The northern California town where I live is famous for two things. The first being its prime positioning at the near epicenter of wine country. It is the working-class cousin to snazzier locales like Napa and Healdsburg. As a result, bistros and wine bars dot the downtown area, trying to lure in wine-fueled tourists who may be staying here, instead of the fancier destinations, as way to save a few bucks. My town’s second claim to fame is the fact that it was home to Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz (Sparky to his close friends and associates), who moved his studio here sometime in the 1960’s. As a result, larger than life ceramic statues of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Woodstock—embossed with the name of the man who dreamt them up in black scraggly lettering— are placed in front of storefronts and office spaces throughout town. My favorite frozen yogurt shop—the one that offers bibles along with their delicious yogurt—boasts a colorful Snoopy statue with dripping waffle cone in hand. It’s kitsch to the max, but when you got it, you gotta flaunt it, I guess.

Schulz drew his iconic and lucrative cartoons from a dark, well-worn office built in a grove of redwoods near a dirty creek. I’m sure when he moved here, the creek wasn’t the dirty, homeless haven that it has become, but times change. During his lifetime he and his wife bought the a rundown ice arena near his studio, paying to have it completely refurbished, and renaming it the Redwood Ice Arena. He also had a hockey court with blue cement floors and white walls put in, as well as an outdoor tennis court. After Schulz died in 2000, the grounds around his playground became the site of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

This modern, glassy building is right down the street from my house, and I’ve been walking my dog in the fields near the hockey rink for the past four years, almost every day, and while I have enjoyed seeing the happy tourists congregating for photographs next to a ceramic Snoopy’s doghouse statue, I’ve never actually ventured into the museum proper. The reality being that I couldn’t bear to part with a single dollar to see old Peanuts comics on view and modern art tributes by people like Christo to the “Peanuts gang.” I mean, I loved my Snoopy lunchbox, snow cone machine, and t-shirts when I was eight, but like I said, times change.

But when my husband suggested we go check out the museum on a free night—the occasion for the free entry being the museum’s eighth anniversary, I said yes without hesitation. I was finally going to enter the building that I’d peered into, mused about, and walked past for so many years. Plus, they were serving free ice cream cake. It took us two minutes to walk over, and once we stepped into the actual building, the exhibits were pretty much what I expected, but still entertaining. I especially liked the random collection of pop culture artifacts that supposedly served as Schulz’s inspiration—a macramé owl, a silver lame vest, a Davy Crockett hat, and a pristine long board pushed up against a wall. Hmmm, okay.

But the most interesting moment of the night came when we were approached by a museum volunteer as we stood before the “Wrapped Snoopy.” A gift from Christo to Schulz, a thank you for the cartoonist’s support of the artist’s “Running Fence” project, erected in Sonoma County in the mid-1970’s. The artistic integrity of a Snoopy doghouse sloppily wrapped in what looks like bedsheets was lost on me. The woman asked us how we liked the museum and we got into conversation. It turns how that she had just moved from Brooklyn, New York and had only lived in our little city for ten months. She was rhapsodic about living here, talking about how much friendlier people were than in New York, and how much she loved the weather. She told us about her walks through the Fountain Grove area where she had moved with her husband.

So this is where I actually get to the book I want to talk about this month. In 2006, Chronicle Books published this amazing collection of photos and essays titled The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. Written by the trippy California-phile Erik Davis, the essays offer fascinating information about the “restless, heretical edge of the Anglo American experience as it probes the inside and outside of religious institutions.” In the essay “Divine Winery,” Davis tells the story of Thomas Lake Harris, a mystic who moved his Brotherhood of the New Life Colony—a theo-socialist commune—to California (specifically the town where I live) in 1875. He called it the “Eden of the West.” Harris and his friends lived in a richly-decorated, two-story manor where Harris taught his acolytes about Divine Respiration, and the hermaphrodite God that he called the “Twain-One.” At the same time, the group established a winery on the grounds that would one day be Fountain Grove, where they built a thriving wine export business. Eventually, Harris was “shamed” (the man did think that fairies lived in the bosoms of women) into stepping down as leader, and after years of being successfully run by Kanaye Nagasawa, the winery fell into disrepair. But you can still walk the creepy grounds of the ruins, where ancient wine barrels covered in graffiti loom under a progressively deteriorating roof.

We excitedly shared all of this information with the woman from Brooklyn, as she peered at us through her hip New York glasses. She seemed interested, but a little put off by our obsession with the Divine Winery. It seemed so far away from the sparkling, proper museum filled with the important but so commercialized-that-it-has-almost-lost-all-meaning Peanuts images that surrounded us. Two versions of the California dream, one that ended in riches, and one that ended in ghosts and decay. I’m thinking ceramic Snoopy statue in front of the divine winery, holding strange fairies and 19^thcentury wine goblet in paw, but alas, never the twain shall meet.