The Cabin at Dutch Flat
By Mark Miller
(V. 3 2019/06/23)
Some years ago, when I was a contributing editor of a national travel magazine, I was asked to write a short piece about a favorite place for a special issue devoted to the “50 Best Places in the World.” When I got to thinking about where I’d traveled on assignment, some 40 destinations ranging from the Hawaiian Islands across North America and Europe to Corsica in the Mediterranean, I realized that the place closest to my heart was none of these but instead a shaggy 19th century cottage in the California Gold Country, in a little-known town a three-hour drive northeast of San Francisco.
The little house stood on two acres of wild grass and pine on the outskirts of Dutch Flat, elevation 3,144 feet, population ranging from around 330 to 160 depending upon the season. The cottage, being totally Western Rough in style, was probably closer to most people’s notion of a cabin -- you’d never find anything remotely like it on, say, Martha’s Vineyard. Built in 1851 of rough-sawn redwood beams, wall boards and floor planks – it had two small bedrooms, a screened sleeping porch, and a kitchen amounting to a culinary time capsule circa 1935. The kitchen opened onto a large living room, and owing to the downward slope of the land the whole shebang rested atop an above-ground basement. The basement was a master woodworking shop filled with hand and power tools, tools capable of building the house above or for that matter just about any wooden home. In the middle of the basement space was a 1923 Crescent Universal Wood-Worker Model 108, a bewilderingly complicated combination band saw, jointer, and tilting-top table saw with the footprint of a mid-size automobile. There was a Yates-American Machine Company table saw built during World War II, along with a router, a wood plane, a drill press and a lathe, all manufactured in the early 20th century in smokestack towns like Beloit, Wisconsin, Lowell, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, and Wyandotte, Michigan. Stacked beneath the lathe were a dozen decorative balusters, the short pillars that support the handrail of a staircase or a porch railing. They perfectly matched the balusters on the cottage’s back terrace; they were made right there. They lay atop an old newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, that when I tried to open it crumbled into what looked like cornflakes. The Chronicle was dated November 12, 1935.
That was about the time the owners added the screened sleeping porch -- they had kept a diary of the cottage since the 1920s, a leatherbound notebook in which they recorded repairs and improvements, minor catastrophes (“7/14/51 Stove fire, put out”). In 1946 they replaced the living room’s original three small windows with five 12-pane steel-frame gallery windows, each six feet square. Placed side by side they created a west-facing wall of glass that flooded the living room with light. To watch a sunset from there, often with a cocktail in hand, was a sublime experience.
The cottage fronted on the tree-shaded two-lane blacktop that winds for about a mile from Interstate 80 to Dutch Flat, which for a time in the 19th century was one of the most productive hydraulic gold mining towns in California. It was also one of the most destructive, as the gold-seekers washed away whole mountainsides with their water cannon bombardments. Older locals refer to the scarred yellow bluffs as “the diggin’s,” implying a scenic attraction deserving of historical respect. Over the century since the diggin’s played out the pines have grown back high enough to conceal much of the erosion, an environmental travesty as bleak as Mars. In any case the gold that spilled down out of those hills bankrolled Dutch Flat in high style, enabling local movers and shakers to whom most of the money flowed to build themselves a town of fancy Victorian homes, along with a steepled Methodist church, a stolid elementary school, a three-story hotel, an opera house and two imposing halls where the Odd Fellows and the Masons still gather for ritual fellowship and drink.
The cottage was removed from all this history, a twenty-minute walk from downtown along a road tufted with blueberry bushes. On the open field behind the cottage old apple trees marched in three arthritic rows down to a split-rail fence marking the western boundary of the property. The owners were San Franciscans directly related to the pair of émigré German brothers who founded Dutch Flat in 1851, the same year they put up the cabin that over successive generations was enlarged into this place. That was in an era when Germans were frequently referred to as Dutchmen, particularly out West, a cultural meme without basis in reality that nevertheless gave their town its name.
Within a few seasons Dutch Flat’s population was six thousand, including hundreds of Chinese in the employ of the Central Pacific Railroad, laboring on this stretch of what would become the Transcontinental Railroad. Boosters pointed to the town’s amateur dramatical troupe and debating society, proclaiming it "the Athens of the Foothills." Mark Twain lectured at the Opera House and Bret Harte took to mentioning Dutch Flat in his stories. The town’s blue-haired ladies are especially proud of this history.
When I arrived for the first time on a sweltering summer day in the mid-1970s Dutch Flat was officially designated as “semi-ghost,” though a signpost on Sacramento Street declared the population to be 333. On that day the only sounds were the sigh of wind in the pines overhead and the flapping of notices tacked to the community bulletin board outside the Dutch Flat Trading Post, a cramped little store “Est. 1859.” In front of the hotel a Golden Retriever was sleeping in the middle of the street.
The owners of the cottage were an elderly couple, longtime family friends, a successful and generous pair who invited me to use the place whenever I wished and insisted that I take them up on the offer. Over a span of seven years I managed to return every summer for stays of up to two weeks, days mostly spent reading, writing, listening to music, hiking in the foothills, swimming in the deep azure water in an old granite quarry on the far side of town, sawing and splitting firewood, repairing the split-rail fence, mowing weeds, and trying to tweak the aged apple trees back into production.
My hosts reached the ends of their lives within a year of one another; such was the bond between them that no one who knew them was surprised. The cottage was bequeathed to a grandchild whose affection for it was not matched by her ability to maintain it. She sold it to buyers who broke her heart by razing it and building a contemporary home on the site. Since then I’ve driven by it only twice, and only on my way to somewhere else. Things change, but I wish this place hadn’t.
My editors were not impressed by my choice of a favorite destination. They pointed out with the wounded tones of the unappreciated that they’d sent me first class to five Hawaiian islands and the Alaskan wilds, Paris, Puerto Rico, Bavaria, the Swiss Alps, Corsica, the Florida Keys, the Great Lakes, New Orleans and Miami Beach and some twenty other places, yet all I could come up with was this little nowhere town in the scrubby Sierra foothills. One of them called Dutch Flat low rent.
I reminded them that when they asked us to pick a favorite place they had not said that it must be an established tourist destination. I’ve been to well-established tourist destinations that struck me as overrun and depressing, chockablock with cheesy resort architecture, where the cheap avarice of the innkeepers, the shopkeepers, the restaurateurs and barkeepers and the other usual suspects was as palpable as the scent of nervous sweat. They said fine but we want a destination from among the places you’ve gone on our dime.
I delivered, but the cottage at Dutch Flat remains my favorite place, even though it’s long gone now.
When I first went there I was working as a correspondent for a British wire service, jumping from city to city, occasionally from country to country. Between my college graduation and my first visit at age thirty I’d had thirteen different mailing addresses. Meantime my hosts had lived in their San Francisco home since before the Second World War. Five generations of their forebears had lived in the cottage or used it as a getaway place since the Gold Rush. When I was there, everything around me breathed stability and rootedness, two things conspicuously missing from my life. Bookshelves covered one long wall of the living room, filled with books and magazines spanning the cabin’s twelve decades. There were bound volumes of Yachting from the 1920s and 1930s interlaced with newspaper clippings of sailing competitions on San Francisco Bay. (The owners’ boat, a 1933 Herrshoff sloop, was christened Argonaut in honor of their Gold Rush forebears, who were nicknamed after the heroes of Greek mythology who accompanied Jason aboard the Argo in their quest for the Golden Fleece.) There was an 1851 edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems. Most everyone in their family attended the University of California at Berkeley; there were more than a dozen yearbooks filled with the signatures and well-wishing messages of classmates soaring on the giddy promises of the Jazz Age (“Keep Cuttin’ the Rug & Make a Mil, Wingo!”), dealing with the possibilities of going to war in Europe and again in Vietnam (“Take care so we can meet again after this mess is over.”).
Long after my final visit to the cottage, after its sale to strangers and its demolition, I would remember the peaceful solitary days of sunshine and silence I enjoyed there, the creaking of pines in the breeze, the smell of dust and sunlight on old upholstery and time as I lay reading on the old sofa, its burst upholstery camouflaged by a pair of Navajo blankets that probably should have been in a museum. I still yearn for those times, for it was a place utterly and blissfully free of contemporary concerns about styles and trends. Everything in the cottage was vintage and wonderfully unmatched, second-hand things moth-balled there by six generations of the same family. Plates, cups and saucers were a motley collection of styles spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, from delicate translucent China to stout US Navy stoneware. The plank floors were covered with old Persian carpets, their reds and blues faded by the sun to furry pastels. The furniture was an assortment of Victorian, Streamline Moderne, and Mid-century styles, all pushed convivially together in that big living room together with not-quite-straight-up old standing lamps whose fringed silk shades gave it the appearance of the lobby of a downscale but comfortable old hotel.
Next to a club chair of cracked brown leather was an RCA console radio and record player dating from the early 1950s. Its two-door storage cabinet was filled with 78-rpm Bakelite discs -- Artie Shaw, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, Glenn Miller, Harry James, Rudy Vallée, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Guy Lombardo and others. The newest record I found was an Elvis Presley 45-rpm disc, the A side “Can't Help Falling In Love” and the B side “Rock-A-Hula Baby.”
What it was about this place that seduced me, the aspect of being there that I recall most vividly, is the sense of continuity and permanence it imparted. In my itinerant life as a correspondent I often felt like a stone forever skipping over water. The cottage reflected the long rich relationship of my hosts, who had come of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War, and made a life together that seemed to me impossibly ideal.
I’d grown up in a fraught household, an only child and the rope in the endless emotional tug-of-war between the complicated and high-strung man and woman who were my parents. Nothing about their relationship seemed permanent; I grew up with an innate belief that the only safe place was solitude.
But the cottage was a place where everything reflected a family saga of stability and affection through generations, success and achievement and the relish of its rewards. From visit to visit, nothing in that little house changed much, no matter who had been there just before me. My holidays there were healthy, nurturing times spent walking in the piney foothills, swimming in natural lakes, reading classic novels I’d long wanted to read -- Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past – learning to cook on a wood stove and listening to music that my parents danced to when they were young and perhaps not so complicated.
Being there gave me the feeling of what it was like to find a good place, such as Ernest Hemingway describes in his story “Big Two-Hearted River” about a young man named Nick Adams, just home from the First World War and suffering from what we recognize today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Nick treks far from civilization into the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, hoping to calm his roiling mind and heal his anxieties through a solitary immersion in the perfect peace and order of the natural world. Come evening on his first day, he makes camp methodically, focusing on every detail, trying to do everything exactly right.
He stakes out his tent, making sure its canvas is stretched tight and its ropes are taut.
Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it.
Over time I came to understand that the cottage in Dutch Flat, the home of a couple who achieved and sustained an extraordinary happiness, was my first good place. It offered a profound and enduring glimpse of what flows from a life of peace and endeavor, of loyalty and devotion to others. Their cottage breathed the essence of the home I hoped to make for myself someday, and that vision, visceral, sanguine and warm, has stayed with me ever since.