Sonoma County is to San Francisco what Heber Valley is to Salt Lake City: a weekend getaway, a bedroom community, a breath of open space within commuting distance of the big city.
The county's southern reaches are only an hour's drive north of the Golden Gate.The area is many things to many people.
First and foremost, it is agricultural. Goat cheese farms and apple orchards are scattered among the vineyards, which when I was there in early November glowed with the deep yellows and crimson reds of autumn. Sonoma County runs neck and neck with neighboring Napa Valley in the race for California's grapevine capital.
Horticulturalist Luther Burbank, who counts among his creations the Burbank potato and the Shasta daisy, found that the region was ideal for growing things. He commuted by bicycle from his home and display garden in Santa Rosa to his 18-acre experimental farm in Sebastapol. Burbank, who died in 1926, left a horticultural legacy that includes 113 varieties of plums and prunes, 13 types of raspberries and 10 variations of strawberries. Unfortunately for him, plant patent laws didn't take effect until 1930.
Modern-day farmers perpetuate the county's horticultural heritage. They sell their goods at the weekly farmer's market at Santa Rosa's veteran's center. Peter Hansen, a retired educator, specializes in unusual varieties of vegetables such as Royal Chantenay carrots, which are stubby and fat, and beets that come in a rainbow of colors -- white, red or gold to be exact. He even grows a beet that's red and white, like a peppermint stick.
He ought to sell at dollar shops. His carrots are $1 a bunch, his beets are $1 a bunch and the kale is $1 a bunch.
Small towns, Utah antiques
Second, Sonoma County is small-town America at its charismatic best. The village of Jenner overlooks a rugged shoreline punctuated with rocky pinnacles. The nearby town of Bodega Bay is where Alfred Hitchcock filmed "The Birds." In landlocked Healdsburg, trendy shops surround a central plaza shaded by redwood, orange and palm trees. The plaza is the setting for free summer concerts, antique shows and arts and crafts fairs.
At Santa Rosa's Railroad Square, the rehabilitated historic part of town that's listed on the National Register, antique and collectibles shops are sandwiched between hip restaurants.
The antique shops are a gold mine. Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Sebastopol and Healdsburg are particularly rich veins.
Whistlestop Antiques, which occupies a hefty corner of Railroad Square, played a part in getting four matching chairs with an aristocratic Utah genealogy back to the Beehive state. The chairs, which have a beehive crest, may have been original to Council Hall on Capitol hill in Salt Lake City. At the very least, they are original Utah furniture dating from the around the turn-of-the-century.
The store auctioned the chairs in 1986. Santa Rosa resident and LDS Church member Don McKinney purchased them for the LDS Church for $125 a piece. The chairs had fallen on hard times in northern California. An LDS bishop in the area reportedly had rescued them from a garbage dump. And they were used in a boys' camp in the Sierras. The antique store found them in Marin County, just south of Sonoma County.
At the auction, the other bidders fell silent after McKinney made his bid. "They later explained that they stopped bidding because they thought the chairs might be going to a church," he told the Deseret News. He and fellow Santa Rosa resident Darwin Wilcox drove them to Salt Lake.
They were refinished with red, tufted upholstery and joined other matching chairs in the Garden Room of the Lion House. They are now displayed in the Long Dining Room of the Beehive House.
Anything goes
Third, the county is an eclectic collection of mix-and-match lifestyles.
Vestiges of the '60s mingle with more recent fringe attitudes. You'll feel the spirit of Mother Jones, the 1960s back-to-earth icon, when you walk into Wild Flour Bakery on the Bohemian Highway. Jed Wallach, a stained-glass artist-turned baker, produces crusty masterpieces using a brick oven heated by a eucalyptus wood fire. Among his to-die-for breads is fougasse, a combination of cheese and herbs that changes daily, and bengal, which is flavored with pumpkin and curry. What inspired him to change his medium from leaded glass to flour and yeast? "I lived in Europe and worked in stained glass. Every morning I went downstairs to a wonderful bakery."
Wild Flour Bakery is a family affair with his daughter, Mia, wrist-deep mixing dough by hand in a huge plastic bowl. She pours water into the mixture from a pitcher, judging its consistency by how it feels.
They must know what they're doing. The place was buzzing with business, even on a drizzly Sunday afternoon.
The bakery is at an out-of-the-way crossroads called Freestone and is a few doors down from a day spa called Osmosis Enzyme Bath & Massage, which takes its inspiration from the orient. It's very zen. Individual massage rooms look out to a garden. The facility specializes in an enzyme bath that creates its own mesmerizing heat, an idea transplanted from Japan.
I gave it a try. The first step in the three-step process is to sit in a Japanese-style tea room looking out at a Japanese-style garden, drinking a soothing concoction that's supposed to aid digestion. Then we moved into a room with two huge concrete bathtubs, for lack of a better word, filled with wood chips and enzymes. Clad in swimming suits, or less, we got into the tubs (two people to a tub) and the attendant covered us with wood chips up to our necks. The mixture makes its own heat, which feels like it penetrates clear to your bones. The attendant brought us water to drink and put cold compresses on our foreheads to keep us from overheating. After extracting ourselves from the "baths," we took a shower and headed for the massage rooms.
The "bath" was interesting. The massage was pure bliss.
Fast forward from Freestone, with its mother earth ambience, to Sebastopol, where some of the shops have new age vibrations. You'll find everything from natural remedies to crystals, which new age practitioners claim will channel your energies and help you find your inner force.
Perhaps the most eclectic of the area's eclectic mix is California Carnivores, a nursery that sells insect-eating plants. Here you can buy a Venus fly trap to replace the dirty fly swatter behind your refrigerator.
Sonoma County plays well with the San Francisco crowd. U.S. 101 feeds people from the big city north through Marin County into Sonoma County and vice versa. During the weekday commute, San Francisco-bound traffic bottlenecks on the freeway near Petaluma as early as 6 a.m.
Some of the residents have deep roots. Barbara Donahue, one of four owners of Whistleshop Antiques, has lived in Santa Rosa for 44 years. "I've seen orchards turned into housing developments and shopping malls," she said. "We moved south of town to get out of the traffic but it moved right along with us. It's becoming a bedroom community to San Francisco."
In her eyes, the area's chief calling cards, the friendliness of its people and the beautiful scenery, remain.
Other residents are green behind the ears. Matt Fahey, who moved from Humboldt County in northern California, is head over heels in love with Sonoma. He lists the Russian River and the mountains as his favorite things. "Annadelle State Park has the hardest mountain bike trails in California," he said. "Rough Going is the name of one of the trails. Believe me, it is."
Like any love affair, there's a downside. In this case it's the cost of living. "Rents have gone way up," he said. The amount he pays for his one-bedroom apartment has risen from $580 to $750 a month in two years.
Once in a while you'll run across an interesting Mormon tidbit. A.P. Haws, a member of the Mormon Battalion, is buried in the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery.
Neil Freebairn, then 12 years old, discovered the headstone during a service project for the Finley Park Ward in 1997. According to Neil's father, David, Haws joined the RLDS Church. Haws' brother-in-law, Luther Terry Tuttle, also a member of the battalion, settled in Manti, Utah, where he became a prominent citizen.
Kathryn Clayton visited Sonoma County as the guest of Sonoma County Tourism.