I never knew much about Igo before we built a house and moved here more than two years ago. I just knew it was way, way, way out west of Redding.
Just the name – Igo – tells you it’s a different kind of place. It is.
Igo is the kind of place where people might knock on your door and hand you 40 pounds of Igo apples, and then two days later, someone else will show up with another box of apples.
Igo the kind of place where, just last night, a woman I’d never met dropped off a Christmas ornament, just because she thought it reminded her of me. (It’s a jaunty Santa in a chef’s hat, holding a cake in one hand and a rolling pin in another. He’s the star of the show on my desk Christmas tree.)
Igo is the kind of place where the main road in Igo proper boasts a beer/bar store, post office, school and church. But that main road was also where I saw – both in one night – a buck with a spectacular rack, standing near the post office, and a little farther down the road a huge mountain lion, leaving someone’s driveway. (Yes, I told the homeowner. The next day, of course.)
Igo is the kind of place where it’s not unusual to hear the sound of gun fire, or roosters, or cattle trucks, or gravel trucks that rumble by.
Igo is the kind of place were you’d best not go snooping around on any of those little dirt roads in the boondocks or you might meet up with folks whom are fiercely protective of their privacy, to the point where even some drivers feel nervous delivering packages there.
But Igo is the kind of place that has some of the most spectacular views, which we didn’t realize fully until after we bought the property, stood on a chair in the bed of Bruce’s truck and saw potential beyond the manzanita and scrub oaks.
Before us lay a wide, curvaceous valley adorned with an arborist’s palette: blue oaks, white oaks and live oaks. Bright green coin-shaped leathery leaves decorated smooth-barked maroon manzanita. Farther off, gray pines rose up to meet The Yolla Bolla Wilderness, the rolling nudeness of the the Bald Hills, and a family of mountains with names as distinct as their personalities: Bully Choop, South Fork, Shasta Bally and Kanaka.
We fell head over heels in love with Igo.
But because of recurrent illegal dumping, the Igo/Ono areas also have some of the very worst views. Tires and abandoned vehicles and sometimes entire loads of crap. Fortunately, it’s less of a problem, since the founding of the area’s super-active Neighborhood Watch group, the poster child for how such groups should operate.
But they can’t stop all the dumping. Like this one. When I first spotted it last week, just south of the Veterans Cemetery, I thought it was a heap of trash collected by roadside volunteers, for pickup and disposal later.
How nice, I thought. Then I learned that the huge flat-bed trailer full of metal and crud and Lord knows what else, had been deposited there, trailer and all. No license plates, to keep it from being traced. I also heard it’s being investigated. Good.
What kind of people would actually load up that precarious pile of scrap, haul it there in the dead of night and leave it for someone else to clean up?
But here’s the thing about Igo. The last time I drove by that dumping spot, much of the garbage was gone.
For every one bad thing that happens here, 1,000 more good things occur.
Like the Christmas parade that does a U-turn in the school’s parking lot. And Santa who rides horseback to visit kids. And Tom and Ray at the Igo Store/Beer Bar, who cook Sunday breakfast and keep collection jars on their counters for every kind of community need. And the citizens’ fundraising can-do that prompted about a dozen people to drive their trucks to the 5,000-foot elevation to cut trees and haul them back to Igo in time for the Christmas parade and their first Christmas tree sale.
Some trees remain for sale. The display is rustic, but the average price for a tree is about $10. Payment is an on-your-honor system. You pick out a tree, pay at the store and that’s that. The proceeds help the Neighborhood Watch program.
Yes, Igo, for the views, but Igo also for its color, its goodness and its people.
