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Tim Britton visits Seaver Vineyards. It's quite a tour.
CALISTOGA, Calif. — The walk takes about 20 minutes, clockwise, uphill then down, and it induces a healthy amount of sweat when the temperature cracks 90, as it does on this late September afternoon last year.
“This is what he did every day,” Anne Seaver says, accompanied by three black labradors. “He walked the vineyard with his three dogs. So what I do, every day, is I walk the vineyard with my three dogs.”
The walk offers exercise, a remarkable view atop Calistoga's Diamond Mountain and communion with the past. When Tom Seaver made this walk each morning, he chatted along the way with his late mother or his older brother, Charles, who'd died from cancer decades ago.
A little more than three years ago, Seaver passed away from Lewy body dementia and complications from COVID-19. Now, for his younger daughter Anne, that same walk is a chance to reconnect with Tom.
“All the little things I took for granted about Dad, now I appreciate so much more,” she says. “I can hear his laugh in my head, especially up here.
“I feel almost closer to him now than when he was alive.”
As we walk past the rows of grapevines that constitute Seaver Vineyards on a still and cloudless day, the crunch of the ground under our feet the only noise, Anne leans down to pick up a feather.
“Since he's passed,” she says, “I've been finding all these feathers.” He loved birds, she explains, enough to coo at them when he came across them in the wild, enough to put a quail on the front gate at the vineyard. His favorite poem, the one written by Charles that hangs in the barn at the vineyard, is about watching the geese:
Oh I wish you could have been here on that day
to share the feelings that we felt
to see them fly away.
“The feathers are the symbols,” Anne says. “He leaves the feathers.”
Outside Citi Field, sitting at 41 Seaver Way, there is one extraordinary tribute to Seaver: a statue that stands 10 feet tall, bronze and steel, the pitcher in the middle of his trademark drop-and-drive delivery. It's a testament to Seaver the pitcher — the pitcher who defined the Mets as a franchise, who won three Cy Youngs and 311 games, who for a quarter-century had received a higher percentage of votes for the Hall of Fame than anyone else in history.
Some 2,900 miles west, at the top of Diamond Mountain, sits a different kind of monument: Seaver Vineyards. This one pays homage to Seaver the man, to a person dedicated not just to his craft but to the concept of craftsmanship.
Tom and his wife, Nancy, purchased the 116-acre plot in 1997 when Seaver was between broadcasting gigs and feeling stagnant in retirement. He'd grown up in Fresno, and his father had worked in the fruitpacking industry, with a focus on raisins. His first job was working the land there. Later, when he lived in Greenwich, Conn., he'd built his own wine cellar out of cement and PVC pipes.
“He had to make sure he had something stimulating to do,” Anne said. |
https://theathletic.com/4816507/2023/09/05/tom-seaver-mets-vineyard/
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