After six months in St. Helena, we moved into a rented cottage in Calistoga, with a fig tree in the yard and a continually flooded basement. I learned for the first time the value and importance of the sump pump, because the water table was high enough to float the house during the wet season, and we had to worry when the water level got above three inches. Outside on the street there was a drainage ditch plentifully populated with spring peepers and other croaking amphibians. The noise they made almost drowned out the sound of the stock-car races at the county stadium, a block west of us. Almost. We had brought a cat with us from Peter Mennen's place, Buckwheat, a barn tabby who remained an outside cat. She was pregnant. I think she had been pregnant continually since reaching puberty. Her kittens were born, and I gave them all cereal names, but only kept one of them, Tapioca, who was white and adorable. So adorable that her putative father, a sandy-haired tom from up the street, was in the habit of grasping her firmly but gently by the nape and carrying her off to show his owners. I had to keep going over there and bringing her back. The other kittens I managed to give away by going to the local grocery store with them in a cardboard box and sitting in the parking lot all day, pleading with shoppers to take a free kitten.

Ron had settled in as lunch chef and evening sous-chef, and was learning a lot about sauces from Masa Kobayashi, the head chef. Masa was a brilliant chef who was almost completely nonverbal in several languages. I remember going to a party at the house of one of the Auberge cooks up in Angwin, a strange little town up in the hills which was primarily Seventh-Day Adventist, but also boasted a fairly large population of dopers and speedfreaks; Angwin was home to Pacific Union college, a SDA school, and also to the big co-op grocery store which was completely vegetarian, and where you could get all sorts of faux meats. Masa and his wife Josphine (who was from Spain and did not have much English either) arrived, sat down with their drinks, sat completely unspeaking for two hours (even to each other), and then left. Ron told me that most of his communication with Masa was in the form of grunts and hand signals. Later on, Masa moved to San Francisco to open his own restaurant; he was found murdered in his apartment in 1984. The crime has never been solved, but the Auberge people had a good idea of who did it.