Homer of the Redwoods
My brief, wondrous life in a remote cabin on the Russian River
ICYMI
I spoke to Daniel Dale at CNN about Trump’s claim that George Washington never enslaved people.
UPCOMING EVENT
I’ll be in conversation with Dr. Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress, and Congressman Steve Israel at the Gold Coast Book Fest in Oyster Bay on 6/30 at 2:30pm.
HOME OF THE REDWOODS
In 2015, the night before I lit out for a remote cabin on the Russian River, my heart was broken. As is almost always the case, the perpetrator was dead.
I’d been searching for historic articles about the unincorporated hamlet I’d call home for the next four months when I found a short article about a local tragedy in the New York Times archives. After I arrived, the missing details gnawed at me, but so did the cold. After I unpacked, learned how to build a fire, my only source of heat, and met my “neighbors,” I started filling in the blanks.
With World War II’s Southeast Asian Theater as a backdrop, Homer Canelis fell in love. He was a lieutenant in the Army Corps, the son of a Greek lawyer in the Bay Area. She was an Army nurse named Theo, who came from a Korean family with an orange grove in southern California.
They were stationed in Burma, where America was backing the Nationalist Chinese regime and Chiang Kai-Shek, a man whose slogan was “first internal pacification, then external resistance.”
Homer’s father disapproved of his bride, but the young couple had fallen in love during the deadliest conflict in human history. The prospect of tense holiday gatherings hardly compared to the horrors they had witnessed. They married before the war ended.
After they returned to America, they settled in Cazadero, which means “hunting ground” in Spanish, on the Russian River. For Homer, the redwoods were prey. He joined his brother, Thesis, who made a living felling trees that grew as tall as 367 feet and as old as 3,300 years.
February 9, 1947 was supposed to be their last day in Cazadero. Homer and Theo had saved enough money to move to Berkeley, where he was going to study engineering. At the end of the day, they could have gone home with Thesis, but Homer insisted they stay behind with a power saw. Just one more tree, he said.
Fourteen hours later, their landlord realized that Homer and Theo hadn’t returned to the small cottage they rented from him. The sun had set. It was raining. He drove to Thesis’ house, hoping to find the whole family celebrating.
The last tree Homer and Theo felled crashed into another redwood. When it collapsed, it pinned them to the ground. By the time Thesis found them, Homer, 23, was dead.
Theo was barely alive. Thesis, with the help of neighbors, sawed her out from under the tree. She was driven to the nearest hospital in Sebastopol, a little over an hour away, and then further south to San Francisco. She would never walk again.
Back in Cazadero, a group of woodsmen worked on extricating Homer’s body. It took six hours.
I was still tracking down leads when another tragedy struck. A truck rolled off the road my cabin sat on, landing upright in the creek. It’s a 20-foot drop.
By the time I joined the crowd, the only sign of the driver was a thin trail of blood. He’d managed to scale the creek walls, something I’d failed to do in the best of circumstances, and knocked on the first door he saw. A neighbor, knowing an ambulance would take hours, drove him to the hospital. It’s still over an hour away.
One of my other neighbors, the assistant chief of the volunteer fire department, took it upon himself to deal with the mangled car. He asked a friend to clear a path for another neighbor’s tow truck. Everyone watched in awe as the tractor went up and down the hill, taking bay trees and brush with him. By the time the Sonoma County Fire Department showed up, it was as if nothing had happened.
That night, I re-read the article. I was less focused on the young couple’s tragic love story than on their remote, tight-knit community. The landlord was friendly enough with his tenants to notice they weren’t home. He knew where to find Homer’s brother. Neighbors raced to the scene and help, despite the late hour and pounding rain. Someone drove Theo to the hospital. Others stayed behind, spending hours recovering Homer’s body from beneath the giant redwood.
I wanted to know Theo’s name, which the Times hadn’t bothered to mention. She was only referred to as a “nurse,” his “wife,” and “Mrs. Canelis.” I was hoping to unearth an obituary, but I found something better. There was a living Homer Canelis in Cazadero. This Homer was president of Bohan & Canelis General Engineering, the profession his uncle would have studied, had he survived. Thesis was his father. His mother had been pregnant with him when tragedy befell the family. They decided to name him Homer. He was born on Memorial Day.
The Homer I spoke to was surprised to hear about the Times article, but he knew a bit about his family’s history. I learned a bit more from his sister, Karen Baur. Within half an hour, they’d told me about six generations of their family. Before we hung up, Homer asked how I’d decided to write about his late uncle, and I told him about the recent truck accident.
He already knew about it. His son had been the guy on the tractor.
See you soonish! In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram and my books, as well as others mentioned on SMK, on Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookstore or library. If you’d like me to sign or personalize my books, purchase copies from Oblong.