Gaye LeBaron: Christo's death revives memories of 1976 and the North Bay's 'Running Fence'

The death of the artist Christo in his New York City loft last Sunday was a personal loss for many of us who are old enough to remember the magic of his Running Fence.

Christo and his wife and partner in art, Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, are lauded by the world’s art community as innovators of a new style of environmental art and praised by critics like the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins for their bold ventures that were “grandiose, ephemeral” and “absurdly beautiful.”

Tomkins’ description certainly fits the project that brought them to us in the mid-1970s, promising to hang a 24-mile “curtain” that would follow the curves and dips of the western Sonoma and Marin ranch landscape to skinny-dip into the Pacific Ocean.

And that is what they did. And we all watched and wondered through some 20 months of meetings, permit applications, denials, appeals and bureaucratic gymnastics never seen in these parts before.

There are many versions of the Running Fence story. Every one of the thousands who saw it has a story. Some can be found, digitized, in special collections of the Schulz Library at Sonoma State. Here’s one, written at the 10th anniversary of the event.

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ON SEPT. 7, 1976, the Running Fence unfurled across 1,000 yards of rocky shoreline and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean, a shining white ribbon of light reflecting the rays of the sun. It was also an illegal act.

It had begun its journey on a hill above the freeway in Cotati and headed west, changing color with the sunsets, rippling with the winds, placing exclamation points for emphasis on the golden hills of western Sonoma and Marin counties.

The 20 months preceding had been a local reporter’s dream come true. The Christo story was ideal - no blood spilling, no lives ruined, just good clean governmental acrimony.

The ’60s liberals, who were supposed to be the intellectual leaders and understand all that conceptual stuff, lined up vehemently against Christo’s project while the conservative West County ranchers joined with New York gallery owners, museum curators and art professors in support.

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OH, THE WONDER of it all,” wrote The Press Democrat’s Petaluma reporter Bob Wells in January of ’74 when Christo and Jeanne-Claude called a press conference at the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds to announce the plans.

Then, for a year we familiarized ourselves with this man Christo, who had wrapped a beach in Australia with synthetic fiber and hung an orange curtain across Rifle Gap in Colorado.

“It’s just an art project,” he deprecatingly told a Petaluma meeting of ranchers whose land would be crossed by Running Fence. But they didn’t believe that, even then. And Dr. Peter Selz, an art professor at UC Berkeley, didn’t either. He called it “the greatest aesthetic engineering experience since the Great Wall of China.”

The economics of the project, Christo told us, were “irrelevant to the art” but the legal and political machinations that lay ahead (even he could not have known how many there would be) were “part of the art process,” he said.

In January of 1975, Running Fence got its first public hearing before the Marin County Planning Commission - and lost. The commissioners voted 3-3 to disallow a permit for the 4 miles of Marin County the Fence would traverse. The tie vote constituted a denial. The circus had begun.

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SONOMA COUNTY’S BOARD of Zoning Adjustments held a hearing in February, described by our reporter George Manes as “the local art event of the year.”

Christo got his permit, in a split decision, but he also heard his project compared to “Evel Knievel jumping his motorcycle into the Estero Americano” and denounced as “an elegant hustle” by a Peace & Freedom Party spokesman who saw the Fence as “exploitation of natural resources.” The artist was accused of fraud and of being a “pseudo-artist: who had come to brutalize Sonoma County.” And that was only for openers.

“You are all part of my work!” said Christo, spreading his arms wide to the crowded hearing room.

We were all learning.

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CHRISTO APPEALED THE Marin planners’ decision to the Marin supervisors and won. And the Sonoma County supervisors denied an appeal from the opposition. The March 1975 hearing on that appeal was jam-packed, the circus aspect pronounced. The San Francisco TV crews sent out for hamburgers, a film crew shot footage for what would eventually become a film called “Running Fence,” and supporters and opposition sweated under the hot lights.

The testimony included predictions of horrendous traffic jams, unruly mobs stomping down grazing land, threats to public safety and fire hazards. But the proponents were eloquent, too. The 50-plus ranchers across whose property the Fence would run already knew Christo and Jeanne-Claude well.

The couple had been in their homes, shared pie and coffee and red wine at their kitchen tables. Christo had shared his vision with them and they “got” it. Les Bruhn, the old coast rancher, summed it up for the supervisors in classic fashion, saying, “I don’t know anything about art, but I like these folks.”

The ranchers got help from unexpected quarters. Sonoma County Taxpayers Association president Jim Groom said “He came to us, hat in hand, money in pocket. We like that.” And a Ukiah man who had lived in Rifle Gap, Colorado, when Christo hung his Curtain, reassured alarmists. “The chickens will continue to lay,” he said.

Environmental activist Virginia Hechtman saved her esoteric fears for the North Central Coastal Commission. She pointed out that the fence would go up during deer season. She feared it would be “a barrier to deer migration” and that poachers with high-powered rifles would shoot deer trapped by the fence. If it was allowed, she said. Christo would be “the creator of the world’s largest and most infamous shooting-gallery.”

Still, our Coastal Commission granted the permit and COAAST appealed to the State Commission.

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NOW IT WAS MAY of ’75. The Fence was scheduled for September and things began to go bad for Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The State Coastal Commission denied permission to cross the 1,000 feet of coastal land it had jurisdiction over. And a Committee to Stop the Running Fence filed a lawsuit challenging the Sonoma County supervisors’ adoption of a negative declaration on the Environmental Impact Report.

Visiting Judge John Golden of Lake County invalidated Christo’s Sonoma County permit. But in September the State Court of Appeals overturned Judge Golden’s ruling. And Christo announced Running Fence would be delayed one year.

In December, permits having expired, he started all over again. This time the Sonoma County zoning board denied him, but the supervisors overruled, listening again to rancher Bruhn who said, “He’s going to spend a million dollars here. We’d be darn fools if we don’t take it.”

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ONCE AGAIN, THE North Central Coastal Commission approved it and the decision was appealed. It was now July of 1976 and Christo’s workmen were setting the steel poles along the fence route. If it was, as political columnist Pete Golis suggested, “the ultimate satire on government,” the agencies were playing into the satirist’s hands.

In August, as the cable was being strung, the government’s decisions took on a surreal aspect. The State Coastal Commission put off the appeal until Sept. 21 - the day the fence was scheduled to come down. The Fence’s plunge unto the sea two weeks before that date was, therefore, an illegal act. But a Marin judge, asked to issue a court order to dismantle it, set that hearing for Oct. 14.

Despite the threat of a $10,000 fine and a $500-a-day penalty for being in the sea, there would be no stopping Christo.

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WHAT CAME NEXT was the mass conversion of the undecided. Those among us who had been, pardon the pun, sitting on the fence about this art form, were captivated. It was, as some columnist or another wrote at the time, “The Yellow Brick Road, the Long, Long Trail A’Winding” and we followed eagerly (and orderly. There were no traffic jams, no stampedes, no fires, no shooting) as it came out of the east, dipped into a gulch and headed for the sea.

What artists have done for centuries with our eyes, Christo did with our entire person - carrying us along into infinity. People went in cars, on bikes, in airplanes. For two weeks they followed the Fence.

In Valley Ford, where it leapt Highway 1, Anita Baccala kept a tally at her Valley Ford Market. Ninety percent of the people, she found, thought it was “fabulous,” 5% thought it was “stupid” and the other 5% “didn’t say anything.”

With those returns, you’d have to call Christo the winner.

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WHEN THE TWO weeks were up and the Fence was removed, the ranchers were offered the nylon panels. They covered a lot of manure piles in a lot of barnyards for years. But the real treasures of our “Two Weeks with Christo and Jeanne-Claude” were the memories. And they linger yet.