Hometown: That Guy

Guy Fieri [Image from publicist. Please note that we have removed a previous image of a Guy Fieri impersonator.  Hey, the guy was good! He fooled us.]

Note: Due to an author error, an earlier draft of this piece appeared in last week’s Ferndale Enterprise. Linda offers her apologies to her Ferndale readers.

He snuck up on me, you know. We grew up roughly fifty miles and a decade apart, him in Ferndale, me in Honeydew. I started high school the year he bought his first restaurant. He became a celebrity; I became the kind of person who has little interest in celebrities. Not that any of that matters to him, or the people who’ve always loved him, nor should it. It’s just to explain that even after I understood who he was and where he had come from, Guy Fieri was squarely in my peripheral vision. And then, quite suddenly, he wasn’t. One day, early in 2021, I found that his blonde spiky hair and bright red face had risen like a cartoon sun at the forefront of my thoughts, no longer a piece of local trivia, but a genuine, underappreciated, source of joy and hope.

If you don’t understand why 2021 is the year of Guy Fieri, you’ve probably never eaten a sandwich from the Ferndale Meat Market, bought homemade sausage from their front room cooler or – as my family has for the past 40 years – rented one of their lockers. Trips to town when I was a kid meant getting up early on a Wednesday, loading the big stock truck with cattle and meeting the sun on our way over Panther Gap. After the auction in Fortuna we would do the shopping, which often meant stopping in Ferndale to fill up our ice chest.

Our ranch has never been on the grid, and our propane fridge’s freezer was about the size of a shoebox when I was growing up, so having a locker in town was a necessity for us and many other rural families, still is. My little brother and I would relish the novelty of passing through the big, insulated door of the freezer room, from hot July into the deepest Arctic, and shivering down the narrow aisles to find our locker. We would try to scare one another by pretending the door had locked behind us. Just when we thought our fingers might blacken and freeze off like a gold miner in a Jack London novel, we made it back through the portal, into the disorienting warmth of the storefront.

Do I suddenly love Guy Fieri just because he bought the building where the Ferndale Meat Market is and has said he wants to keep it exactly the way it is? No. Around your fourth decade you start to realize wanting to keep things exactly the way they are is a recipe for heartbreak. I love Guy Fieri because he’s Guy Fieri, unashamedly, unabashedly Guy Fieri, and if you don’t understand why that’s awesome, then maybe – like me – you weren’t paying attention.

Those town trips when I was a kid were about more than getting groceries. They were about striding into the outside world with mud on the bottom of my jeans, sitting in the passenger seat of that big lumbering truck and making clear my own sense of identity. I was a rancher’s daughter, a country kid, tough as hell, twice as mean as any city softie who’d never bucked a bale or pulled a chute. Something about being in Ferndale, stepping out in front of the tourists strolling Main Street, fortified that identity. I remember clearly the day a young family looked into the back of our cow-poop splattered truck with wonder.

“Do you think they keep cows in there?” mused the father.

We laughed about that for years.

But then I turned 18, and left for college, went – in fact – very far away, to San Francisco. I tried to buy the right clothes and find the right words to fit in when I got there, but it took a lot of practice. In the seven years I lived in the Bay Area, the transition back and forth from city to country permanently changed how I saw myself. It became harder and harder to snap back from Doc Martens to cowboy boots; I felt like an overused rubber band that had lost its elasticity. As identity crises go, it’s a pretty common one, and boring enough that I won’t go on. (The problems that come with being in your early twenties are pretty boring in general, I’ve realized now that I’m in my late thirties.)

The point is that while I was floundering around trying to figure stuff out, Guy Fieri was working his butt off and being awesome, wearing loud shirts and louder hair, officiating same-sex marriages, putting local restaurants on national TV, serving free meals to wildland firefighters and raising money for restaurant workers who were struggling due to COVID-19. That’s a man who knows who he is, where he’s from and what he wants. I’m as surprised to say it as you might be to hear it but —seriously— Guy Fieri is a role model worth emulating.

There’s always a hesitation to throw your love behind a celebrity, even a local one, because celebrities are people, and people with money and power can often turn out to be monsters. For this reason I usually save my endorsement for unimpeachable candidates like Angela Lansbury and Danny Trejo. But I’m going to take the plunge for Guy Fieri. Sorry I showed up so late to this party. But hey, I brought some frozen steaks.

Linda Stansberry is a writer, journalist and rancher who lives in Eureka with her family. Hometown is a syndicated monthly column. For more information or to contact Linda, visit www.lindastansberry.com.