Nothing says "Home" like tar weed...

Olmanriver, my most favorite Long Valley history researcher, just made a comment on an old post that I did about Tar Weed and other aromatic plants. He found and transcribed the poem so we can all enjoy it. I have never seen the poem before, but it rings so true to Laytonville and the Long Valley that it tugs at my heartstrings and brings back that far away feeling of being back home in Laytonville again.
 
This is what he placed in the comments:
olmanriver said...


"I am still not sure about which plant is tarweed. Maybe a local poet can help us with our tarweed identification...

Margaret S. Cobb Smith was a poet and painter who taught school all over northern Mendocino county. The daughter of Chilean royalty and one of the first settlers of Long Valley, William Smith, Margaret married Mr. Oliver Cobb who ranched beside the SF Eel by Sproul Creek. They married in 1904, and the property was left to her at the time of his passing in 1914.

The Cobbs hosted Jack London's 1911 visit when he toured up the coast with his wife Charmian, driving a four horse team. He wrote an account of this vacation expedition for Sunset Magazine. Andrew Genzoli wrote in the Redwood Country: "The Cobbs proved to be such good company that Charmian called them 'our people'. She tried her hand at fishing and caught up on correspondence while Jack set about writing his lasst Post story, 'The Feathers of the Sun', a rollicking comedy about a desreputable beachcomber with royal pretensions. Here was a South Seas version of Kipling's 'The Man who Would Be King,'..."

Margaret also had George Sterling as a close friend, and corresponded with Ambrose Bierce. She did get poems published, and was a good painter, but the work she is most known for was Blaxine, a story of mixed white and Indian families and a rare novelized glimpsed into what it was to be a half-breed. The poet Joaquim Miller touted the book highly. Lynette sagaciously sussed out that this was modeled on the AE Sherwood family situation of Sherwood valley, which I was able to confirm through an online reference to a teacher who had taught the Sherwood kids in Sherwood, and Margaret Smith in Long Valley. As this is Lynette's bailiwick I shant say to much here."


More after the poem.
 
 

 

Long Valley by Margaret S. Cobb

"We passed through Long Valley in September,
Facing its first gleam of level at Farley Creek,
Then from the little uplift at the old Talkington place,
The valley before us in a glory of browns, tans, and saffrons,
That dimmed and faded in the distance of mauves and gray.
It was late evening. the guarding prescence of old Farley Peak
Lifted itself against the sky in pale opaque blueness.
Cow Mountain and the Cahto hills lay black against the west,
Against a wash of pale green western sky, and across this sky
Floated thin lines of brilliant crimson clouds.
Yet so transient this cloud beauty that even while we watched,
And ere we reached the old Leonard place,
It had faded to a gray lavender and lay against
A paling sky.
And now the tar weed, sweet vagrant of the valley,
Useless, unloved, but offering its golden discs by millions
To waste places, filled the air with its poignant tang,
Bringing back childhood with a pang of pain--
Old dreams of childhood lived in this lovely valley.
Fences now lay as purple lines across the fields,
Straw from the threshing lay as beaten gold,
Willows become as gray and olive dreams against the low red hills, Unkempt old orchards glowed, painted with scarlet apples'
Pines lifted their delicately lined contours, oaks were purple massed,
Then came the friendly Lights of Laytonville,
And blue night settled broad and vast o'er all,
Only the tarweed, vagrant, unloved weed,
Still told of fields widespread beneath the night."

Well, the whole south end of Long Valley was named “Farley”. There was Farley Ranch, Farley Flat, Farley Peak, and the Farley School House. I guess that the newcomers decided that there were too many things named “Farley”, so they changed the name of Farley Creek to Long Valley Creek, otherwise everything is called much the same as it was a century ago.

There are two glorious times to be in Long Valley One in May, when all the grasses are just starting to dry up and turn brown, and all of the wildflowers are blooming in grand abundance, with the sweet smell of the drying grasses, and beauty of the flowers, waving in the last of winters windy grip.

And two, in September, when the gardens are ripe, the orchards are ready for the plucking, the berries are all turned into fragrant syrups and jams. The last of the grain straws are still laying in the fields, and… ah yes! The stinky little flower that most all of the Laytonville natives have learn to love.. Tarweed. The Tarweed grows in the clay soil of the valley bottom, where other plants have been grazed or mowed down. The tarweed takes over the fields after the harvest of the hay and grains. It is the sweetest, or strongest, depending on whether you like the smell or not, in the warm summer evenings about beer time.

There is nothing like eating a fried chicken dinner at Gramma’s house. With chickens fresh from the hen house, soda biscuits and gravy, and fresh corn and peas from the garden. Gramma always served the summer dinners on the back patio that was cooled by a large grape arbor built over it. One of the things that I remember about those dinners it the smell of the hot summer heated tar weed in the valley air.

My great grandmother Laura Middleton used to speak of “the Talkingtons” who she was friends with. So the name is familiar to me. My mother said that the Talkington’s place was at the south end of the valley just north and west of Jack Farley’s place.

My mother also said that she went on a plane ride with a fellow by the name of Lew Leonard in 1928 or 29. But she didn’t know if he was related to the Leonards in the poem.
Every homestead, everywhere, had a fruit orchard, with as many variety’s as possible. Albert Etter, from Ettersberg‘s, name was invoked whenever anybody wanted to speak about apples with any degree of authority.
Ah… but the tarweed… the sweet smell of home. Sweeter then the smell of all of my sweetest memories.

Okay, this is the plant below more commonly known as "Tarweed". The blue flowered plant above is "Vinegar weed". I call them both tar weeds. I know.... I'm wrong. But, I'm not the only one.