Ghost Town
Ending autumn with a pair of unusual road trips
In the waning days of fall, Leslie and I embarked on a pair of camping trips in our van that would turn out to be the shortest and the weirdest of the many adventures we have had since taking delivery of Next Chapter in September 2020.
Given that this span has included road trips across 12 states through pandemic shutdowns, blistering heat waves, hazardous-air alerts, wildfire closures and torrential atmospheric rivers, naming one of our late-November excursions the weirdest of any in our three-year travel itinerary is saying something.
I’ll save the weird for later and start with the shortest trip: a two-day, one-night outing from Ventura to Paso Robles, round-trip distance just 320 miles.
Normally we would not bother with the chore of prepping and packing the van for such a brief excursion, preferring to stack multiple adventures into one longer road trip. But this was actually a rescheduled fragment of a more protracted trip we had planned for the second week of November, which would have been anchored by three nights of camping in the Santa Cruz Mountains to check on recovery of the wildfire-devastated forests in and around Big Basin Redwoods State Park. From there, we planned to work our way south, stopping to explore the most out-of-the-way outpost of California’s Spanish mission system while camping in the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains of Monterey County, and culminating with a night camping outside Paso Robles so we could visit Sensorio, a difficult-to-describe outdoor art installation that we have long wanted to experience.
We reserved campsites, bought tickets and passes, laid in provisions and prepared for a week on the road. Our goal was to explore unfamiliar corners of our native state and region in much the same way we did in autumn of 2022, with our outing to Morro Bay and the Los Osos Valley.
But just a few days before our planned departure, the National Weather Service predicted a significant early season deluge for the Santa Cruz Mountains — not the best conditions for visiting the burn scar of the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex wildfires. So we canceled the bulk of the trip, dialing our plans back to just the Paso/Sensorio visit, since those tickets were nonrefundable and the predicted chance of rainfall that far south was much lower.
It turned out to be a good call. During the days we had planned to be there, the Santa Cruz Mountains were hit by heavy downpours (although fortunately no significant mudslides or debris flows), whereas we stayed mostly dry in Paso Robles. We also had a fantastic Hipcamp site east of town on a rolling cattle ranch/worm farm, and a mind-bending experience in a fantasyland of colored lights.
Field of dreams
Sensorio opened in 2019, the creation of British artist Bruce Munro, and has four elements. “Field of Light” is the original and remains the centerpiece, consisting of more than 100,000 colored fiber-optic lights on stems, powered by solar energy and draped across several acres of undulating, oak-dotted hills. Subsequent additions include “Light Towers,” a maze of 69 structures built out of more than 17,000 wine bottles lit by colored lights that change in harmony with mesmerizing a capella music recorded by South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Soweto Gospel Choir; “Gone Fishing,” semi-circular collections of rods tipped with light; and “Fireflies,” a constellation of bulbous glowing forms that to me and Leslie evoked jellyfish more than fireflies.
Pathways lead through the installations, and although photographs can show you what it all looks like, they cannot convey what it feels like to wander through the spectacle on a dark autumn night. We arrived in waning daylight just before a glorious sunset, which we enjoyed from a terrace warmed by gas firepits, and we remained there as darkness stole over the valley below and the field of colored lights came to life. Once it was fully dark, we joined the procession of visitors exploring the installation, each twist and turn of the path revealing a different perspective, a different blend of colors and shapes.
It was a full-body immersive experience, disorienting in a delightful way, mesmerizing and emotionally moving to a surprising degree. After our circuit, we stopped at the Sensorio kitchen for dinner, which we enjoyed outside while listening to live music. We then headed back to our campsite. We lingered there the next morning, enjoying the remarkable view from our perch on a hilltop overlooking the southern end of the Salinas River Valley, before heading back to Ventura.
Into the weird
Our second autumn journey came just a week later. It was in one way a very traditional sort of road trip: a drive up to the Bay Area to spend Thanksgiving Day with family. But it also included a very nontraditional element that continues to haunt me.
We left Ventura later than we had hoped on Wednesday morning, stopped for lunch at our favorite spot in Carpinteria, and then began slogging our way north on the 101 through moderate traffic, intending to reach my sister’s home in San Rafael in time for dinner.
The late start, however — coupled with the abbreviated daylight of late autumn — found us still in the Salinas Valley when darkness fell. Tired and unwilling to grapple with the gantlet of traffic stretching from Gilroy through San Francisco under nighttime conditions, we detoured to a ranch Leslie’s family owns outside the town of Gonzales. We parked in the driveway of a house built there to accommodate visiting family members, and camped for the night in our van.
We finished the drive the next morning through blissfully light traffic, and enjoyed a wonderful holiday visit and family feast with my sister Stephanie, her husband Sean, and my son Daniel, who drove from his home in Sparks, Nev., for the occasion.
The gathering was made warm by who was there, but was notable also for who was not. My family and I are navigating our first holiday season since my parents died last December, and as anyone who has lost a loved one knows, traditional gatherings and celebrations during that first year of mourning pack a heightened emotional punch. So many times over the decades we had found ourselves gathered for holiday meals around my sister’s table, and we felt Mom and Dad’s absence keenly this year. We drew solace from each other, however, confirming that the best way to navigate our changed and charged emotional landscape is together.
Leslie and I took our leave the next day, traveling north through Petaluma and Santa Rosa, and stopping for lunch in the relentlessly charming wine country town of Healdsburg. We then headed to one of our favorite wineries to taste and stock up on the interesting Italian varietals they specialize in producing.
From there, we traveled deep into the past.
As I wrote about last month, my siblings and I have been working for most of a year to settle my parents’ estate, including disposing of the properties they owned either outright or in partnership with my dad’s brother. In late summer we sold the Sebastopol ranch where my parents lived before their deaths, and we are now in the process of prepping and marketing the shared properties, which requires more complicated negotiations.
The grand prize in that small portfolio is the home ranch, 23 acres of agricultural land in the heart of west Sonoma County wine country. Our broker has already received inquiries from potential buyers, and with any luck, we will be able to reach an agreement with one early next year. Once we do, the property will pass into new hands, to be reborn as a commercial vineyard or perhaps a luxury home site with a planting of grapes.
Which is why, on the day after Thanksgiving, Leslie and I found ourselves camped in our van next to the ruins of my childhood home.
Goodbye again
My family moved to that ranch when I was 5, and I lived there until I was 20 and left for college in Santa Barbara. Those 15 years now represent less than a quarter of my life, but the degree to which we are shaped by the places we inhabit depends as much on when we spend time there as on how long we stay. Those were formative years that shaped the adult I became, and my experiences growing up on the ranch continue to color the life I have lived ever since.
I wrote an essay about this the first time I said goodbye to that ranch. That was 30 years ago, and the piece was published in an issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, as one of the winning entries in its 1993 nature-writing contest. The submission grew out of a visit to my childhood home four years after my family had all moved away, leaving the ranch — once an agricultural paradise of blooming fruit trees and vines laden with wine grapes — more or less abandoned to the elements and the forces of nature once kept at bay by commercial horticulture.
An excerpt:
Though we didn't rely on the income it produced, we still worked the land ourselves, pruning the vines and trees in the winter, disking and pulling suckers in the spring, crawling in the hot summer sun picking prunes, and suffering knife cuts and bee stings in the autumn-crisp vineyards. We hoisted lug boxes of fruit, dug bogged tractors out of springtime mud, turned storm-toppled trees into firewood with a chain saw, cut drainage ditches by hand in December rain.
The real value of the land, however, lay not in the crops it produced, not even in the lessons it taught us about hard work, the kind that blisters your hands, stains your clothes, puts an ache in your back, and makes a noontime drink of plain water taste good beyond words. The measure of the land's worth was the way it forced us into intimate contact with the natural world and with the place where wildness and domestication rub against each other in a slow, grinding, tectonic embrace.
(I will post the entire essay in a follow-up to this installment of Next Chapter Notes.)
Three decades ago, the ranch was already a monument to entropy: trees and vines overrun by weeds and wild blackberries, the buildings falling into disrepair, invasive grasses colonizing the unpaved driveway. During our visit this year, however, the ranch was almost unrecognizable. The orchard had vanished, the vineyard had returned to the oak woodland it likely had been before settlers arrived and scraped the land bare for farming. And the buildings had become ruins, or disappeared entirely.
When I was growing up there, the ranch had a surprising number of these structures, given its modest size. There were two houses, each with a garage, a big redwood barn, and a constellation of outbuildings to which my family attached individual descriptive names: The Workshop (a converted chicken coop that housed my dad’s wood-working and metal-working tools), The Freezer Shed (another repurposed chicken coop), The Chicken Coop (a chicken coop), The Pump Shed (atop our domestic well), The Playhouse (a children’s playhouse my dad built), The Green Shed (original purpose unknown, but painted green and used to store firewood), The White House (an abandoned cottage that was a wreck even a half-century ago), The Tractor Shed (self-explanatory), The Sprayer Shed (ditto), and The Poison Shed (agricultural chemical storage).
What remains of them now is a ghost town of listing walls, swaybacked roofs, rubble piles and un-paned window frames gaping like eyeless sockets. We parked Next Chapter in the front yard — recently cleared by a bulldozer — next to the house my family occupied for 25 years, and set up our camp furniture and propane fire pit.
Leslie and I have camped and shared cocktails by firelight in many places over the years, but none quite as surreal as this. We watched the sun set, bringing a warm glow to the ravaged stucco and remaining window glass of the old house, ate dinner, and then sat by the fire to watch moonlight spread over the silent landscape.
I expected it to feel eerie, maybe even foreboding, but it did not. There were ghosts there, to be sure, but they were the remembered young parents and younger children of our early years on the ranch, when the house was filled with bustle and noise, love and laughter and tears, and too many people for its cramped footprint. The ghosts were me and my siblings building forts out of field boxes in the orchard behind the barn, climbing trees, exploring the biological mysteries of the creek that bisected the ranch, walking down the long dirt driveway to catch the school bus, crawling around in the hot August sun to pick prunes shaken from the trees by my dad and uncle. It was Christmas mornings by the fireplace in our tiny living room, Thanksgiving dinners at the table in the cluttered kitchen, summer days weeding, watering and harvesting the prodigious garden my mom planted each spring.
Our campsite that night was haunted, yes, but haunted by memories of life in all its exuberant, messy beauty, by memories of our family’s past and of my childhood in a remarkable place. Those are gentle ghosts whose visits I will always welcome.
When we awoke the next morning, it was 22 degrees outside and everything around us — the ground, the vegetation, the roofs of the van and the still-standing sheds and houses — was covered in a glittering blanket of frost. As the sun warmed and thawed the world, we enjoyed our morning coffee outside and then packed up to head down the driveway, through the gate, and back on the road to new adventures.
You've given me the impetus I needed to see Sensorio.