Home Is Where I Want To Be

But I guess I’m already there.

Tina Weymouth, Ednah Holt, Lynn Mabry, David Byrne, and Alex Weir in “Stop Making Sense”. Image: A24

A triumphant return home to Mountain View, California from our first enormously memorable European motorcycle trip was barely a week old when we were told the lease on the address we’ve called home for nearly 17 years wouldn’t be renewed. This is where we raised two dynamic teenagers; entertained friends and family from around the world; cultivated a fine array of flowers, plants and trees; enjoyed flybys from hummingbirds; took care of countless dogs; and garaged nearly 30 motorcycles on a rotating basis.

Pal Brian and I geared up and waiting for Henri to join us on our romp north to the 2023 Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride in San Francisco. Image: Jean Boulanger

This is the 1947 peach orchard caretaker’s cottage with a funky layout that looked like a double-wide upon first inspection in late November 2006 – when we desperately needed to find a place of our own after sharing a tiny log cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains between Page Mill Road and Alice’s Restaurant on Skyline Boulevard – slowly becoming our own version of a Silicon Valley mansion.

I wrote hundreds of articles sitting on the front porch, in a city where porches are about as rare as a homeowner who tends to their own lawn. Rare rain showers were enjoyed from the same porch, and the two dogs to call this place home preferred the porch over anywhere else on the property, which butts up against Los Altos and is owned by a church.

A church’s main focus is to provide community, and the Silicon Valley is chockablock full of fractured communities. We were drawn to this house because we joined the Highway Community, a nondenominational church launched at Palo Alto High School’s Haymarket Theater on Easter Sunday, 2000. Highway merged with an older church in 2005, and took over its Mountain View campus, which included this 1947 peach orchard caretaker’s cottage and its $219,000 mortgage.

About the same time, Highway’s board of directors voted to buy Red Rock Coffee, located on the first floor of the same historic downtown Mountain View building that housed the church’s offices on the third and fourth floors. To truly be part of the community, the board of directors decided, what better way than to run a coffee shop where the focus was ‘caffeine, culture and community’? 

We moved into the church cottage in late December, 2006. The rent was agreeable, which was important because we didn’t have Midwest collateral to afford a Silicon Valley house, nor were either one of us working in the seemingly lucrative tech industry. Stocks and dividends from the local big boys (Apple, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) have been known to pay many down payments in these parts, where the average household income is $155,264 (as of 2020) and the average home price is $1.8 million (July 2023). 

August 2007, Jean became Red Rock Coffee’s general manager, after a short stint as office manager of a start up two buildings down Castro Street. She had run our bicycle company in Dayton, Ohio and worked in the marketing department of an international consulting firm for 10 years prior in Wisconsin. Highway’s senior pastor knew Jean was the ideal person to run Highway’s non-profit coffee shop, and within the year Red Rock occupied the first two floors at 201 Castro Street.

Over time – as Jean built a solid foundation in the Mountain View business community with Red Rock continuing to attract entrepreneurs to its benches and chairs to code, brainstorm and pitch investors – it didn’t matter what financial crisis or pandemic was rocking the rest of the world; one thing was curiously clear: Silicon Valley’s cost of living was rising faster than my hairline, and nothing would stop the ridiculous tidal wave that was wiping out the middle class, lower class and anyone dumb enough to think they could survive amongst the tech elites.

Lots of dreamers valued a place like Red Rock to scheme and write and code and interview. Check out this recent Bloomberg video partially shot at Red Rock, because the interviewee holds it so dear:

But we push on. A running joke in our family is that the cost of living is the same here as anywhere else in the United States, but we gladly pay the ocean, sunshine and mountain taxes. Where else can we find daily tranquility? We also meet the best people the planet has to offer, good folks who come here to make a go at the modern equivalent of the 1840’s gold rush. And the best of the best dig motorcycles.

And in late 2020 – after 15 years – the Highway Community sold Red Rock Coffee to someone wanting to continue its legacy. Someone who valued the effort Jean and her staff made to make everyone feel welcome, someone who appreciated the knitting club, book club, Sunday Moto Club, and Monday night open mic. And I’ve appreciated the coffee shop as a place to scheme and write and interview and just plain hang out. We’re fortunate our home at Red Rock continues as we have to say goodbye to our little cottage.

This isn’t a requiem for the 1947 peach orchard caretaker’s cottage with its walls holding photos of our family or paintings by our children, or its garage holding motorcycles and bicycles that have carried us thousands of miles. It’s a celebration of having survived a lot longer than we imagined in a home we could shape into our own community space. We relocated from southwestern Ohio with a scrappy plan to make our mark in northern California 17 years ago, and that desire hasn’t waned.

We’re excited to see where this California experiment takes us next.