CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Napa town ended with the abruptness Tom had become used to in this weird through-the-looking-glass place, with a belt of wild country that marked the future limits of the built-up area. Evidently it was never going to be more than about half the size of its FirstSide analogue, at least according to the plan.
The road up the valley was two-lane blacktop flanked on either side by broad grass verges and by rows of Italian cypress trees, a little west of the streamside forest. The trees beside the road were giants forty feet tall and more, standing like dark green candles casting endless flickering bars of shade across the road as they drove north; more were growing as field-edge windbreaks among the cultivated land. Their shadows lengthened as the sun dipped westward toward the rough sawtooth ridge of the forest-shaggy Mayacamas; eastward the lower, drier Vaca hills were distant shapes colored in olive-green chaparral and golden grassland; the flat valley floor was never more than five miles from edge to edge, nowhere out of sight of the mountains.
Much of the land was in pasture the color of old honey tinged with green, enclosed with chest-high redwood fences weathered nearly black. The fields were starred with violet camass, blue-flag and golden mariposa lily, and still dotted with a thinned-out scattering of huge oaks that gave the whole valley the look of a great park. Herds of glossy black Angus or white-faced Herefords ambled through grass to their knees and rested in the shade; so did sheep with the rather silly naked look the beasts always had after shearing, and sounders of black-and-tan pigs rooting for last season’s acorns. Horses drowsed, or looked over the fences at the vehicles passing by. Every fifth or sixth field was in wheat or barley, ripe now and the same bronze-gold color as Adrienne’s hair, almost glittering as it swayed in the long shadows of the evening sun, and so thickly splashed with crimson poppies that he knew without asking they didn’t use herbicides here.
Occasional modest vineyards stood green and shaggy with their summer foliage, the earth between the rows disked clean and showing through the leaves in tones of cinnabar or pale gray or brown. The grapevines were well west of the road, close to the foot of the mountains; he blinked again, seeing in his mind’s eye the endless monoculture of grapes that was the Napa in the California he knew. Here they were a minor element in the landscape’s symphony, and small orchards of other fruit seemed as numerous: cherry and apricot, pear and plum, pomegranate and almond and walnut, gray-green olive and bushy fig. Close to the road an occasional strip of land lay under the whirling spray of irrigation sprinklers, watering crops of vegetables and soft fruit; a crew handpicking tomatoes into boxes waved as they passed.
“Pretty,” he said after a moment. Actually, it’s fucking beautiful, but let’s not get overenthusiastic. “And it looks a lot more… mmm… established than I’d have expected, considering how recent it all is.”
Adrienne nodded. “The climate helps,” she said. “Things grow fast here; we started settling the Napa in the late forties. And the Old Man is fond of saying that one of the merits of aristocracy is that it encourages the people in charge to think about long-term consequences. If your descendants are going to be living on the same piece of land, you’re careful how you treat it. ’Specially if you think in terms of bloodlines and families, and we New Virginians most emphatically do think that way.”
“I can see aristocracy might look nearly perfect, if you’re on the top of the heap,” Tom said dryly. “Or one of the kids of the people on top.”
“Oh, Granddad also says the drawbacks include continual feuding and faction fights,” Adrienne said. “We’ve managed to keep those political rather than shootin’ affairs. So far.”
They drove slowly, not because the traffic was thick, but because much of it was tractors towing flatbeds loaded with hay or other cargo. One was filled with a pungent material Adrienne identified as Peruvian guano. It made the freshness more of a contrast once they’d pulled by; the air was warmer here than it had been near the strait, in the high seventies, and it had an intense scent that held sun-cured grass, wildflowers, turned earth, a breath of coolness from the jungle-like riverside forest to the east.
That was a thick mass of jade green, deep green, brown-green; tall valley oaks with interlaced crowns; beneath them sycamores, black walnut, Oregon ash and box elder, laced together with a thick mass of California blackberry, poison oak and willow, interwoven still tighter with wild grapevine and blossoming Castilian rose. Birdsong was loud even over the engine noise, and the buzz of insect life nearly as intense; they had to stop a time or two for explosions of monarch butterflies, drifting across the road in orange-white clouds dense enough to hinder vision. Now and then a gap showed a small sunlit meadow or the glitter of the river’s flow, or a bend opened up into a little marsh. A half hour north of Napa town they saw a swath cleared for a long timber bridge to the eastern shore, and beneath it a trio of boys on an improvised raft valiantly trying to pole their ungainly craft off a gravel bank in the bright shallow water.
“Probably convinced they’re on the Mississippi, if I remember my brothers,” Adrienne said.
Tom had to grin; there were a lot worse ways to spend a summer afternoon stolen from chores than imagining you were adrift with Jim and Huck and the Professor. He certainly had, and it took a lot more imagination when you were using the Red River of the North with its bare banks running through endless fields of flax and sunflowers. The two Irish setters splashing around the raft seemed to think it was great sport too.
Boys and dogs probably came from one of the steadings he saw now and then at the end of a tree-lined dirt side road heading westward; farmhouses low-slung and roofed in Roman tile, built of whitewashed adobe or pale cut stone, and all set well back from the river. They were surrounded by gardens, often with some of the huge coast live oaks and valley oaks left standing near them. Big red-painted hip-roofed wooden barns loomed behind the dwellings.
Nobody builds that type anymore except for tourists, he thought.
But these were real barns, holding fodder and livestock and equipment; and none of the other outbuildings were the simple utilitarian sheet-metal shapes of modern working agriculture either. Even the silos were plank bound with steel hoops, like giant cylindrical barrels.
He turned a farm boy’s eye on the tilled fields; harvested flax, some potatoes already lifted and others still roughly green, and the yellow-gold grain.
“Winter wheat, I suppose?” Tom asked.
“Plant in late November or early December, harvest in June,” she confirmed. “Barley and oats too, of course.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, thinking back.
Wait a minute, squared. At the rate I’ve seen, there can’t be more than a few thousand acres of grain in this whole valley, much less this “estate” of hers. It’s three-quarters pasture or grass leys. Why all the labor?
The tractors he’d seen on the road or working in the fields were little red fifty-horsepower models with open cabs and small front wheels. That was the obsolete image most city folk had when the word “tractor” went through their minds, the sort of thing his grandfather had used when he got back from Korea.
I wonder just how old-fashioned they are here? Tom thought. They could import anything they wanted, after all. He went on aloud: “How exactly do you harvest your wheat?”