COVID Quarantining in Santa Rosa—History 101
I hated history in high school, and when I got to college I took just one course in it (a History of science course), and I only did that in order to meet my “general education” requirements. For decades after I graduated, I never bothered to think about the subject again. Instead, I became an actuary and my focus became the future and what might happen next. Of course to anticipate the future, I had to learn some actuarial science and, in particular, to learn how to understand what historical data was useful and what was not. I am also pretty pragmatic, and so I only focused on what I needed to know about how things used to be in order to evaluate what is and then figure out how it might lead to something that hadn’t happened yet.
The main reason I hated history was that to learn it, and how that history might inform the future I had to agree, if not believe, that what we were told about the past (i.e. what happened and how it happened) was true. For me, that was always a show stopper. I never believed anything my teachers asked me to accept as true, just because it was in the textbook.
In math, I had an easier time of it because whenever I asked my teacher why a given proposition was true, not only was there an explanation I could follow, but if I really didn’t believe their answer, I could look up the proof. Math can provide great comfort because not only is there verifiable truth, but in order to get better at math, you solve problems which, with very few exceptions, have one and only one correct answer
History, on the other hand, at least as it was taught to me, was a story — almost always a deadly boring one– full of names, dates, and “events” that were supposed to lead us to an understanding of how things came to be the way they were. I wasn’t that bothered by the imposition of the late 50’s/early 60’s American lens on the subject – I had been well-indoctrinated by my Cold Warrior father to believe in our country’s exceptionalism and benevolence toward other countries who did not (like the Russians and Chinese) mean us harm, but the whole thing just seemed pointless to me and I could never get over the fact that all I heard was one single interpretation of a set of an incomplete and (to my mind) unreliable set of facts . I knew enough algebra to know that a single equation with even two unknown variables had an infinite number of solutions. My history teachers, however, were singularly uninterested in my algebraic analogy. They just wanted me to memorize the “facts” and reproduce (with appropriate elaborations) the picture they had drawn using just of a few of the lines and colors preserved in libraries and museums.
Like many of my early attitudes in life, my father didn’t like this one – not even a little bit. He used to warn me that “those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it”. To his credit, he believed in primary sources and at too young an age he gave me a worn but beautiful set of Presidential Papers. It was a gift he had picked out especially for me on an antiquing get away weekend that he and my mother took to New England when I was 8, leaving me in the care of my mother’s younger (and much cooler) brother Dick. My dad was pretty excited about his purchase and was crestfallen when I simply said “thank you” and ignored the old books in their ancient green bindings for the rest of my childhood and deep into my adult years.
It took me a long time to realize how stubbornly ignorant I was being by holding onto this attitude toward history, and only after I started collecting old books myself, did I begin to recognize just how fascinating an exploration through the past those books can provide. In fact, many years after I received his gift, having reached a relative secure perch in the corporate world, I took a harder look at the volumes and began to appreciate the beauty of not just the old books he gave me, but of the power they had to illuminate the past. This was especially true of those books whose own history had a story to tell.
As many of you now know, my property burned down earlier this year and with my home, I lost many of my oldest and most treasured books. I considered those books to be windows into the last two centuries (my oldest books were from the early 1800’s) that allowed me to peer through clouded and sometimes cracked glass to see into another world. For me, these books were mini time machines, and in the last 20 years I’ve spent hours and hours with them – generally not reading them cover to cover, but rather holding them and examining them; dipping into them and sampling their contents when the spirit moves me. I savored the writing, the ideas of they expressed, and most of all, I got to know many of these long dead authors through the words they left behind.
I guess that is why I became a writer – through old books, I learned the magic of words and ideas that survive the centuries. In fact, I believe that when a book survives more than 100 years without being
pulped or burned, it has proven its value. As to the Presidential Papers – well, thankfully they still reside safely in the one house I co-own that did not burn down
Ever since I moved here – initially in 2012 on a part time basis, but more permanently after the fires of 2017 – an event that makes you commit one way or the other, Santa Rosa has been where I truly live, and Sonoma County is the place where I feel most at home. My property is in the “unincorporated” part of Santa Rosa, at the headwaters of the Santa Rosa Creek, where the South Pomo tribe of Native Americans lived in harmony with the land and where much drama and history took place after the White Man arrived, first in the form of Missionaries from Spain and later when others claimed the land for their own – sometimes with hard work, sometimes with gold, but far too often with guns and force.
Part of what I love about living in Santa Rosa is that unlike Princeton New Jersey where I grew up, here you can learn about the area’s past by talking to people and listening to their stories – and what stories they are!
In the last few months I’ve listened to many old-timers tell me the stories of what they experienced growing up in this area or what they learned from their families whose roots extend back many years. As far as I can tell, the stories are true but just like writers of history textbooks, there are a lot of missing pieces to fill in. For me that is the essential part of exploring the past. Just like that single equation with several unknown variables – there are innumerable ways to fill in the blanks and have a true expression. However, there are still also infinitely more incorrect solutions to that same equation that are demonstrably false.
It is our lot as human beings to never have enough information to know the full truth, but if we are vigilant and lucky ,we do have a shot at not being taken in by a false narrative. Like my father, I believe in primary sources or as the historians might say “contemporaneous first-hand accounts”.
No mortality table extends beyond age 120, and so it is a fact that no resident of 19th century Santa Rosa is still alive today, but some of the families in town have been here since the Homesteaders arrived in the 1860’s along with many more who arrived when the Homesteaders first sold out – at first only gradually but soon in a rush that began at the end of the 19th Century and lasted until the early 20th .
I speak to as many of these folks as I can find, listen to the stories, many of which were told to them by parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and family friends and then try to form my own picture of what Santa Rosa used to be like and how it became the wonderful town it is today. I try to separate the signal from the noise and by doing so attempt to determine the essential aspects of what happened in this very special spot.
It has been a joyful venture, even in these difficult times, but this weekend, for reasons entirely beyond my control, I was able to go even deeper and consult some of the primary sources themselves to learn more about Santa Rosa and this part of Sonoma County, but first I want to tell you a true and much more recent story about some of the people who are today’s Santa Rosa.