Bourbon Point Memories Run Dry
I wrote and shot this story over the course of two years. Not to make it sound like a bigger deal than it really was; it just took a while for the whole thing to unfold.
Anyway, I finally was able to get it in the paper a couple of weeks back. The lake and its future use has been a hot topic on and off around here for a while. It will probably be that way for a long time to come as the lawsuits make their way through the courts and the vacation mobile homes slowly disappear.
Bourbon Point Memories Run Dry
As the last few boxes get packed and cement blocks are pulled from underneath cobwebby axles, Chris Krzywicki grabs the cordless drill, his eyes on the steel Art Deco nameplates adorning his father’s old vacation mobile home.
“I’m keeping these,” said Krzywicki.
For more than 30 years, the Krzywicki clan, along with their extended family and friends, made Bourbon Point — at the mouth of a cove at Lake Berryessa’s Pleasure Cove Resort — a gathering place on weekends, vacations and holidays, traveling from as far north as Redding and as far south as Los Angeles.
For a long time, it was just Stan, Barbara and the six kids. But as time moved on and neighbors moved out, sons Ted and John Krzywicki and daughter Carol Krauthamer, all got mobile homes there, making Bourbon Point virtually their own.
“When we were kids, we loved water-skiing so much we would sleep on the deck or in the boats and get up at the crack of dawn to ski,” said Ted Krzywicki, the eldest son. “(Lake Berryessa) is what’s kept our family together.”
“It’s like your own church. It’s grounding,” said Krauthamer.
Late last summer, after crossing their water-wrinkled fingers and wishfully thinking the Bureau of Reclamation would decide to let the mobile homes stay, the Krzywickis were forced to take out their trailers and pack up their belongings.
With the Bureau of Reclamation’s Record of Decision for Lake Berryessa banning the lakeside mobile homes in June 2006, the Krzywicki family finds itself with a boat full of memories and no lake to float them on.
“We were hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” said Chris Krzywicki.
Two of the last three mobile homes still in the family were given away once cleaned out, one going to a Napa Valley ranch and the other to a contractor to be used as an office. But Ted Krzywicki stored his, keeping open the possibility of dropping anchor somewhere else.
“I’ve been looking all over the place to go with my trailer, but nothing out there gets you (as) close to the water,” he said last year. “My boats have been sitting in the driveway all summer. At least I can sit in them and turn the stereo on.”
