New York Times article on Caspar

Caspar News and Press Releases

AVA response to New York Times article : 7 August 2002

SUNDAY'S PRESS DEMOCRAT contained a story from its mother ship, the New York Times, on the precious little community of Caspar. For those of you who've never had the pleasure, Caspar is a suburb of the long gone village of Mendocino. The story about Caspar's uninspiring efforts to essentially become a gated community for rich old hippies, was accompanied by a deceptively contradictory photo of a pair of effete, large-size Poodle dogs whose expensive haircuts could feed a Ukiah welfare family for a week, romping in front of one of Caspar's few remaining abandoned structures. The photo's foreground was dominated by a hand-printed sign attached to a gate post that read "This way to the main road, you bleeped tourists!" Another photo has the Casparados arranged in the inevitable groovy-groove circle which, given their exclusionary efforts, should have been turned outward not inward.

TO GET to the point, Caspar, like all the nice weather Pacific enclaves up and down the Mendocino Coast, is now an upscale suburb for wealthy people who mostly lived or live their lives elsewhere. Anderson Valley, for nauseous example, is wholly dominated by a lethal combination of the retired rich and an outside-based wine industry, both parties deeply in love. The weather here is even nicer than it is in Caspar, hence its lure for the golden hordes who have now destroyed it.

WHEN MENDOCINO COUNTY was "discovered" by the trust fund division of the back-to-the-land movement in 1968, the county's small-communities were family-oriented, close without being closed (except to the big naked pile people in the hills), and friendly. High school sports was weekend entertainment. It was country, it was community, and it was good. Now it's no community, the kids are on dope instead of playing ball, and the Caspar candy asses who've made us the fragged tourist target we've become are celebrated in the New York Times for trying to keep everyone else out of their tidy bowl view-sheds! The Casparados told The Times reporter that they thought there was room in their oppressive little enclave for maybe 40 or so more homes. At a half-mil and up, who's that likely to be? It won't be a little league and bake sale family.

THE NICE WEATHER communities of Mendocino County are now un-family oriented and urbanized, in that their social focus is on frenetic schedules of entertainments and activities for adults, a large portion of whom are single and militantly solipsistic. What the Casparado-style preservationists decry down the road in Mendocino, they brought here, and may the plague plague them too.

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