At their remote seaside cafe on the rugged Mendocino coast, owners Pat Kelly and Bonnie Simons take turns pouring coffee, scooping ice cream and–during the lulls–solving the year 2000 computer problem for a $2 million software development company 115 miles away.
Five years ago the two San Francisco software executives packed their attache cases and quit the city life, but not their corporate careers. Now instead of commuting through crowds to the 14th floor of a high-rise office building, they simply slip behind a blue curtain that separates the front of the cafe from the office in back.
There, from a laptop in the tiny town of Gualala, they make a comfortable living writing technical manuals and programs for the Forecross Corp., all while realizing their dream of living on California’s beautiful northern coast.
“We can even watch the whales go by while we work,” Simons said, sipping fresh coffee from a mug.
Simons and Kelly are among those who have swapped their suits for sweat shirts, their mega-mainframe systems for portable word processors and headed to this 80-mile stretch of craggy coastline to telecommute via Internet.
Locals have dubbed the area reaching from Jenner to Mendocino “Silicon Coast,” and boast that there are more computer users per capita here than anywhere else.
Though no scientific data exist, a recent survey by the Coast PC Users Group found that about 3,600 computers are in use in the region, an area with about 6,000 households.
Another report compiled by the Mendocino Unified School District showed that more than half the students in grades 4 through 12 use the Internet at home.
“People think we’re just a bunch of country bumpkins out here, but this is one of the most extraordinarily technical groups of people anywhere,” said Marshall Sayegh, 48, a former construction supervisor who now creates business Web sites and technology links from his home in Gualala.
It won’t take long, he hopes, for the virtual world to rebuild the real economy along the Northern California coast, which has declined with the faltering fishing and timber industries and made residents heavily reliant on tourism.
It all became possible just four years ago, after the Mendocino Unified School District decided to go into business as the area’s only local-access Internet service provider by making its cyber-connection publicly available.
Students had been able to use the Internet at school after NASA paid for a dedicated phone line installed directly to the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, which allowed them to reach the World Wide Web without getting tangled in expensive long-distance phone charges.
The grant expired, but interest in Internet access was flourishing. And though it was enormously expensive and risky, “everyone saw the power and the potential in it,” said Mitch Sprague, an English teacher who spearheaded Mendocino High School’s effort.
Today the Mendocino Community Network (mcn.org) has 2,500 subscribers and is the heart of the cyber revolution under way along the north coast.
Stacked in a small room tacked on to a class at the high school–its walls still unpainted and the wooden beams exposed–expensive computer components fill three floor-to-ceiling columns.
From behind the glass-paneled doors that protect them, green lights blink as modems from Cuffy Cove to Schooner Gulch and places in between log on to the system.
Behind the stacks of equipment are miles of bundled, intertwined wires and telephone cords running along the walls, under the desks and on the floor. The hum of the monitors and the buzz of fans used to keep the equipment cool drone in the background as staffers on headsets answer calls and questions from the network of people who have come to depend on mcn.org as their lifeline.
“I even have students who live in houses without electricity that are now connected to the Internet,” teacher Deena Zarlin said.
They boot up with the help of wind- or solar-powered systems, 12-volt batteries or propane generators to access anything and everything just like their urban peers.
“It gives us a tremendous amount of access to experiences, people and resources that just wasn’t possible before,” said Zarlin, who lives three miles off a dirt road half a mile from her nearest neighbor.
“I mean, sometimes I’m even e-mailing while video conferencing,” she said. “Now that’s country living!”
There are hundreds of examples of how the Internet has changed life in this picturesque, isolated terrain, said Jim Heid, who hosts “Point and Click Radio,” a weekly computer talk show simultaneously broadcast on the local public radio and the Internet.
There’s the construction worker in Fort Bragg who linked up, found his true love in cyberspace and is now happily married; the woman who used the Internet to trace long lost relatives and arrange a reunion in Europe and the grandmother who gushed with excitement when talking about sending and receiving e-mail to her brood scattered across the globe.
“I have a camera pointed outside my window that snaps a live picture every five minutes (and posts it on my Web site), and a lot of people tell me they check my weather cam before coming to the coast so they can determine whether or not they need to wear a sweater,” Heid said.
Internet commerce also has transformed some longtime locals, like Mickie Zekley, into such successes that they’ve become hometown heroes.
For the last 25 years Zekley eked out a modest living in his small shop in Mendocino that sells rare and exotic musical instruments. Three years ago, Zekley began the basic work of putting his catalog on the Internet.
“It’s really been phenomenal,” he said. “We used to send out maybe 30 to 50 catalogs a week, now we mail out at least 1,000.”
And his client list has grown from 2,000 names to more than 180,000, he said.
