Labor and play

It turns out that not all of us went to the Burning Man Festival after all. Most of us stayed closer to home and thousands more came here for a visit, which made for a very busy Labor Day weekend around Sonoma County.
A few thousand of the beautiful people queued up at Sonoma Wine Weekend at $175 and $500 per head.
Elsewhere, there were great lawn concerts with Motown’s Smokey Robinson at SSU’s Green Center, George Benson at Rodney Strong and New Orleans’ Rebirth Brass Band with our own Dixie Giants at Sonoma Mountain Village. The late summer weekend farmers’ markets in Sebastopol, Windsor and Healdsburg buzzed with excitable vegetable shoppers and conversations about our “commons.”
In other words, there seemed to be lots more play than labor — as it should be.
But Labor Day here also means harvest time, so the back roads were noisy with farm trucks towing clankety grape gondolas, filled with the mid-season pickings from the night before. There was no holiday for the vineyard crews and the winery crush teams.
With the day off, some of us dipped our toes — but no dog noses — in the Russian River. Some of our more weighty politicos and labor leaders turned out for the annual union-sponsored pancake breakfast in Santa Rosa. The crowd at Cloverdale’s Friday Night Live concert with Charlie Musselwhite almost doubled the small town’s official population. Big crowds also turned out for the return of high school football.
The glorious weather, beautiful scenery and the diversity of the gatherings is just another reminder of how wonderful it is to live here. A word for all this comes to mind, even as it is a word we are trying to make extinct due to its overuse. The word is “awesome.”
What was happening where you were? Did you pause, venture out or do some routine labor? Labor Day on Monday was a forced holiday for many, with banks, post offices and most businesses closed. When the daycare center closes for the day, lots of working moms make other plans. We heard about a few neighborhood barbecues, too.
Some very close friends of ours planned to watch the Giants baseball games on TV but turned them off and sat in the dark for a few hours. Very sad. Maybe they should have gone to Burning Man instead, the gathering of 70,000 post-apocalyptic revelers in the remote northern gray desert of Nevada. Reports indicate Sonoma County was well-represented at the purposeless pop-up event.
But, locally speaking, the epicenter of Labor Day was probably Wine Weekend, with 2,500 wine lovers at MacMurray Ranch on Westside Road. Billed as the biggest weekend of the year for Wine Country, some 200 wines and food tastes from 60 local chefs were sampled under a dozen billowy white tents in a pasture where previous owner, actor Fred MacMurray, used to graze prize-winning Aberdeen Angus cattle.
Saturday’s wine showcase, and two companion events at Francis Ford Coppola and Chateau St. Jean wineries, raised $4.5 million for a series of nonprofits, including several local youth eduction programs.
Labor Day, the first official national holiday, is no longer a salute to organized labor unions or the legions of factory, mine and blue collar workers. Now, a day off from work is time away from a computer screen, spreadsheet or a clean office.
Labor Day in our 21st Century is a depiction of how our jobs, economy and national interests have transformed. Men and women used to do the jobs of machines. Then machines did most of the work. Now, fewer and fewer of us ever do any real labor and we look for machines, not to help us work, but to help us play.
This Labor Day holiday has been confusing.
— Rollie Atkinson