The Getaway

He was literally the last person I expected to see when I walked into a Calaveras County winery on my anti-Valentine’s long weekend. Angels Camp is roughly 350 miles from LA; I’d never even heard of it before attending a timeshare presentation and scoring an almost-free resort weekend where it was one of the options. I didn’t want to go to San Diego or Puerto Vallarta or Las Vegas; I’d already been to those places. Thus, I ended up in the Sierra Nevada foothills at a nice condo-style golf resort. Anyway, long story short, there he was, at my fourth and last stop of the day.

He’d put on flesh. Not fat, but muscle. His hair was long, tied back in a ponytail that was not at all feminine. His skin was golden brown now, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. I wasn’t entirely sure it was the same guy—I’d only known him for three months, ten years ago—until he took one look at me and said, “Alan?”

I said, “Oh my God, Donnie, it’s really you?”

“It’s me.” He glanced at the person he’d been talking to—they looked very curious—then back at me. “Will you be here for a while?”

“I was just about to do one of the flights in the tasting room.”

“Great, I’ll find you there.”

We didn’t shake hands, much less hug. All the same, I would swear the earth moved.

Maybe it did. The state is really seismic, after all.

I watched Donnie leave the reception area with that other person. Then I wandered around, looking at a photographic history of the winery, owned by the descendants of Chinese immigrants who’d come to California during the Gold Rush. Wondered how Donnie ended up here. Maybe he’d be free after his workday ended. Maybe we could have dinner somewhere and get caught up. I wanted to know everything about him.

Okay, I wanted to take him to bed, like right that second, but I was now forty years old and I had some self-control. Instead of continuing to indulge in wild speculation, I went into the tasting room and selected my flight.

This was my fourth wine-country weekend, because I’m not the kind of guy who’ll live in California and not go to Napa, Sonoma, and the Santa Ynez Valley. I’d been aware that Gold Country now meant liquid gold, but it’s a hell of a drive, so the timeshare giveaway was all that got me up into the hills. I’d be back, though, because despite the drive, this was a great place for a getaway. The traffic, compared to LA or Napa, was negligible. The weather was great. The landscape was gorgeous. The wine, every drop of it that I’d tried, was fantastic.

And Donnie was here. I was much too young to retire, and there was surely nowhere close to here where I could make a comparable living, but I was not at all inclined to write off all possibilities.

Well, hell, there I was, back at wild speculation.