Fifty years ago this year, California’s drought of 1976 was so severe that we in the burbs kept buckets in the shower to use the run-off to water our lawns and load our squirt guns.
A neighbor had a sign in their bathroom that read, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” This was read to me by an older child since I had yet to learn how to read. I was only four years old—it would be an entire year before the fledgling literacy of kindergarten, let alone Star Wars. I was still processing that my one-year-old brother was going to remain a feature of our household.
Besides epochal moments like the release of Kiss’ Destroyer album and Rocky, 1976 also saw the so-called Judgment of Paris, the now-mythic blind tasting in which California wines bested the French on their own turf, 50 years ago this week.
This triumph permanently altered our area’s self-concept as the phrase “Wine Country” metastasized into a billion-dollar marketing concept enveloping what we used to call the Redwood Empire. Coupled with the publication of Serial, originally in Weekly’s own Pacific Sun, and the enduring mythos of a hedonic, hot-tubbing, bastion of primal screaming, affluence across the Golden Gate was complete. The idyllic environs of the North Bay began their journey to becoming a global lifestyle brand. And the cultural aftershocks are still unfolding.
1976 was a heady year—our nation’s bicentennial year, no less—but another local event occurred that, though not as seismic and certainly not as remunerative, stood a chance at becoming as defining.
For 14 days during the late summer of 1976, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude draped 24.5 miles of white nylon fencing across Sonoma and Marin counties. Beginning inland near Penngrove, rolling through Valley Ford and descending into the Pacific Ocean near Bodega Bay, the project reportedly cost millions, required years of lawsuits and negotiations and looked, depending on one’s perspective, either transcendent or like the world’s largest shower curtain.
The Running Fence was art for art’s sake. And in hindsight, it was oddly predictive of the North Bay to come: beautiful, ephemeral, controversial, photogenic and capturing ongoing quandaries about land use and local commerce. It was the first great Instagram backdrop of Wine Country. Simpler times.
In 1976, the North Bay stood at the threshold of reinvention. The drought dried things out. The wine made the region intoxicating to the wider world. And the Running Fence stretched across the hills like a giant white ribbon wrapping the future into a bow.
Fifty years on, we are still sorting out what exactly arrived inside the package: prosperity, pretense, beauty, displacement, better restaurants, impossible housing costs and oceans of pinot noir. The North Bay became a place where counterculture evolved into luxury culture—at least for some.
Still, I find something heartening in the sheer audacity of that era. People here believed they could reinvent industries and identities, and much of what followed was strange, lucrative and occasionally ridiculous. But it was also imaginative. Since then, the North Bay has spent half a century trying to decide whether it’s a community or a commodity. What we become for the next 50 years, we’re choosing now. It doesn’t have to be a blind tasting.
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