THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509150065
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY GREG RAVER-LAMPMAN, TRAVEL CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 110 lines
FOR MANY, CALIFORNIA evokes visions of lunacy, captured by one of its recent presidential contenders, Jerry Brown, who was dubbed ``governor moonbeam'' by his detractors.
Even the word ``California'' has become adjectival. Describing something as ``very California'' is not always a compliment.
Unfortunately, my home town of Sacramento doesn't fit stereotypes of California. In the Sacramento Valley, you're much more likely to pass a stockyard than an ashram.
Still, during my most recent visit, I decide I needed to do something. . . , well, something California.
That's how I ended up in the Napa Valley in search of decadence.
My first stop was a place called White Sulphur Springs, smack in the wine country, outside the quaint old town of St. Helena.
As far back as 1852, San Francisco doctors began to prescribe the healing power of mineral-laden hot springs. The St. Helena and Calistoga areas have hot springs positively reeking with minerals.
While other geysers in the area produce mild-tasting carbonated water, St. Helena's springs were here were laden with a potent dose of sulphur. To get a sense of the odor, eat a pickled egg. Wash it down with a warm beer. Then belch.
At White Sulphur Springs, that pungent aroma was evidence of curative power. Seward ``Buzz'' Foote, who now runs White Sulphur Springs, said doctors sometimes ordered patients to soak in the hot sulfurous water for as long as six hours a day. Spring runoff had also created hot, stinking mud. Soon, doctors had patients wallowing around in the mud, too.
Surprisingly, the whole venture caught on. Soon White Sulphur Springs had cottages, a dining room, and a bowling alley with a 12-inch thick plank floor. In 1859, a group mustered together $100,000 to build a mammoth luxury hotel. It didn't hurt that the springs were in the middle of a redwood forest.
Unfortunately, that first hotel burned to the ground, beginning something of a trend. White Sulphur Springs has had a series of opulent hotels, including one incinerated when a drunken employee threw a Fourth of July firecracker onto the roof.
Today, White Sulphur Springs comprises rustic cottages, an inn and a lodge house. There are no televisions, radios or newspapers. The mud baths are gone and the spring flows into a small triangular pools, like a Jacuzzi.
Clothing, it was made clear, is optional.
The cottages and inn are often rented out for wedding parties, who indulge in mineral soaks and massages before watching a bride and groom get hitched under the redwoods. During our visit, a young couple sat at a table planning their wedding, the husband using a computerized Macintosh notepad whose operating system he had helped design. Their baby played nearby.
White Sulphur Springs definitely offered some of the decadence that I'd hoped to find, including what they billed as ``mud wraps'' and ``seaweed wraps.''
I decided to go for a mud wrap. A young woman led me into a small room, where I disrobed and reclined on a massage table wearing a terrycloth crotch cover she called ``a diaper.'' She soon returned with a Tupperware bowl full of a concoction of mud, sulfurous mineral water and floral additives designed to lessen the stench.
In the name of research, my wife opted for a seaweed wrap. I suppose I had visions of her being mummified in kelp. Instead, she was painted with a similar paste, this one made of pulverized seaweed.
After the paint jobs, we were wrapped in giant sheets of what seemed like Saran Wrap, then cocooned in red wool blankets, utterly immobilized, staring up at the ceiling. We lay there for about 20 minutes, the scent of potpourri and the sound of New Age music filling the air.
``Is that an oboe?'' Sharon asked at one point from her cocoon. I listened to the music. ``No, I think it's a clarinet.'' That pretty much summed up our conversation during that 20 minutes.
The woman returned, told us to put on robes and shower nearby. We then were free to soak in the sulphur pool.
Now, that experience definitely seemed ``California.'' But as we drove away from White Sulphur Springs, an image haunted me. I remembered watching the movie, ``The Player.'' In that movie, Tim Robbins drives off to the desert to soak in a tub of mud.
Now, being painted with mud may be decadent, but it's not anywhere near as decadent soaking in a tub of mud. So off we drove to Calistoga, where the hillsides are riddled with geysers and springs, including one that produces the Calistoga mineral water you buy in grocery stores.
Calistoga is full of spas that offer massages, herbal wraps, facials and mud baths. At one end of the town, a steaming geyser flows into an Olympic-sized pool, where people bob around on mats.
We ended up going off the main drag to a place called the Golden Haven Hot Springs, lured by a discount coupon in a local newspaper.
Like many of the spas in Calistoga, Golden Haven Hot Springs resembles a Travelodge more than any ultra-luxurious resort. But Golden Haven was crowded. After checking in, and producing my discount coupon, I was given a terrycloth robe and a mesh bag for my clothes. A hostess led me to a room with a large, tile-lined tub full of hot mud.
The hostess explained that Golden Haven's mud was a special mixture of clay, mineral water and peat moss.
``Peat moss?''
``Yes, peat moss.''
She left, allowing me to settle into the muck.
Getting into the mud was surprisingly difficult. The mud was so thick I had to force myself under the surface. The mud didn't have the belched-egg stench of a sulphur spring, but had a more subtle odor, more akin to dirty sneakers. Thanks to the peat moss, the mud also felt kind of furry. The deeper I settled, the hotter the water became, scorching my skin when I approached the tub's bottom. To avoid that, I allowed myself to float. I felt as if I'd been encased in a hot, dirty jello mold.
Once I settled in, the hostess returned, glommed some mud over my shoulders, and smeared clay over my face. She also put a cool, wet wash cloth over my forehead, then walked out.
Ah, yes. This was what I was seeking.
This, without equivocation, was so . . . California. by CNB