Sugar Mountain - Growing Up On a Hop Ranch

     Sugar Mountain

“Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain
with the barkers and the colored balloons,
You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you're thinking that
you're leaving there too soon,
You're leaving there too soon.”

Growing Up “Hoppy”

An Essay About Growing Up on a Hop Ranch

I’ve wanted to write for a very long time about the period in my life when Grandfather Wattenbarger worked as a machinist on the E. Clemens Horst hop ranch in Sacramento.  Big people called it “The Horst Ranch.”  But for years I thought they were saying “The Horse Ranch”, even though I never saw a horse of any color.   In my mind’s eye I was much older then than I actually was when you do the math.  I was born in 1951 and my grandparents moved off the ranch in 1960.  If you figure that permanent memories start from around age five then what I remember happened between ages five to nine.  Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

It was just such a marvelous time of life there.   They say every child remembers a time in their young lives when the stars were aligned and all was right with the world.  I loved being there.  It was my peaceful kingdom, moated from the sieges of life.  The ranch was huge, as it ran for miles along the American River all they way from where it crossed Watt Avenue through an area of Sacramento now known as Campus Commons, until it ended where Fair Oaks Boulevard crosses near California State University at Sacramento.

As large as the ranch was, (I’ve never figured out why it was called a ranch and not a farm), there were only two houses and the Horst Company owned both.  The ranch foreman, who also oversaw the larger of two hop processing sheds, occupied the larger house.  My grandparents occupied the other house, as Grandpa ran the smaller shed.  Neither house quartered children, so when the royal flag was flying over our tower indicating my brothers and I were in residence, we ruled hundreds of acres of rich river flood plain planted with a bountiful crop of hops.  I became a benevolent dictator, David the Munificent, the friend of all.

I was the friend of the mess hall head cook who allowed me unrestricted access to his commercial kitchen where he prepared vast meals for the staff and seasonal workers.  I sampled his work product regularly for quality, even without a royal cupbearer (especially the sheet cakes).  I observed from a distance the on-site slaughter of cattle, providing my subjects fresh meat, even though I abstained for a brief time after each butchering. 

I was friends with Mexican migrant workers and visited them regularly to inspect the suitability of their quarters in each of the two large two-story bunkhouses.  They shared with me the fruits of their gardens planted to supplement the company chow.   They took me fishing at night for catfish on the American River that seen through today’s lens would seem impossible.  We walked out and over the river using the water pumping structures.  It may be where I got my affection for Spanish and tried to become fluent from junior high school all through college.

I often patrolled the many roads crisscrossing the hop fields using the royal (used) bicycle, following the water trucks dusting down the dirt.  The expansive concrete pads underneath the giant hop processing machines were a great obstacle course as I laced around the massive supporting timbers. 

 In the early evenings, I sat with my grandparents in the shade on the east side of the castle two stories up on one of the staircase landings.  I taught them how to drop a rabbit from 100 yards away with a .22 rifle as the rabbits leaped the tops of irrigation mounds underneath the hop poles.  My grandfather was a quick learner and became a good shot.  Catching a rabbit mid-air in full momentum led to a tumbling death throe of Olympic quality.

Some days I went to work with Grandpa.  We had to rise early, pack a lunch and walk a short distance to the shed.  I held his hand in case a rabbit, wounded the evening before, tried to exact revenge.  His enclosed work area in the shed was suspended between the first and second levels amidst a labyrinth of wooden stairs, landings and catwalks.  He tried to make me feel needed by giving me a safe repetitive job I could do relatively unsupervised. 

One day he had me straighten a pile of bent washers.  The sequence was; vise, washer, sledgehammer, hand, and then “bang”.  But in my zealousness to impress him, I got the sequence wrong.  I went vise, washer, hand, sledgehammer, and bang – off came an entire fingernail.  The wound was nothing that a full bottle of Merthiolate, a compound that contained mercury, alcohol and salt, couldn’t cure.  After a few laps running around the large workbench screaming, I finally regained what little dignity I had left.

I can still describe the layout of the castle in great detail, room by room, feature by feature.  A favorite area was outside beneath one of the staircases where we instructed the groundskeepers to leave the area natural so we could practice engineering skills in the malleable sandy loam soil.  The soil was not only rich in nutrients for farming but also rich in nutrients for the imagination of youngsters training for their royal role in future service to the infrastructure of the throne.  

The wooden castle was two stories tall with two large staircase entrances.  The entire first level was an unfinished cellar with a dirt floor.  The castle was built to survive the yearly flooding before the large river levee system was constructed.  My grandparents used to store food in this area they had canned, mainly fruit.  All year long we had pears, apricots, peaches, and cherries, which I often decreed to be transformed into pies and cobblers. 

The only task I kept personally was to go down to the basement at night and turn on the one bare light bulb hanging in the middle of the room where the jars were shelved and retrieve the canned fruit (why the shelves couldn’t have been closer to the door I’ll never know).  All of the other subjects in the kingdom were too terrified to cross the shadowed dirt, grab a jar and get out before fear consumed them. 

In the Midwest where my grandparents were from originally, growing up during dust bowl times, canning was not just a handed down family tradition, it was a needed vehicle for survival.  Without its discipline many families would go hungry during the winter or when epic dust storms ruined crops and killed livestock.  My grandparents canned all life long and must have found the plentiful harvests of fruit and vegetables found in California a blessing they never took for granted.  But I digress.

Like Spanish, the ranch was the genesis of many enduring loves.  I have always loved tractors.  On the ranch, tractors were everywhere.  I issued a proclamation that all the tractors be nightly housed and maintained in a large barn adjacent to the castle.  I can still smell the oil and grease soaked dust.  This proximity opened the possibility of after hours inspections of any tractor left outside.  There were so many levers, pedals and gauges.  To this day, the only real tractor to me is still a 1950s gray Ford with a red engine.   

Outside the barn was a scrap pile where pieces of engine overhauls remained temporarily.  My favorite find was the voltage relays.  They had unlimited imaginary purposes, from powering spacecraft to receiving signals from deep space.  Most young men had pinup calendars.  Mine contained twelve tractors, completely exposed with close-ups of big relays.  I still love rummaging through junks piles looking for treasures.  I know if I keep looking I’ll find a relay that may inspire my grandchildren.

To this day I love wandering through aged fractal-patterned oxidized industrial buildings and complexes.  Old factories, assembly warehouses, chemical plants and production buildings all interest me greatly.  These facilities all have their own story and represent what was high technology of their times.  They were the center of livelihoods, were creative in their efficiency and thought to be permanent.  They remind me that nothing is permanent and aging cannot be avoided.  It is enough to know that once you were vigorous, productive, and useful. You thought you’d remain that way forever with regular oil changes and proper tire inflation.

Sometimes a serf would come to the door and advise us to remain inside.  A fire-breathing dragon had been spotted scorching the land with his breath.   A tractor-mounted knight dressed in HAZMAT armor was dispatched to dispatch the dragon.  Soon a horrific noise could be heard in the distance.  As the noise got closer you could just begin to make out the figure of the knight with a dragon attached to and trailing from the tractor.  The dragon’s jet engine-like scream was deafening as its fire flung stomach acid all over the hops.  It had the foul smell of an insecticide.  The dragon didn’t finally behave until its belly was empty.  Strangely, the stomach acid drenching the hops had an amazing protective effect.  The hops, free from pestilence, thrived.   Dragon’s acid is now heavily regulated but my love for tractors still knows no bounds, further heightened by their rightful reputation as dragon slayers. 

Then it happened.  Sometime while nine years old, I was vacationing at my parent’s castle and awoke one morning to learn that the hop realm was no more.  My grandparents had retired and somehow managed to move completely off the ranch in the middle of night.  There was no warning, no discussion, no request for help, not even to transport the crown jewels, (aka voltage relays), to a safe location.  Most importantly, no one asked my opinion, let alone my permission.  The dream ended, the castle gone.  I never saw it again.  The land became too commercially valuable to remain as a ranch of any kind.  It was sold along with almost all other hop producing lands in Northern California. 

All jesting aside, I was emotionally unprepared for its sudden loss.  There was nothing that could be done about it and I knew that.  But just because you know something intellectually doesn’t necessarily help dispel the raw emotions.  I didn’t know that I was actually mourning my loss.  I felt sad and internalized my deep disappointment.  I dreamt about it for years but never told anyone how I felt.  After all, I just finished being a strong and responsible foreman.  Without giving in to psychobabble, internalizing my feelings became standard practice.  OK, back to the story.

Hop production flourished in Northern California from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s.  In 1894 Sacramento County was the largest producer of hops in the United States, all thanks mainly to Emil Clemens Horst.   Mr. Horst was born in 1867 in Germany and died in 1940 in San Francisco.  He revolutionized hop growing and processing with his patented mechanical separator that harvested the hops while discarding the vines and leaves.

At one time, Mr. Horst had the largest number of acres under hop cultivation in the world.  His first property purchase anywhere was just outside Wheatland California, along the Bear River.  The small unincorporated area of Horstville between Wheatland and Camp Far West Lake still bears his name obviously.  In addition, Horst owned ranches in Sloughhouse along the Cosumnes River and in Hopland in addition to vast holdings in Oregon and Europe.  

Hops, as most know, is a plant used in brewing beer.  The hop cones contain different oils that add flavor to the beer and make it foamy.  The cones grow high on the vine and had to be picked by hand.  Horst’s patented separator made the harvest easier.  Hop plants are planted in rows about six to eight feet apart.  Each spring the roots send forth new vines that are started up strings attached from the ground to a high overhead trellis.  Harvest came near the end of summer when the vines were processed to send just the cones for drying in vast kilns.

The monetary importance of hop production to not only Sacramento but also to Northern California for decades cannot be underestimated.  It was huge and I got to rule over one of its largest estates.  I may have been one of the youngest royals charged with such responsibility.  Today the only impression of E. Clemens Horst’s footprint on Northern California is on private land near the Consumnes River.  There, the sagging remains of a hop kiln, a water tower where the rusted name “Horst” can just be made out, and a wheel-less pickup with his name on the door, all ironically bound by vines he once yoked for a century.

Hops are still produced in the United States.  The rich soil bordering the Willamette River in Oregon produces abundant crops, as does Yakima Washington and areas of Idaho.  Yes, Idaho.  It turns out the soil loved by potatoes is just perfect for growing hops.  Maybe I’ll visit one of these places at some point, my Trip to Bountiful so to speak.  But until then, I will dream of my “Sugar Mountain” experience.  A time when no one dare tell a royal child to “not touch this”, “not go there”, “be careful”, or “don’t get hurt”, such silly warnings for someone that oversees hundreds of acres. 

My last attempt to remain connected in some way to the hop industry came as a teenager.  One small shed remained in our region and it was the August harvest.  I tried to get hired on to do anything from sweeping floors to picking sticks out of the hops before drying.  But I was not picked out of a shouting crowd of college students looking for work.  Technically I was too young anyway, but I would have lied.  I didn’t want to believe this chapter of my life had truly ended, but it finally did.

Even though I love hops, I don’t drink beer.  Even though I love tractors, I’ve never owned one.  I can experience owning one vicariously by roaming the Texas countryside and seeing them everywhere (or buying a few shares of John Deere).  There’s still hope that by retelling this story over and over to my grandchildren they might someday be motivated by my experience to become successful enough to actually own the John Deere Company outright. 

Until then, there’s always the annual tractor calendar and my harvest of memories.  It was truly a great adventure at a time when children were once free and safe to explore far and wide, a time when I was supremely hoppy.

Sugar Mountain Video