My earliest memory of Ferndale is, well, my earliest memory.
I remember looking out over the Eel River toward the town I would spend most of my formative years and hearing the noon whistle blow. From what I can recall of the memory, it was cool and breezy with a gun metal sky and I was well above the porch railing; which leads me to believe I was in the arms of my mother. I’ve asked her about this because I know none of the houses in we lived in looked over the river toward town. She too couldn’t remember a place were we lived that had such a view but later told me of a place we stayed after moving back to the north coast when I was about eight months old for just a couple of weeks. She remembers it because the woman who lived in this house would not allow my mother to smoke inside; which explains why I would have been in her arms on the porch. My mother was very good at managing a cigarette while occupying both hands. However, my grandmother was the master. My sister and I would watch in amazement at just how long the ash would grow before it finally broke off and fell to the ground or her lap or the soup… but rarely into an ashtray.
Like most who still live in the Eel Valley, my family is a mixture of immigrant heritage. My grandmother’s parents came through Ellis Island in the twenties as Juan and Maria Martinez from the Azores Islands of Portugal. They settled as John and Mary Martin; hard working dairy homesteaders on the bluffs of Centerville overlooking the Pacific Ocean. My grandfather, who himself arrived from a small colony on the Italian-Swiss border, died when my mother was two and we know little about him. My grandmother remarried again after both of her second husband also died from cancer and remained married to Van, her third husband until she died just a few years ago.
My grandmother was a large woman who spent most of her time in the kitchen. She was a renowned cook and was known to out drink the toughest of the tough. Among many of the Portuguese dairy farmers she could be relied upon to host huge and ruckus parties; most of which included unusual fare such as abalone, duck, venison and plenty of fresh caught pacific wild salmon. She had a vegetable garden and canned everything. She had an entire garage full of canned goods which she readily doled out to the extended family as though she were a one woman food pantry for the homeless.
Ferndale was a community of primarily two ethnic groups, the Dane’s and the Portagees. Each had their respective halls at the end of town which were used for various celebrations and gatherings. As a child I was glad to be a Portagee because our annual celebration was a Catholic excuse for eating and drinking not like the stanch protestant affairs over at the Danish Hall. Oddly enough, our event is called the “Holy Ghost Festival” but more on that later.
The town has an idyllic setting; it’s nestled into the green hills of the northern California coast, comprised of one main street, aptly named Main Street with several streets crisscrossing to modest neighborhoods of its sparse population. Among many small family owned shops there was a volunteer fire department, a grocery store, a five and dime store, a bakery, post office, three gas stations, the local newspaper called the “Enterprise” and two establishments known as “The Palace” and the “Ivanhoe” which served adult beverages until very late hours of the night. There was an elementary school for kindergarten through eighth grade and a four year high school. Ferndale is home of the Humboldt County Fairgrounds and boasts to have the world’s largest living Christmas tree. It also has a gothic old cemetery that would have been a perfect setting for the old television show, “Dark Shadows.” Our house, in the mid sixties, was just across the street from this cemetery and each weekday afternoon this ghoulish soap opera was haunting my mother on our 23 inch black and white TV with tin-foil, covered rabbit ears.
At a quick glance you would think Ferndale is an overtly Christian town with it several churches; many which have tall, white steeples that jut up over the Victorian homes and storefronts which are clustered together and surrounded by green, dairy pasture. Hardly the place you would typify as a good versus evil playground. In Ferndale it seemed as a boy growing up that it was all good. But little did I know outside my boyhood wonders lay grownup realities that would be the perfect battleground for evil forces and hidden truths where dark shadows did exist.
The Catholic Church was a large influence on our family at a very early age. Although my mother wasn’t devout my great-grandmother was and located perfectly between the parish and our home as the matriarch she was. My upbringing brought first confession and first communion, catechism and confirmation. It even began before that with unusual stays at the Nunnery, a house where the local nuns lived and provided daily watch over my sister and me. At the time we never understood why we went there and when I finally realized that it was to be a regular event for some time I began to dread those visits. Those ladies were so strict and nap time was always in a bed made so tight I could hardly breathe. It was during this time that I learned to make the sign of the cross as a preface and finale to prayer. Although I knew it was the right thing to do… I didn’t want to do it. Not because I had an aversion to the trinity but because I had to say, “Ghost.” I was tremendously afraid of anything, ghostly.
For some reason, as early as I could remember, I always… and I mean always, had bad dreams. I hated bedtime with a passion because of the horror that awaited me. There were so many different dreams like finding something in my bed or experiencing the floor give way sending me into a free fall. However, the most common dream was getting chased by an eerie, dog-like monster toward the bedroom door that would not open and me screaming to the top of my lungs to be let out. I always woke up just as the ankle biter got to me.
Needless to say I made it difficult for my mother when it came to bedtime and I’m sure it was something of a relief to her sometime around the age of six when I started sleeping through the night.
My mother and father met when mom was still in high school. I know very little to this day about their courtship and wedding. I’ve been told they moved after the wedding to the bay area where I was born and shortly returned because my mother was not accustomed to the pace and population of the city. From what I now know upon arrival back to Humboldt county things began to unravel for the two of them. It would be only a few short years after my sister was born my parents would separate. I suppose as a three year old child you never quite understand the way life is supposed to go until you’re well past the events that were never supposed to occur. Such was the case for me as I never noticed the tight lipped arguments and lonely nights. It wasn’t until the day my father in a fit of rage took a hand painted plate from the kitchen and walked into their bedroom and struck that plate against my potty-training chair. This plate was no ordinary hand painted plate, if there is such a thing; it was a plate given to my parents on their wedding day commemorating their marriage. As I walked in just in time to see the pieces shatter I actually knew what this meant. My dad was very mad at me. Later when my mother tried explaining that it was because daddy was angry at mommy and wasn’t coming home anymore and they were no longer going to be married, I understood it to mean that I broke up their marriage.
My sister and I began spending a lot of time at my Grandmother’s house. We practically lived there for several months only occasionally seeing my mother. I saw my father once more when he came by the house to say goodbye. He had brought a small bag of candy and handed it to me when he left. I don’t remember if I cried but I do remember treasuring that bag of candy. In fact, I intended to save it as long as I could. Don’t ask my why, but I felt the safest place to keep this small treasure was to bury it deep in the bottom of my mother’s closest among her shoes. Safety, oddly enough, can come in the strangest places. I never did get hurt in my dreams and I never had a vampire bite from Barnabas Collins; the two things that frightened me most… oh, and one particular nun named Sister Francis. But I never felt so safe than when I was at my Grandmother’s house, even as a teenager and even more so when I would come home from college. Grandma’s house was the first place I would go. Her house was a constant; a harbor in a sheltered cove… a place I knew would be the same every time I entered through the back porch door. it is what we get the word family from… It’s familiar.
Likewise, a small town in itself is something you do not want to see change. Since the years of my boyhood, many stores along Main Street have changed owners. Some of the stores changed from one thing to another and some simply have gone away because those stores were family business that had no family left to carry on the business. There has been some development and of course there is always redevelopment and restoration of the old Victorian architecture that is so much the pride and heritage of this small coastal community. And though my grandmother is no longer with us and I have long forgotten much of the memory of Ferndale first hand, each time I drive across Fernbridge and enter that lush green valley I feel safe, familiar and a part of something that makes up life… I feel at home.
