The Mayor of Happy Acres: Helpless: An Elegy to Happy Acres

My brother, Tom, pictured below, wrote a lovely memoir about Happy Acres when he first visited in 1974. In the story he says 1971 but he is mistaken. In his many wonderful stories, he is occasionally "mistaken" about who, how, where, why and when but plods on undaunted. When I call him on some bit of mis-remembered trivia in one of his pieces, his stock response, which I have since adopted for my own writing is: NEVER LET THE TRUTH GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD STORY.
I apologize for the quality of the photo below. I scanned it from the back cover of my brother's book Shave Ice, published in 1989. My copy of the book, lovingly inscribed within, has been read and re-read; passed around among friends; been lost and finally been found again. Currently the Happy Acres blog contains two of my brother's pieces from this book. I plan on transcribing several more in the near future. Once again, I apologize for the picture. My brother's left ear is not deformed. But my! Wasn't he a handsome devil in 1989. He still beats me by a mile in the looks department.

Here's what I looked like a short time before I moved into Happy Acres

There is a place in North Ontario with dream comfort memory to spare; And in my mind I still need a place to go; all my changes are there.

Neil Young

“Helpless”

In the spring of 1971, when I first saw it, the old homestead on West California avenue was hip and funky.

Wood smoke drifted from its stone chimney. Guitars played on the back porch. Horses grazed on a sunny, three-acre slope dotted with wildflowers. A lime-green VW bus occupied the lone legal parking spot.

Wiping my feet on the entry mat, I glanced up. An ornate wooden cuckoo clock sat in a cobwebbed notch above the door, its frozen hands suggesting time not be taken too seriously.

“Welcome to Happy Acres!” my brother Mike sang out, wrapping me in a big bear hug. “Mi casa es su casa.” Of course, it wasn’t really his casa—Mike rented it from the family that had first homesteaded the place back in the 1930s. But it felt like his.

Parking my bag beside an old black piano, I followed him into the pine-paneled living room and noticed the first of many structural tics: The oak floor sagged gently down and to the left. This tweaked everything else just slightly out of square—windows, bookcases, doorframes—and gave the place a Dali-esque tilt well suited to its era and occupants.

On that first visit—as on many subsequent ones—a party was just roaring to life as I arrived. With the great stone fireplace crackling at their backs, glossy-haired young women in granny dresses knelt by a trunk full of record albums, riffling through Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, and Jefferson Airplane. Late sun slanting through redwood trees set rubies of light dancing in their wine glasses.

On a chunky butcher-block table in the crowded kitchen, crisp vegetables from the garden sat in wire baskets, waiting to be diced into salads, sliced into stews, broiled beside chickens. Beyond the kitchen, late arrivals clumped down the hallway to offload parkas, instrument cases and amplifiers in the music room. From the wall, tippy portraits of bygone ancestor’s looked down disapprovingly.

In a back yard reached by a rickety outdoor stairwell, coals glowed in barbecues, and a cord of fresh-split bay wood scented the air. As the first stars sparked the azure sky, strings of Chinese lanterns sprang to life in the plum trees, casting multicolored light onto the sparse lawn below. There, bearded guys in cowboy boots and fringed jackets discussed the music business, world travels, the war.

As a reluctant member of the U.S. war machine at the time, I ended up on the conversational fringe. Gazing out over the twilit pasture, I heard horses nickering in their barn, oak trees creaking in the wind, an owl hooting in a eucalyptus tree high overhead.

Through redwood branches, a vee-shaped slice of San Francisco shimmered in the distance like a rhinestone pizza. And at vision’s edge, the Golden Gate Bridge chilled its lobster-red towers in a dry ice fog.

That was my first visit to Happy Acres. Of the party that roared on through the night, of the music played and sung, of the laughing faces passed in corridors, stairwells, smoky rooms, I remember little. It was one night among many, 30 years ago.

As those years passed, the antique cuckoo clock above the door saw many changes. Journeys and relationships began and ended in that house, trophies and keepsakes gathered dust there, fortunes grew and dwindled.

A parade of tenants came and went. The horses changed color. The garden cycled from fallow to fruitful to fallow again. The redwoods filled in, and the glittering slice of San Francisco vanished.

The clock also witnessed many cuckoo moneymaking schemes: rental yurts, the baby salad green farm, the music studio in the garage, the shiitake mushrooms in the basement. Aquaculture made a splashy debut, and windrows of “designer compost” girdled the garden. Everything produced, if not wealth, a priceless treasury of laughter and tall tales.

Then, Sunday morning, the phone rang. My brother’s voice was funereal. “It’s over,” he said. “The owners have decided to sell.”

I reminded him of the 30 years of good times and low rent, but he would not be consoled. Time had stood still beneath the cuckoo clock, but not in the neighborhood. Gradually, yuppies supplanted hippies, BMWs overtook VW buses, and sleek “dot-com” mansions displaced rustic redwood cabins with abalone shells nailed to the walls.

Anybody who has lost an “old home place” to development knows the story. It’s just progress. It always hurts.

Now this place too is gone. But in our minds, as Neil Young sang, we still need a place to go. All our changes were there.

Tom Stevens for the Maui News, 2001

Luckily for us "Happy Acre-ites", the county zoning commission, which had caused the trouble prompting the landlord to consider selling the property, went on its mischievous way to bedevil some other poor soul.

The Mayor of Happy Acres Heading to His Garden circa 1992