So, here’s the story of what happened at Napa that had me seeing red, not of the earthy varietal with pepper notes kind. Frighteningly, the trip to Napa also seemed to highlight how much of a smug Northern Californian I seem to be channeling.
Here’s the scene: Quaint, like oozing quaint, wood and jewel tones and overstuffed furniture in the living room hard buy a winding wooden staircase, little inn right in the heart of town. It’s a fine little bed and breakfast that prides itself on “old world” Victorian touches, although it’s old world interpreted to the very new world of the turn of last century West. In the dining room there is a sturdy mahogany (or other deep-toned, antique-y, substantive capital “d” Dining Table wood) with high ladder-back chairs surrounded by full cupboards and side boards proffering about eight kinds of tea, three kinds of coffee and various delicious, chocolate-encrusted snacks and fruits.
It is this table where the inn’s guests are meant to dine on souffles and scones communally.
Dutifully, M. and I arose for breakfast and joined the others. As we pondered our fruit cups and allowed coffee to do it’s necessary business we got acquainted with the vacationers around us. One possibly mismatched couple was a bubbly, currently blonde who hailed from southern Florida and seemed to enjoy the areas wine for it’s obvious effects, and a fastidious looking dude in a dress shirt on a Saturday morning who described his extensive research and note-taking on the wine enjoyment front. Apparently, he arrived ready for bear with files, notes, long lists and a number of must-try vineyards and vintages.
He didn’t say where he was from, and I, enjoying a good backstory, created theirs for them in my head. It involved their meeting up at the inn from different places. Perhaps a modern-day internet hookup. Perhaps something more fitting of the Old World Inn that included correspondence on heavy rag stationery and quotes from the Brownings or Shelley. My evidence was their separate flight plans, as the note-taking man with the neatly tucked in shirt couldn’t fly a red eye and would leave at dawn instead. Or was it the blonde who couldn’t sleep on a plane?
Another couple was the heart of the heartland, arriving in the strange wonderland of California from Michigan. Polite and personable and together on a week’s getaway to wine country, away from their children left at home. They are the ones who made me realize I’ve become a foodie food snob.
Napa is a fascistically a food-lovers destination. The area is home to the fabled and famous French Laundry with its 9-course fixe price dinner that’ll cost you above a couple of c-notes just for walking in the door, assuming you can get reservations. Even the downtown Napa brew pub features rosemary polenta and organic salmon. Still and all, so-called “California cuisine,” is all about regular, available, fresh, seasonal food done well and often fairly simply. It’s all about the food.
Therefore, I could not imagine at all what the hell could it possibly mean that the Michigan couple couldn’t find food they liked. They were self-described, simple meat and potato people, and they simply couldn’t find any food they recognized on the menus.
All I could figure out is it must be a language gap — “golden yukon” “a potato gratin featuring a medley of red, blue and purple” or “a side of fingerlings” may not have shouted their earthy, tuberous identity. Salads tend to have strange leaves like spinach, arugula, butter blends and mixed field greens. Meat is often listed by cut and cooking method. But, most assuredly, since moving here and dining at some of the pedigreed California-style restaurants, and despite my own meat and potato roots, I can both find something good and know what the hell I’m eating.
Finally, there was the older couple from Texas, San Antonio to be specific. The woman was one of those older women of a certain size and blondness that always remind me of Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde,” which makes me feel incredibly guilty and judgmental. A good old, well put together gal, still wearing nice things and keeping her hair an acceptable level of big. Her man was a dapper but leathered dude in the Texas sense of “dude,” with a mustache that could have come from the ranch or a Provincetown or Castro men’s only cowboy bar.
We actually met them the night before when we arrived, and they explained the ropes of the self-serve snacks and beverages. As it turned out, way back when the Texan roomed with a fellow cadet from Randolph, MA back at Westpoint. There was much hilarity over his story of the honor system and the need to mark absences, and how no one could understand the boy from Massachusetts who would ask people to “mahk his cahd” when they were heading out. The Texan was definitely the kind of guy who knew a little about a lot of things and wasn’t even a wee bit shy about sharing his vast knowledge.
For example, after a week in Napa he knew how wine was made, the plumbing systems used to vat and un-vat the wine, which wineries were modernized, the best tours, the best vintners. Or, so one would believe from his didactic approach to light breakfast conversation.
Cue me, newly born California food snob. Right about the moment I heard about the wine nerds notes and the Texan’s journeys up and down Route 29, I realized that locals don’t actually tour that many vineyards. Actually, they do. The difference seems to be that if you live around here, you might hit a handful in a day meandering a bit away from the crowds or to the ones you know have wines you like. The tourists were all touring up big numbers, though, dozens in the weekend, miles driven, tours taken, or quick zips in and out to check off that you saw where Francis Ford Coppola hangs out.
I was way more interested in trying to find out where they had eaten or the wines they tried or the styles they liked. I got data more than conversation, and I mentioned that I knew about some of the local restaurants, if anyone was interested, because I had planned a work meeting in the wine ‘hood. And, the woman from Michigan politely enquired as to what I did for said living that had me planning meetings.
Ahhhhh. Sadly, I answered her question. My answer involved non-profits and economic development, and, the horror, the horror, I mentioned Africa.
The Texan came alive. His first offensive attack — “There’s plenty of poor people right here in America that need helping.” Yeah, I acknowledge, there are indeed. However, between the reality of my coworkers who do stuff right here at home, and the economic shithole that is living on under a dollar a day, personally I don’t think it’s enough to just say “Fuck it, I have problems of my own.”
For the pragmatists out there, if you really need the good old U. S. of A. or G8 reason why it’s self-preserving and personally beneficial to help the world’s poorest — Belly full, healthy folks in a prosperous society don’t sign up for terrorism so much. The Somali pirates didn’t take to the sea for a love of salt spray in their sails and a buccaneer’s adventure. It’s a desperate, unhappy choice of men without an excess of choices.
I didn’t get into that second point too deep about the poorest of the poor and never got a chance to talk about security. The Texan piped up, and I am not lying, exaggerating or otherwise teeming with artistic license. The man said, opening of course with the universal prologue that means nothing good is coming, “I mean no offense but…” He said, “I mean no offense but those people, they breed, pardon the expression, like rats.”
He continued on to tell us stories of Africa and what his hunting guide Cecil told him and showed him around Botswana. He said, the men there, they just can’t help themselves, they are tribal, they are primitives, they’ll just walk up to any woman any time and if they could get away with it they’d just take her right there in the streets. Cecil told him and showed him. And, historian the Texan was, because he told me that this behavior was centuries and centuries old, they have not changed a bit from the tribes, it’s how they have always been. Implication: Savage, uncivilized, animal.
I’m not really sure about this hundreds and hundreds of years of history he claims. The whole planet is layered with stories of imperialism and colonialism and trade and wandering and blending. There is no modern story in any country that does not reflect outside influence. Hell, Britain has Roman walls and the march of various Caesars taking what they had, and much of modern Africa is a story of European colonial greed. So, who are these pure folks with evil appetites, and how does the Texan know it is how they have always been?
Not to mention, there’re real live statistics to back up the rat-breeding essence that discriminate against no one, race, creed, color or nation of origin. Where there’s extreme poverty there are babies being born. Lots of them. Every poor and beleaguered group has had their day of overpopulated, “uncivilized” breeding, whether it’s ghettos in New York overflowing with fresh with faces from Ellis Island, Muslims in Mumbai today or Hindus in past centuries. Faces, tones and religions change but the economics stay the same. Family planning comes to those with the resources to plan ahead, educate their kids and not just scramble for a meager daily existence.
Of course, I didn’t get all that out. Nope. We all then head to hear the Texan’s lecture about his days in Botswana. About AIDS. About poverty. About crops growing on little built up hillocks (which totally reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s description of what the missionaries failed to do in The Poisonwood Bible), and blue tarps covering bodies dying too fast from disease for a proper burial.
Somewhere along the line with the blood pulsing in my temples and my agony over whether to rip his throat open with my butter knife or continue a civilized meal delicately sipping my fresh-squeezed orange juice and french-pressed coffee, I looked over at M. I was pretty sure if he was a praying man, he was praying I wasn’t soon locked up for assault. I completely missed that the Texan’s wife got up and left the room. (The beauty of being in a committed partnership, is you have a partner to fill in those kind of details later that same day.)
I got through it. I got through listening to his monologue. I got through his arrogance, his insistence that the only way out was with the help of leaders like the head of Botswana and Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who went to Harvard. Only I don’t think the Botswana president is a Harvard grad, as he claimed, since there’s a stronger Oxford streak in that particular neck of the leadership woods. I could agree on education, without having to agree that our country’s Ivy League was the only hope.
In the end, he put his hand gently on my shoulder in a paternal gesture, looked me in the face and sincerely asked whether we were leaving that night or if we’d see more of each other. He seemed honest and genuine when he indicated that he hoped we could talk more.
I think everyone was happy to see both the Texan and M. and me leave.
Meanwhile, I, of course, spent the day ranting and obsessing. If I pardon the “those people breed like rats” line and the racist and paternalistic and just plain godawful ignorant discussion of the geopolitical landscape, I was still incensed. Livid, as Pat would say. Any way you look at it, he broke the social contract that is a morning at a bed and breakfast. First off, and right out of the gate, you never, ever, ever challenge someone when they answer what they do for a living. OK, maybe if they’re the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, you’re allowed leeway beyond the polite nod, but for everyone else it’s a smile and a “that’s interesting.”
For fuck’s sake, can’t a girl get some eggs and a cup of joe without listening to inane bullshit? And, why, oh, why must it be that right-wing older men seem oddly drawn to me? I think they think that with a few cogent arguments I will be drawn to the light that is their politics. I think they are very wrong.
Technorati Tags: America, Africa, racism, California, food, Napa, wine
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