I arrived in northern California for an annual meeting of the Eschen clan, relatives of my father’s grandfather who started a stevedore and ballast business, Eschen and Minor, in 1891. My family members and I convened in Sacramento because we were going on a field trip to the Port of Stockton, an hour away, where the firm that bought the family enterprise decades ago now has operations.
En route to Sacramento, I cruised along State Route 16, a two-lane road running along Cache Creek between the Blue Ridge and the Capay Hills. Live and valley oak, alder, and cottonwood trees, dry golden grasses, groves of almonds, walnuts, and olives, and farm stands selling nectarines, peaches, apricots, and cherries filled the landscape. I’d just visited one of my closest friends from the University of California Davis, Dru. After college, she and her husband founded Full Belly Farm, a four-hundred acre certified-organic farm with over eighty employees and an equal number of crops. Dru and I had, among other escapades, rafted down the Stanislaus, Rogue, and American rivers, backpacked in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and built igloos to sleep in on ski mountaineering trips. She turned me into a vegetarian and taught me to cook that way.
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A warm breeze rushed in the car windows. The dry vegetation filled me with that northern California smell. I was home again.
A relative at the meeting asked what my favorite place in the world was. I blurted “Northern California” and “Spain” ―the state where I was born and raised and the country where I live. I haven’t resided in California for over forty years. Why did I feel at home and happy in both?
This trip, without trying, I discovered remnants of Spain that I’d seen in my youth, but I’d never paid attention to. Now, they surrounded me, even the bloody, cruel, and violent parts of Spain’s colonization of the territory’s Native Americans.
The day’s destination, Sacramento, means “sacrament.” The name comes from the Spanish explorers who visited the valley beginning around 1542 when the first European explorer sent on behalf of the Spanish government arrived in California. None considered the area valuable until 1808 when a Spanish explorer christened the valley and river “Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ.” Still, the place remained undeveloped until the arrival of pioneer, settler, and colonizer John Sutter in 1839 at the beginning of the Gold Rush. Miners and explorers from all parts of the world flooded to California. With this activity came a plethora of ships into the harbor that needed to be unloaded and ballasted to send gold and goods all over the world. This enabled my Danish ancestors to found a stevedore and ballast company.
Sutter features in my childhood memories more than Sacramento, once an agricultural and trading post named after him and now the state capital. My parents took us on road trips to the Mother Lode country in the Sacramento valley and foothills. My father would pull the station wagon into one of those tourist traps that let kids look for gold. My brother, sister, and I got a pan, bucket, and shovel and plunked ourselves down at the bank of the American River to try our luck.
After the Eschen and Company trip to Stockton, I drove an hour and a half south to Sonoma County to the home of friends Kate and Craig. Kate, Dru, and I had shared a house at UC Davis as well as wilderness adventures. In Sonoma, we visited Mission San Francisco de Solano, the last of the twenty-one missions the Spanish Franciscans had built from San Diego to Sonoma in the 18th and early 19th centuries. They placed them along El Camino Real (the Royal Highway), aka Highway 101, the main thoroughfare of my child- and adulthood drives to my parents’ home and anywhere I wanted to go. The fathers placed a mission every thirty miles, a day’s journey on horseback, to connect missions, towns, and forts.
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On July 1, 1769, Junipero Serra raised the cross over the first mission in Alta (Upper) California, now San Diego. The Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican fathers used the missions to convert Native Americans to Christianity. The Spanish royalty wanted them “civilized” to make way for Spanish settlers colonizing California. To turn them into their countrymen, the fathers taught them farming, carpentry, weaving, pottery making, tanning, and their language. They also showed them how to ranch and herd stock animals.
In fourth grade, I studied California history, including the missions. My takeaway lesson had nothing to do with the missions. My friend Beth (whom I wrote about in two prior Snippets) and I got in over our heads doing an assignment to create something from the California rancho and mission days. We began to piece together in the driveway a wooden cart that donkeys pulled. It was three or four feet long. As the afternoon and night dragged on, the wheels, handle, and slats proved too complicated for us. Giving up, we went to bed. The next morning, we found my father had finished the contraption for us. More than rancho life, I understood my father’s generosity and dedication to his children.
Driving south on 101 to San Rafael to visit my mother’s boyfriend, who just turned 101 and still lives alone, I visited the second to last mission built. Constructed in 1817, the priests named it after San Rafael el Arcángel, the angel of bodily healing. The Spaniards founded this mission to assist the one in San Francisco by providing care to northern California Native Americans who became ill from working in the cold, foggy, and wet San Francisco climate. Within in a year, three hundred Indigenous people lived there.
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My last stop took me just across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Presidio where I visited a friend, Ann. For the hundreds of times, I’d driven by this expanse of old military buildings on the way to San Francisco, the airport, or my parents’ house, its Spanish origins had never sunk in. Instead, while headed north, the landmark Presidio meant we just had to cross the bridge and we’d shortly be home.
Only on this trip did I pay attention. A Spanish lieutenant-colonel Juan Bautista de Anza led a Franciscan priest, 193 colonists and soldiers, and 1,000 head of livestock from Sonora, Mexico to the San Francisco Bay to establish in 1776 El Presidio de San Francisco, a military garrison for the Spanish empire. The settlers were mixed Spanish and Indigenous after more than 250 years of intermarriage since Spain conquered Mexico in the 16th century.
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This small, adobe post grew in size and import as it became American, eventually playing a role in the Civil War, skirmishes against the Modoc and Apache Indians, a base for expansion into the Pacific, the 1898 Spanish-American War, World War II, and the Nike missile defense system. This Spanish fort now houses the Officers’ Club, a gathering place for Army service people and their families.
I grew up with the names of San Rafael, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, and others but took for granted their meaning in the state’s history. They and their origins have always been a part of me. Maybe this familiarity has made it easier to adjust to living in Spain, like one phase of life branching to another or sharing roots. Spain will never replace California as my homeland, but I can better appreciate how one led to the other on life’s continuum.
I really enjoyed how you wove together your recent visit, the Spanish history of the state and your memories of activities growing up in our beloved Northern California. It is so interesting how we layer the history and deeper meanings of our home place after learning about their context from living away. And as much as I enjoy the anecdotes you do keep sneaking that history in! 😉 Thanks for taking us along on this wonderful description of our home state!
Andrea, my first read of the day! I love your writing style. You weave so many layers together.