Sonoma Wineries:
Jack
London in the Sonoma Valley
After returning home, Jack London continued to write, producing over fifty books, including White Fang, South Sea Tales, The Sea Wolf, and many articles. He made wine, husbanded pigs and other farm animals, rode horses around the ranch, and drank a lot.
After his death of kidney disease at age forty in 1916, Charmian
built the Spanish tile-roofed, fieldstone walled “House of
Happy Walls,”
which is now a museum in Jack London State Historic Park. Original
furnishings, photographs and souvenirs from world travels, his
roll-top desk and Dictaphone, and even rejection slips from publishers,
create a poignant scene.
London wrote of his first sea voyage, “Possibly the proudest
achievement of my life . . . occurred when I was seventeen . .
in a three-masted schooner off the coast of Japan . . in a typhoon.
I was called from my bunk to take the wheel. The air so thick with
driving spray that it was impossible to see more than two waves
at a time. The schooner was almost unmanageable, rolling her rail
under to starboard and to port, veering and yawing . . and threatening,
when the huge seas lifted under her quarter, to broach to. Had
she broached to, she would ultimately have been reported lost with
all hands and no tidings.
I took the wheel. . . I stood there alone at the wheel, in my grasp the wildly careering schooner and the lives of twenty-two men. Once we were pooped. I saw it coming, and, half-drowned, with tons of water crushing me, I checked the schooner's rush to broach to. At the end of the hour, sweating and played out, I was relieved. But I had done it! With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and guided a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of wind and waves.”
The article on this page is adapted from the book, Backroads of the California Wine Country by Karen Misuraca (www.karenmisuraca.com), published by Voyageur Press.
Photo Credit: The pictures on this page are by Lisa Moore. www.studioponderosa.com