffic island and golf around the east island before returning to hit the lamppost where you started. For this game, par four is good. Three is excellent. Hit par two, sign a professional contract, and come back in the daytime. The campus cops don’t seem to mind. But don’t break the law, just focus on fun and enjoy their patience–and their protection. Santa Rosa Junior College, 1501 Mendocino Ave.
D.B.


Best Reason to Twitch Your Hips

So you’ve always wanted to gyrate in a grass skirt, clatter castanets, or learn the intricacies of exotic Kathak dancing with bells on your ankles, no less. Look no further than the charmingly run-down Lincoln Arts Center in Santa Rosa. The International Dance Theater and School holds weekly Hawaiian hula, Spanish flamenco, and Indian Kathak classes for adults and children. Beginners and beyond are all welcome; even dancers of the two-left-feet variety will discover reasons to pound and twirl. In such a friendly, supportive environment, can it be such a big (and exceptionally well-choreographed leap) from studio to stardom? International Dance Theater and School, 709 Davis St., Santa Rosa; 544-0909.
P.H.


Best Place to Scratch the Sky

An easily missed road winds steeply out the back of Armstrong Woods State Reserve and catapults the unsuspecting adventurer to an expansive forest view that is free of human artifacts. It’s an eyeful of wooded mountains. Rolling hills and coastal bluffs make a person feel remarkably alive and blessed to live in Sonoma County. It’s a perspective that’s difficult to find, a succinct answer to that nebulous, questioning, hemmed-in feeling that so often haunts life. Take Armstrong Woods Road from downtown Guerneville. Don’t leave this one just for tourists.
D.B.


Best Local Lunar Landscape

Sure, the official explanation sounds plausible. I mean, it’s possible that wind and water and small bits of rock and seashells could have combined to transform the red-orange sandstone cliffs along the coast at the county’s northernmost state park into a decidedly alien sort of exterior decor. Ribbed and pocked with rounded holes and depressions, the gritty rock walls are quite unlike any other geologic feature within hundreds of miles. So what do you think the strange formations really mean? The truth is out there. Salt Point State Park, 25050 Hwy. 1, Jenner; 847-3221.
B.R.


Best Comeback Kids

Where once there were merely dozens, now perhaps hundreds of river otters are making the Russian River and its watershed their home. Reportedly, these shy, frisky mammals have built nests on Cassini Ranch near Duncans Mills, and several otter families have been spotted near Jenner–hey, otters just wanna have fun. The aquatic whiskered members of the weasel family are known to build muddy slides on riverbanks, where they spend hours sliding and splashing. Though not endangered, river otters are considered a “species of concern.” And several recent unconfirmed sightings of their endangered seafaring cousins, sea otters–which were wiped out locally more than 150 years ago by opportunistic Russian pelt hunters–have raised hopes that leisurely otter watching will be all the more fun this summer.
S.P.

From the March 26-April 1, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc. Maintained by .

Best of Sonoma County ’98

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Best of Sonoma County ’98

These are a few of . . .


David Licht

Our Favorite Things

WHAT IS THIS PLACE we call wine country? To the many visitors, it’s fine restaurants, afternoons spent sipping liquid bouquets, and languorous trips down the Russian River in rented boats. For those of us lucky enough to live here, it’s all those things and more. It’s catching a spirulina buzz at the Health & Harmony Festival. It’s enjoying the golden drop of vineyard leaves in the fall after all the tourists have gone home. It’s dressing a child up as a chick for Petaluma’s Butter & Eggs Day parade. It’s swinging a basket of fresh produce at the Thursday Night Market. It’s the cool splash at Memorial Beach at the end of May. It’s the entire town of Penngrove, with its sweetly curious frontier feel and the Palace of Fruit roadside attraction. It’s standing in a candle-lit mission during the Christmas season, eating gingersnaps and singing sacred songs with strangers. It’s being buzzed by an owl while sitting in the cheap seats at the Sonoma County Fair rodeo. It’s picking up rubbish at the beach; the old-fashioned circus calliope on the Petaluma Queen; free summer concerts in Healdsburg Plaza; and sunset at Goat Rock.

It’s the place we call home.
























‘Best of’ staff picks by: Jon Asturias, Dylan Bennett, Greg Cahill, Gretchen Giles, Paula Harris, Liesel Hofmann, Daedalus Howell, Bob Johnson, Sara Peyton, B. L. Prando, Bruce Robinson, David Templeton, and Marina Wolf.

From the March 26-April 1, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc. Maintained by .

Long-shot Candidates

Dark HorsesMichael AmslerOn the bandwagon: Allen Barreca, left, Bill Patterson, and Pia Jensen say they're in the election race for the long haul, despite seemingly insurmountable odds. Why do they run? Shedding some light on long-shot candidatesBy Janet Wells Dark horse ... (b) an almost unknown contestant regarded by only a few as having a chance to win.--...
Read more

Biotechnology

Germ WarfareMichael AmslerBio tech: Ecologists Dan Wickham and Bob Rawson used a bacterial formula to cleanse the Laguna de Santa Rosa. Turning crud-devouring bacteria into goldBy Stephanie HillerWITH the ease of PacMan, bacteria naturally found in soil can gobble up unwanted organic material: manure leaching into streams, oil spilling in soil, and even human waste clogging up the filters...
Read more

Strictly Roots

Riddim King Michael AmslerSome father's son: Strictly Roots frontman Rason Jahmal carries on the legacy after his father's untimely death.Strictly Roots regroup after leader's deathBy Charles McDermidRastafarian reggae is triumphant, the heartbeat call to consciousness. It is a call that can be as deep and spooky as a bad dream: as loopy and leering as Redd Foxx after hours;...
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Art in Bloom

Pistil Packin'Michael AmslerFlower arranging from the inside outBy Bruce RobinsonIS THIS JUST some of whatever you saw?" Caroline Rousset asks incredulously. Rousset appears less than pleased with the array of flora I have laid on her worktable. We have met in her downtown Santa Rosa floral studio, where I am to get insights into the art of flower arranging...
Read more

Calvary Chapel

Losing My ReligionPhoto Illustration by Magali PirardConfessions of a backslidden Christian--a prodigal son returns to the 'fast food' church where his faith in Jesus began . . . and endedBy David TempletonI CONFESS right from the start that I am--and for 17 years have been--a backslider. If you're in the club, you'll know what this means, and you'll know...
Read more

Ferry Service

Making WavesMichael AmslerCounty and local officials question plans for Petaluma commuter ferry serviceBy Paula HarrisSCOTT TREE has nervous energy to spare. Slender, bearded, and with an intense gaze, the 44-year-old local entrepreneur dashes rather than strolls. In one hand, he carries a sheaf of elaborate plans for a local ferry service to San Francisco; in the other he grips...
Read more

Talking Pictures

Line of Thinking Presidential pardon: John Travolta and Emma Thompson star in Primary Colors.Political satirist Paul Krassner gets primary with 'Colors'By David TempletonIn his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation, David Templeton calls up infamous political satirist and publisher Paul Krassner to gauge his reaction to the much-hyped film version of Joe Klein's insider novel...
Read more

Artrain

Horse PowerMichael AmslerSmithsonian's Artrain rolls to HealdsburgBy Gretchen GilesTO REACH Elizabeth Candelario, it is necessary to clamber up an old redwood beam, balance on an ancient railroad tie, and make a final scramble onto the none-too-clean floor of the building in which she is standing. Candelario, the executive director of the Healdsburg Arts Council and the spry mother of...
Read more

R&R

Easy Does ItMichael AmslerWood, I could: Packed in hot wood chips and enzymes, Lisa Santos discovers that bark is better than bytes. After a week at the computer, Santos relaxes at the Osmosis spa, in Freestone, picked by you as the best local getaway.'Best of' local recreation--playing hard couldn't be any simplerSIX A.M.: Get groggily out of bed, pull...
Read more

Best of Sonoma County ’98

These are a few of . . . David LichtOur Favorite ThingsWHAT IS THIS PLACE we call wine country? To the many visitors, it's fine restaurants, afternoons spent sipping liquid bouquets, and languorous trips down the Russian River in rented boats. For those of us lucky enough to live here, it's all those things and more. It's catching a...
Read more
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