Table Talk
IF YOU'VE driven north from San Francisco on Highway 101, through Marin County, a little way past the last Petaluma exit, then you've seen the house I grew up in. There's no reason for you to have noticed it. An unassuming, single-story, ranch-style home, it's the most modest property on its hill.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Running Fence began nearby, on the other side of the highway. I'm speaking of Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and his collaborator-wife, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. The fence comprised 2,222,222 square feet of white nylon, hung from 90 miles of cabling, suspended between 2,050 steel poles. It flapped in the wind across public land and 59 private ranches (including a corner of our own property) until it reached Bodega Bay and plunged into the sea. It stood for two weeks in September of 1976. Then it was gone.
My father, who served as the accountant for many of the nearby dairy ranchers, was one of the people Christo and Jeanne-Claude had to deal with before they could build their fence. I assume the farmers had their CPA make the arrangements because lawyers were something they only dealt with when matters grew dire. The matter of the wasn't dire, it was weird—a new, 1970s kind of weird. And in his way, my father was one of them. He grew up on a dirt farm in Utah, on land so hard and barren it could barely feed nine kids, no hope of providing enough to clothe them. They bought their own clothes with money they earned digging ditches for more prosperous farmers. He enlisted to fight in the Korean War. He earned an accounting degree on the
