NICENESS COSTS SOMETHING

Sonoma is a nice town. We’ve always thought so, ever since we first visited and did the whole “wine tour” bit nearly a decade ago. Somehow we find Sonoma Valley (or  “The Valley of the Moon”) the slightly more pleasant destination than its more famous neighbour the Napa Valley when it comes to a straight choice between Californian Wine growing regions to the north of San Francisco.

Sitting just forty miles or so to the north of the Golden Gate bridge, this made it the obvious choice as a place to acclimatise and recuperate from the journey, and to adjust to the cultural shift required when you plonk yourself down inside a new country where even things like the urinals in the so-called “restrooms” can suddenly seem strange and unusual and mysterious and difficult to handle.

Sonoma is, like many American towns, based upon a grid system which is centred on a town square. This meant a bit of confusion for my flight-addled brain as we arrived because I forgot quite which of the roads to take to get to the motel we usually stay in, and so I found myself exploring roads running at ninety degrees to the ones I thought I was, getting frustrated and, in the end, giving up the search and heading towards the “Visitor Center”.

This can happen a lot if you’re driving in a grid matrix and don’t have that notion of place that Americans seem to be born with hard-wired into their brains. North, South, East, West, Left, Right and Town Name comma State seem to give the natives a very precise sense of place which I find rather incredible coming from the geographical vaguenesses of England. I’m not sure that I’m explaining this very well, and perhaps it is just me, but I’ve never really had that same sense of place as the ordinary people seem to have in the States.

Despite the fact that notions of “Left” and “Right” make perfect sense to me and were learnt at a very early age (something to do with tying shoelaces if I recall correctly...), somehow they get “flipped” when I’m in America, so that, when somebody tells me to take the next left, for example, I will understand perfectly and yet my brain and all of my instincts will insist that left is right and I will act accordingly even though I know better. This can get very bewildering when you are on the Freeway, when you are being told about “right exits” and you keep on looking for them on your left. Eventually, of course, you adjust, right up until that moment when you panic and your instincts start to kick in and then you can very quickly resort to being all over the place again.

Maybe it is just me. It’s just a very odd state of mind to explain and to get across to other people, but it also leads to a certain amount of geographical confusion when you’re trying to navigate yourself around in an unfamiliar town.

As to that basic certainty everyone giving you directions seems to have about where the cardinal points are, well, again, it’s just not the way we think about space back in England, Europe.

Someone will tell me to go three blocks North, for example, thinking that they are being perfectly clear, not realising that they’re talking to someone who has a vague understanding that his garden has a South facing aspect, but the road to get home twists and curves so much that the sun can be setting behind me (in the West... right?) and then to my right, and then right in front of me, sometimes within a quarter of a mile. Grid systems obviously make a sense of direction in relation to the larger planet a very sensible way of thinking about things, but probably doesn’t sit well with our older and more shambolic and eclectic town planning systems that are still, in some cases, taking into account street plans made in the middle ages and earlier.

Anyway, I was going to write about Sonoma today, wasn’t I? Going to the “Visitor Center” proved to be a good call, to be honest, and I wish that I’d just bitten the bullet and gone there straight away instead of insisting to myself that I knew where I was going. A pleasant chat with an ex-pat Scottish lady who’d lived in the States since 1976, a lovely clear map of the town (always a plus), and a discount on our Motel of choice quite cheered us up. We also noticed that the “Cheese Factory” shop was still around, but sadly that the shoe shop where I bought my Converse Trainers six years ago was no longer there.

“Yes” we thought, “It’s still a nice town.”

This is a town, after all, where much of the economy is based on Wine Production which probably makes for a very mellow outlook on life. Historically, it is such a centre of reasonableness that apparently all four sides of the Town Hall were designed to look the same so that all four sides of the Town Square had the same view of it and all of the businesses could claim to be opposite the Town Hall.

A compromise, yes, but one built on “niceness” and a sense of civic pride.

But living in a “nice town” does tend to come with a price. A couple of things did give me pause to wonder whether that price is worth paying. The first was the request to sign a “city ordnance” as we checked into the Motel, one which required us not to make any loud noises after 10pm at night. The second was when we went for lunch and tried to order a beer. Now, neither of us are exactly youthful, but the friendly barkeep was rather insistent that we could not be served a beer without picture I.D. and was absolutely resolute about this. Unfortunately, this was the one time when the Passports had been locked in the safe back at the Motel, so our lunch was accompanied by lemonade that day. We were told that this was likely to happen anywhere we went, so we spent the rest of our time with our Passports resolutely kept about our persons, but this was the only time it happened and so tends to become more of an annoyance retrospectively.

And that’s what I mean really. In “the land of the free” it seems that it’s quite easy to sign away some of those freedoms by voting in bye-laws that make your life a little nicer, but also a little more restricted. I’ll accept that alcohol and noise control are probably not the worst things to have to deal with if it keeps your community a contented and happy place, but it’s knowing just where to stop, isn’t it? How many more of those “little freedoms” are you prepared to give away in order to keep your community “safe”, and at what point does the community itself start to resent this continual interference in its life?

Take a look at the picture of the sign over on the right which I took on another day in another town. It’s just a long(ish) list of “restrictions” to people’s basic “little freedoms” that I saw in a town that prides itself upon being a place where people go to have “fun”. None of them in themselves are unreasonable, and all of them probably make life less stressful for those people who are quietly going about their business on the boardwalk, but equally, perhaps the more you restrict those little outlets for what might be termed “youthful exuberance”, the more people might try to find other, less pleasant ways to let those needs out, and in a country where the right to bear arms is written in the constitution, it’s hardly surprising when a little bit of repressed “youthful exuberance” can sometimes boil over in to something far more tragic.

It’s just a thought, and none of it makes Sonoma any less of a nice town, but of course sometimes it is in those “nice towns” that horrible things can happen, and it’s usually then that people start to say things like “How can something like this happen here. This is a nice town”.