Go: In search of a woman named Mata Ji

Tapovan, they said, was my gateway to the Himalayas...

                                                       

     I slept badly on the night train from Delhi, one of those great, swaying, monochromatic monsters that ceaselessly prowl the sub-continent, and got off in the morning in Haridwar. The name means "gateway to the gods" in Hindustani, a reference to the Himalayas, but this was still the baked plain of northern India, the mountains no more than distant shadows under the haze of the building monsoon.

     The Ganges, the color of cafe au lait, brimmed with Hindus renewing themselves in water that had descended from a glacier almost three hundred kilometers away, near a place called Tapovan. That was my destination, and already I was exhausted by the heat, dust and low-grade hysteria that is daily existence in the most colorful, clamorous of countries.

     I had come to India in search of an extraordinary woman who reportedly lived in a cave at 14,000 feet, a 20th-century Hindu anchoress known as Mata Ji, the only one of many Himalayan hermits to endure the winters there. I wanted to know how and why she did this, and to take the measure of her mountains, but I had begun to regret the whole enterprise.

     That night, in an airless hotel room in nearby Rishikesh, I dreamed of violence on a mountainside, and of blood welling up from the bottom of a deep blue sea. Six hours later, in the back seat of a hired jalopy plying relentlessly dangerous roads, I came upon a battered blue bus that had been side-swiped by a truck. The driver appeared, wiping blood from his face, a profoundly unsettling coincidence.

      Hindus put more faith in instinct than in reason. To them dreams are prophetic, with little distinction made between the conscious and the unconscious. Both aspects of life are as varied as the terraced rice paddies in the foothills reflecting almost infinite shadings of green and blue, a vivid mosaic of the external world through which I carried the memories of the dream and its painful realization.

     I stopped in Uttarkashi, the last town of any size before the road assaulted the mountains in earnest. I wanted to rent trekking equipment for the walk to Tapovan from Gangotri, at the end of the road. But Mount Support, the outfitters, contained only a faded backpack standing in the corner. While negotiating for it I watched young men try to piece together mis-matched poles and greasy canvas, until finally the owner told me, "I think you don't need a tent."

     I had read of fierce winds in the mountains in June, of snow. I had no stove or pots, just a dozen high-protein "power bars" and a bottle of halazone tablets. On impulse I held up my flimsy rain shell for assessment.

     "No!No!No!No!" they all chorused.

     I held up my Patagonia sinchilla.

     "Yes!Yes!Yes!Yes!"

      India may be the only country in the world where hermitry is a viable career option. A century ago Rudyard Kipling wrote in his fine, neglected novel, Kim, much of it set here in Uttar Pradesh, "All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end." Not a word, however, about holy women.

     India nurtures more religions and sects than any other country, having incubated two of the leading contenders, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Zoroastrianism and India's very own Jainism. Hindus comprise about 80 per cent of the populace, more than half a billion people; their pantheon is appropriately crowded with a staggering array of gods and demi-gods, their plump, pretty, androgynous and sometimes bestial faces gazing from beneath the eaves of temples and shrines, out of shop windows, from rickshaw dashboards, postcards and necklace pendants.

     Intimately bound up in daily life, Hinduism involves the belief that a series of re-births lead eventually to salvation, known as moksha. The determining element is karma, that term so abused in the West; the relationship between people and karma is strictly causal. Behave badly and you will have corresponding karma and consequently a lower level of reincarnation - as, say, a cobra, or a dung beetle. Behave well and your karma improves. Meditating enhances one's understanding of one's karma, and this and other benevolent actions eventually liberate one from the cycle of rebirth that is moksha.

     Roots of Hinduism arose in the Indus Valley at least 1000 years before the birth of Christ. (The southern Dravidians also exerted influence.) The Vedic hymns and scriptures that gave Hinduism structure were  brought south by the Aryans; today their descendants look more like inhabitants of northern Europe and North America than most other races of Asia. I kept seeing old classmates and celebrities along the road, deeply sun-tanned, inexplicably involved in the steep idyll of the Indian Himal - Larry Byrd sitting cross-legged on a straw mat, a skinny Al Gore sharpening a scythe on a grindstone, Jodi Foster in a bright green sari, bent double under a load of firewood.

     These mountains, as imbued with spirituality as with tectonic drama, are the ultimate goal for what amounts to a nation of pilgrims. I saw them in battered busses spewing black smoke, bound for the shrines of Badrinath, one of the four famous dhamas of India. Bare toes pressed against cracked windshields like petals in grubby floral arrangements, their impassive faces marked with red or yellow daubs of sandlewood paste, sign of the devout, they hung calmly out over frightening thousand-foot drops to the Ganges while their drivers backed up to accommodate other busses on the narrow corniche or threaded the spaces between the mountainside and  tumbled boulders.

     Near Jhala Chatti the dirt track switch-backed and the valley opened up to reveal the mass of the Himalayas rising straight out of the earth: strung stone bows younger than the Rockies, streaked with green where the pines - Ponderosa and the stately deodars - had taken hold, cut at the base by the straight-arrow ferocity of rapids wild beyond classifying.

     It began to rain. By the time I reached Gangotri, at more than 10,000 feet, I had changed from shorts to trousers and a sweater. Mist rose in waves from cataracts that had eaten deeply into the marly stone of Kedar Gorge. The Bhagirathi River, the main tributary of the Ganges, flowed northwest, hence the name of the town, Gangotri, which means "Ganges turned north." According to myth it was here that King Bhagirath meditated to propitiate the god Shiva who kept the Ganges suspended in the coils of his hair. Satisfied, Shiva released it as three streams, one of which touched down here and immediately resurrected 60,000 people from their ashes.

     Gangotri was also the site of the temple of the goddess Ganga, built in the previous century by a Gurka commander in the Garhwal. Busses jammed the one narrow street on the precipitous slope, disgorging pilgrims, bundles on their heads and backs, the women wrapped in saris, the Punjabi sikhs wearing creased Nehru hats, collars turned up to the cold. Others had come from as far away as Madras and Calcutta, and the mountain states beyond India's borders. White dhotis - pantaloons - marked the progress of old men; the turbans of the Rajasthanis bobbed in the human current, past stalls of incense, bead mallas, bottles for taking away some water of the Ganges, flowers for floating prayers on it, staffs for climbing to the glacier at Gaumukh, brass castings of the syllable, Om, mystical affirmation intoned during the mantras, and every staple from matches to mangoes.

     Mixed with the Aryan were Mongoloid features of some locals, animated by the hustle of mountain commerce: carters piled with suitcases, mule drovers wearing their ropes, hawkers and bearded sadhus, poor spiritual seekers and/or beggars under black plastic sheets, and overall the roar of the plunging Ganges and the intermingled smells of the incense, dung, and the unmistakable skunkiness of smoldering cannabis.

     Most Hindus are followers either of the god Vishnu, the preserver, or of Shiva, the destroyer and reproducer, whose seat, and that of his consrt, Parvati, is in the Himalayas. Some Shaivites believe their god passes the time blowing dope and so base their lives on that, like the half-naked sadhus, smeared with ash, their hair in serpentine dreadlocks, their tridents, symbol of Shiva, planted at the edges of their squalid little camps. There people were expected to drop alms - paise, fractions of a rupee - as they passed, on their way to the temple.

     On impulse I approached a pilgrim in jogging shoes and a Windbreaker and asked if he spoke English. He asked, "Where are you going?"

     He was a diamond merchant from Bombay named Sunil, on pilgrimage with his family, and he took me in hand, found me a room in the Tourist Rest Home across the river - kerosene lanterns, communal baths and toilet stalls, hot water in buckets extra - advised me not to get involved with the Shaivite beggars, and said, "Come with us to arti."

     Hindu practice centers on three activities: worship, known as puja, cremation of the dead, and the observance of the caste system. Arti is morning and evening worship of the vastly complicated tripartite godhead. Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma. All are associated with animals that provide them with celestial transport, and with powerful consorts and almost infinite incarnations and representations reflecting on the harmony of things spiritual and material - part of the natural laws of dharma.

     Sunil and his wife, a plump, pleasant woman in a white sari, a large diamond in her nose pierce, led me through town. We bought little leaf boats containing chrysanthemums and went down to the river's edge. They scooped up water and sprinkled it over their heads, said prayers, and set their flowers adrift. I was an observer, not a believer, but felt drawn into the pervasive embrace of Hinduism, touched by the sight of men and women dousing themselves with tumultuous glacier-melt, the sounds of children playing and the ceaseless tolling of the brass bell above the steps struck by ascending pilgrims.

     As I launched my flower boat I thought of my daughter, Jess, a student of Asian religions and reader of classical Tibetan who had planned to accompany me to India, before life intervened. I missed and needed her, to explain things and to absorb some of the daunting intensity of this place, enhanced by altitude and fatigue, the scent of wood smoke, the sight of saris, cerulean, carnelian, spread in the twilight, and lamps coming on in the windows of the ashrams across the river, all under the high, sun-lit hugeness of the Himalayan snow mass.

     Already the faithful were sitting on the stone terrace outside the temple, shoes off, chanting and squirming, a medley of ages, racial affinities and styles: shawls and saffron turbans, bright cottons and synthetics, drab woolen jackets and the orange robes of the sannyasin, the mendicant holy men, Indian tourists and their porters, the shaven and unshaven, clean and dusty. A cry went up as the doors were swung open. Sunil joined in the shouted praise of the goddess, a silver figurine on an altar amidst radiant cloth and tinsel, while a young priest on the temple porch held up a brass dish in which seven flames guttered in the cold night breeze. He began to chant, a repetitious call to faith.

     Afterward, we ate at the Tourist Rest Home - curried vegetables, roti, dal and tea - while the generator gasped in the stairwell, the electrical current lost somewhere along the line and the darkness barely alleviated by candles and lanterns. "That is where you are going," said Sunil, of the silvery black peaks visible far up-valley, under a fingernail moon. "And you don't speak a word of Hindi," said his wife.

                                                        

     "While traveling in these hills," lectured my little guidebook, Call of Uttrakhand, bought at a stall in Gangotri, "please never try to divert your attention towards any seenery (sic) or howsoever sublime beauty, charm or attraction, as the practice may prove harmful and you may tumble down or perhaps loose (sic) your life even..."

     I needed a guide and found one in a room built into the face of a rock, one of the gentrified caves popular with sadhus in the Himalayas, fitted with a door and rugs. His name was Ram Sharma and he was given to meditation as well as to mediating the affairs of some of the many westerners drawn to India. He told me, in a sing-song voice through which his university education showed like elbows in a tattered sweater, that he had rejected the purely intellectual approach to enlightenment. "People talk about soul, and person. What is that? Book study! I want to get into self-knowledge, life experience - not gurus, not ashrams, but self."

      He escorted me through town, his blue robe - Shiva's color - draping a diminuative, animated figure that seemed to glide rather than to walk. Raised in Bombay, a former disciple of the late Rashneesh who founded the famous ashram at Pura, Ram Sharma was a Brahmin, the priests' caste that included India's cultural and religious arbiters. He had agreed to accompany me to Tapovan, but first he wanted to introduce me to Gangotri's celebrated "baba" - the affectionate term for Indian swamis.

     We found the swami seated under a tree, in the lotus position. I had expected him to be copiously bearded, burnished by the sun in these high altitudes; I had not expected the swami to be naked. He and Sharma conversed in Hindi, and then I was invited to join the conversation. I asked why he had come to the Himalayas, and he laughing out loud when Sharma translated. It was the "vibrations," he said, that had for millennia drawn both Buddhists and Hindus. Then he asked, “Why did you come to the Himalayas?”

Next: Tapovan and Beyond

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

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Big Sur Rediscovered: Part Two

                                                 Faith... and Fire

In the novel, The Stranger in Big Sur, Lillian Bos Ross called Big Sur “a state of mind,” a comment often repeated here. This is in part a tribute to the inspirational impact of Big Sur’s geology, which is complex even by California standards, a medley of volcanic debris, sea floors, old mountain ranges from far to the south, rocks from the Sierra and all over, descending and rising from the earth’s magma in the on-going tectonic tango. Further complicating things are active fault lines and something called an “accretionary wedge,” essentially a large bump pushed up when the Pacific plate dove under the continental one, forming much of California’s coast but nowhere as dramatically as here.

The Santa Lucias may be less than 6,000 feet in elevation, but the ocean breaks on near-vertical slopes that capture all the moisture, some of it in legendary fogs, making of the coastal creases giant, lush terrariums and leaving the interior hot and dry. That, too, is part of Big Sur, although unseen by most visitors and residents. The ridge between the coast range and the backcountry is attainable only by several hours of difficult hiking, or by driving the dirt road that winds up from behind the Ventana Inn, through half a dozen locked gates maintained by the U.S. Forest Service which owns most of it. The view from the top includes massive green headlands sunk claw-like in deep blue water, and ocean and sky meeting in a distant cloud bank.

“Big Sur’s all about the mountains and the ocean,” says Bruce Emmons, a 30-year veteran of the Forest Service, “and the interface of the two.” He pulls his SUV to a stop, while off to the left eight condors lazily ride thermals fed by a relentless sun. “By definition, it’s everything south from the Carmel highlands to San Simeon,” 70-odd miles of coastline and just 340,000 of the 2 million acres that comprises the Los Padres National Forest, including the Ventana wilderness on the eastern side of this ridge.

Part of Emmons’ job is lubricating agreements allowing the government to acquire additional property and thus remove it from the possibility of development. In 2002 he participated in a controversial land deal that transferred 1,200 acres of the old Brazil Ranch near Bixby Bridge, the spectacular northern gateway to Big Sur, to public ownership, providing the FS access to the ocean and forestalling plans for a hotel and condos. But a prime concern of today’s 1,500 coastal residents is that just such land acquisitions by the feds will turn this coast into another Yosemite and them into fauna to be gawked at by tourists.

Some 500,000 acres in and around Big Sur are already protected by either ownership by the FS, the Bureau of Land Management, state parks, and the University of California Natural Reserve System, or by easements on large pieces of private property and federal and state regulations regarding coastal areas. Decades of conflict over just what Big Sur should be has resulted in some rare compromises among government agencies and local interest groups. “The people here are all highly individual,” said Emmons, who wore his institutional green lightly. “They love us and they hate us.”

He produced an excerpt from the agency’s management plan for the Los Padres, and said, “Read this.” The plan emphasizes Big Sur as “an overall visual and cultural impression of landscapes attributes… that gives it an identity and ‘sense of place’” to be maintained “for its internationally valued scenic beauty and biodiversity… Management will be particularly sensitive to the fragility of the unstable landscape and the commingling of terrestrial and marine ecosystems.”

That may all sound sensible, but for the Forest Service it was near revolutionary. Instead of concentrating on timber, minerals, graze, and other extractable resources at any cost, as the agency does elsewhere else in America, it has moderated its procedures here and broken new ground in taking care of its terrain.

Big Sur is the only national forest fronting the Pacific, but unique in other ways, too, a congeries of additional government and philanthropic jurisdictions – the California Coastal Conservancy, the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District, the Big Sur Land Trust, the Nature Conservancy, active members of the Sierra Club and other watchdog groups, and local boards and entities. They are all devoted to maintaining the status quo and by common consent gather regularly to air differences and potential land use problems.

In addition, an alliance of spiritual stakeholders met four times a year to discuss the environmental integrity of this view-shed: Esalen, the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County in Carmel Valley, the New Camaldoli Hermitage of Catholic monks outside Lucia, and Tassajara, in the heart of the Ventana wilderness, the first Zen monastery founded in the United States. Tassajara takes in paying travelers, trains monks, and brings its own brand of enlightenment to some of the nation’s oldest land use problems. All four institutions were in fact stories in their own right, and such an assemblage of stewards could be found only in Big Sur.

Driving back down the road, Emmons added, “Local people like the idea of protecting the land, but they oppose any plans to change things.”

He wore a drab tunic and a blue ball cap. Intense blue eyes never waver. His name was David Zimmerman and although raised in a Mennonite family in the Midwest, he’s the director of a unique, ambitious spiritual enterprise purposefully set in the figurative middle of nowhere. Tassajara - the Esselen word for “the place where meat dries” - attempts to combine the fundamentals of monastic life with the periodic satisfaction of lay desire for a spattering of enlightenment.

About 5,000 guests descend the rattling dirt road in spring and summer, drawn by the beauty and remoteness of the Big Sur’s backcountry, the hot springs, and the unavoidable spiritual ambiance. But in winter the monastery enfolds upon itself, the zendo full of committed monks without distraction, the dark mornings filled with meditation, the sound of chanting, and the thwok of the hammer against the wooden han calling them to meals. “It gets in your blood,” said Zimmerman.

There were student monks as well. One, age 26, gave up college and a career in photography to become a Buddhist, leaving the farmland of Minnesota and a Catholic upbringing to join the Buddhist noviate. She, too, had an easy smile and a kind of steely considerateness. “I studied Zen and achido in college,” she said, “and meditated. It was the first time I had thought about how I was thinking,” and that was the end of photography career. “Now I’m profoundly grateful for all this space. We’re mindful of how we have to take care of it. After being here for almost two years I’m thankful also that I’m not driven to get the latest computer or whatever.”

     Guests have their own protocols to follow: no talking in the baths; line up for dinner at 6:45; don’t intrude on the special sessions for those on retreat. At 8:30 in the evening the striking of the han called the willing to meditation in the dimly lit zendo, where a monk with a clipboard assigned everyone to a position facing the wall. The whisper of bare feet on creaking floorboards was the only sound, followed by light bell strikes, then silence. Within your solitude are unspoken responsibilities: don’t fidget or sigh, focus for 40 minutes until the tapping of a drum and bells signal that meditation has ended. Outside, the night was dark, cold, and exhilarating.

     Douglas and Anna were two life coaches from San Rafael who were staying at Tassajara half price, chopping vegetables – “lots of onions” – in the mornings to make up the difference, and in the afternoons swimming nude in the gin-clear water of the Narrows on Tassajara Creek, or percolating in the bathhouse. They considered the experience both fun, and instructive. “There’s a lot of talk about proper knife use,” says Anna. “For instance, you don’t drag the cut onions across the board with the blade, which dulls it, but use a kind of spatula.” When the couple heard a bucket being dropped accidentally one morning, they turned to each other and said, “More onions.”

         

Carmel to San Simeon may be the official designation of Big Sur, but the two extremes – Carmel’s pastel bungalows, and the ornate Hearst mansion - differ markedly from each other, and from Big Sur’s center. Geographically speaking, that’s Partington Creek, five miles south of Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn. It runs into the ocean near a tunnel dug in the late 19^th century through one side of the canyon, to provide access to a narrow harbor. There, in a heaving sea of kelp, tanbark was loaded onto ships for transport. Today the only users are tourists clambering over rocks in search of black turban snails, hermit crabs, and resplendent ochre seastars exposed by the falling tide.

     The road leading up to Partington Ridge resembled a wobbly rocket trajectory rising steeply from Highway 1 through coastal scrub - manzanita and yellow-blooming chemise. Those locals in little houses hidden away behind stands of madrone and live oaks, some with vintage pickups, VW busses or Airstreams in the yards, were reluctant to come out and direct lost strangers. Nowadays the residents are less likely to be counter-cultural than newly rich from the real estate, venture capital, and other California booms, but many are long-term residents who have adapted to changing times.

A few big vegetable gardens were testament to their self-reliance, although “there are fewer of those now,” says Jean Alexander, blonde and suntanned, carrying a basket of vegetables just picked by her and her 10-year-old son, Ryan. He had hair to his shoulders and a welcoming smile. “It used to be that one person would grow tomatoes, another would grow potatoes, and everyone would share. Now we have to be more self-reliant.”

The Alexanders lived on the old Angulo property. Her husband, Kevin, was in the process of expanding their bright, airy house. A builder by trade, he was also the care-taker, a traditional, coveted job in Big Sur that is scarce now. Kevin grew up in Big Sur as part of an itinerant family living out of a car, bathing free at the old Esalen, and pursuing the proto-typical hippie existence. He remembered, with a laugh, pouring cold water over his head in the mornings. “We liked to keep things simple.”

A successful builder, Kevin belied the notion that the off-spring of the ‘60s was somehow damaged, his life conventional by most standards, and apparently happy despite the loss of old chums. “The closest thing to community events these days is the softball games at tk State Park every Monday,” where the Roadhousers took on the Nepenthe Outlaws and other teams.

The main house on the lawn below, made of concrete by The Old Coyote, had squat chimneys and big windows overlooking the Pacific. A yurt sat on a platform out of sight, with an open-air shower and a world-class toilet set between two majestic redwoods. Visitors slept in the yurt and awoke to the call of the olive-sided flycatcher (quick, three beers…) and a blast of light on opposing fields as morning sun cuts through a defile in the Santa Lucias.

“The old Big Sur values are dying off,” Jean went on. “Poets, artists and beatniks used to live off the land. They could just squat on a place and write a letter to the owner, who would write back and say, ‘Great. Just keep an eye on it.’ Some new owners still buy property to be close to Big Sur, but others move their old lives into the new multi-million-dollar house, along with their staffs. The paradox is that rich people provide some jobs for those who stayed.”

A nurse, she also did cliff rescue for the Big Sur fire department, and some home schooling. “The year book still says that the students were born on such-and-such ridge. There was only one hospital birth in the class last year.” But in recent years “we’ve lost fifty percent of the locals as people sell out in the land boom. Most service jobs are done now by recently arrived Hispanics, and their children make up more than half the primary school students.”

Both parents were thankful for a place and a life for their children at odds with the American norm. “I see a difference in the kids up here,” said Jean. “There’s no television, no mall, no cell phone rut. They read a lot. They got a feel for the land that kids in town don’t have. They’d dress up as Indians or something and frolic through the garden, picking berries. They had a real childhood.”

Ryan made the all-star baseball team, bitter-sweet because play-offs mean more hours on the road for everyone. Her older son, Kyle, took the bus every morning at 5:50 to middle school in Carmel. “When he was born the road was closed in 17 different places, because of the rain. It meant more community because people would meet down there. They’d chat, and bring baking. Now the road’s always kept open for Ventana and the Post Ranch Inn, and there’s no down-time. We pray that the road gets closed.”

The following June, Mary Lou Torens was working in a neighbor’s garden when “I saw the clouds rolling in from the Pacific, lashed by electrical charges, darkest, scariest, most beautiful and “ knew what was coming.”

Kevin saw the first lightening strike in that meadow across the canyon from their house. “It was the loudest clap I ever heard. Immediately flames came up, and I called it in.” Firefighters were soon battling the downhill creep of the fire, but during the night it moved around the head of the canyon. “I cut some trees below the Angulo place, to act as a fire break, but the heat was so intense it blaze melted the gutters.”

Also spared was the Alexander’s residence, and the house of Mary Lu Torens and her husband, Magnus, although tongues of blackened earth licked at its borders, and the towering redwoods are singed at the bases.

Contrary eastern winds that rise most night in Big Sur brought the inferno down the mountain behind the town of Big Sur and environs. Ventana was saved by the dumping of retardant and oceans water from planes and helicopters, and the constant efforts of firefighters who were served cuisine straight from the Ventana kitchen. Highway 1 acted as a natural fire break, so the Post Ranch Inn and Esalen were unscathed. Nepenthe’s too survived, although plate-sized embers fell on the deck, blown from across the road, extinguished by those who stayed behind.

The fire lasted for days and burned many acres and some houses, among them the Tin House above Partington Canyon, built as a retreat for Franklyn Delanor Roosevelt, who never came. “But what I regret most about this fire,” said Don McQueen, piloting his all-terrain vehicle up a steep service road above his house, “is that the steepest canyons were burned, which means massive mudslides when the rain comes, and the loss of many redwoods.”

Down-slope, the eerie, ashen defile was punctuated with blackened tree trunks of trees interspersed with the beautiful deep red of those that survived. Some such trunks were singed but whole, while others were charred at the base, with gaping caverns where the fire got past the bark and created chimneys. Up-drafts fed by the heat below scoured the insides and emerged as much as 40 feet above ground “like giant Bunsen burners, so loud you couldn’t hear a person shouting.”

Since Highway 1 acted as a natural fire break, the Post Ranch Inn, Nepenthes, and Esalen all survived with relatively minor damage. In the back country, Tassajara lay in the path of another lightening fire, and was saved by firefighters who wrapped the buildings in fire retardant material. Also spared was the d’Angulo house, the Alexanders’ above it, Henry Miller’s old residence, and that of Mary Lu Torens and her husband, Magnus, but tongues of blackened earth seem to lick at the borders of their properties.

Meanwhile, the residents of Partington ridge were laying in provisions for the fire’s aftermath: lentils, brown rice, rye flour, powdered milk, gasoline. Some part of everyone up here seems to look forward to a serene, if forced, winter isolation if the consequences of the Basin Complex fire descend on Highway 1 in the form of rain-fueled landslides. But they were optimistic. “Look,” said Mary Lu Torens, pointing to a green redwood sprig on the scorched earth near her house. “New growth’s already pushing through the ashes.”

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

 

Go: Big Sur Rediscovered

It's the most romantic stretch of coast in North America, possibly in the world. I've been going there for more years than I care to admit to, and finally came to understand the place with the help of those who live there. Part One:

(Photos by Catherine Karnow)

“Young people were living in cars and under the bridges. Once I saw smoke coming from a field just north of here and went up to find two dozen hippies, their naked kids running around, and fires going. Fire’s always a danger in Big Sur.”

Don McQueen, 79, straddled an old four-wheeler in his tattered sweater and torn trousers. A daunting figure - six-foot-eight, big hands, size 15 boots – he was remembering the ‘sixties in Big Sur, the spectacular stretch of coast south of Monterey where the Santa Lucia Mountains plunge into the Pacific and Highway 1 snakes high above violent surf. “Some of the newcomers were worthless, but some were okay. We were so stuck in the mud around here that the supervisors couldn’t even approve another school for the overload. The new people shook things up.”

I first saw Big Sur in 1963, and in the intervening years returned several times but never had a clear understanding of its unusual history, complicated geology, or its place in the pantheon of great American landscapes. Beyond extreme physical beauty and the inspirational jolt the first glimpse of Big Sur always provides, it remained for me as much mystery as reality, intimately associated with the Aquarian age McQueen describes.

Then a few summers ago droughty California had some 1,200 wildfires, including one in Big Sur. That became the Basin Complex fire, and it put the famous coast in jeopardy and in the news again after a long hiatus. But many younger people, I noticed, no longer had a clear idea of the place, and those my age had very different notions of it: iconic collision of earth and sea, New Age navel, home of superannuated flower children, prime ocean-front property, and up-scale venue for travelers who could afford $700-a-night beds, infinity-edge hot-tubs, and hundred-dollar prix fix menus.

McQueen’s father was the engineer in charge of building the coast highway in the late ‘30s, and Don assembled his commercial campground on the same road in the ‘50s, shaded by a 4,000-year-old redwood and now worth millions. “A few hippies thought they could make a living just by breaking into houses,” and a rougher element including motorcyclists hung out in the Redwood Lodge just up the road. “It had a hard dope problem, with fights, and gang-banging. I told the owner I’d clear it out if he wanted.”

 He was also an authority, according to a friend, “on what’s required to survive on a 17 percent slope,” just one of many descriptions of Big Sur. McQueen admits to “throwing some people through windows.” He put two malefactors in a car, “broke their distributor cap with a hammer, so they couldn’t start the engine, and pushed them down a hill toward Carmel.”

That bar was re-born as Fernwood, a sign of the times. Big Sur, too, is a relatively tame venue for travelers who can afford $700-a-night beds, infinity-edge hot-tubs, and hundred-dollar prix fix menus unimaginable in 1960. But half a century after that restive time Big Sur remains as difficult to define as it has always been: iconic American landscape or New Age navel, home of superannuated flower children, or working community, California’s most expensive real estate, or a unique bit of wilderness?

     Spanish explorers and colonists didn’t know quite what to make of it, either. Seafarers stayed clear of the rock-toothed el pais grande del sur, and missionaries making the long over-land journey from Mexico City used the valley of the Salinas River, miles to the east, not the impassable coast darkened by huge trees and coursed by two un-navigable rivers. Presidio and missionary headquarters were established in Monterey in 1770, then a mission in Carmel. Father Junipero Serra set about enslaving and converting to Catholicism those members of the primitive coastal tribes who lived close by and any who could be enticed out of the rugged and inhospitable “El Sur.”

Large tracts of coast were granted to former soldiers and cohorts of provincial governors by the Mexican government in the 1830s, including three near Carmel on broad marine terraces high above the ocean, most of which have survived intact. The 8,876-acre Rancho San Jose y Sur Chiquito, 20 miles south, eventually came into the possession of Captain John Rogers Cooper, who turned it into a cattle ranch in the 1840s, worked by Hispanics and Indians.

Some of the first “Americans” in El Sur were the Posts. William Brainard Post, who had been stranded in lower Baja on a voyage from Connecticut, eventually made his way to the whaling station at Point Lobos, acquired 640 acres just south of the big river, and in 1867 began to build a house. Money was made by others from redwoods and Douglas fir felled in the steep canyons, an arduous, dangerous job, and the bark of tan oaks used in the tanning of hides. Supplies arrived in small sailing vessels braving a coast with little safe anchorage, and timber went out the same way.

The first continuously operating post office south of Carmel called “Big Sur” was in the Posts’ house. It had one of the most spectacular vistas ever shared by cattle, hogs, and the 60-residents who dropped by to get mail, talk, peel apples in season, dance, and lament the absence of a good road to “town.” That meant Monterey, 30 miles to the north, but the rough dirt tract over which they rode horses and drove wagons meant they were no longer dependent for staples upon unreliable steamboats plying an unforgiving Pacific.

The road was steadily improved into the 20^th century, when self-reliance took another hit with the arrival of cars and trucks. They brought new faces, among them homesteaders, tourists who stayed in roughhewn “resorts” run by the Pfeiffer and other families, and what might be called a new creative class. During the ‘20s and ‘30s the poet, Robinson Jeffers, praised what he called “the noblest thing I have ever seen,” meaning Big Sur, and wrote about the difficulty of maintaining the tortuous road in Thurso’s Landing, where “seas thundered on the rock, and rain fell heavily/ Like a curtain, with one red coal of sundown glowing in its dark.”

Other new arrivals were more interested in aesthetic adventure than convention. Jaime de Angulo, the son of a Spanish nobleman and a disciple of Karl Jung’s, bought property on Partington Ridge and built a house of concrete that was to be a dude ranch but never had a customer. An avid student of native American languages known locally as “the Old Coyote,” Angulo wore his hair long in Indian fashion, wrote poetry, and lived in scholarly squalor, according to contemporary accounts, sometimes riding his horse in nothing but a cape and a belt of silver conchos.

Another locally famous European, Helmuth Deetjen, the well-born son of a deacon in Bremen, Norway, arrived in Big Sur with his wife, Helen, circa 1930, bought 120 acres in Castro Canyon, and built a combination home, store, and inn. A devotee of music, philosophy, art, and politics, he had attended the University of Heidelberg with both Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf Schools, and Adolf Hitler. Deetjen claimed that his last words to Hitler were, “You just don’t understand the American cowboy,” and that he later fled Europe because he knew what Hitler was capable of.

Deetjen brought a quirky combination of sophistication and hominess to Big Sur, reflected in his quaint construction, in Scandinavian style and in native redwood, of what became both a home and a lodge. One of the locals helping him was the 11-year-old Don McQueen. Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn contained Helen’s antiques shop and included cabins, some barely big enough to turn around in, with droll names like Chateau Fiasco. Pottery, sculpture, paintings and craft, much of it created by a long succession of Big Sur artists, occupied most horizontal spaces, and still does. Deetjen carved into a lintel in the dining room a quote from Mozart’s Magic Flute: “Within these sacred portals revenge and hate must cease/ The souls of straying mortals in love will find release.”

In 1937 the coastal highway linking northern and southern California was completed, some say the biggest change to occur since the arrival of the Spanish. Big Sur became accessible to cars from both directions, which meant more sight-seers, more exposure of outsiders to a unique landscape that had largely remained a national secret, and more artists, writers, and mavericks seeking an alternative to what Henry Miller, one of them, would soon be calling America’s “air-conditioned nightmare.”

Miller himself took up residence on Partington Ridge in 1942 and became Big Sur’s most celebrated literary figure. His neighbors included Angulo, Harry Dick Ross, the sculptor and painter, and Emile White, another painter who lived down on the highway and served as Miller’s erstwhile secretary. Miller wrote several books while overlooking the Pacific, including The Rosy Crucifixion and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch. He and Deetjen occasionally drank together at the inn, only six miles north of Partington, where an employee once attempted - unsuccessfully - to hide a microphone behind a curtain to record what the great men said.

In 1960, Miller left wife and children to run off to Paris with a woman half his age, dismaying the usually forgiving Big Sur bohemians. Emile White’s house on Highway 1 later became the Henry Miller Memorial Library, a trove of Milleriana that  today offers a broad retail selection of retail books, and a cultural program popular with both locals and visitors.

Miller himself was quickly superseded by a tide of so-called beatnik and hippie writers, among them Jack Kerouac whose On the Road replaced the once-banned Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn as a must-read for a new, rebellious generation. Kerouac’s friend, Lawrence Ferlenghetti, owner of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, publisher of the poets Alan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, had a cabin up the coast, on Bixby Creek, that was featured in Kerouac’s depressing, eponymous Big Sur novel; another novelist, Richard Brautigan, a suicide, wrote the goofy, charming fictional account of life here the sixties, A Confederate General in Big Sur. By then the place had acquired a reputation as the gravitational center of LSD and “free love,” an image it has never really shed.

Deetjen died in 1972, and his inn was transformed into a non-profit, another sign of the times. Patrons in the ‘80s included John Denver, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Peter Sellers and Mia Farrow. Nowadays in season it’s thronged with baby-boomers and young lovers drawn by the fire on the hearth, gnarly authenticity, and the ghosts of a watershed decade still ringing in the speech of occasional regulars ordering blueberry pancakes at the bar.

Meanwhile, Don McQueen was repairing gaps in the coast highway his father had built, where pavement occasionally slips unavoidably into the ocean, destabilized by torrential winter rains. He worked on other, now famous Big Sur projects, including Nepenthe, the bar and restaurant built on a point just north of Castro Canyon and named for a magical potion in Homer’s Odyssey, on land previously owned by Orson Wells and Rita Hayworth.

Nepenthe was patronized by locals and the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton during filming of The Sandpiper, and Kim Novak who once danced on a table there in her almost all-together. “Nepenthe’s was incredibly welcoming in the hippie era,” says one long-term resident. “Every month there was an astrological birthday party for locals, with dancing on the deck,” but all that gradually ended as the contingent of tourists grew exponentially and Nepenthe’s expanded, and raised prices, to accommodate it.

The actor, Steve McQueen, visited Nepenthe’s in the late ‘70s, looking for Don McQueen as a possible long-lost cousin, annoyed by the failure – or refusal - of locals to recognize him as the star of The Great Escape and other movies. He and Don McQueen became friends despite the dissimilarities in their lives, and physical statures. “Steve walked around like a bantam rooster,” Don said affectionately. They rode motorcycles together on Highway 1, and “my wife and I once took Steve’s dinner reservation at Ventana. When he showed up with Ali McGraw and saw us, he just laughed. They came over and joined us.”

The Ventana Inn and Spa was, when it opened in 1975, Big Sur’s first modern, full-scale resort, and another watershed. Ambitiously designed, lovely to behold, and controversial due to its size and prices, Ventana made Big Sur a “destination,” to the dismay of many in Big Sur who nevertheless played dominoes at the bar. By providing beauty, luxury, and whatever else was required for a restorative “California” experience, Ventana brought a new sort of sophisticated, well-heeled visitor.

After a few years the formality in the dining room and bar, like the steep prices, discouraged locals from coming, and in the early ‘90s, after a succession of owners and infrastructure problems, Ventana’s coveted spot as the primo watering hole passed to the Post Ranch Inn. Just across Highway 1, on land once occupied by old William Brainard Post.

There builders took pains to make that resort environmentally friendly, with cottages raised on pilings among live oaks. The restaurant, Sierra Mar, seemed to hang over the ocean, a la Nepenthe, and today guests can dine on ahi and braised Kobi beef while watching gray whales bound for Baja. But beyond the tasteful confines of the Post Ranch Inn and Ventana, life remains a struggle, with relatively few jobs and an acute housing shortage that’s getting worse. The chef at Sierra Mar, Craig von Forster, recalls living in a van at the side of Highway 1 in his early days at the inn. Today, he adds, “if you drive south toward Lucia after 10 p.m. at night, you’ll see dozens of cars in the pull-offs. In most of them the people who do Big Sur’s work are asleep.”

The most common definition of Big Sur by people who live here is “the coast between the lighthouse at Point Sur on the north and Esalen on the south.” The center of the so-called human potential movement, and a story in its own right, Esalen was founded by Michael Murphy, now 78, whose family acquired the precipitous land in 1910. It was named for the indigenous Esselen people, the shyest of the coastal Indians who left exquisite cave paintings and first used the hot springs that would become notorious. Locals had gone there in number after the completion of Highway 1. Miller reportedly did his laundry in the naturally heated water, and itinerant users included the likes of Aldous Huxley and John Steinbeck. Murphy’s passion was eastern religions, and soon after he met Richard Price, a psychology student at Stanford in a meditation class in, the two of them created Esalena.

To be community where no one religion or philosophy was be favored over another, it evolved into a medley of Eastern and Western traditions aimed at transcendent “human potentialities” written about by Huxley. Esalen had an enormous influence on what became the “California lifestyle” and it would flow eastward across the American continent, and beyond. The hot springs were essential to that notion. In the early days, Esalen was open to anyone for a pittance, “and it was free to good-looking women,” says Mary Lu Torens, who has lived in Big Sur for 30 years. She remembers when the purpose of the springs was high-minded, based upon the belief of the Esalen Indians that “you went there to heal.”

The old concrete bathhouse was divided between men’s and women’s sides, and everyone was nude. “We all bathed together, but if women wanted to bath without men they could go to the other side. There were two big communal tubs, and two old single, bear-claw ones.” Scented tapers were placed on top of pillars at night to counter the odor of sulfur. “I can still smell those lovely candles.”

In those days, “no one talked in the baths. You looked out at the ocean, or up at the hills. There weren’t many cars in road yet. No negative thoughts were allowed in the baths, and they weren’t for partying.” That came soon enough, however, along with an ever-increasing presence of drugs, and sex. Eventually Murphy and Price, accompanied by the folk singer, Joan Baez, and some others, walked down to the baths with Dobermans on leashes and dispersed an orgiastic group from San Francisco.

This signaled a change at Esalen. Control was imposed on users, and prices began to climb. Imported psychiatrists, psychotherapists, proponents of Rolfing and various meditative and massage techniques, psychologists – traditional and pop - physicists, and lecturers of all sorts moved Esalen further into the academic and therapeutic fields.

Co-founder Price was killed in 1985 by a falling boulder, after hiking up the springs’ origin, what some in Big Sur saw as a karmic event. Money became an issue as never before in 1998, when the rains of El Nino started a mudslide that took away most of the old bathhouse. Replacement cost $25-million and included hillside stabilization and an earth-quake proof foundation. Etched glass doors now admitted spa-goers, and a separate room was devoted to serious massaging by fully clothed professionals. Less than half the bathers were nude, the choice of swim suits and suntan lotion was strictly up-scale. Locals still had access to the baths for $20 – but only between the hours of 1 and 3 a.m.

“The pettiness of the day-to-day operation is annoying,” said one Big Sur resident, but Mary Lu Torens pointed out that “many people over the years have had that box inside them unlocked at Esalen. It has done a lot of good.”

The sprawling “campus” had an established feel, with lawn running to the cliff’s edge, an enormous, carefully maintained vegetable garden, and structures well integrated into the land. Daily guests paid $50 just to stroll around. A mixture of the mostly middle-aged attend one of an impressive array of workshops - Harmonic Presence: Primordial Wisdom and the Music of the Spheres; Moving Meditation Practice: Inspiration, Vision, Ecstasy; Sex, Love and Intimacy: For individuals and Couples, and many more – after paying $150 for a minimum of two days, plus $605 for basic accommodations and meals.

A total of 17,000 people visit annually, most of them “students.” The dining hall was crowded at noon; dress was casual. The director, Gordon Wheeler, appeared on the deck in jeans and a flannel shirt. He was a clinical psychologist brought from Harvard in 1999 to run Esalen, with swept-back hair and a scrim of goatee. Michael Murphy had turned 78 and, Wheeler said, “We’re all in founder transition.” Part of that was Esalen’s subtle shift in message. “We’ve always been about personal and social transformation. What’s new is our focus: the personal and the social can’t be separated.” That meant workshops such as Sustainable Eating for the Planet, and Building Sustainable Leadership for Justice, and a heightened awareness that “the world’s in tough shape. We have to step up, locally as well as globally.”

Asked about Big Sur, Wheeler said, “it’s the land of the individualist, and legendary because of that,” adding, “It’s outlaw country.”

Tomorrow: Part Two - Fire 

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

A review from the Washington Times

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Nose: A Novel

By Philip Kopper - The Washington Times 

By James Conaway
St. Martin’s, $24.95, 326 pages
It is a brave novelist who opens a book with his heroically obese wine snob, “a vast floodplain of undulating flesh,” flopping in marital bliss, with his wife “making that melodious sound that reminded him of mermaids singing in an unintelligible language of a place he had never seen.” James Conaway does just that, describing the elephantine epicure on Page 1, at dawn in supine union with the comely Claire, who is “mindful not to kill him in the process.” No joke, and no porn either.
It is quite apt, actually, as “Nose” sniffs out a world that seems essentially screwy to this reviewer, a dried-on-the-vine Easterner. This is California’s world of wine, a realm that Mr. Conaway has explored before in nonfiction perambulations. Screwy? Yes. How else to describe a state and state-of-mind populated by folks who are variously and simultaneously cerebral, engaging, excessive, earthy, enduring, fleeting, funny, fanciful, faddish, obscene, opaque, obscure, scurrilous, mindless, timeless, downright silly and deadly serious. This is a world as plain as a palate-cleansing cracker and as uselessly ornate as a McMansion in Potomac, as contrived as an ad campaign for a new line of plonk, and as mystical as tending grapes by the phases of the moon.
The book, too, is complex. A thriller? In part. A mystery? Somewhat. An exploration of a confused ethos or comedy of manners? Surely. And a gentle exegesis that explains the business of oenology out there on the other coast. One can learn liters about the making and marketing of wine from this fluid tale, a sweet-and-sour libation to Napa chic with a short finish. (Full disclosure: This reviewer and the author are acquainted, having both labored in the vineyard of Washington wordsmiths for decades.)
Mr. Conaway’s eponymous title character, wine authority Clyde Craven-Jones lives by his nose. A haughty English transplant, he is to wine what Howard Cosell was to sports, or Carl Sagan to astronomy, or Samuel J. Carter to little liver pills. Craven-Jones‘ Thursday morning diversion is but an aperitif to his day’s principal task: blind-tasting the week’s crop of newly released vintages, and grading them on his patented numbered scale. He sniffs and sips, until —Eureka! — a mystery bottle rates a perfect 20. This launches CJ’s quest — and that of every smarmy sot, aesthete and epicure west of the Sierra Nevada who reads his newsletter. Their grail: to identify the wine and its vineyard source in a treasure hunt that will not end before someone dies in a fermentation vat full of ripening cabernet. Only in California.
The cast of characters in this cross-genre romp includes some inevitable types. The narrator starts out as a feckless cub reporter and becomes, by turns, a wine nut, private eye and blogger. The proprietor of the local wine bar, the Glass Act, is a ponytailed giant with an appreciation of cabernet as nuanced as the wine critic’s. There are blond bombshells, and a heart-of-gold heiress, and venal developers, and pure souls seeking solace in the dark of the moon.
It’s not hard to tell the villains by their slimy chat. “Give it a moment to breathe,” one vinifera magnate advises. “Now try it. Powerful, right? In that first pop lies the essence of Cabernet — rich black cherry, grace notes of cassis and cedar back in the shadows, doing the antiphonal bit. That’s Copernicus, my friend” — no, not the ancient astronomer, but a brand of vino as overpriced as his pitch is overstated. This is Jerome, who “had remade the land as it had never been, and himself as a principal in a retro-colonial pageant, part vaquero, part royalty. His tailored shirts of Pima cotton with the three-button cuffs, trousers without pockets, those sombreros.”
The overarching dilemma, as his daughter discovers it: “Wine was to make everything clean and wholesome. But daddy didn’t put on a plaid flannel shirt and a pair of lace-up boots; he bought a cravat and leased a Lamborghini. Wine hadn’t cleansed anything. Nurturing beautiful landscapes here didn’t make up for destroying them elsewhere; wine just whitewashed ignoble transactions and made celebrities of many who belonged in jail.”
Meanwhile, back at the vineyard downstream from Copernicus’ corrupted hillside, a salt-of-the earth vintner buries cow horns packed with manure and digs them up again, then puts the contents into an earthen crock insulated with peat moss. “Mix a small portion in a water tank and spray it on the vines,” he prescribes. “The weaker the solution, the stronger the effect.” When was less not more?
But, he preaches, the “cow horns and the other stuff are just the sacraments . Don’t get hung up on those. The main idea is to take care of your land, control what comes onto it, what goes off. Do the best for your place, whatever limits that imposes. Including limits on profits.” Now there’s a gutsy message, a challenge today for alpha characters on both coasts and in Middle America, too.

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Encore

And I've pulled together a few short reviews of my novel you may not have seen. (For more reviews go to the table of contents at right and scroll down to March and April blogs.)

                                                

    Bought the book, curled up on the sofa and dove in to a fun and engaging story about a sun drenched valley with too much wine, money and characters. A combination coming of age story for some 30 somethings (how fitting for the valley), mystery and escape tale. Great descriptions of CA and the personalities that inhabit the rarified world of wine. Life is too busy for me to travel to sip and tour so the book was a perfect substitute. Great read. J. Abraham

    An exceptional vintage. Robust,lively, with a long finish; not too long in the oak. Uncork this one and settle in for a delicious read. I downed the whole thing in one sitting. Americanoak

    "Nose" is fun to the bottom of the bottle and I can't recall a more enjoyable read. It's a mystery and a romance (a couple of them actually) and also a send-up of Napa in particular and the wine industry at large that amuses and never gets tiresome. The writer obviously has a fondness for the place, even as he skewers it, and for the product, too. Conaway, who has written two nonfiction books about Napa and has been the wine critic of The Washington Post, knows his stuff and it shows. Got my doubts about the solar-powered tractor he invents here, but none at all about the shenanigans. The story rings true because so much of it really is, with a lovely, lovely finish. John Lang

  

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

   

   

A review of Nose

From the Pennsylvania Vine Co.

Nose: Quaffable Fiction

by Mike Madaio
This post is part of our ongoing series on wine reads.
Wine books that come across the PAVC desk tend to be somewhat academic – either a reference guide, a historical account, or perhaps a collection of essays about different wine topics. Though some read like novels (e.g. The House of Mondavi), almost all are non-fiction. As such, it was with great interest that we cracked open Nose, a recently-released novel by James Conaway, set in a fictitious wine-making valley of California that bears a striking resemblance to Napa.
Conaway does bring non-fiction wine writing experience to the table, with bestseller Napa: The Story of an American Eden and follow-up The Far Side of Eden, both of which dig into the real-life US winemaking capital. With Nose, however, he takes a decidedly more casual tone, playfully mocking the politics and personalities of the valley and the soap operas their lives often become.
The story’s MacGuffin is the delivery of a mysterious, unlabeled bottle to Clyde Craven-Jones (aka “CJ”), the world’s foremost wine critic, whose unabashed love of big, bold wines has reverberated throughout the wine world and inspired many wines aimed at his palate. (Sound familiar? He also publishes a paper newsletter.) This mystery wine is the first ever American wine to receive a 20-point score (the best possible), but CJ doesn’t know who made it. The ensuing quest to identify said wine, led by protagonist and valley newcomer Lester Breeden, weaves its way in and out of the lives of the biggest characters in the valley.
Much like CJ’s preferred quaff, this book is made for easy consumption.

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose