Irish proverb: The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.
Hard Times in Small Places
I am a nearly-native Californian, having lived for most of my adult life in Berkeley, a smallish, pretty university town right across the bay from San Francisco. But I've chosen to set my mystery novels and stories in some of California's more northern, lightly populated places: mostly in fictional Port Silva, based on the town of Fort Bragg on California's Mendocino Coast; and in the actual town of Weaverville in Trinity County.
Mendocino County begins eighty-plus miles north of San Francisco, and its coastal area is rocky, difficult of access, and ruggedly beautiful. Mendocino is, or was, heavily timbered, and from the 1850's on, cut logs were brought to the coast, to ports and/or mills, via half-a-dozen small rivers. Several of these ports were home to busy fishing fleets as well.
Trinity County, further north and inland, is 3,500 square miles of forests, mountains, and rivers with perhaps 13,000 residents. Gold was the original mid-19th-century draw here, with many very productive mines along the Trinity River. When the gold was gone—mining still happens in a very small way—timber was the remaining resource. A look at a California map shows Trinity County as mostly green, made up of national forests and wilderness areas. In other words, most of Trinity County belongs to the federal government.
Over the latter half of the 20th century, the abilty to make a living in these areas lessened as overlogging and clear-cutting led to restrictions—remember the spotted owl?—and fish populations declined. But there are aspects of this coast and these forested mountains that win the heart and nourish the spirit, and some of the people who'd lived in and loved these places hung on. The towns on the coast learned to welcome tourists rather than fish; Trinity received varying degrees of support from the federal government for being steward of all that land. If Mendo/Fort Bragg, and Weaverville, didn't exactly flourish, they did survive, largely by community cooperation and effort.
Then in 2008 came the Great Recession, or whatever it finally turns out to be named. The United States, along with the rest of the world, hunkered down and covered its head; and to the surprise of hardly anybody living here, California turned out to be spectacularly ill-prepared for trouble.
As state revenues tanked, the state cut services and chose to retain money that would ordinarily have been returned to counties and cities; and those that were poor and distant to begin with took a terrible hit. Agencies and offices—planning and permit departments, motor vehicle departments, animal control, garbage collection, institutions like museums and libraries—went to reduced hours or wages, laid off employees, or were shut down altogether. Summer jobs for young people disappeared, numbers of transients increased, panhandling got worse and more forceful. Trinity County's Sheriff's Department had to reduce its already hard-stretched force of deputies still further and ask for more help from volunteers.
And—there are ongoing conflicts between agencies about just how law enforcement should deal with illegal immigrants—if at all.
And—California's legalization of medical marijuana use and cultivation has tripped over its own legal feet and the result is anarchy.
In this time and place, a small town police chief like Vince Gutierrez, or a county sheriff like Gus Angstrom, is pretty much left to make it all up.
—Janet LaPierre
Read previous entries:
North State
Spring is Sprung
Fort Bragg
Berkeley
Word Play
© Janet LaPierre.