Northern California: Independent State of Mind : Regions: Residents of the North see their needs and interests overwhelmed by those in South. Out of sense of fear, frustration, comes talk of secession.

If they’re sitting around the local cafe drinking a “horn of zeese” (cup of coffee), munching on a few “loweezies” (soda biscuits) and telling a few “wheelers” (tall tales), some of the older people still speak it--Boontling.

About a hundred years ago, residents of the Boonville area, a tiny community 110 miles north of San Francisco, decided to invent their own language.

Boontling, they say, was dreamed up by adults who wanted to evade sharp little ears and indulge freely in gossipy “nonch harpins” (objectionable talk). It also meant locals could say what they pleased right in front of visiting “bright-lighters” (strangers, presumably from the big city).

“In traveling through this remarkable region,” David Yeadon writes in National Geographic, “I came to realize that ever since the first settlers arrived in the Gold Rush days of the mid-1800s, Northern Californians have invariably spoken their own language, though no other town has yet gone as far as Boonville.”

Northern California has always been a place apart, combining scenic splendor with the pioneering heritage of its people. Theirs is a stubborn independence linked with a spirit of community and a deep love for the soul of the land.

All of this has widened the gulf between them and their ever-expanding sister, Southern California, whose political power and growing need for resources, many feel, have long overwhelmed the needs and interests of the North, Yeadon says.

And lately the Northerners have begun expressing themselves very clearly, using words that the rest of California can understand. One of the most forceful words is secession.

In June of last year, 31 of California’s 58 counties held an advisory vote on secession, and 27 opted for it. Secession has been an issue more than 100 times since the state’s creation in 1850. But this was the largest vote yet, an unmistakable signal that a complex web of problems and concerns has evolved into discernible fear and frustration.

More than a century of logging in the vast mountain forests here has endangered the prospects of the loggers almost as much as those of the spotted owl and the marbled murrelet. Once-rich salmon populations are suffering from dams, silting of streams and damage to their spawning beds upriver. The fishermen are suffering in turn.

And there is the ceaseless demand for water from the suburban sprawls of Los Angeles and other southern cities. In California, 75% of the water originates north of Sacramento, while about 75% of the demand occurs south of it.

As Darryl Young, a legislative representative of the Sierra Club California, told Yeadon: “Grass roots is the way to go here. That’s what Northern California’s all about.”

The residents--cattle ranchers, lumbermen, fishermen, alternative life-stylers, Indian groups, newly retired couples, burned-out yuppies and ambitious entrepreneurs--live primarily in small settlements scattered across a varied terrain.

First come the great green patchwork patterns of the Sacramento Valley, embraced by the mountain arms of the Sierra Nevada to the east and the western Coast Ranges of Trinity, Klamath and Siskiyou.

Then the land rises abruptly, ridge upon ridge, to the soaring broken volcanic cones of 14,162-foot-high Mt. Shasta, haloed by a strange lenticular cloud. Many religious sects have settled around its base, regarding it as one of the Earth’s vital “power centers.” Most Northern Californians see Shasta, at the least, as a powerful symbol of the region’s identity.

In the sleepy and slightly rundown old railroad town of Gridley (self-proclaimed Kiwi Capital of the United States), Bill Burleson, third-generation publisher of the 112-year-old Gridley Herald (circulation 3,400), proclaims:

“Secession? I’m all for it. The locals are all for it. We’ve got no voice in state government now. We need less regulations--too many damned regulations. We need to get to keep our own money.

“Damned Southern California,” he says of the water situation, “they’ll drain us dry! If it wasn’t for us, it’d still be desert down there.”

The cattlemen don’t feel that frustrated gloom, up in the rich, undulating high country of Modoc and Shasta counties. Every week the town of Cottonwood holds the largest cattle auction in the state.

“There’s not a lot better places than this cattle country,” says Wade McIntosh, an auction assistant. “Maybe in some ways we’re 20 years or so behind the times. We don’t seem to get all those kinds of headaches like other areas. These guys, they’re their own men up here. If there’s troubles in the small towns--fires, people out of work, church needing a new roof--everyone helps out. They make it work as a community. What do they need secession for? They’ve already got it.”

With tourism one of the few real growth industries in Northern California, small towns must fight hard to balance the pressure for development with their desire to retain community spirit.

On the coast, Mendocino sits atop its cliffs--a lacy frill of Victorian architecture against lines of dark pines. “We’ve managed to keep a real community spirit here,” Christiane McLees, editor of the Mendocino Beacon, said, “despite the tourism, the developers and everything else.”

The balance is something all Northern Californians seem to be striving for.