Now and Forever

A Stroll Through Harmony’s Past, Present, and Future

Define the car as a space for the present, the capital-n Now. Some vague, pop culture-influenced creation myth tells me a road trip is about the journey, not the destination. The car is the vessel for the journey, the place we reside during the in between. For right now, for almost, for no, we’re not quite there yet.

Define a destination as a place for the future. But more and more often these days, I only want to go to places drawn up from the past. When I drive through California, I rarely want to find something new. I want to revisit the places I’ve been before, recontextualize them, dig my feet into someone’s stomping grounds until I feel like they are mine.

Outside the window as we make our way down the 101, rolling, lush, and green hills greet us. Accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack, soon enough we are transported to Harmony, a 2.5-acre, one-block, tiny town.

My parents used to bring me to the Central Coast when I was growing up, meeting my cousins who lived in Northern California at a halfway point, staying in Cambria or Morro Bay or Santa Barbara. The memory I have of Harmony, California, is not really a memory; it’s more likely a construction of feelings I’ve built around a photo my mother took of my cousins and me in front of the old creamery.

Harmony and I are kindred spirits. We both love to rehash our history. I approach the famous sign, reading: Harmony, Pop 18, Elev 175. The iconic epigraph has been woven into the heart of the town: in the pottery shop, there are magnets and mugs and tiles reproducing the sign, these souvenirs surrounded by the work of local artists.

The town grew around a thriving dairy industry in the 1800s, and local farmers participated in coop-based creamery founded in 1907. A mural depicting the town’s history in script tells me the name originates from a shooting death that led residents to declare a pledge to live in Harmony. That’s not quite how it happened, Aarika, a long-time resident and unofficial historian of Harmony, tells me. Apparently, a domestic dispute involving the stabbing of a teacher resolved in the local schoolhouse taking the name Harmony, a moniker the town adopted after. Aarika tells me the hallway behind the creamery was added during revitalization efforts in the 70s, designed to match the rugged historical look of the old creamery, paying attention to details such as reproduced square nails. These restoration efforts took place decades after the dairy industry left Harmony in the 1950s, the town shrinking thereafter.

Harmony is a place that refuses to become a ghost story, a town obsessed with its past, waiting for its future. It’s also changed a lot over time. The wedding chapel has a wine cask façade, having served as a wine tasting venue before being repurposed for nuptials. Walking around the block, there’s a memorial for Freddy (short for Alfredo) the cat, who was the town’s unofficial mayor for many years. At the Harmony Glassworks, Terry recalls an early trip to Harmony 32 years ago when she was pregnant with her daughter and passed out at the Italian restaurant, which has since closed.

The Now of Harmony is a little trickier to characterize; the present is imported mostly from nearby Templeton. An ice cream truck and a cheese-based food truck park in the middle of the town for tourists to enjoy. Visitors sit at tables in the town’s center, eating ice cream and grilled cheese sandwiches, enjoying company in this cozy pocket next to the highway. “Going to see cows on hills!” reads a recent entry to the town’s visitor booklet, which is filled via ballpoint pen with the inside jokes and travel logs of strangers. Harmony is privately owned by Alan Vander Horst, and plans to revitalize it with a farm-to-table restaurant have been complicated by zoning and the need for a water treatment plant installation.

Circling the block of Harmony over and over, I wonder how to define a community. I think about a small town as a tenant of some American genesis of neighborly comradery and rural bliss, about a farming town as some embodiment of an American Dream. But maybe Harmony is too small and altogether too peaceful to hold these heavy abstractions. It’s a place filled with whimsical statues of cows; a place to eat ice cream with your friends and enjoy some agricultural history education.

My conversation with Aarika is briefly interrupted when she greets another resident of Harmony, a woman who opens a gate in the middle of the block in order to guide her red car through. There is some irony inherent to living in a place famous for being small. Harmony spends its days as a center of international travel, with people from all over the world coming through. “At night, you have the whole town to yourself,” Aarika says.

She tells me about a couple who were gifted a cactus by a friend who passed away shortly after. Looking to house the plant before moving away, they requested to plant it in the drought resistant garden on the pathway to the pottery shop, where it currently thrives. It’s a nice thought. How lovely it must be to live forever in Harmony.

Words: Sarena Kuhn

Photos: Emily Langton