In My Cabin at Jack London Village

My office is an old cabin built into the base of a tall bin at Jack London Village, an historic set of buildings just south of Glen Ellen here in the wine country of Northern California. The building has been used as a studio of one sort or another for many years, I’m told. Originally it was part of a winery that had been established during the Nineteenth Century, one of the first in the Valley of the Moon. The cabin was put in much later, sometime during the early 1970s, I believe.

The structure itself was built by Joshua Chauvet or by his successor, Charles Pagani, as early as the 1880s or as late as the 1940s, as a bin for collecting the unavoidable byproduct of winemaking. As the wine was being made, the stems and pressed grapes were sent over by a trough from the main building for temporary storage. Eventually, the resulting pulp would be emptied into carts waiting below, and then returned to the vineyards as compost for the following year.

In describing the building for my clients, I wrote the following explanation of how it can be seen as emblematic of my general take on life: “As with any historic building, this old stemhouse brings a rich accumulation of meaning that asks in turn to be lived with deliberately, and conscientiously. Such houses are structures that provide a conscious relationship with nature, rather than appliances that would protect us from nature to make life ‘safe’. As in any aspect of the examined life, we may make no assumptions. No lines are straight, no angles are truly square, and no surface is really level. The wood is old and uncertain, and the glass can be thin in places: please watch your step, and trust your weight against nothing.”

From these thoughts the idea of a book is now beginning to take shape. The focus of my research and writing is upon the Tower, and upon the people whose dreams have been played out there: upon the stories of the lives of the artists and the artisans whose work had shaped the building, as well as how the history of the building itself had shaped and sheltered their work. I want to write especially of the inspiration and the resolve, the hopes and the inevitable compromises that always instruct an innocent idealism in the inescapable facts of life. A fellow who once lived there told me that businesses have struggled in the Village because of a Miwok curse on the land, put there by the original people of the valley when the Europeans first arrived. My take however is that nature will not simply grant our wishes, but rather challenges us to work hard if we would realize our dreams— and that our dreams are only a first tentative design of what must eventually take place in our lives as our destiny, and, as much, the destiny of the land in which our dreams take place.

I recall being struck by a description of the vitality of the land, perhaps the healthiest region in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, given by the Sonoma Valley Ecology Center. The extensive wilderness of the Mayacamas range along the eastern side of the valley, and the square miles of undeveloped land that reach from Annadel Park down to Sonoma Mountain along the western side, are connected by a great regional park that provides passage for all the great and small native animals that still inhabit the region. And the Tower stands at the center of all this activity, where pools of water form in the stream beneath my cabin, and where the animals come to gossip and argue in the evening.

It is a large project that I have in mind, reaching from the specific story of the Tower towards the epic encounter of human enterprise with nature’s demands. Occasionally I will publish this newsletter to keep you posted on my progress, and of course I would appreciate your feedback. I plan to learn who used the building when, and to interview each of them to bring their stories, their dreams, and their work to life. Architecture will remain the consistent theme as the effort and design of the structures that we build to house our dreams, in a world that teems with a natural and difficult, wonderful life.

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This article previously appeared in The Tower Summer 2004.