9. Where Does Everybody Go?
Downtown Sebastopol remains something of a mystery to all of us. Mostly to me. It is unlike almost anywhere I have lived, except perhaps Hawaii, in that the town seems to have been scattered across the landscape rather than deliberately assembled. There is an old downtown. There is the Barlow, which is several acres of expensive but not exactly quality restaurants. There are businesses hidden along side roads. Many of which we have yet to discover. There are restaurants tucked into places that do not look like restaurants until you are already inside them. There are services, like the local pharmacy, tucked into a room inside a difficult to reach office building on a one way street. There are stretches that feel busy and alive, and still others that seem to have gone home for the evening without telling anyone. The central question is: Where exactly is downtown Sebastopol? Is the old downtown downtown? Is the Barlow downtown? Is the Barlow itself actually one place, or several small districts loosely pretending to know each other?
Even within the Barlow there are pockets that tourists seem never to find. Then there is the larger question of what kind of town Sebastopol actually wants to be. A music town? A food town? A drinking town? And if it is a drinking town, what exactly are we drinking? Wine would seem obvious. We are, after all, surrounded by vineyards. But the Barlow seems oddly committed to cider. We are, after all, surrounded by apple orchards. Downtown, meanwhile, there is a Belgian beer garden that is simultaneously a sports bar, garden, concert venue, and occasionally something approaching a rave. It does not, as far as I can tell, have a particularly commanding selection of Belgian beer. This feels very Sebastopol. The clothing stores downtown also remain mysterious. Some seem designed for tourists in an area not exactly designed for tourists. Others for women of a certain age.
Most of the shops stay tightly closed, even during hours when one might expect people to wander in. Perhaps this is to keep out the traffic noise. Perhaps the owners are inside quietly deciding whether downtown exists. The one place the kids and I understand completely is the movie theater. The seats are old. They do not recline. No one appears to have considered any of the features modern theaters now require in order to show a movie. But they serve good food. They have wine. Beer on tap. Soup. And most importantly, the prices remain within the boundaries of recognizable commerce. This makes the theater one of our favorite places in town. Almost everything else is expensive enough to require discussion before ordering. Twenty-seven dollars for a hamburger. Twenty dollars for a burrito. Six additional dollars if the burrito is expected to contain meat.
It is difficult to find anything that costs less than twenty dollars, and most meals seem determined to land somewhere in the thirties. Sometimes the prices feel nearly triple what we were used to paying in Colorado. I had warned Erin about this before the move. In Sonoma we will pay wine-country prices. In San Luis Obispo, we would pay college-town prices. There would be no winning. So far, this prediction has proven annoyingly accurate. All the more reason, we decided, to repair the greenhouse. We would grow food. Lots of it. Tomatoes. Lettuce. Herbs. Perhaps enough zucchini that we could begin distributing it to neighbors in retaliation. We would become independent of the twenty-dollar burrito. This was now part of the plan.
One evening, though, we decided to go out properly. It was warm. The air was soft. The Barlow was full of people. We ate, wandered around, and began to feel for a moment that we were not merely people living inside an active construction zone. Then it was 9:10. And everything was closed. Not closing. Closed. The Barlow had apparently gone to bed. We stood there looking around. Surely there had to be somewhere else to go. A bar. Music. A restaurant. Anything. There was one visible center of activity. Screamin’ Mimi’s. The ice cream shop had a line stretching out the door and around the building. Apparently the entire nightlife of Sebastopol had condensed into a queue for ice cream. So we joined it. And, almost annoyingly, the ice cream was excellent. Some of the best we had ever had. Still, while eating it, I kept wondering: Where is everyone? Where do people go at night? Surely this could not be it. Perhaps this was simply another feature of the town's strange geography.
The nightlife was dispersed too. Maybe there was a restaurant hidden down an otherwise dark road. Maybe someone was playing music in a barn. Maybe fifty people were sitting around a fire in someone’s backyard drinking natural wine and discussing soil. Perhaps nothing here announced itself. You had to learn the system. You had to know someone. You had to discover which road to turn down and which gate to enter.
There were already hints of another world beyond Sebastopol. Roads disappeared beneath redwoods and came out in tiny towns we were only beginning to learn: Forestville, Freestone, Valley Ford, places toward the Russian River and the coast whose names still meant very little to us. Sometimes you would pass a hand-painted sign at the end of a driveway or glimpse something happening behind a hedge and wonder where everyone was going. The whole region seemed to contain a second geography invisible from outsiders.
For now, we were the outsiders. We knew the movie theater. We knew where to get very good ice cream. We knew where to buy a twenty-seven-dollar hamburger, plus twelve dollars for a side of fries. Everything else would come later.
And really, we already had entertainment. Now that I had people helping, the entire project seemed to be accelerating. The ADU was being stripped. Soon we could rebuild it into a proper room. We would decide what to do with the strange bathroom in the garden. Then we would repair the greenhouse. Then we would plant. Then we would unpack the remaining boxes. Then the furniture would find its proper place.
Then the garage would be emptied. Then the property would finally begin to settle down. We had only been there a couple of weeks. It was all coming together. Soon, I thought, we would stop working on our new life long enough to actually begin living it.
