The great earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed other places besides San Francisco. For example, the little rail town of Occidental, in western Sonoma County, suffered the same fate that day – and among that fire’s victims was an old-growth redwood tree.
The tree fell over and lay there, undisturbed by time or humans, for more than a century. Then, not long ago, someone cut up the tree and made it into slabs, which awaited use at a miller’s shop in Sonoma.
That’s where Michael “Bug” Deakin found the slabs, and had them shipped to his Heritage Salvage yard in southern Petaluma. His people know how to put good wood like that to good use – and indeed, “We just delivered a table to Kenwood made out of one of those slabs. It is just absolutely spectacular.”
That particular slab was 14 feet long, four feet wide and four inches thick, he said, and weighed close to 1,000 pounds, making a most impressive patio table for some ambitious Kenwood resident.
For Deakin, the stories behind the wood are as ?important as the wood itself. And the quality of both the wood and the stories increases with age.
“I’m a guy full of stories, that’s what it is,” he said. “I love the story of everything that comes through the yard.”
Somebody with enough stories to tell might write a book, so that’s what Deakin did, pounding most of it out during a 54-hour train ride from Emeryville to Chicago. The result is “Heritage Salvage: Reclaimed Stories” – and its many tales reach like tree roots throughout Northern California and beyond, with a few extending straight to Sonoma.
One such story includes Sondra Bernstein, owner of the now-iconic Plaza establishment the girl & the fig restaurant. Deakin had already worked in downtown Sonoma, using his reclaimed wood to build Lokal on Broadway, followed by Dean Biersch’s HopMonk Tavern down the street.
On Nov. 24, 2010, the day HopMonk opened, Bernstein dropped in to check it out. (“They always like to go look at a new place,” Deakin said of restaurant owners.)
What Bernstein saw impressed her. “I saw the tables over there and some of the woodwork, and I’ve known Dean for a while, and I said, ‘All right, where’d you get this wonderful stuff done?’” she recalled.
Biersch hooked them up, and the rest, as Deakin might say, is history, as the collaborators worked on redoing Bernstein’s patio themselves.
“I loved the idea of reclaimed wood, and the idea that inside the building we had so many different textures and so many kinds of wood,” Bernstein explained.
The resulting patio has the same warm, rustic feel, with a line of hanging panels along its First Street East side – they can slide on a track and sway gently in the breeze – allowing peeks in from the sidewalk while still providing privacy, which is just what the proprietor was looking for.
“He surprised me with the fig leaf on the door,” Bernstein added. “That was a total surprise. I really did not expect that.”
Deakin writes in his book that the wood for that job came from “the Spring Lake Park changing rooms’ redwood, and the Penngrove water tank wood - and rusty corrugated roof metal from a chicken barn.”
Other wood sources, for other jobs, include original pilings from Mare Island and the discarded bleachers from high school or college gyms. These are made into “tabletops, bar tops, you name it,” Deakin said – and in fact, the very tables and bar that impressed Bernstein four years ago were made from the bleachers of three schools, including Sonoma Valley High School. (Biersch’s establishments often leave the seat numbers stamped onto the bleacher wood, for character.)
Deakin writes that there’s “Nothing quite like butt-rubbed bleachers for that polished look,” and he goes on to name the various people who probably sat on them in their school days, depending on the place and year of the bleachers.
“I named my company Heritage Salvage because I’m just as much into salvaging the heritage as inheriting the salvage,” Deakin said.
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