Читать книгу A Vineyard in Napa - Doug Shafer - Страница 14

FIVE

Arrival—1973

We met my mom in San Francisco and drove into Napa Valley on a sunny January morning. The hills were vibrant green, and the air was warm enough that you could wear a T-shirt. For a Chicago native this was a jaw-dropping introduction to the season they called winter out here. We drove north on the two-lane Silverado Trail out of the town of Napa, passing walnut orchards, hay fields, and vineyards. Cattle chewed their cud and stared at us from hillside pastures.

About seven miles north of Napa, Dad turned on the blinker, and we made a right onto a narrow drive that jogged around the base of a forested hill. The road split on the far side of the hill, and we went left.

The arrow-straight drive was flanked on both sides by row upon row of nut-brown, skeletal grapevines in winter hibernation. The roadway ended at a collection of odd little buildings, dominated by the part-adobe, part-stone house with a red tile roof. The rest were creaky-looking outbuildings. Beyond these structures, however, was an incredible sight—massive green hillsides shot through here and there with craggy, thrusting bedrock. And blocking out nearly half of the eastern sky stood towering cliff s called the Stags Leap Palisades.

When I’d imagined California, I’d thought of beaches, dune buggies, and oiled, bronzed skin. This was like nothing I’d pictured.

The house looked as though it had started as a modest stone structure that was later expanded, several times, by builders with more vigor than skill. Its tile roof seemed like a Mediterranean afterthought. The interior was all crooked floors and doorways, and its oddly scented rooms echoed, since there wasn’t yet a stick of furniture in the place.

That first night, with the moving truck still several days away, we unfurled sleeping bags in the living room, stoked a fire in the fireplace—the house’s only heat source—and pretended we were camping. My parents were buoyant and energized by this new chapter in their lives, and my brother and I couldn’t help but become infected by their sense of adventure.

As I lay in my sleeping bag that night, I took in the foreign feel of this place. The sounds outside were like nothing I’d heard before—vast silences broken occasionally by the yelping of a coyote, the hooting of an owl, the rustle of oak leaves from the huge, shaggy trees just outside. With no streetlights for miles in any direction, the night sky out the off-kilter window was a rich, limitless blackness fogged with stars.

It wasn’t Oak Street, and it was light years from Malibu. But already this felt like it could become home.