Rural Manpower
By Bruce Patterson
Healdsburg’s State Office for Rural Manpower turned out to be a single-wide travel trailer parked in the Caltrans equipment yard behind the Dry Creek liquor store. Back then the 101 freeway, extending like a conveyor belt north from the Golden Gate Bridge, dumped you on Dry Creek Road, and that, especially seen through the pounding rain, gave the place a forlorn, end-of-the-line kind of feeling. I’d been hoping to see a brand-spanking-new government office building doing a booming business in foot traffic, but laying my eyes on what looked like a contractor’s trailer squatting on a construction site made my heart sink. Throw in the fact that only one car was parked anywhere near the trailer, and the prospect of me finding a job—any kind of job, anytime soon—was starting to look awfully dim. Gazing into the empty, splattering, puddled backlot grayness, it occurred to me that a diet of beans and rice might not be so bad after all. I parked my Chevy nose to nose with the trailer’s front door and, when the rain slacked off a bit, I ran for it and burst through the door.
Excerpted from Bruce Patterson’s Turned Round in My Boots: A Memoir, published in October 2010 by Heyday Books. Patterson describes the life of a returning Vietnam veteran and the difficult process of learning how to readapt to civilian life in Sonoma County. He interweaves descriptions of the odd jobs he picked up wherever they were available with memories of his childhood, his work in the anti-war movement, and the devastating effects of having fought overseas.
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