By Amy Laprade.
I’d had some of the best times of my life in San Francisco but was ready for a change. My love affair with the city had grown stale after six years of living with crazy housemates, wrangling with seedy landlords, and shlepping from one dingy flat to another.
I broke it off with San Francisco in the winter of 1997 when a man came into my life. Kevin was the quintessential California boy who sported long hair and garish Don Ho shirts. He’d grown up among the spidery freeways that snake along smog-filled L.A., and the piers of Venice Beach. He knew the dusty desert peaks of the Santa Anna Mountains like I know each and every birthmark on my body. Years ago he and his brother Shawn had been uprooted to Marin County to live with their mother.
Kevin talked me into moving to Marin months after we began dating. Traffic aside, the county was only a twenty minute dash over the Golden Gate Bridge, north of San Francisco. Kevin found us a two-room studio apartment with a dutch style door in a little town called San Anselmo, which is in the central eastern side of Marin County. We lived on Bell Avenue, a quiet, residential street, off the main drag. Our building was tucked among a grove of redwoods. Every morning, the spicy scent of these trees carried on the air, dry as the striker on a matchbox. The scent would later mingle with the cool, enveloping fog, that fell in cascades over the golden hills of San Geronimo Valley, West of us. The air in San Anselmo was a contrast to San Francisco’s air, where black exhaust belched from the Muni buses daily.
The center of San Anselmo was lined with boutiques selling silk scarves and watches from Switzerland. It boasted specialty shops that sold gourmet chocolate, organic wine, and cigars from around the world. These stores had nothing in common with the x-rated porn shops of downtown San Francisco, with their black-mirrored windows and stuttering Christmas lights. These specialty shops had nothing to do with the twenty-four-hour convenience stores with their bullet-holed windows and entrances that stank of urine. I’d gone from dodging homeless people with their shopping carts on sidewalks to dodging yuppies in spandex shorts as they barreled down the dirt paths of Mount Tamalpais on their mountain bikes. Mount Tam, as everyone in Marin called it, was the local biking and hiking hotspot. The high trail had breezy golden vistas, laced with windswept junipers, gnarled toward the valley below. The low trail boasted cool, mossy ravines with enormous ferns, towering Redwoods, and random Mountain Lion sightings.
Mount Tam is not only rumored to be a defunct volcano but is the centerpiece of Marin. No matter what town Kevin and I were in, we’d always catch a view of Mount Tam. We could even see the tip of it from the end of Bell Avenue.
In Marin it seemed that everyone drove a BMW or a Lexus, everyone except Kevin and I, who tooled around in his boss’ rattly work van. Kevin was a plumber who did service jobs for a living while I went to massage school at night. Exhausted by the end of each week, we vowed to take it easy on weekends. To Kevin, that meant an adventure of some kind. During our first year together, he took me to a new place every weekend.
The town of Bolinas, a forty minute drive West of San Anselmo, was a funky, clandestine coastal town, comprised of colorful characters who liked to smoke grass and chop down road signs so that the tourists and realtors couldn’t find their way in. Bolinas Beach was infamous for its Great White shark infested waters.
“A friend of a friend of so and so, lost his pinky finger in a shark attack while out on the fishing boat in Bolinas Bay,” so the rumor went. I always wondered if the rumor was real or a story devised to keep tourists out.
In any case, one had to be very acquainted with Western Marin to know where the turnout to Bolinas was. There was only one turnout on that lonely coastal stretch that Kevin knew of, and even he would occasionally miss it. He missed it once during an adventure of ours. It was night and the fog was heavy. There were no street lamps to speak of, and we’d rolled endlessly through the shroud, our high beams never penetrating further than one foot beyond. If there’d been a moon that night, we hadn’t known about it. John Fogerty’s grainy voice crackling over the radio as he sang, “Better run through the jungle, don’t look back to see” was the only hiatus from our own bickering about how we should’ve taken a left at the fork instead of a right.
Eventually we found ourselves dangling dangerously close to a seaside cliff. A sign, barely illuminated in the pallid glow of our high beams, read Point Reyes National Sea Shore. EROSION CONTROL, PLEASE REMAIN ON THE PATH. Point Reyes is at the bitter end of the continent and approximately a forty-five minute drive (without fog) from San Anselmo, and has miles of protected shoreline.
“Well, where to now, Ame?” Kevin shouted over the crashing surf.
We hiked down that rocky precipice and into the mouth of a cove. It was my birthday and Kevin was trying to make it special. He’d brought wood and kindling along. We rolled sleeping bags out on the beach and got a fire going. Kevin played his guitar and we polished off a bottle of wine, but just as we were settling in for the night, the tide came rolling in. I grew scared.
“You’re getting paranoid, Ame,” Kevin grumbled.
Jagged cliffs surrounded us in a narrow horseshoe and felt cavelike. When we’d arrived, the tide had been far out. However, within an hour, it seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere and fast. Raging foam swallowed our stretch of sand and slapped the rocky outcrop that’d sheltered us from the wind. The first drops of ocean spray pelted our arms as we blindly stumbled up the precipice in the fog. We would later discover that we’d been at Drake’s Bay, only one of several areas that comprised of Point Reyes.
We tried to find it again the following weekend but became distracted by the way the lovely redwoods of Lagunitas, a town in West Marin, had cast bending shadows over our windshield. We ended up, instead, at Bodega Bay, which is further north along the coast from Point Reyes, and a forty minute drive Northwest of San Anselmo. The switchbacks on the road to Bodega were endless. Many were crumbled from erosion. In some places whole chunks of road had plunged two hundred feet below, into the jaws of the churning Pacific. However, Kevin and I forged ahead at five-miles-per-hour, with me holding my breath, eager to get to the beach.
On other trips, we languidly rolled along lonely stretches that seemed to go on forever, or until they fell off the edge of the state. We’d often stop to admire the vistas where wisps of cloud would hover far below our rocky perch. They were the only things dividing the ocean from the sky. Gulls would circle mutely as they cast aquiline shadows on golden hills, carpeted with poppies: riotous orange lashing at blue skies. At such a distance the roaring surf was no louder than a dull boom and the waves seemed to roll in slow motion.
On the way to Bodega, we’d stopped at the Cheese Factory in Petaluma, which is a farm town in Sonoma County, North of Marin. There purveyors sold a wide variety of brie cheeses, French baguettes, and table water crackers. Visitors could purchase wine for as little as five dollars a bottle, since it came from local Wineries in Napa Valley.
Calistoga, one of the towns in Napa Valley, had been another destination of ours, and was an hour drive Northeast of San Anselmo. There we’d watched Old Faithful, an ancient geyser, spout plumes of hot spray that stank of rotten cabbage while getting buzzed on wine samples.
On the day of our Bodega Bay trip, however, we stuck to one bottle of Cabernet. Trying to rid ourselves of the chill from the coastal breeze, we took our provisions to the pond, dodging the hungry ducks on the way. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, we alternated bites of bread and cheese with the dry, red liquid that’d warmed our bellies.
Bodega Bay, part of Sonoma County, is an enclave between two stumps of land that jut into the Pacific. There, Kevin and I rolled our pant legs to our knees. We traversed that golden beach, observing the way our reflections rippled and shimmered on the wet sand. A gaggle of starfish in their pink and purple glory, revealed themselves on the rocks with each receding wave while sea urchins gently suckled my toes. The surf crashed against the barnacle-crusted boulders while I made a run for the dunes, squealing with delight as my hair clapped my face and the salty breeze stung my nostrils.
Kevin watched me with an expression of endearment. Only he could get me to drop what it was that I was doing. Only he could get me to come out with him and witness all the beauty that is our backyard. Our foot prints were the only ones left behind on the beach that day. The only other person around had been a a man fishing on the rocks.
Soon Kevin and I longed for the warmth of the van. On our way to the lot, we were intercepted by a red fox who slinked low on the path before vanishing into the high grass. A sonorous moan from a distant foghorn announced the four o’clock hour as we started the engine.
We headed in the direction of home, yet weren’t ready to return from our dream, so we pulled to the side of the road. There was a trailhead that looked like any other on the Pacific Coast: white sand that vanished over a grassy embankment.
Abbot’s Lagoon, tucked away in West Marin, was a place even Kevin didn’t know about. Together we’d discovered the fresh water lagoon and wildlife sanctuary. Snowy Egrets lighted on its glassy surface. They grew stiff and still like paper sails, their necks arched toward the sky. Water Lilly clusters levitated among shadowy depths, a dark jade green. I wanted to strip down and dive in?but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because the brown sugar dunes, bearing blades of delicate grass, appeared to have drifted into perfect formations, eons ago. They have since been undisturbed by nobody’s feet but that of the sandpipers’. Why should anyone cross them now?
I held my breath. This time not in fear of tumbling over a cliff, but because I wanted to drink in the silence, save for the distant surf. I no longer wanted the noise pollution of my heartbeats. I worried that my words, our speech would intrude upon a place that was seldom intruded upon by man.
When Kevin and I finally did speak, it was a whisper. I don’t remember the conversation. I only remember what happened next. He stopped whispering suddenly and pointed to a ledge above us. I looked up and saw the silhouette of an antelope, sporting a rack of antlers as wide as an eighteen wheeler. We wondered how long he’d been watching us. He was so still that for a moment I was convinced he was only a statue. He suddenly bolted in the other direction. His gallop was like thunder.
We weren’t frightened by the antelope, exactly, but we were afraid of what might be watching us without our knowing it. After all, we were only guests at that lagoon, but were glad that a world beyond humans still existed.