Sebastopol Where the Junk Bonds

For 45 years I have driven Highway 12 west from Santa Rosa to get to the town of Sebastopol where I live.  Half of the drive consists of houses and commercial development on both sides of the freeway and the other half is through what is now called the Greenbelt that has at least a semi-permanent status as a separator of towns or, open space.  The open space consists of family farming and a large wetlands area known as the Laguna de Santa Rosa.  There is some deep comfort that comes from knowing that this town buffer of open space remains in the long-term planning philosophy of this county.

Only one tiny change has occurred in all these years in that open space.  One day a few years ago, while driving past the dairy on the north side of the highway where I was wont to see Holstein dairy cows daily, I did a double-take because I thought there was something wrong with one of the cows.  To my amazement it turned out that a metallic object with that black and white look that a Holstein has had become part of the herd!

What on earth, I wondered, was somebody trying to prove?  Or state?  Was it a joke?  Was it behavior resulting from the expounding of a famous study of Holstein dairies that concluded that Holsteins give 10% more milk if there is a metallic lifeless likeness of them planted in the pasture? 

This was not a one-of-a-kind experience as it turned out. 

Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent had begun to dot the landscape with a localized art form turning used up scrap and throw-away metallic (and other) objects into a kind of anthropological artifact collection that, planted all over town, has managed to endear itself to the locals, get discovered by the community at large, and is beginning to appear in articles far beyond Sebastopol.  Not only that, Amiot and Laurent and the artifacts that he creates and she paints have found their way into the local culture and, in so doing, have refined the identity of this small town.

Suzanne Daly writes about these local artists in a web site (http://www.patrickamiot.com/) Daly noted that after a successful career working with ceramics, Amiot felt it was time for a change.  Playing with scrap metal and making fun art from it had become something of a pastime for him when he pondered the possibility of making something more of the hobby.

"I always had this desire to do things out of objects, but I just couldn't imagine making a living out of it. I still can't. It's one of those things when you think of something but tell yourself, 'This would just be too good to be true.'"

In the midst of his career upheaval, Amiot started making junk art for fun. He created and installed a giant fisherman made from a water heater in his front yard, and received an unexpected reaction—his neighbors wanted to see more. The rest, as they say, is history. And history plays a big part in the sculptor's philosophy behind the raw style of his art.

"The whole purpose of my work is to glorify these objects, because they have their own spirit," Amiot enthuses. "When a hubcap has traveled on a truck for millions of miles, and has seen the prairies in the winter and the hot summer asphalt, when it's done traveling with that truck and finds itself in the scrap yard and I find it, I kind of like to use that. This hubcap, or whatever piece of metal, from the day it was manufactured until now, has an important history. And I like to think the spirit of all these things lived incredible lives. If they could talk to you, they could tell amazing stories. That's something I don't want to hide."  (from Suzanne Daly’s article)

I found this humorous snippet in a travel-tips kind of web site that shows that, to an outsider, this love and passion that Amiot and Laurent literally display all over town, the spirit in the objects referred to and the depth of their being embraced locally have had a magnifying effect on the perception of this small community’s culture.

 “If you leave town heading east on State 12, you'll see a massive metal cow towering over dozens of real Holsteins. At dusk, the live bovines gather around the mother of all cows and use the sculpture as a scratching post, says Amiot, who fears they might tip it over. A giant cow-tipping with fellow cud-chewers as suspects--only in Sebastopol.”

The travel-tipper who added his or her flavorful editorialization at the end (only in Sebastopol) was able to infer there is something unique about Sebastopol that preceded Amiot and Laurent, something that was ready for their art.  It was here that Amiot and Laurent have gone from local folk artists to become integral components of the folklore, powerful contributors to the local culture, major contributors to the very identity of our town.  If you google Patrick Amiot, you will be amazed by how many sites come up.

I hail from a Southern California beach town called Hermosa Beach.  The Beach Boys went to high school in the next town to the north, the surfboard business exploded there (Velzy, Jacobs, Dewey Weber, Greg Noll), the Biltmore Hotel once had a fine hotel there right on the beach.  The beach has always been an important element in the identity of Hermosa Beach, but its greater claim to fame is a night club begun by Howard Rumsey called the Lighthouse Cafe.  Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All Stars burst on the scene one night in the mid 1950’s and pulled in huge crowds.  Night after night crowds poured in from all over the greater Los Angeles area until the club became a fixture on the landscape.  By the 1960’s Hermosa Beach was known as the epicenter of the West Coast jazz scene.  Before I moved north, I saw the biggest name jazz artists at the Lighthouse.  John Coltrane was a regular there after he broke up with Miles Davis.  Davis was also a regular as were Roland Kirk, Les McCann, Australian Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck, Jimmy Smith, Ahmad Jamal, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Thelonius Monk and all the jazz greats of the time. The culture of the town spread beyond its boundaries as Hermosa Beach came to be known for its unique identity crafted over many years by Howard Rumsey. I was at a function as a child when Mayor Edwards publicly thanked Howard Rumsey for putting Hermosa Beach permanently on the map.

Another California beach town has developed a kind of culture and unique identity for the decades-old roller coaster and other thrill rides and food concessions right on the beach at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.  There are many towns with boardwalks, but if a person hears a conversation and knows it is about California, should the word boardwalk enter the conversation, there is no question about what town is being discussed. 

You might say that at least part of a town’s cultural identity centers on the associations in people’s minds of some activity, place, or object with that town.  Like it or not, for example, it is known around the world that Humboldt County, California, is home to one of the largest cash crops in America: marijuana.  It forms one leg of the Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity Counties that have attracted the attention of growers around the world. So much has the identity of this region come to be associated with the cash crop that a blind eye has been turned by many an official knowing that all those new pick ups purchased with cash in harvest season are a kingpin in the local economy now that the old mainstays of commerce, fishing and lumber, have seen better days.

Think of what takes place in your mind when you hear Zydeco music or hear about Cajun food, the Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, or think about the beignets consumed en masse at the Café du Monde. These are quintessential ingredients of the New Orleans culture and everybody knows it.

Not to imply that Sebastopol is infused with an identity as entrenched in the culture at large as the jazz greats of the era of cool jazz, the reverie associated with bead strands thrown off New Orleans balconies, the new drug lords with their organic Humboldt pot gardens, surfing safaris to hot sandy beaches or rides on the Santa Cruz roller coaster,  Not yet.  The culture of Sebastopol is in a state of flux because its original identity as the gateway to the Gravenstein apple farm has been corrupted and reshaped by the presence of the chic wine-grape grower and new people coming here with high-tech backgrounds, leaving behind the alienation of urban life, bringing along telecom skills, advanced degrees in enology and viticulture and organic, eclectic tastes with a hunger to experience the sense of community that can exist readily in a small town,

The blending of the agrarian beginnings of Sebastopol with the infusion of America’s new computer savvy thinkers has begun a process that is evolving into a refined local culture partly defined and memorialized by Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent who have set aside a percentage of their sales of the calendars available with photos of their artwork to the local schools (tens of thousands of dollars to date) and populated the street they live on, Florence Avenue, with dozens of their creations.  People who drive Florence from one end to the other experience up close the contribution these artists have made to local culture.  One could say that Sebastopol is a town where the junk bonds the people.