This novel is a fairy tale in the Romantic sense, in that it seeks to explore the possibility of a life more artistic, creative, and humane. As all fairy tales of its class, it is a protest against the mechanisation of life and regimentation of people.
While the impetus of this story came from my own life experience in Idyllwild thirty years ago, the elements in it are suitably (or synchronistically) grounded in the German fin de siecle youth movement (which is the grandfather of the hippie movement) and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which gave the village its first fame in the 1920s. Belden's Pinecraft furniture was first made here, with Belden himself living in nearby Pine Cove. Idyllwild was the site of Craftsman furniture manufacture throughout the 1920s and 30s.
The area was first inhabited by white Europeans in the 1860s. Some were looking for gold. Some, like John Muir, were looking for that ineffable mountaintop experience. Logging began in the mid 1870s and the area was heavily deforested by the turn of the 20th century. There were in 1900 many remaining loggers' cabins, taken up by summer visitors, when the Inn and the Santatorium opened in the first decade of the century. Of the logging tycoons, several families rose to prominence, among them Anton Scherman, for whom Dutch Flat was named, George Hannahs, and Claudius Emerson, foresaw the rapid dead-end of logging and envisaged something else – a resort for city folks. The Hannahses and Emersons were responsible for most of the growth in the village in the 1920s and 30s, and, in the story, the area where George and Claire live in upper Dutch Flat was once part of Hannahs' Mill and later the golf course Emerson founded in the 1920s before the reservoir of Foster Lake was created. The Gregorys' cabin is similiar to one at Fuller's Mill, up in Pinewood, and to the cabin on North Circle Drive in the village, which now serves as the Idyllwild Area Historical Society Museum; both are of the same vintage.
Idyllwild remained a rather remote and sleepy mountain town through the Second World War, when military personnel were among the few visitors, due to wartime travel restrictions, the roaring business of the summer church camps and winter sports of downhill and cross-country skiing reduced to a trickle. But late in the 1940s and early 50s, help came in the two forms which would define the town until this day – the founding of Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, and the coming of the mountaineers.
Max and Beatrice Krone and others founded a summer music and arts programme in upper Strawberry Valley, with such renowned guest teachers as Pete Seeger, Ansel Adams, and Bella Lewitski. This evolved into the West Coast's version of Juilliard, a College Preparatory Music and Arts high school, now known as Idyllwild Arts Academy.
Also in the late 1950s, the Los Angeles branch of the Sierra Club discovered Suicide and Tahquitz, with the latter's world famous Lily Rock, and they declared it a perfect spot for sport climbing, being much more convenient to Los Angeles than Yosemite. They made it their base for rock climbing. In 1966, the great climber Royal Robbins invented what became known as the Yosemite Decimal System of climbing grades on Lily Rock.
In the mid 1970s, there was an influx of hippies to the area, back-to-earth homesteaders seeking a more sane and humane way to live; their presence added the conservationist live-off-the-grid element to this artistic and bible camp community.
In the late 1970s, I was one of those deeply influenced by the back-to-earth movement. I was also a bible camp habitué. My family had many times fished at nearby Lake Hemet, and we passed through the village several times on the way from Banning and Big Bear. But in the winter of 1979 I came up alone to church camp at Camp Maranatha, up the steep and winding 'scenic' hwy 243 in the pitch dark, to stumble, glad as any 19th Century traveller, into the spartan dormitory in 10 degree weather. After a day or two, being an introvert, I went on a hike in the woods above the camp and town, and there, standing in the crystalline woods, looking down on the snow-encrusted village, I had a breathtaking transformative experience; in a flash I saw, whole and clear, how life could be and how I was supposed to be, what I was about. Live off the land in a cabin in the woods in as much self-sufficiency was possible, write, make crafts for the tourist trade. The only part I missed was that it wasn't just anywhere I found myself, but here, for I truly feel at home nowhere more than in the woods, in the mountains, in the high country. Idyllwild is not called a mile-high paradise for nothing, if you love this sort of life.
More or less, I live that life today, though I live in another sleepy village on the San Mateo coast, south of San Francisco. I am an inveterate folkie still, and write and do herbs and make everything from scratch and all the rest. I have a degree in Celtic studies, play and sing folk music and dance at folk festivals, and live the ethic of the Arts and Crafts Movement. But time marches on. It is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this year, and the 30th anniversary of the seminal visit to the San Jacintos Last year, I thought, What if I had lived this sort of life here, what would that be like? What would the townies think? Could you raise kids that way, and what would happen to them if you did? So this story was born, as a thought-experiment, in meditation, as I travelled through the woods of Golden Gate Park to work.
Subsequently, I discovered that I had created 'out of thin air' the iconic Idyllwild experience. Reading the blogs of several townies, they describe living off the grid, and being the only one to bring tofu dogs to their schoolmates' birthday barbecues. These resonances were a beautiful affirmation that it could be done, the life I saw, the 'happily ever after' of the fairy tale.
Some places in this story are very real indeed and here in the village - the Red Kettle, the town hall, the old general store, the co-op - but some are manufactured – Mosey's - there was a pub/eatery back in the day, frequented by musicians, known as the Clam Shack, but it had an, er, unsavoury reputation (no pun intended)... so not to cast aspersions on anyone who played or worked there or can remember it at all, we will quietly bypass this bit of history; the Zen Centre (the genuine article being in nearby Mountain Center) among them. There is a Karma Kagyu Buddhist meditation centre outside of town near Pine Cove, the latest incarnation of one started by the 16th Karmapa in the 1970s.; this is the school of Buddhism that I studied.
The people are mostly taken from those I know (they will recognise themselves here in disguise), but I have had the most uncanny experience of coming face to face with Joe and Maggie Wheeler and Shirley Fossie here in the village. Whether composite or actual, the characters in their incarnation here represent the true community spirit and way of life here.
Idyllwild, as Robert Smith has written, is a town 50 years in the past, in a pre-World War Two ambiance of no chain stores or franchises except the gas stations. It has changed remarkably little in the last 30 years, unlike Hemet or Palm Springs, which were also once small resort communities. It retains its integral, conservationist community spirit. May it ever be so.
May the circle be unbroken.
Kelly Joyce Neff
Idyllwild, May 2009
