Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Wintery Winters
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
The trouble with dinner parties is that they aren’t parties at all. People who hardly know each other are assembled to consume good-to-mediocre food while searching for something to talk about. Trapped between the main course and dessert, it’s beyond my acting ability to feign interest.
Too often a braggart—usually a male—will serve up a travel story about “making a connection with the locals” who, he claims, became life-long friends. People as trophies.
Collecting humans the way I collect photos of archaeological ruins or old cathedrals, much less bragging about them, turns me off. Anyways, I’ve traveled as much as the next guy and I know it is damn hard to have a friendship-creating conversation with anyone, let alone someone who is a stop, a minibreak, on my travel itinerary.
At my last dinner party, I only survived by retreating into myself. It’s a trick I learned from my students. My name is Noah, and I teach the history of civilization to semi-civilized high school students.
Instead of faking interest in the table conversation, I mentally plotted out a road trip the entire length of California. Hollywood. The Redwoods. Big Sur. Disneyland. Stanford. San Francisco. I could almost hear California Dreamin’ playing from the car radio. Like the lyrics say, I was California dreamin.
Beyond its iconic tourist destinations, California is agricultural. 77,000 farms and ranches grow 400 commodity crops. There are pastures, fruit trees, vegetable gardens, farmhouses, barns, silos, cows, horses, goats, tractors, combines, harvesters, corn rows, almonds, walnuts, chickens, sheep, irrigation ditches, orchards, rice fields, pigs, avocados, grapes, lemons, melons, peaches, plums, strawberries. All of it sprinkled like confetti over 25% of the state’s acreage.
And farmworkers and farmers. And farm towns like Winters, California.
The Winters vibe is innocence hardened by lifetimes of honest, earthy labor. Saturday night dinner at a steakhouse. Battered pick-up trucks. A Victorian gazebo and a bandstand painted white. The storefront facades are antique ornaments.
The men wear blue jeans, boots, flannel shirts and ruddy complexions the color of dried soil. The bars have jukeboxes and dartboards. On calm, clear, blue-sky days, hot air balloons ferrying tourists cast bulbous shadows over yellowy fields of sunflowers.
The downtown has one, and only one, metered parking space. Originally put there by a prankster, the meter generates approximately $100 a year to help finance the town’s July Fourth fireworks. I’m guessing that covers about one star burst.
On a ghostly, frosty early morning, walking down Main Street, my shoulder is bent against the January cold. A few leaves cling valiantly to the trees, keeping guard like the last of the Spartans. I pull my scarf tight around my neck.
Inside the Putah Creek Café, a waitress smiles a welcoming, honest smile before calling me “dear” and “honey.” She pours a warming cup of coffee. I order farm fresh eggs with golden yolks—scrambled. Hash browns. Sourdough toast soaked in butter. Sizzling, peppery sausages.
Forgetting my own counsel about making friends with the locals, I decide that, at least in my own country, it’s worth a try. Winters seems like the kind of friendly town that might have someone who wants to get to know me.
My first difficulty is how to start. Should I drop in unannounced to meet the Winters Express editor? Talk to a shopper in the plumbing aisle at the hardware store? Ask my waitress when her shift ends? Get chatty with a police officer?
Quietly, I pay at the register. Quietly, I exit the café. Quietly, I recover my solitude.
The temperature is a cold silence.
