Dim Lights, Small City
By Chris Colin, Special to SF Gate; Monday, May 7, 2007
Jim Corsaut fixes boats. Outboard motors, inboards, even upholstery, he says, as we roam Isleton’s warm, quiet streets. But that doesn’t explain why over the course of the day, everyone — everyone — who sees him waves. Could be because this Delta town has a population smaller than your average California high school. Could also be because Corsaut, 67, happens to be the mayor as well as the marine mechanic.
I’m in Isleton, population 840, to learn what that means. Specifically, what does it mean to be a mayor — and a fixer of boats — in one of the Bay Area’s last remaining small, small towns? We’re far from Gavin country, far from Ron Dellums country. To get to Isleton, you drive up on the levee, along the river, past a sign nailed to a tree advertising “JERKY,” past a stand selling pistachios and almonds and oranges, past a couple of rusting kitchen appliances — but mostly past a large, peaceful emptiness. Corsaut came here 20 years ago to help a friend whose houseboat sank. He liked it and stayed.
(At an Isleton City Council meeting on April 27, it was revealed that Corsaut, went to prison 15 years ago for a repeat drunken driving offense. Corsaut had not previously disclosed this information.)
The small-town mayor owns a funny little piece of real estate in the American imagination. In movies, he (yes, usually he) is Simple but Honest, a little comical but Fundamentally Decent. He stands, nostalgically, for plainspoken truths, an alluring naivete, an alternative to big-city chaos. I think we can all picture, more or less, this character. But rarely do we see what the real-life version actually does or what a typical day is like or how a person gets into it to begin with.
Anyone can do this, the repairer of engines and ruler of Isleton tells me. I’ve met him at the small office that is City Hall (population: four), and he’s wearing muddy jeans and an old sweatshirt splattered with Gelco. If he means the uniform is affordable, I believe him. But I think he’s talking about broader requirements for running a place like this. You can’t spend more than you have, he says with a shrug — understand that and you’re mayor material.
Not that Isleton has always proven easy to manage. Money’s been tight. Corsaut took office in December — “my platform was ‘the city is in dire straits.’” He’d never given thought to politics, but it’s not surprising he won. With his peculiar inclination to listen as people speak, he’s the kind of man you’d immediately decide to leave your children with, to say nothing of your outboard or your city. His virtues are not Gavin-style Charisma or Earnestness or that weird Thumbs Up thing. Corsault’s assets are strictly lowercase: a laconic brand of honesty and a sparing drollness with friends, and the friendly sort of gray mustache designed to accompany those.
Corsaut estimates he’ll spend 20 hours a week doing City Hall work and, during peak season, up to 50 fixing boats. There’s also racing to squeeze in — in addition to repairing them, he builds them and races them. It’s a busy life, in a low-key, five-minute-walk-to-work kind of way. I get the sense he’s something of a mellow whirlwind here, where many residents are retired — former factory workers from Antioch and well-drillers from Rio Vista, Corsaut says. The community they’ve formed feels like a happy, occupied ghost town, coming from the big city. Visitors have referred to it as a place that time forgot. But that makes it a town that traffic and stress and even crime have also forgotten, by and large.
“We don’t have drive-by shootings,” Corsaut says. “We have drive-by shoutings.”
Oddly enough, we witness one. When you’re shadowing the Isleton mayor, you’re out on the street, and the street is where Cadillacs back into pickup trucks over by the river. The young woman in the pickup gets out and is stomping and cursing as she inspects the considerable damage. The woman in the Cadillac speeds off. It looks like a dispute. The mayor squints.
“I know that girl.”
“What does the mayor do in this situation?” I ask.
“My job? Leave it alone,” he says.
More people used to live in these tiny Delta towns, and possibly there was less to be frustrated about. They worked at the long-closed canneries and asparagus farms. Even earlier, Chinese immigrants, having finished with the railroad, settled in these parts to do levee work. Nearby Locke is known as one of the country’s few rural Chinatowns. But the numbers have dwindled over the years.
“People ask why the population keeps getting smaller,” Corsaut says, smile imperceptible. “I tell them whenever a girl gets pregnant, five guys leave town.”
Joke, of course. Isleton’s shrinking because there’s little work to be had. But this also translates to a strikingly pleasant peacefulness, even quieter than other famously quiet Bay Area towns. The mind slows, and the predominant thought becomes: I can’t believe this is just an hour from San Francisco.
Or at least I think it’s an hour. Hard to say, because I got pulled over on the way for allegedly — allegedly — speeding on 680 North. Which brings me to the question a person always wants to ask a mayor. Can you get me out of this ticket or what?
Corsaut isn’t offended by the question, but it’s clear I’ve watched too much TV. In Isleton, small-town politics aren’t the rollicking, good ol’ boy, back-scratching free-for-all I’d imagined. They’re a carefully circumscribed set of procedures for getting small things done; changing a streetlight requires a quorum. Not that people don’t still look for favors. We’re chatting with Gigi from the chamber of commerce when a freshly scrubbed, torso-heavy man with a cropped goatee introduces himself. He’s in town applying for a job as a police officer and, with some stifled nervousness, he ventures the kind of thoughts one practices with one’s spouse the night before.
“A lot of people say Isleton’s just a stepping stone. But I intend to stay and be police chief one day.” He clears his throat. “If that turns out to be, you know, OK.”
There’s the briefest silence — the man wants the mayor to offer to put a word in or to give a wink or whatever it is they did in different times. But Corsaut, who is half-distracted by a marine catalog in front of him, just nods politely and says it’s nice to meet him.
Later, over sandwiches at Isleton Joe’s (folksy waitress: check; $1.50 mugs of Bud: check), I ask if people approach him for favors often.
“Well,” he says, considering a French fry. “Yes.”
If you can’t shoehorn a man into a policeman’s uniform or even get a dopey writer out of a speeding ticket, why go into local politics? And how do you do it? Three years ago, Corsaut started attending city council meetings (“There’s no movie theater in town,” he points out). He’s not the sort to name names when describing certain … inefficiencies. But the system was breaking down a bit: For two years, the garbage company wasn’t getting paid. The fire department’s agenda kept sailing through unimpeded. Important meetings were being missed, causing the city to miss out on funding opportunities. Mostly, though, bankruptcy was around the corner.
Corsaut became something of a political heckler, he said. He kept poking at the status quo, and finally someone asked him to become it. A city council member, like the mayor, is paid nothing. He dragged his feet a bit then agreed to run. He prepared a series of TV ads, bought some ads in a few newspapers — no, I’m kidding. In his coffers? $200. He spent it on signs and won.
We’re back in the Impala. Along one part of the levee, a couple of workers are pulling weeds. Corsaut, again without cracking a smile, critiques their work (“Those ones right there, those aren’t weeds”). We cruise through a side street and a man on crutches waves, followed by a man walking beside a field — president of Isleton’s Filipino Club, Corsaut tells me.
“I met him the other day,” he says, demonstrating that, once in a while, he encounters a resident he’s never met before. (Sometimes they provide great food, too, he adds. “I’m going to go to as many of those meetings as possible.”)
You can only drive for so many minutes in Isleton before you run out of road. Soon we find ourselves on a huge expanse of dirt beyond Main Street — Corsaut explains that here, over the next few years, Isleton will become something else entirely. Over 300 new housing units are going in, the first bit of development since the early ’70s. The city’s population is expected to double.
“I was dead set against it until I realized that, financially, we were about to go back to the county. Our revenue is so small and expenses, like wages, are growing,” he says. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to grow without losing what makes us so special.”
All day I’ve felt around for a kind of agenda in Corsaut, apart from keeping the town in the black. Is he the sort to legalize gay marriage? Ban trans fat? But I’d come up empty — ambitious reforms are the province of bigger cities and, anyway, this just isn’t that kind of place. So I’d concluded Corsaut isn’t motivated by a Philosophy so much as basic civic decency and a slightly old-fashioned interest in keeping the train on the tracks. (As he would put it, he likes the place and has some time on his hands.) But then he wheels the Impala up onto the levee, and we look out over the gentle river, and conversation turns to life on the Delta.
“Sometimes I put the boat out in the middle of the river and just cut the engine,” he says. “It’s just so quiet and peaceful. You don’t get that in very many places.”
When he was growing up in Walnut Creek, Corsaut says, the city had 2,100 residents — he remembers the fuss over a proposed multi-unit building.
“Now look at it,” he says. “We still have a small town here. They’re rare. We want to keep it the way it is. If we have to drive 15 miles to Lodi for a Safeway, that’s OK.”
Corsaut has a four-year term in front of him. There’s a city plan to file and budgets to manage and a new city manager to bring in and a historic development to oversee, not to mention boats to fix up and Filipino dinners to attend. But somewhere in there I sense Corsaut also has a commitment to cutting Isleton’s engine and seeing to it that the small town floats off on its own as much as possible.
This story has been changed since its original posting. — Ed
Chris Colin was a writer-editor at Salon, and before that a busboy, a bread deliverer and a bike messenger, among other things. He’s the author of “What Really Happened to the Class of ‘93,” about the lives of his former high school classmates, and co-author of The Blue Pages, a directory of companies rated by their politics and social practices. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, the New York Observer, McSweeney’s Quarterly and several anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.
