We looked at the map and found a small spot of a town halfway between Tahoe and St Helena: Upper Lake, population 1,052. TripAdvisor said there was a nice hotel in the town and the online photos made the town look like a pretty place.
Upper Lake is a pretty place and the Tallman Hotel was terrific. We were there for the Home Coming parade down Main Street on a bright Saturday morning. Traffic was stopped while each class of the local high school and junior high school was road in floats the length of the street along with their respective Home Coming Kings and Queens.
As well as the football teams and their cheerleaders:
Kids of all ages got into the act:
The thing we will remember about Upper Lake was our chance meeting with Henry and Margaret, who were sitting on their front porch as we strolled down Main Street. We walked over and said hello. They welcomed us up onto their porch and shared a little about their lives. They were sister and brother who dated back to a time before Upper Lake started to gentrify. They were people of very modest means for whom life seemed to have gotten more difficult as time progressed.
They were two of seven children who were born in this house, and the only ones still living in Upper Lake. Henry mentioned that he was born in the front left bedroom, and that his mother had actually been born in the back bedroom.
Margaret had left Upper Lake when she married and moved to a small town in central Ohio. It was huge change from her life in California. She lived there for thirty years. When her husband died Margaret moved back to Upper Lake and is now working as a home health care giver. She had worked in a nursing home but found the one-on-one relationships of being a home health care giver were far more satisfying.
Henry had served in the Army, stationed at the DMZ in Korea in 1967. It didn't sound like an easy place to be posted; Henry's face was deadpan as he recalled how the winter was so cold a can of beer would freeze solid if you let it sit around for 30 minutes. His comment made David think back to a front page of the Hartford Times photograph that he saw 60 years ago. There was a little one-column-wide map of Korea showing the 38th parallel and the latest location of the front line, and a photograph of a GI standing in deep snow, wearing his helmet and long poncho, slouched over with his back to a wind-driven rain. After our conversation with Henry and Margaret David searched various websites but haven't been able to find that photograph. Here's one he did find that conveys a little bit of the feeling he remembers having as a 10-year old looking at the newspaper.
When Henry returned to Upper Lake he worked for a while in a sawmill, and then he drove 18-wheelers delivering 50,000 of lumber on each trip from Eureka to Los Angeles.
Now he and his sister live together in their childhood home which has seen better days since Henry is no longer able to keep it up. It sits directly across the street from the boutique hotel we had found on the internet. We had to wonder how long it would take before gentrification overtook Henry and Margaret's family home and their story would be forgotten. On our way out of town the next morning we saw Henry out in front of his house and stopped by to say goodbye. Writing this now, I look at the fresh faces of those local kids and wonder if any of them know the story of their quiet, gentle neighbors on Main Street.