Access is, in a sense, controlled. To reach Healdsburg we pass through a greenbelt that separates the town from more ordinary sites and acts, almost, like a time machine. We might not know it yet, but we are about to find nostalgia.
We emerge from the greenbelt into a special stage set, a charming arts and crafts town square, from, say, upstate New York 150 years ago: bolstered by a Japanese restaurant, some of the best wineries in the world, and access to wi-fi and the New York Times. A map of the town might be called Haven. People entering this set for the first time often have the same surprised reaction, which is that this space is home.
We’ve moved beyond the reach of the urban poor. They huddle in the
present in so-called blighted areas of cities about to be redeveloped by
billionaires for upper middle class occupancy (paid for with tax
money).
In Healdsburg we find a miniature city without a genuine city’s problems. We’ve discovered an imaginary Golden Age where we walk into the bank and the clerks know us by name. We run into friends at the post office and the mayor at the health food market. The town is a cross between Brigadoon and an Andy Hardy movie.
The Healdsburg film set, a few miles wide, warms us. We love the rows of craftsman-style homes. The town doesn’t pretend to be the California of Old Mexico (like Sonoma) or of the much later Mediterranean villas, where the Irish wear sombreros in parades, riding palominos with silver studded saddles. The Healdsburg set is what came between those two, a forgotten immigrant era. Of course we wouldn’t want to live in the real historical town of the later 1800s. Who would? Harlan Heald, the town founder, died in his thirties like everyone else.
Healdsburg didn’t begin as an international destination. It was a grimy village where men in John Deere caps, men who sewed together their own baseballs from raccoon hides, met each morning in the same cafe, sat together at the same tables and ate the same leathery fried eggs for breakfast after breakfast.
Today many of the people in town have migrated across the green belt from San Francisco if they are white (bringing graduate degrees) or from Latin American villages if they are brown. For the white people it’s a town filled with forward-thinking progressive Democrats. We’re unsure what the Latinos believe about time travel, but they might believe that they have journeyed into a future where people have flush toilets but no voice in governance.
My most insightful friend once told me that Healdsburg is what we consider a paradise, and it is. But we’ve learned the hard way that good city planning will not make us virtuous. The basic problem is not in the roofs we erect. It’s in what lays beneath the town square. The field under the set keeps tilting. Power and money roll to one end. The foundations crumble.
In Healdsburg we find a miniature city without a genuine city’s problems. We’ve discovered an imaginary Golden Age where we walk into the bank and the clerks know us by name. We run into friends at the post office and the mayor at the health food market. The town is a cross between Brigadoon and an Andy Hardy movie.
The Healdsburg film set, a few miles wide, warms us. We love the rows of craftsman-style homes. The town doesn’t pretend to be the California of Old Mexico (like Sonoma) or of the much later Mediterranean villas, where the Irish wear sombreros in parades, riding palominos with silver studded saddles. The Healdsburg set is what came between those two, a forgotten immigrant era. Of course we wouldn’t want to live in the real historical town of the later 1800s. Who would? Harlan Heald, the town founder, died in his thirties like everyone else.
Healdsburg didn’t begin as an international destination. It was a grimy village where men in John Deere caps, men who sewed together their own baseballs from raccoon hides, met each morning in the same cafe, sat together at the same tables and ate the same leathery fried eggs for breakfast after breakfast.
Today many of the people in town have migrated across the green belt from San Francisco if they are white (bringing graduate degrees) or from Latin American villages if they are brown. For the white people it’s a town filled with forward-thinking progressive Democrats. We’re unsure what the Latinos believe about time travel, but they might believe that they have journeyed into a future where people have flush toilets but no voice in governance.
My most insightful friend once told me that Healdsburg is what we consider a paradise, and it is. But we’ve learned the hard way that good city planning will not make us virtuous. The basic problem is not in the roofs we erect. It’s in what lays beneath the town square. The field under the set keeps tilting. Power and money roll to one end. The foundations crumble.
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