AND QUITE FLOWS THE RUSSIAN RIVER IN OBAMA LAND

AND QUITE FLOWS THE RUSSIAN RIVER IN OBAMA LAND
By: Rajbir Deswal & Chander Koumdi
From Los Angeles to San-Francisco, via the dry grass-laden yellow dunes, through a green-turning land scape, with thousands of white windmills, on to the blue water of the 39th Pier, with the striking-red Golden Gate in site, we were asked by Nazoo and Lakhbir our hosts to have a feel of the cable cars, Union Squire and Crooked Street of San Francisco, before our three days sojourn with them at Guerneville just twenty minutes drive short of the grey waters of the Pacific Ocean.
While driving from over the magnificent, awe-inspiring and one-time longest (1.7 miles) Golden Gate, we had thought that the excitement to see all that was seeable would take a backseat and a beating then. But the moment we crossed down the slope, from the engulfing clouds swamping on us, the view right in front showed the Sonoma County’s idyllic and serene landscape, largely dominated by vineyards and redwood groves. Close by flowed the Russian River which is all the year round good for swimming, kayaking, canoeing, angling, sunbathing, and boating, before it joins the Pacific Ocean at Jenner, just by the side of the famous and scenic Sonoma Beach, on the much touted(and really beautiful) Highway No. 101.
Our destination was the sleepy town of Guerneville where they have about fifty wineries and Armstrong Woods spread in an area of about 800 acres with Redwood trees which almost seem to be piercing through the sky. This small downtown on the Russian River has all the serenity, calmness and laidback lifestyle typical of holiday places though the regular inhabitants of the town love to be staying in what was historically called Stumptown since being a big centre of the then flourishing lumber trade almost all Redwoods were logged and freighted out for money in 1800s.
A railhead is still preserved here to tell the story of the transported lumber from the once famous ‘Big Bottom’—another name given to the Redwood Groves area. The local Pomo Indians named this summer camp as ‘Ceola’ which meant ‘shady place’. Present day Guerneville takes its name from a Swiss immigrant and a local businessman George Guerne who owned a sawmill in 1800s. Oxen driven carts to San Raphae, laden with lumber took 9 days for a round trip in those days. The original site of the station Guerneville was purchased by Korbel Brothers and has retained some souvenirs of the eras gone by.
Guerneville has the largest number of hotels, restaurants and eateries especially meant for Gays and Lesbian community locally called the LGBT. One can see the implicit signs as “Hate Stops Here” put up at many places on ‘interest’. Infact after the 1970s, people inclined to this genre of sexuality in San Francisco, started exploring Guerneville areas for their escapades and found a favourable ambiance for a recreational destination here. The Northwestern Pacific Railroad, once primarily used for lumber freighting having demised in 1930s, had left the place only to be frequented by illegal drug users and made worse by the floods in 1964.
Luckily for us it was ‘Happy Fourth July’—the American Independence Day, and the day began with crowding around of locals and tourists in the Town Plaza, where they had huge and fuming barbeques and steaming white dressed chickens, Pulled Pork Sandwiches, hotdogs and hamburgers lined up like bricks in a kiln. Orchestras and buntings galore of colours only a Rainbow could quantify added to the atmosphere when revellers thronged the Beer and Wine Bars as early as at 10 in the morning. We were also excited about the pyrotechnic spectacle of fireworks over the Russian River’s Historic Bridge. And for that we had to pick a spot early in the evening.
On our way to the Korbel winery we found vehicles moving at a snail’s pace and people enjoying their predicament of not-being-in-a-hurry for a change. It was a ‘five-minutes delay expected’ but what we could read from the faces of holidaying men, women and children was that they wanted to live every moment how-so-ever-slow or even stilled. We did some wine-tasting at the winery around which were the vineyards sloping down to Russian River making its white waters reflecting immensely against a green foreground. We picked Pinochet—a variety of wine—to be declared our favourite, then and remembered to impress the bartenders thereafter, everywhere.
One-O-One—the Highway at Bodega Bay showed up a plethora or cars stashed on the slopes leading down to the Pacific with white-rock-gates harbouring sea-gulls and other avian of the sea variety hovering and resting and snoozing and cooing and cleansing their own feathers with craned out beaks on their sides. Their squeaking and tweeting echoes from the skies to the vast expanse of blue waters. Vacation houses is another craze in the entire Sonoma County and mostly they are situated in a way as from one could watch a daily sunset or have the beach in reach.
Our last stop was at Jenner, where Russian River splits into sinking and surfacing delta streams, ultimately joining the Pacific, as if to give a feel to us the onlookers, of completion and culmination, of a beautiful journey undertaken, exploring life and liveliness, in all its varied shades and velvety textures—made only to give happiness and justifying its existence. The not-so-vast delta site offers an ambiance of laidback variety, which easily sinks in the holidaying mood of revelers and nature lovers alike. If Los Angeles and San Francisco are marked for men and their activities, then Guerneville and Jenner qualify their indulgences.