A Tale of Two Valleys
Chapter One
THE DENSE, DOGGED TRAFFIC persisted across the Golden Gate Bridge and all through the Marin County suburbs. The freeway's congestion continued for a twenty-mile stretch. Then, as a city dweller, I felt a quiet thrill and a sense of anticipation to see "Sonoma" in reflective letters on the green sign suspended over the roadway. Few place names held a sense of promise in their very sound, the way they did to Proust's narrator as he surveyed a map, but "Sonoma" was one.
The word worked like an incantation, for as I turned off of Highway 101 and swung sharply eastward, the trappings of suburban sprawl disappeared almost instantly. The motels and fast-food drive-throughs and office parks and housing tracts were suddenly banished. There were open fields on either side of the road. It began to feel like the country, but the remnants of modernity were still too near to be certain. A first-time visitor wouldn't be sure whether this was just an anomalous patch that somehow had defied development but would soon give way to the pervasive concrete and neon of homogenous civilization.
Then came the real portal to a radically different place and cul ... read full excerpt from: A Tale of Two Valleys ebook
