Vallejo Vignettes — Waterways and their watering holes

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Navigable waterways

I moved to Vallejo three years ago and went on a search for new friends in this view-tiful city on the bay with its straits, lakes, and a slough. I tried the well-known spots along the Mare Island Strait but found that they were very popular and regulars were hard to spot. I decided to do what a citizen in a city with a yacht club on each of its straits, a ferry service and a school for seafaring might do: be a captain of their own ship. 

I bought my first kayak and associated accouterments and decided to try it out on Lake Chabot at Dan Foley Park. It is perhaps the best possible place to learn how to kayak: a big lake with calm waters that offers people, waterfowl, and giraffe watching, with lions roaring in the distance to further aggrandize the experience. 

I met the local fisherman of the lake and they thought I was there for the thrill of catching something with gills. Alas, while I did discover the joy of kayaking at Lake Chabot, I was not able to find friends. Nevertheless, I continued to gradually improve my kayaking skills on the lake in order to chart a course on the straits and hopefully encounter kindred spirits there.

After one such kayaking session, I decided to try a nearby brewery with an ironic name that I had heard about: Napa Smith. It was situated on the shores of White Slough and I figured it could bode well to do some scouting of the slough for a potential kayaking session. As it turned out, the scouting was not necessary. 

A Watering hole and its lovers

Napa Smith was a watering hole, a brewery to be exact, perched on the shores of White Slough at its rear and with two giant palm trees at its front with the taco truck “El Rey” parked next to them. The brewery had fun beer styles and paired it with cornhole, board games, darts, foosball, all situated within a family friendly environment.  

Among the patrons were local business owners, mechanics, architects, chefs, dispensary employees, former city council members, scientists, tourists, and their significant others or families. These were the kindred and variegated spirits that I had been searching for ever since I had moved to Vallejo. 

There were the people behind the bar: shout out to Alina, Zay, Rhys, John, Louren and the various others that made all who stopped by there come to love the community that formed at Napa Smith. There was Dave who would come all the way up from Napa, Whitney who would often be found working on reports on his laptop while cramming in a conversation or two, Drew and his friends practicing on their Kendama and Mike the mechanic trying to relax and be ready for the next car that needed fixing. 

Towards the middle and end of most nights Manny, the taco truck owner, would come in and join us. He would sneak in a foosball game with me and we would be neck and neck as the top foosball players there. If things got too busy at the taco truck, Rosa, his wife, would come in and scold him to come back out and help with the orders. 

Most, if not all of these characters, were there to bid Napa Smith adieu when it closed its tap room for the last time. The official closing time was Friday at 8 pm but many of us were there until deep into the early hours of Saturday morning. 

The aftermath 

There were those of us Napa Smithers that wrote down our information on a list the night Napa Smith closed. Our hopes were that there would at least be an email chain that would lead up to a future reunion. That email chain and reunion never came. 

In the, now, months that followed, some of us would see each other from a distance or even run into each other in town. Others reached out among the small clusters they knew well at Napa Smith and carried on at places such as Happy Hour at Bambinos, Mare Island Brewing locations, Townhouse or the newer places like El Barbas, Manny’s Steakhouse new location on the waterfront, and the recently opened Vallejo Brewing Company. 

At this point though, all of us Napa Smithers look back with nostalgia on the vibe that we had. A place where at least a person or two would know your name but most people remember seeing you before if you were a regular. It was an oasis or island of sorts. 

Vallejo has many of these islands, some of which have been aforementioned and some of which are actually on an island. If we extend the island metaphor to cover these islands, we would have an archipelago. This interwoven literal and metaphorical geography would be facile for a Vallejoan to navigate. An exploratory minded Vallejoan would say (in their best Patrick Steward voice):”These are the voyages of the Starship inter-city vibe, its continuing mission: to explore funky eclectic islands, to seek out new vibes and new personalities. To boldly go where a fellow Valleojan already has been: a city by the bay that’s straight up V-Town.”

— by Braulio Soto, an architect working in downtown Vallejo