About once a week at our house we have a choice to make: which
farmers market to go to ‹ Sebastopol, Healdsburg or Windsor?
It¹s tough. Each one¹s appeal depends on more than just
wonderful fresh organic veggies. The markets have their own
ambiance, offering a separate mix of expectations, synergies and
peripheral entertainments.
In the mood for a West County exhibit of woo-woo rasta
yarn-heads dancing with feral children to insufferably earnest folk
music? Can¹t beat the Sebastopol plaza on a Sunday morning.
Want a chic vegetable boutique where the women wander around
looking like models in a Smith and Hawken catalog? Go to
Healdsburg. You can wear your tasseled loafers.
Or maybe you¹re yearning for onions on card tables in a somewhat
artificial old town atmosphere that feels like you¹ve wandered onto
the set of a Steven Spielberg movie. Windsor awaits.
³It all depends,² said a farmers market regular, when asked how
he decides which one. ³Healdsburg, it¹s like a certain package,
farmers market, dog park, Downtown Bakery & Creamery.²
Likewise, Sebastopol has the adjacent Whole Foods Market,
citadel of nutritiousness, and the promise of a walk in the Laguna
park, which you¹re likely to have all to yourself.
My wife is the savvy shopper when we go to the farmers market. I
tag along like a visiting anthropologist studying the native
customs.
Windsor has been our destination lately. We go to the market at
the Town Green and explore all the new shops and restaurants that
seem to have opened about five minutes ago. Truc Linh is a terrific
Vietnamese cafe where you can sit outside with your dog, drink iced
coffee and watch the world go by. Windsor has its own quirky
sociology because it¹s such a homogenous freeway suburb, a place
that had no there there but now suddenly boasts a new instant old
town that conveys a fascinating mix of optimism and fakery. Has
this been said elsewhere about the architecture of the new
urbanism? There are hilarious ironies and disappointments. The
faux-antique facades beckon, make you want to walk around and
explore and imagine yourself living in an upstairs apartment close
to restaurants and shops and a view of the village green ‹ but the
concept can be derailed when you come upon a strange surreal
alleyway of concrete and white garage doors, a grid of utilitarian
inhospitality where no one goes for any purpose except to get into
a car. The new urbanism¹s blend of residential and retail is
supposed to be the antidote to urban sprawl, but they haven¹t done
away with the car? Wasn¹t that sort of the whole point?
A question that arises when you¹re at the Sebastopol Farmers
Market is why the singers are so annoying. The music is loud and
the songs sound comically absurd, like a fusion of ³Spinal Tap² and
³A Mighty Wind.²
But no one else seems to mind. Sebastopol¹s market is a reminder
that West Sonoma County seems to have been invented by Harry
Shearer.
For sneering at fashion statements, Sebastopol is usually the
best . ³It¹s amazing,² my wife said one Sunday in the plaza, ³how
many humble peasants live in Sebastopol.²
We went to Healdsburg for dinner one night with our friends R.
and C. who were up from the city. We¹d planned to eat at Willi¹s
Seafood & Raw Bar but it was closed so we walked around
discussing plan B. Manzanita? Barndiva? That restaurant was also
closed on a Tuesday in the summer in a town full of people carrying
disposable income. We wandered into the town plaza where a rapt
audience in folding chairs sat listening to jazz played by
musicians under the gazebo. We hadn¹t anticipated the farmers
market. It was set up on two sides of the Plaza along the sidewalk
and it was crowded with people who were dressed like summer
vacationers in shorts, print shirts and straw hats. It all had the
feeling of staginess, but it was an exuberant staginess, a
posturing that at its center expressed an ideal, a vision of a town
market experience seldom (if ever) commonplace in suburban
California. Clearly people were longing for something they knew
could happen, and did happen elsewhere, as in Mexican towns, for
example, everyday, albeit in a more primitive, rustic and
poverty-tinged context: A bazaar full of life ‹ is there anything
so magnetic? I thought of the incredibly busy, diverse and
mysterious outdoor mercado we used to explore in Antigua in
Guatemala. I thought of the old Maxwell Street market in Chicago in
the 1970s where you could buy things like a pound of black pepper
corns for about ten cents and black guys played blues and just
walking around there made you feel unusually lucky to be alive.
I don¹t know how revolutionary it is that the farmers market
vendors do sell really good garlic and basil and big red ripe
tomatoes that seem to promise, just by the look of them, much more
than we¹ve come to expect from a tomato sold in a Safeway. Maybe
it¹s the direct sunlight bouncing off their red skins. Maybe it¹s
the closeness of shoppers and vendors standing there behind their
displays. The farmers market won¹t replace the supermarket but it¹s
a marvelous alternative when it reaches a certain critical mass as
it does in Healdsburg on a summer night. It feels like something we
dreamed about in the 1960s, a simpler way of life and commerce that
hippies could envision but could not articulate, let alone bring
off.
Unignorable was how many of us at the Healdsburg Plaza were of
that generation, now pushing 60 or just past it, grey hair and
stubble, still wandering around looking for the right
restaurant.
We ended up at Bistro Ralph because it was on the plaza and was
open and had a table for four. My wife and I drank champagne and
toasted the satisfaction of having completed our tax return. We
ordered steak and fries and lamb and duck confit and waited for our
meal while R. described his sister¹s battle with alcoholism: falls,
emergency room visits, drunk-driving arrests, tangled phone
conversations, anger, depression and exhaustion all rolled into a
story that was horrible, sad and hilarious in R¹s narrative. I
imagined the whole farmers market, or at least the nearest diners,
all listening in, fascinated and horrified by his account of a
drunken Peninsula millionairess.
