On the Back Roads (16 page)

It was nine miles to a place called Surf, which is little more than a railroad crossing. Fog was heavy. I parked, pulled on a jacket, and walked across the hard sand to the very edge of the American continent.

The surf rolled out an unbroken uproar like a waferfall, not an intermittent crash, as you might expect. I walked to a fence that closed off Vandenberg to the public. All this beachfront belongs to the Air Force. Seagulls hung in the air like satellites. They were watching me, I think. It's always curious when nature looks back.

Were it not for the defense needs of our country, this beach would surely be lined with high-rise condominiums and restaurants draped with fishnets and colored lanterns. Besides saving the world from a few disasters, our military has quietly preserved a piece of this Pacific frontier for generations to
come. Obviously, it is not the Air Force's mission to be a land conservator. They get the job by default, and they do it well by just maintaining the fence.

Leaving the beach, I drove through a curtain of fog. The sun and Lompoc lay on the other side. This town is not a saltwater tourist mecca like the others tied to it by Highway 1. I don't suppose even a Snoopy beach towel is sold here, nor the knickknacks you buy a third cousin who is getting married. Lompoc appears focused on its own people, not those who come in off the highway. That was good enough for me. I decided to stay.

I stopped at the open-air farmers' market, a once-a-week occurrence at Ocean and I Streets. Vegetable shoppers clustered around the stands, shaded by umbrellas. Behind them, like a colorful stage prop, was a huge mural with sweeping waves of blues, reds, greens, and browns. It adorned the side of a building and took up half a block. Even an open door in the mural did not create a significant void in the picture. It was that big.

The Lompoc Murals Project began in 1988 and probably will go on forever. It now numbers twenty works of art on buildings around town, depicting events in local history. I found ten of them, all within five minutes of where I parked my motor home. One alley is a two-walled, outdoor art gallery. The subjects ranged from people to porpoises.

I settled at the town's RV park next to the Santa Yenz River. There is no water in it, but a sign still warns of sudden flooding. Guess it could happen here, too, but not tonight.

The next morning, fog off the ocean made the day look chillier then it really was. Although the people in Lompoc can't see the ocean, their weather is controlled by it. An average high in July is seventy-one degrees; in January, it is sixty-four degrees.

This marine influence, with days beginning and ending in moisture-laden fog, has made the Lompoc Valley ideal for growing flowers. It has been the sole crop here for most of this century.

Darrel Schuyler has been here the whole time. “I am a third-generation farmer,” Darrel said. “We grow flowers for seeds, not for funerals and things like that. But much of that seed production has now moved to Chile and China. The hottest crop here now is asparagus.” I met Darrel in the Hi Restaurant, where he and a group of guys gather for coffee most mornings.

Every town has a place like the Hi. If one group activity remains exclusively male in this increasingly unisex world, it happens every morning in small-town America around Formica tables. Like an all-night poker game, the composition of the table changes one at a time.

“It takes two years to get a crop of asparagus,” Darrel continued. “They cut it by hand and wrap it in a wet blotter that feeds it going to the market. And ya know where that market is, don't ya? It's Japan.”

Then he told me just how hard it is to grow seedless-watermelon seeds. “It's so tough, they sell for $1,500 a pound.” “You mean a ton?” I was sure one of us had it wrong.

“No, a pound. That's about a quart jar full.”

Before I could further pursue this question, we got sidetracked saying good-bye to the judge, who was leaving for court. Everyone was very courteous to the judge, the only man in the restaurant wearing a tie.

The fellow across the table changed the subject to diatomaceous earth. He mined it, which involves scraping it off the sides of mountains.

“It's used in filters. They call it diatomite. It's really a few million layers of a few million years worth of dead marine life, like crustaceans and algae,” the miner explained. “Out of here, most of it goes to the brewing industry, but you see it too in swimming-pool filters.”

The Lompoc Valley is the world's largest producer of diatomaceous earth. Obviously, this was ocean bottom eons ago. In spite of baking in the sun since then, the material is still 50 percent water, which is cooked out when it is processed.

Darrel drifted somewhere. I never got a chance to talk with him again. The price of seedless-watermelon seeds still hounded me. I wanted to get it right. I spent the rest of the day working at it. My search led me all over town.

I drew a blank at the chamber of commerce. They made some phone calls, tried to help, but couldn't. I asked a lady at a plant nursery. She thought I was nuts, but referred me to the Bodger Seeds Company at the edge of town. They only know about flower seeds, and they showed me multiple bags of those. I even called the Santa Barbara County Growers Association. Their answer: “We don't grow melons in this county.”

As a last resort, I logged on the Internet and tied into the Froese Seed Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Kathleen Froese wrote me that she sells seedless-watermelon seeds for 11 or 12 cents apiece to truck farmers. By the pound, they can run as high as $1,500, Kathleen wrote, but she sells them retail for about $750.

Glad that's over!

I
n a town known for ranching and a great recipe for pea soup, Buellton's Avenue of the Flags appears as a magnificent boulevard waiting for a city. With four lanes in each direction—two for driving, two for parking, and room for six more in a grassy meridian—it's a lavish main street for a town of 4,000 people, even in Cali forma. Each block has its own floodlit flagpole, from which the American flag is never lowered. On a summer day, the vehicle count on the avenue averages around thirty an hour. That's a mere trickle compared to what it once was.

“‘No way!' we told ‘em. That was the first time, in 1948. They wanted to move the highway out of town so they could make it wider. Well, the highway was the town. We lived off it. In those days, Highway 101 was the direct route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This was the first natural stop for those out of LA and the second stop for those coming south. We had eleven gas stations and a big sign: Welcome to Servicetown, USA.”

Jack Mendenhall pulled a pen from the pocket of his plaid shirt and roughed out a map on a paper napkin. We sat in Mother Hubbard's Coffee Shop, on the Avenue of the Flags,
and are well into our third cup of coffee. A lady who overfilled the chair at the table next to us was spooning up the remains of her biscuits and gravy. Her tight wristwatch had almost disappeared around her beefy arm. She chided us for drinking so much coffee. “Bad for your heart and vessels,” she scolded us with a Texas accent.

“Buellton is 150 miles from LA,” Jack goes on. “That's about as far as a guy drove in a day. The road was two lanes, full of curves. The cars were slow.”

Jack savored a special memory.

“When I started pumping gas, and I mean we literally pumped it, it was five gallons for a buck, including tax. Remember the old visual gas pumps? At night they were a thing of beauty.”

A visual gas pump had a cylindrical, glass tank on top. The tank ususally held ten gallons. An attendant pumped gas into the tank by hand. Gallon markers on the tank showed the customer exactly how much gas he or she got and what color it was. Some was blue-green or orange. Ethyl was usually red.

“Light from the globe on top would streak into the glass tank and filter through the gasoline, making the whole tank glow, almost shimmer. As the gasoline went out, air bubbled up through it. The bubbles were clear as crystal in a sea of orange or whatever. Who remembers that? Darn few, I'll bet.”

I learned later that Jack is a collector of the old visual gas pumps and their colorful, lighted glass crowns. At age sixty-seven, he is also a race-car driver. He's done 219 miles per hour at Bonneville Flats.

I tapped on the map-napkin. “So, what happened in ‘48?”

“Well,” Jack leaned back in his chair. “the businesses along the highway agreed to move their buildings back, at their expense, so the state could widen the road. What's more, they gave the state the land to do it. Pretty generous, eh? That worked fine until 1962. Then the state proclaimed that 101 was to be a divided highway and that it would bypass Buellton. We said, ‘But you owe us from last time.' We wanted three interchanges into town and the old highway
turned into a parkway, grass and all. They agreed, surprisingly. Later, we put up the flagpoles.”

There is one tree on the parkway. It's a mature pine, about two stories tall. It was cut fresh from the nearby hills for the Christmas tree in 1970. They stuck it in the ground and wired it down as in years past. It was Jack's job, since he then owned the tow trucks in town, to lift the tree out and dispose of it after Christmas. He claims he forgot or got busy. By the time he got to it, the tree had sprouted new growth and apparently had taken root. It still stands where they stuck it in 1970. It is Buellton's perennial Christmas tree.

Slick travel brochures—the kind that overflow showy racks in tourist centers—call Buellton “the Gateway to the Santa Ynez Valley.”

White wooden fences embroider pastures of prosperous cattle ranches and horse farms in the Santa Ynez Valley. The fields create a patch-work-quilt effect in the rolling hills of oak and eucalyptus. Carefully tended citrus groves and vine yards add a mix of pattern and color. Tucked away in the valley are three little towns, a lake, and seven wineries open for tours and tasting. The valley oozes with rural charm and is increasingly a retreat for the Los Angeles crowd seeking serenity and sanity. A few entertainment celebrities call it home. An ex-president did, too, until a few years ago.

The valley also has Solvang, a Danish community of about 5,000 residents that draws nearly that many tourists every day. They come to stroll through Old-World ambiance, to eat aebleskiver—a globe-shaped Danish pancake—and to buy rare, handmade items ranging from furniture to toys.

That Buellton is the valley's gateway is a geographic fact. But it is more than just a drive-through to Danish pastry and wine country. Aside from having a main street that could double as a golf course, Buellton is the home of California's most famous roadside restaurant. It dates to 1924, when two young immigrants arrived here with little more than a dream and Juliette Andersen's recipe for pea soup.

In those days, it wasn't vehicle count or competition that dictated where to locate an eatery for travelers, it was how
many driving-hours since the last one. The ranch town of Buellton was perfect, the first natural stop,” as Jack said.

Electricity came to the valley about the same time the Andersens did. Anton, who had been a chef in Denmark and New York, was so proud of his electric stove that he named his restaurant after it: Andersen's Electric Café. Within a few years, electric cafés were as common as the name Andersen. So, Anton hung a new name on his place when he added a twenty-room inn: Buellton Hoi el Café. In 1939, the name evolved to Andersen's Valley Inn.

Although he had built his business on his wife's pea soup, Andersen had not yet hit on a catchy name that sported his café's specialty. But his friends had. Around town, Andersen—always seen in a white shirt and tie—was known as “Pea Soup.” His café became Pea Soup Andersen's. Whether he made the decision or others made it for him doesn't matter. The name changed in 1947. Anyone who travels highway 101 today knows it. Marketing genius or chance, the restaurant's name and the pea soup it dishes out bring in over a million and a half tourists a year to Buellton.

Although Juliette and Anton are long gone, Pea Soup Andersen's is still where it has always been, Although it has changed owners a couple of times. It's twice its original size but still serves the same thick, green soup for $3.95, all you can eat.

“How much is that?” I asked to former manager Jimmy Sanchez.

“The record is eighteen bowls,” Jimmy replied. “The man who set that record came back once when I was a waiter. He could only handle thirteen then.”

On a good day, Andersen's sells 500 to 600 gallons of pea soup. That is more than all the servings of wine, beer, coffee, and soft drinks combined.

Jimmy's fat her, Joe Sanchez, is the head chef. He started with Andersen's thirty-one years ago, five years before Jimmy was born. Joe and his kitchen crew make the soup the day before it is served, allowing it to simmer all night in
eighty-gallon vats. “Carrots, celery, peas, and seasoning. That's all that's in it,” Joe explained.

That simple recipe of Juliette's and the town's around-the-clock commitment to the traveling, put Buellton on the map long before the Santa Yenz Valiey began luring tourists with wine, tranquillity, and a piece of old Denmark. It was at least a quarter century After Andersen dished up his millionth bowl of green soup and Mendenhall pumped his millionth gallon of orange gasoline that the trendy valley even had a need for a “gateway.”

Now they pass off old Servicetown USA, as a mere point of entry, a drive-by window. Another facade is fabricated. Tourists revel in it. We who journey through do our best to under stand it.

I
t is a semiannual ritual, my returning home to off-load clothes of the season past and to take on those appropriate for the next one. But this visit marked a milestone: I have been rummaging around the country now for two years, 28,000 miles alone in a motorized condo.