A Separate Place - by Charles Jones
Did you know there is a book about La Honda with old photos from the 1970's and published by the Sierra Club? You may recognize some of the characters mentioned in it or others artfully photographed by Susan Friedman. A great photo, for example, of Limey Kaye is on page 82 (also see Bill Underwood's "putting you in the Limey Light" page for more photos of Limey - http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/4495/limeylight.html )
The jacket cover of the book says, "It is a place people feel in their bones, La Honda - a place made special by the precarious balance existing between the land and the people…Jones offers a portrait of a town as a living community. He gives us old Gus, who embodies the spirit of La Honda, living easily, for whom the distant past and the new day are equally exciting. He gives us Mac and Grace, founders of the Boots and Saddle tavern, made famous by the Merry Pranksters. And he gives us the soul of the town, all as if he were revealing, like a lover, the secrets of his self.
Jone's La Honda is a place joining the old traditions to new values without destroying either. But while La Honda is a separate place by virtue of this fact, the town is only 50 miles from the heart of San Francisco…Only a hard and frenzied fight by La Hondians prevented construction of a dam which would have undoubtedly fulfilled the conditions: given a projected population of 160,000 in the year 2080…And perhaps the most ominous of the signs is the violence, trouble imported into town on La Honda carnival days, which attracted people who understood nothing of La Honda's life, and who destroyed a life.
Jones is saddened by this tragedy and by all it portends. Therefore, he takes a chance of opening La Honda to the world, of inviting outsiders to know the town, for in this knowledge lies La Honda's only chance for all places like it. For Jones feels, if more people can be made to understand its separateness, then perhaps it can survive."
Unfortunately this book was published in 1974 and is no longer in print. Jones was a longtime resident of La Honda when he wrote this book, and he was able to poetically capture the soul of the town. It presents La Honda as a very special place - which, of course, it still is.
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