A Meandering Search for the Idyllic Small Town of His Dreams

There’s a small town in the dreams of anyone who has spent his life amid the clamor of a big city, and I’m always looking for mine.

It’s in a place beyond crime and traffic, where windows are left open at night and no one is blowing 9-millimeter holes in little children to prove their manhood.

I don’t know how long I’ve been searching for a town like that or even if one actually exists within reach. A psychologist told me once that what I was seeking was the small town of my soul, and I had to get there from within, not from without.

I was beginning to believe that until I stopped at a village in the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain a few years ago. It was in the fall, and a soft mist had created the kind of light that illuminates dreams and fairytales. The town emerged from the mist like Brigadoon. Bright flowers cascaded off second-floor balconies, and distant music drifted like butterflies down the ancient streets.

I spent a day in its soothing mists and wish I could return. But, like Brigadoon, the city of myth that appeared only every 100 years, it is beyond reach, too far away, a distant place in the landscape of my longing.

I’m looking for a small town closer to home. I tried the Anza-Borrego Desert once, and while there’s a kind of lonely beauty to the emptiness of sand and mountains, I wanted trees around me and waterfalls. I asked a waitress in Borrego Springs why she lived in a place without any special qualities that I could see, and she said, “Why not?” Later she talked about the wild flowers that turned the desert into a garden once a year, but her tone lacked any enthusiasm for either the town or the explosion of color that dressed the gray terrain every spring like a flowered sunbonnet on an old lady’s head.

I wasn’t exactly living in a tent among the sidewinders and scorpions while I was there. I’ve done all the roughing it I’ve ever wanted to do and chose a resort called La Casa del Zorro for my stay. It was 42 acres of beauty and luxury, and if you’re ever in the need for pampering, that’s the place. A gourmet dining room, private swimming pools, rooms with bars and grand pianos, elegant gardens ... who could ask for more?

I could.

I’m not looking for artificial luxury, but for a place somewhere that bubbles and whispers, where a stream murmurs and a sundown wind sighs through the tops of trees older than dreams. And so I went on looking.

My latest search took me to the Mother Lode, the gold country of Mark Twain and Brett Harte, up in the Sierra Nevada out of Modesto. I wrote a couple of columns ahead and took off looking for what turned out to be a small town of memory, where my wife and I once roamed almost a half-century ago.

I remembered Columbia and Angels Camp and Jamestown as peaceful reminders of an era submerged into history, but whose relics remained intact. The relics are still there, clustered into narrow main streets of stores and century-old hotels. But like most towns with any kind of attraction at all, they’ve become destinations for tourists lured by landmarks and gewgaw stores. The area has grown beyond its history.

It’s all relative, I guess. Driving cross-country once, I stopped at a gas station in the middle of a town two blocks long and listened to the owner complain that the place was getting too crowded.

A roadside “serpent’s palace” had caused something of a tourist rush and then a construction boom, and the gas station owner hated it.

“Used to be a nice, quiet place,” he said bitterly, “but things have gone to hell since the two-headed snake came to town.”

The two-headed snake has come to the Mother Lode too. Housing tracts and golf courses are beginning to grow like chaparral on the mountainsides and in among the trees, creating a new kind of gold rush. This one is for builders, not for miners, who can’t stand the look of empty land. God help the Mother Lode.

There are still a few quiet places to hide up there, and we found one just east of Twain Harte. It was in a bed and breakfast called the McCaffrey House, set off the main road, among trees that reached halfway to heaven. There was no bubbling brook nearby, but you could leave the windows open and hear the trees whisper.

It’s a great place, but it still isn’t the small town of my dreams. Edgar Allan Poe was always seeking his El Dorado “over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of the shadow.” He was a troubled man, and it probably existed only in the final moments of his life when all the pressure was off and the only thing that mattered was poetry.

Maybe that’s where my small town exists, set among the trees in a fading twilight, over the mountains of the moon. Maybe I’m just not ready for it yet.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.