EarthThe Calistoga Mud Baths
To Aristotle, the world was made from four elements: fire, earth, water, and air. After a mark-to-market seminar in San Francisco, Nancy and I spent a long weekend in California's wine country, where we indulged ourselves among the elements. So here, courtesy of a little artistic license, our trip to wine country as classified by Aristotle.
EarthAs usual for these wine country trips, we started our Saturday morning with mud baths. By now we have the routine down, but for maximum panic attack, none have compared with our first experience. Set your wayback machine for ... summer, 1984.
As part of a three-week vacation along the upper west coast (Seattle to San Francisco and back), David and Nancy visited our quirky witty friends Bill and Eve Rumpf. That Saturday afternoon we drove up through Sonoma and eventually Calistoga, Bill and Eve exhorting us the whole time that we must take one of the mud baths for which Calistoga is famous (the name is a conflation of California and Saratoga, which in the late nineteenth century was well known as a spa resort).
Arriving late in the day, we quickly discovered that all the baths were booked except the Golden Haven, which advertised mud baths for couples and had just had a two-person session open up. Bill and Eve graciously deferred with a quick marital glance -- oh, good, we can stick the Easterners with it and wimp out ourselves! -- that left Nancy and me standing there, offering up our credit card to the Rashneeshi (or equivalent) who ran the spa. They all wore gauzy white robes and cylindrical, dervish-like white turbans. Women were distinguishable from men because their beards were shorter. They took our credit card imprint and assured us we'd have a wonderful experience "that will get all the toxins out of your body."
So there Nancy and I were, walking down the corridor past small white rooms -- Hitchcockian enough for you yet? -- into a big garage. Cinder block walls, cheap aluminum folding-chair lawn furniture with plastic slats, a recess with two shower heads, two big tubs, and two cinder block coffins, 8x4x2 1/2 feet, filled with dark mud.
Accompanying us was a perky if slightly zaftig seventeen-year-old girl with short black hair, white shorts, a pink sweatshirt, and lime-green flip-flop sandals. "Hi, my name is Kammy," she said sprightly as soon as we were in. "Take your clothes off and I'll be right back."
Nancy looked at me -- is this where he bolts?-- but we had already paid the money, and frugality outweighed modesty. So I shucked, and sat in the chilly plastic folding chair, legs crossed at the knee (ahem), arms crossed on my lap (ahem), until Kammy returned.
Now, the typical prudish American male would like to get into the mud quickly. But it doesn't work that way. Instead you sit your butt at the tub's head, then pivot so that your legs are straddling the sides, and crab-walk a foot or two down the sides of the tub (by now modesty is taking a distant second place to gymnastics, and the thought crosses your mind, It's all giblets and she's seen much worse), finally laying yourself onto the mud. Yes, onto. The mud was heavy and dense, so instead of sinking demurely below the waves, I splatted on it. Kammy leaned over, dug her arms deep into the mud under my butt, emerged with a double armful of the stuff, and dropped it -- splap! -- onto my groin. Several more vigorous excavations and some squishy snuggling finally culminated with me submerged from the neck downward. Then Kammy did the same thing with Nancy. "Okay, I'll be back in fifteen minutes."
The mud was as hot as a very hot tub, and because it is a solid -- well, a mushy solid -- heat travels through it slowly, so the deeper I burrowed, the hotter it got. You can definitely scald yourself, especially on the entry. Hence the crab walk. When I held still, the texture was slippery (think chowder), but if I moved around I felt the pumice-grit. When Kammy returned, sweat was running steadily down my face. "Time to get out!"
Modesty had long since departed the scene as we hauled ourselves up out of the mud. It hung on our bodies in thick sheets that we scraped off with the planes of our hands, but every hairy spot and every orifice was thoroughly gunked up. "In the showers," Kammy said, "and I'll rinse you off." Looking like Creatures from the Black Lagoon, we stood underneath while Kammy hosed the hard-to-reach spots (reminding me, years later, of Harvey Keitel's line from Pulp Fiction, "You've been in county before, haven't you?").
Into our individual mineral bath, big claw-footed white ceramic tub filled with very hot mineral water (and a bubble-bath foam icing) into which had been sprinkled a few eucalyptus leaves, which gave off a cheery aromatic effervescence that first formed as a tickle in the crack of one's cheeks, then slithered up the spinal groove to our necks. After fifteen minutes of soaking Kammy returned and we stepped out, my skin glowing the pinkest it had been since my birth. Kammy draped us toga-style in sheets and we padded wetly down the corridor to one of those little white rooms in which were two pallets, one on each side. She instructed us to lie down, wrapped the sheets around us again, gently pinning our arms, and rolled us burrito-fashion into a thick wool blanket. Then she laid a heavy alpaca blanket atop us up to our necks, folded wet washcloths over our foreheads covering our eyes, and punched the tape player, filling the room with the soothing lobotomized sounds of ultra-mellow Hawaiian New Age slack-key guitar. "I'll be back in a while," Kammy said as she left.
We lay there for a few moments, eyes covered, arms loosely pinned. "David," Nancy said with desperate calm, "If I lose it can you get me out of this?"
"How was it?" a grinning Bill and Eve asked when we got out. "Did you get all your toxins out?"
"Don't you know?" I asked, suddenly suspicious.
"No, we've never done it."
WaterNothing replenishes depleted toxins like wine tasting and Napa and Sonoma have the most user-friendly wine-tasting arrangements in the world (except for Australia, where they'll pour you eleven different wines at ten in the morning and top it off with port). Suitably refreshed after our morning mud baths at Nance's (Nancy had supplemented hers with an hour massage done by Hirani, pronounced Harney according to the guru who had renamed her -- hey, it's California), we headed south along the Silverado Trail to our first tasting.
Once upon a time, Napa was an up-and-coming viticultural area eager to show its wares, but during the Nineties the region has become so famous, its wines so pricey, and its roads so crowded that many of the Napa wineries now create barriers to tasting, such as fees from $2 to $5 or required appointments, and some even close entirely. Rombauer, our first stop (just south of Calistoga), requested appointments, but when we arrived it became clear that this was simply their means of allowing themselves to close the winery whenever they wanted to. (Makes sense when you think about it, if you advertise hours you have to man the desk the entire time, and for a small operation -- some of them have only the family as full-time workers -- that can be a real inconvenience.) I am generally embarrassed to admit that, when out of town on business (and this qualified), I take along a cell phone, but when arranging wine tastings it is a huge amenity, allowing you to call ahead and verify availability.
To taste wine successfully, you need only four things: time, memory, willingness to verbalize, and a wallet. Some wine vendors try to cow their customers into overpaying, with icy sniffs and highfalutin phraseology such as, "a brooding, stubborn wine that, if placated with a few years' cellaring, will reward your patience", but remember, it's your money, you're in charge of the encounter. For the anxious, see Nancy's and my practical but exceedingly personal approach to wine tasting.
Had lunch back in Calistoga at a terrific small restaurant that Hirani had recommended (Wappo's Bar) and tried the chardonnay from a new winery, Pezzi King, which the waitress recommended. In wine country, if it's local, on a foodie restaurant wine list, and unknown, it's likely both good and a bargain. The Pezzi King was delicious and I decided to seek out their Sonoma winery the next day.
Back on the road to Joseph Phelps, one of the best known wineries, famed for its flagship cabernet sauvignons Eisele Vineyard and Insignia (a Bordeaux-style premium blend from several vineyards), in a lovely setting with a Japanese shingle-style winery. We had been hoping for a glider ride that afternoon, but as we emerged from our cars it began first to rain and then to hail -- fortunately, only tiny pea size, but disconcerting nevertheless and certainly not the weather for your maiden voyage.
Our tasting guide, a thirty-ish retired chef from Austin, Texas with a face and body softened by baby fat that might get serious in a year or two, settled us around Phelps' large expensive wooden tasting table and then poured four wines for us. The first two were a kind of test -- will they be blunt enough to say they dislike them, or will they nod politely? -- but then he rewarded us with a mature Eisele (1983, very tasty but they needed to move it) and the current release of Insignia (thick, chewy), at which I earned small concept points by noting it was not ready to drink, and finally a fine dessert wine. (If you've ever had dessert wine and thought it was no good, it's because you had a cheap dessert wine. The good stuff is nectar.)
Phelps is in such demand that, like several other Napa vintners, they sell much of their production via mailing list, but they can only do so in the fourteen states that have reciprocal tax agreements -- for the remaining 36 states, sale of wine through the mails is illegal, a holdover of Prohibition that is now maintained through the zealous lobbying of -- follow the money, grasshopper -- the liquor distributors, who like having a system that mandates a useless middleman. To dramatize this point, the New York Attorney General recently had his nineteen-year-old son call several wineries and order cases through the mail, as if this was a principle cause of teen drinking. ("Hey Bennie, it's Saturday night, let's drop $95 a bottle for a case of Opus One and get shitfaced.")
We had hoped for a glider ride but the day had turned rainy and nasty, so we hit two more wineries that day before returning to our room, where we finished the day (before dinner, that is) by soaking in the heated-mineral-water pool at our motel, Doc Wilkinson's.
The next day we crossed the hills to Sonoma, where I dropped Nancy in Healdsburg and visited Pezzi King and Quivira before collecting her for lunch, after which we went down the Russian River and tasted at Hop Kiln, Rochioli, Davis Bynum, and Martinelli. Upper Sonoma county (the Russian River, Dry Creek, and Alexander Valley) produces just as good wine, is half as crowded, and the wineries are nicer (and free).
Air We'd been advised that glider rides are best early or late in the day, when the thermals are stronger, so we had originally scheduled our ride for Saturday afternoon, but the hail storm nixed that, so we rescheduled (via cell phone while riding around in between wine tastings, how yuppie) for Sunday morning. After our in-room self-serve breakfast (Fiber One and milk, bought two days earlier at the local supermarket, eaten from in-room disposable clear plastic cups using white plastic spoons filched from the supermarket's deli counter, how skinflint -- more tips for practical travelers), we walked across Washington Street to the glider field, on a beautiful cloudless sky, temperature in the mid-fifties, with no wind at all.
A glider is about eighteen feet long, its fuselage about three feet in diameter. The wings are enormous, maybe fifty feet in span, but narrow, about two and a half feet where they join the fuselage, tapering to a foot and a half at the tips. With no engine and minimal controls, the canister is lightweight and thin.
The brochures had advertised rides for one or two people, provided the two people weighed less than 340 pounds combined, and we found out why. The constraint is volume, not weight, and 340 pounds is a convenient euphemism for you're too wide to ride together. Gliders have two seats only, one in front for the pilot, the other in back for ... both of you. The fuselage is about three feet wide (maybe narrower), which means the two passengers are sitting more or less right on top of one another, and if one of the passengers is six foot three, it's a contortion. I had one leg stretched out in a side vacant space under the pilot's seat, the other bent. My left arm was out dead straight, funny bone resting on the bare aluminum window sill, my right arm up and over Nancy's shoulders. Meanwhile, she was unable to get her whole bottom on the seat, so was wedged partly on my thigh, partly on the seat.
Once we were suitably ensconced, and wriggling against one another to get space like kids in the back seat ("Mom, he's touching me!"), our pilot Dennis climbed in, settled himself, and pulled the canopy over our heads -- a single semi-cylinder of clear lexan so we can complete full-sky visibility. The tow plane, a squat little overpowered sky tractor, slowly taxied down the oil-base runway, picking up speed, and by the time the air speed indicator passed fifty mph, our glider was aloft, followed a few seconds later by the tow plane ... and we were up, banking left over the vineyards. Over the next four or five minutes the pilot corkscrewed upwards until we reached about 5,000 feet, and our pilot cut us loose.
Riding up on the tow plane was slightly nerve-wracking, especially when the glider lifts and you realize that between you and several thousand feet of falling is nothing more sturdy than a quarter-inch of sheet metal, but Nancy's heart first went into her mouth on release. Not only was there the intellectual awareness -- uh-oh, we haven't got power any more -- there is also the sudden lift as the glider bobs up (with a better lift ratio than the towline, the glider is actually held down by its tow) and a sudden errp as the glider, now no longer tethered, rolls and yaws itself into the turbulence -- or, as the pilots euphemistically and optimistically describe it, the lift.
Napa is, after all, a valley. When driving, you are only peripherally aware of this, but when you rise in a glider you can not only see the double line of hills (rising to about 1,500 feet) that form it, you can also feel the wind waves that spill over the hills like water running over rapids. Imagine colored streamers as the wind comes over the mountains and visualize the dipping contrails where a glider could perch and surf its way upward. But you fully accept this explanation only after you are back on terra firma and your stomach has turned over a few times in the interim, because the glider, like a horse taking the hurdles, bucks and jags abruptly and (to the passengers, anyhow) randomly, a result that is extraordinarily unsettling, especially with the huge canopy of bright blue sky around you.
Fortunately, Dennis was a peach: about 35, glossy black hair, friendly and laid back and reassuring. A glider is quiet enough -- there is a steady background shoosh akin to riding in a good but not airtight car -- for normal conversation, especially with the sound reflection from the semi-cylindrical canopy. Dennis told us the glide ratio was thirty to one -- for every foot of altitude the glider gives up in level flight, it can cover thirty feet horizontally, an enormous, almost unbelievable ratio when you realize that from where we were, and assuming no lift at all, we could cover thirty miles before touching down. The plane has so much natural lift and air-buoyancy (my term) that it flies nose down most of the time, just as a surfer points the nose of his board down -- in effect, the glider is constantly surfing down a rising column of air, using its speed to generate lift and using the lift to rebuild height. By contrast, virtually all commercial jets fly nose up, even when level -- some of them even land like a duck, butt down, nose up. But that's because they have poor glide ratios like three or four to one, which means that without power they have little maneuverability. Dennis told us of an Air Canada flight a few years ago that had lost power but been landed safely, because "fortunately the pilot was a glider pilot."
Gliding is much like sailing, and for a pilot the air becomes tactile the way it does for a sailor. The aircraft is very responsive and light, as well as having enormous air-buoyancy, and the pilot flies much more with his senses than his instruments -- indeed, Dennis scarcely glanced at them the whole time. Not having to scan his instruments, a glider pilot is always looking around so he sees other aircraft coming (if they do), as well as spying out cumulus clouds that indicate hot air rising (good thermals and thus good lift).
Gliders are slow -- stable airspeed is about 70-80 miles an hour, with a stall speed of about 40 and the top speed of 100 attainable only by pointing the bird almost straight down. The more you think about them, the more comfortable you are, to the point where I now believe Dennis when he said he considered gliders the safest form of aircraft there is -- with a competent pilot, of course, if he has a brain hemorrhage we're in serious trouble -- because so few things can go wrong: no engines to fail, no complex systems to break, no instruments to be misread and confuse the pilot, a fairly constant source of power, and a huge landing area available from that wonderful glide ratio.
Since gliders drive off rising air, they depend on sunlight to heat the air, which means that by definition flights are no longer than sunup to sundown. But within that horizon, a determined glider pilot can stay aloft almost indefinitely and can cover huge distances, navigating from thermal to thermal, spiraling up the thermals to gain height, then coasting down between them to gain distance, converting one to the other. The record is Pennsylvania to Florida and back in a single (very long) day.
For twenty-five minutes we bounced hither and yon, our psyches settling but our stomachs being folded into omelets, when Dennis asked, "You want to go in?" While we were enjoying the flight, it was cramped in the back seat and we had been rolled and yawed sufficiently, so we agreed and he spun the glider gracefully around past the field. "You're going to circle again?" I asked, since we were up so high compared with the runway. "Nope," Dennis replied, and to my astonishment he brought the plane around in a single sweeping curve, pointed its nose down, and brought us down perfectly in line right at the beginning of the runway and touching down delicately as a feather before rolling to a halt to the left, near the rest rooms so we could wash up.
"You may think this is dangerous," Dennis had said at one point during the flight. "You're touring the Napa valley, and at day's end, you're going to be driving home along a two-lane highway with people who've been tasting wine all day, and all that's protecting you is a line of paint."