Writing about Cazadero from Palm Springs seems weird as I look up at a sunbaked rocky mountainside while trying to conjure memories of that place on Austin Creek deep in the primordial shade of giant Redwoods. Maybe not so weird though as there are some profound linkages to be made between places, and not just that they have both greatly impacted me. There are other things that tie them together. There’s the numerological coincidence of 106 for example, that’s the forecast high temperature here today and the highest annual rainfall that we ever experienced (106 inches) in Cazadero during the decade that we had a cabin there (2001-2011). Cazadero is known for rain, pounding rain like Hawaii, and 106 inches was by no means a record year; that would be 143” in 1936 according to a quirky old-school website that we found in those dial-up days shortly after buying the cabin, the webmaster of which has since died.  We were told the rainfall numbers ahead of time, and being from Oregon I paid it little mind, but it’s impossible to fully grasp until you’ve lived through a winter there—and winter is when it all comes down. Summers are warm and dry, leaving the Redwoods to suck on fog and groundwater, and suck they do, as much as 500 gallons per day (look it up). However, the number 106 is just playful nonsense—of course there is more.

Ultimately it’s the gay thing. It always is. Cazadero is just down the road from Guerneville, the pre-AIDS summer weekend party retreat from the SF fog on the Russian River. Palm Springs is, well, the slightly less tired version of the same thing with a much wider audience and a different off-season. So there are a number of people that moved back and forth between these places with some regularity. The Guerneville realtor who sold us our cabin in Cazadero had a house in Palm Springs, and we once met a couple who had given up their weekend place in Caz very near ours to buy a celebrity guest house in Old Las Palmas, what celebrity it was supposed to be I don’t remember, but I do remember the massive stainless steel front door. They gave piano sing-along parties. But I’ve jumped to far ahead and astray.

Guerneville has always had a rough time of it. Each economic downturn seems to have a greater impact there than in the rest of Northern California, combine that with the periodic flooding of the river, and well it seems to just barely keep its head above water—forgive the pun. Its gayest period was the late 70s early 80s followed by the devastating impact of AIDS, followed by a big flood in 1986 that buried the whole town in water. When I moved to SF and started visiting the River in 1989 it seemed to be making a comeback, both from the cultural devastation of HIV and the last big flood—and it was fun again—for a while. Dancing could be had at The Woods, Fifes Bunkhouse, The Cattle Company and The Tripple R., and there were plenty of options for cheap places to stay an easy 90 minute drive north of The City.  From my perspective that last little burst of rebirth was short lived. Just exactly what has happened to the Russian River since and why I don’t fully understand, though we know how it played out for us. We can’t very well blame the Google Bus—or can we? I guess the gays are just richer, more digital and more prone to nesting than playing these days.

It seems the final attempts at “making it work” at the River were attempts at going upscale. A venue known simply as “Retreat” offered massage and cucumber-water poolside, and Fifes’ nightly orgies gave way to a wanna-be swanky country wedding venue, straight ones that is, this was before gay weddings were legal or popular in CA. The new owner of debauchery-turned-wedding-venue, though gay himself, became notoriously hated by most locals for shutting off access to one of the biggest venues for annual gay parties like Sundance and Lazy Bear, and for patrolling the well-worn riparian reeds and brambles on the grounds to thwart late-night hook-ups, and of course for closing down the biggest cheap campground in town. The owners of a club called Fab that had opened up in an old theater in town were among the most outspoken critics of what the new owner was doing to Fifes—the one-time ground-zero of gaydome in Guerneville—and launched their own little rumor-fueled boycott. The two were briefly the celebrity couple in town, and not just because so many knew them from the steam room at Golds Gym back in The City. Club owners have a certain cache. Fab even threw foam parties, which seemed a little late even back then. Rikk came home from one with a rash. The great big teepee-shaped dance floor at The Woods had burned down years before and everything condensed until finally only The Tripple R and Cattle Company remained. It seemed we bought our cabin in Cazadero just at the time gay river life was collapsing in on itself for the second and maybe last time. But in 2001 we weren’t looking for a party, we were looking to escape—it’s just always reassuring to know there’s one going on nearby—just in case.

One of our favorite weekend getaways throughout the 90s—and Rikk and my very first weekend date spot—was a place at the River called The Highlands. It was common in those days for most of the gay resorts (The Woods, Fifes, The Willows…) to offer camping on the grounds as a cheap alternative to renting a room—and it used to be very cheap—I’m talking 7 dollars cheap. That was a smart move, maybe even a coordinated one, as it tended to keep the crowd poor (i.e. young). The river and bars were all within easy walking distance so it could be quite a little party town on summer weekends. The Highlands was up the hill from town (out of the flood zone as locals would say) quiet, sunny and most importantly clothing optional. Sometime in the 90s The Highlands sold to a very “quirky” straight couple, an enormous woman and her scrawny dead-ringer for John Waters husband. They wisely, upon surveying their guests, changed virtually nothing about the place—including the coed showers. They were the “anti-Fifes”—God love ‘em—and it worked.  Unlike Palm Springs, the Russian River never had any “men-only” resorts—at least not as official policy. A Northern California dyke who walks in on two guys making out in the sower will most likely just say hi, or would have done back then.

One warm fall weekend by the pool at The Highlands we met a friendly “local” (we would later learn the inside meaning of the word both at the River and Palm Springs—getting in places for free) who convinced us to come back to his “cabin” in Cazadero—“just down the road.” It’s actually more than a half hour’s drive on super windy roads, and we’d never heard of it. As we followed in our car—not at all drunk—our little adventure was getting tiresome if not sketchy. When we finally arrived at his place it turned out to be worth the drive—perched on a mountainside with a large expanse of gardens and a waterfall at the end of a long private road. It was even a real log cabin, though a very big one with a downstairs guest apartment. A couple years later when this guy and his partner had become good friends we used to make fun them for their blenders—like how many blenders (a metaphor for houses) can one couple own? We once stayed in the downstairs apartment at their cabin, which of course had its blender or two, and once at their Palm Springs house we heard one partner tell the other, “don’t use that blender, it’s the bad one.” We cracked up, but never told them why. There must have been a lot of blended drinks served in those days. As we became friends they convinced us to buy a place nearby in Cazadero, and having them close by was a bonus—in case we needed to blend something.  Of course in no time we too had multiple blenders, vacuums, beds, couches, TVs stereos and bills—and our friends sold their cabin.

That first visit to our new friend’s “cabin” was in fall and the next Memorial Day was our first invite to their annual season kick-off bash, a well-known Russian River event. Tents were pitched on every available patch of ground on the lawns and in the woods, including ours, and the first Buddha Bar CD was blaring from outdoor speakers. Blenders were hard at work, and the smell of pot was heavy in air. I’ve never been much for herb. One year Rikk and I rode our bikes with Critical Mass in the Gay Pride Parade and I got so stoned from one of Brownie Mary’s brownies that I got hit by a float and lost my way home. I did some at the Memorial Day party and passed out for an entire afternoon. These parties in the woods were epic for sex. Some new porn star was discovered that weekend, but honestly I’m not even sure I ever saw him—there that is. It was a long weekend, and my tolerance for a crowd has a short fuse, so I went on some drives around the countryside. It was on one of those drives that I saw it, a low slung house right on Cazadero Highway—I mean right on. There was a for-sale sign and the place was empty so I stopped and poked around. The mid-century modern house filled up a triangular sliver of land between the road and the creek and was surrounded by towering redwood trees all around. There was more deck than house, the house was mostly glass and I was in love. We had talked about buying a place somewhere at the Russian River, but this one didn’t meet any of the criteria we’d set down. We wanted sun not redwoods; the site mattered more than the house etc. etc. But, love is love and it didn’t take much to convince Rikk that we could swing this—besides we had the example of our new friends and their philosophy of the magic of California real estate that just increases in value for ever and ever (insert sinister foreboding music here).

Cazadero is a word that either means “hunting grounds” or it doesn’t, depending on which Spanish speaker you ask. The last year we had the cabin a Black Bear was killed on the highway, but that was big news as they’ve been pushed way up into the Sierra and Trinity, and the sad Grizzly that graces the state flag (chosen to scare the Mexicans and drawn from a stuffed bear in San Francisco) has been gone even longer. “Caz” is a tiny town a few miles north of the Russian River on one of California’s last remaining wild undammed streams Austin Creek—a cute name for what can be a raging torrent 10 feet deep and 100 feet wide in winter—all rain, no snow melt. The town was there because the mill was there, the mill was there because the trees were there, and trees built San Francisco and the gold mines. Everything was cut. The trees around our little house were second growth, between 100-150 years old. Dead center under the house was a sawn off stump eight feet across. When you cut a redwood new shoots create new trees, sometimes several trees encircle the stump and then it’s called a faerie-ring. We had one of those that I built a tree house in just above the hot tub overlooking the creek below. You could lie on your back and look into infinity up through the ring of tall trunks. I once had the chance to ask a “redwood expert” if redwoods ever really die, since they grow back after cutting. The answer was complicated. He claimed he could tell a redwood grown from seed vs. one that started life as a shoot, and something about genetics. I always preferred to think of them as eternal. After timber came resorts, which became popular in the late 19^th century accessible by a narrow gauge railway on what is now Cazadero Highway, and during that era temporary wooden dams were built on Austin Creek to create swimming holes. The infamous Bohemian Grove, rumored to be the final decision point for funding Lawrence’s bomb (yes that Lawrence–Livermore and Berkeley Labs) is just down the road. Summer dams are still built on the Russian River. One keeps a nice deep swimming hole at the bend in the river as it passes The Grove where they anchor a floating dock during their annual gathering of the masters of the universe. I once paddled my kayak past while they were in session, which is a tightly held secret except for the limos and helicopters. Dick Chaney was reclining on the floating dock like one of the enormous sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf, and he too was barking at someone. I wondered where the sharp-shooters were at that moment that I thought of a strike to the head with my paddle, as they must have been watching my every move from somewhere. We once tried to drive into The Bohemian Grove acting all casual–sometimes a big black Mercedes SUV goes unchallenged–not here. We were met with guards carrying automatic rifles.

The year we moved into our cabin a heated battle was just winding down between locals claiming the right to build temporary dams for all kinds of made up reasons—they were losing—and Fish and Game (yes animals are still called game in CA). I was at the Cazadero Store one day—before knowing much about the locals—that is the people who live there throughout the week. There was a flyer taped to the counter about a town meeting to be held on the issue of summer dams. I asked the owner of the store who would be representing Fish and Game’s perspective. The place fell silent. He leaned over the counter inches from my face and through tobacco stained teeth he grunted, “why the hell we want them there?” OK just the case of beer then, thanks.  Life did slowly return to the creek. We have a good friend who’s a ranger that we met years ago in a tub full of guys at Orr Hot Springs who for a time was in charge of monitoring the fish in Austin Creek. We had Great Blue Herron, Night Herron, Egrets and when the fall brought the creek flow back, otters, which were great fun to watch and all right outside our windows. This morning having coffee by the pool here in the old Tennis Club neighborhood of Palm Springs a huge hawk swept right passed my head on its way to grab a Koi from the fake creek in the fake oasis—more coincidence?

One hot July day shortly after moving in to the cabin two friends showed up on Saturday on their way “kayaking.” I thought their short shorts were a bit slutty for kayaking but didn’t reach the conclusion as quickly as Rikk did that they were really there as a welcoming committee to help us “christen” the place. At the exact moment when the deck was being christened all over by the four of us, a dead redwood limb broke loose 100 feet above and crashed onto the deck. Better than a cigarette.

Then the building campaign began. Little by little we made most of the transformations we wanted to make to the house and some we had to make to keep it from washing away. We took our realtor’s advice and found a contractor before anything else. His last name was Deck—so perfect. A big guy, he and his wife showed up for an estimate in full leather on their Harleys, making sure to let us know that all his current clients were gay. He turned out to be a super nice guy who has since moved to the Big Island. His own house in Guerneville was half under water one year. Ironically he moved to Pahoa which is now threatened by lava. Starting with the hot tub he built 6 or seven projects including a couple that he originally told us he could not do—in other words they weren’t legal.

In the second or third year the creek topped its banks and spread out under the house. The house sat on wooden piers behind a wooden retaining wall 10 feet high reaching right down to the creek bed. The wall leaned badly outward, being tethered back to that 8 foot stump with a steel cable. The gap between the soil bank and the wall was filled with old sandbags pushing it out even more. It boggled the mind, what was holding what? The house is holding the wall, the trees are holding the house, the wall is holding the sand bags? None of this was visible to us or the inspector when we bought the place. It was all camouflaged in ivy, which is probably what was really holding it together.  A fix would have meant major permits, even working in the streambed. Lucky for us the dotcom bubble burst and suddenly our contractor had a change of heart. He built a massive concrete retaining wall on the creek with proper permeable backfill and weep holes, but no permit. We felt really bad for the two guys that dug the trench behind the existing wall, by hand, 10 feet deep and 3 feet wide. The work was not invisible to the neighbors on the opposite bank, but I’m sure they were thinking how they might use this knowledge in the future—don’t ask don’t tell style. It was the custom. The new bathroom, laundry, Tea House and  illegal eight foot gates went up, paid for by numerous “refies,” and all was well, until the next recession—a different matter entirely.

Storms were very dramatic in the redwoods, which are notorious for shedding branches that tend to come down like missiles, heavy end first. I once had one fly past my head before crashing through the deck rail and dropping into the flooding creek where it was quickly swept away. Twice they came straight through the roof, once through the skylight into the bed—we were not in residence.  Power was also a very touchy business, and when it went out so did the well pump and the water, at which point you either hunker down for a scary night or pack up and leave. Rural western Sonoma County is the absolute last priority for PG&E (OK after Hinckley) so we could wait several days every outage. The flooding though was mostly peaceful, making no sound at all really as the brown water rushed past dining room windows with the occasional bobbing tree. One thanksgiving someone created a genius environmental art project by throwing pumpkins into the creek at evenly timed intervals somewhere upstream and unseen by us. They trailed past our windows one after the next for about an hour. There is nothing else orange in the redwoods and the sun was directly above the creek—it was brilliant.

There were overnight guests and parties in those days, having a place in the country makes weekend social life easy—people start asking if they can come. One such weekend with a kind of mismatched group, and rain, turned into drama, or I guess I should say trauma. After that weekend I started referring to Cazadero as the place old dogs go to die. A friend from work (that’s really an oxymoron and we all know it) was up with his large asthmatic old dog the same weekend as the guy who’d shot porn in our apartment while were away the year before. It wasn’t a good mix. I think the group was bigger, but it didn’t relieve the tension between them. One was fretting about the dog the other drunkenly intolerant of the fretting. I think he even said something like “birds fall of trees and die every day.” The creek was about a foot deep at that time and water stretched 100 feet from bank to bank so it must have been spring. In late summer it can stop flowing all together, leaving only a gravel beach that neighbors use for strolling. The dog seemed mysteriously drawn into the creek always walking downstream, and we retrieved him the first few times. As the evening of eating and drinking on the deck wore on and it got dark, suddenly the dog was gone again, and this time we didn’t find it. My friend went into panic mode. He had flyers waiting in town at the crack of dawn and had walked Austin Creek, Austin Creek Road and Cazadero Highway up and down before anyone else in the house was awake. He and I set out in my car for another round of searching as I knew where the access points to the creek were, kind of hopelessly. As we drove, suddenly his cell phone rang. I don’t believe in Gods or angels, but the significance of this cannot be overstated as there is no cell reception on Cazadero Highway. I slammed on the breaks for fear of losing the signal and he answered the call from the woman who had found the dog and seen one of his flyers, all before 8:00 on Sunday morning. The dog was cold and drenched, having walked/floated 3 miles in Austin Creek before collapsing for the night on the front porch of one of the nicer houses in the neighborhood.  Even the choice of this house seemed odd, not the closest to the creek, not the easiest to find, and the dog had to climb a long stairway up to the porch. My friend was crazed with tears of happiness, frightening the woman and her kids. I knew this dog’s days were numbered—and they were—he died shortly after. “Where old dogs go to die.“

Crime wasn’t as common as one might think by the look of the area and some of the houses. It has a bit of an Appalachian vibe. One neighbor even raised a few pigs one year—not good on hot days. When we first moved in I decided it would be good to get mail there so asked the post office in town and was told the box needed to be on the opposite side of the road from the house. Our neighbor in that direction was often outside tinkering with his little redneck Toyota truck so I went across to ask about the mailbox situation. He immediately answered that we already had one and gestured in its direction, starting to walk toward it, then stopping suddenly, explaining that he couldn’t go that far as he lifted his pants leg to show me his house-arrest electronic ankle bracelet.  He turned out to be a very nice guy and we were glad to have some eyes on the place during the week—or so we thought—and he also delivered our firewood. One Friday night, 5 or 6 years after buying the place, I arrived at the house alone and very late and the gate was open—a sight that a sent a chill up my spine. After parking I went to close the gate and something was blocking its path. It’s extremely dark in the redwoods and there are no street lights, which is generally a good thing. The object in the way was some kind of metal bike rack and there were other chunks around that I had to move aside. I got the gate shut and decided to worry about it in the morning. When I got back to the scene in daylight it made no sense at all. It seemed someone had opened the gate, backed in the driveway to throw out some scrap and then took off. Only later when I went to the woodshed to stoke my winter fire did I realize that one whole layer of stacked firewood was missing. Then I realized that the metal must have been in the back of whatever truck stopped to steal our firewood and at that moment became less valuable. We often wondered if our neighbor might have sold the wood back to us later. I put a paddle lock on the outside of the gate, but that made me really nervous like putting out a sign saying “nobody home.” The place got less comfortable.

Losing firewood didn’t bother me really; there are poor families up there that probably needed it for more than winter ambience. However, there are some events that you never really can get past. My parents came to stay with us one weekend and they were planning to stay on for a week after we returned to work in the city. Sometime on Monday I got a strange call from Rikk reporting that my mother had called him to tell us they had left the house as someone tried to break in the night before. The story was confused and short, and I couldn’t reach her so I called the sheriff who went out to check around. He called back and said everything was locked up and seemed fine, but I still really didn’t know where my parents were. When I finally reached them—cell reception is spotty to nonexistent in western Sonoma County—they told me they’d been awakened by the loud thuds of people jumping down from the fence onto the deck. Then flashlights were aimed into the house as the intruders moved all the way around un-curtained glass walls. My dad yelled and turned all the lights on. The bad guys headed for the gate, but couldn’t figure out how to open it and climbed over. Dad followed in time to see them jump into a waiting car and disappear. We had an alarm system installed that very week, but I never slept the same there again. It forever changed the way I felt about the place, with Rikk’s new yoga gig and him teaching most weekends and me there alone. It was the beginning of the end and “sell” was almost on the tip of my tongue. If only I’d acted right then.

The “Great Recession” didn’t exactly cause us to get rid of the place, but by the time we realized we wanted to anyway we were at the center of a perfect economic storm—way “under water.” In hindsight we could have tried doing a vacation rental or something else to just hang on. Now as we watch San Francisco values rebound even skyrocket once again, the Cazadero house is still probably worth just over half of our 2010 mortgage. We weren’t prepared to hold out for ten years or more, so we tried for a short sale (short as in the price is short of the mortgage—meaning the bank takes a hit). There was interest in the house, there were offers but at that time Bank of American wasn’t the least responsive. I was happy to hear of their recent record setting 17 billion dollar mortgage fraud settlement, but even that does nothing for us or any other of their residential customers and they go right back to their merry ways. There was a lot of guilt involved in this episode for us. We hated the idea of not fulfilling our promise to repay money we barrowed—one more reason why capitalism works so well for the big guy who has no such feelings. We stopped paying the mortgage to get their attention, but even that didn’t work. We were tired and our realtor was tired, but just when we were about to walk away from the house we gave it one more shot by listing it with a couple of realtors from the city who’d just set up shop in Guerneville.  They convinced us we had nothing to lose by trying once more. What should have been a happy relief—not going into foreclosure—turned out to be bittersweet. The bank agreed to a short sale, accepting the very same offer from the very same buyer that they had ignored a month earlier—plus some cash from us, probably the amount of the realtor’s commission. No one can harbor ill will for the buyer, she got twice the house for the same price we’d paid 10 years earlier, and she was persistent enough to make it work. She was—like her email address—smart: (“onesmartjap@something…”). I hated her though. I couldn’t help it. Later when she called to say she wanted to buy all the furniture that was in the house, which we’d already trucked back to the city and put in storage, I reluctantly agreed so long as I didn’t have to meet her and that whatever price Rikk negotiated with her I didn’t want to know. There were some pretty good pieces left, even after cramming everything we could into our tiny city apartment, a Nelson table, some rugs, but most notably—as I’m writing this story in Palm Springs just down the road from the Kaufman House—two rare Neutra Boomerang chairs. Those boomerangs most definitely won’t be coming back.