Visiting in the middle of California’s wine country, I am surrounded by rolling hills, small truck garden farms, cows in every small field, strawberry fields and farmer’s markets. Lots of collapsing wood barns and even collapsing metal barns. Narrow roads. It has some echoes of Point Roberts but the area is much drier and way more touched by its neighboring towns and cities. In fact, seeing this area makes me realize just how untouched Point Roberts is by the close-yet-far urban and suburban areas to the north and south.
The nearest small town to where I am is Sebastopol, which carries to the visitor no memories of the Crimea, where I believe the original Sebastopol was located. Nor does Sebastopol remind me of the slick suburban areas I know from southern California, where every house appears to be either a recently built or a recently remodeled Spanish hacienda.
Instead, Sebastopol appears to be filled with small stores and small, functional and beautifully maintained houses with a kind of spontaneous ambience. On one street, a few blocks long, most of the houses’ front yards feature witty, intricate, recycled-metal sculptures. The ones above are typical, but there were maybe two dozen different pieces. Some were almost as big as the front yards they sat in. It’s hard to believe that every house owner had purchased this art; easy to believe that the sculptor gave them away for the sake of a permanent exhibit.
That’s an idea that Point Roberts, if it had a charitable sculptor of witty, intricate, re-cycled metal pieces, could easily borrow. Photos of more Florence Ave. sculptures here. The metal artists: Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent.
No comments:
Post a Comment