He Told Me About the Railroad, and Plans to Build More Track

On my last night in Northern California, I stayed in the town of Ukiah, population 14,000. I met a man there who told me he was a retired professional rock and roll guitarist. With that introduction, Hal Wagonet shared what people have been talking about over coffee during the past few months in Mendocino County.  I often ask this question when I travel–I like to get  a sense of the zeitgeist, what’s on people’s minds, and to define the the local buzz.

Hal began by giving a little bit of history which is representative of this whole region….his father was a logger and he too has spent time earning a living running sawmills. This is the industry that fell to its knees after a series of market drops and a steep decline in available redwood.  Hal cited a scene photographed by National Geographic in the late 1940s as the beginning of the end, where the devastation of the forest as a result of logging turned the public against it.

So just like in Fort Bragg, this area is no longer a logging center, and now tourism has risen to provide nearly as much revenue as the illegal growing of marijuana.  That’s an issue that has people all over the state talking…a proposition to legalize pot use and allow people to grow their own weed. You either can believe that the taxes will help the ailing economy and put back some of the  drastic cuts, or you think as one wine maker told me, “why should we be the only ones who have to pay taxes? Tax them too!”

But he stressed that water was a far more crucial long-term problem that also gets talked about out here. The wooden water tanks I saw in Mendocino looked a bit like the ones atop most New York City skyscrapers, just right down next to the ground.  The water battles were put into detail a bit, he said Mendo only owns 12% of a dam right in Mendo because their citizens didn’t pay up. So Sonoma which did, gets an 82% share, keeping much more water and limiting growth. But for many Mendos that is a good thing.

There is a railroad that serves the town of Willits, where Hal lives, he told me about it and plans to grow the Skunk Train service to get people from Fort Bragg on the craggy coast inland to Willits and then let people hook up to existing north/south train routes. Brilliant!  Hal is very enthusiastic about these topics, sharing that he’s been a county supervisor, so he has an understanding of what it’s like to govern by committee. Hard. He won, served, then ran again and lost.  But now he’s a member of many other boards and promotes tourism for the county.

But back to that issue about the illegal pot. It brings in $1.5 billion to Mendo and the surrounding counties per year. That’s WAY too much money to leave untaxed. So it’s moved from being as it is in most of the US, arrestable and a big hassle, or, here, not something anyone cares about. It’s been nearly legalized, God bless the people out here.   Hal added that Mendocino county has the nation’s highest percentage of artists living in it.