About These Chronicles...

About These Chronicles...

Dear Bolinas,

I may have been familiar to some of you as "Backyard" Steve in the days of my residence here, thirty-some years ago.

In his book, "The Town That Fought To Save Itself", Orville Schell devotes the following paragraph to me: "...Steve. Shy street person. Arrived several years ago and crashed in the loft at Future Studies office. Loves animals. Plays piano. Has just kind of been around all this time without going too far over the edge." (Goes on to quote dedication from my mural in Scowley's bathroom).

While Orville's book was a wonderful chronicle about the intellectual and political life of the town at that time, and should be required reading for all Bolinians, it is as incomplete a description as the above paragraph.

I hope to paint another picture - a mosaic and a composite made from the piecing together of my moments. How I loved my life in that time, and the people who colored it then, as now.

In his novels "Tortilla Flats" and "Cannery Row", set in Salinas and Monterey, Steinbeck wrote little of the political life there, yet his portrayal of the lives of his characters leaves a lasting and vivid image of what LIVING there was like in those times. He captured the spiritual and emotional lives of the people with richness and color, reaching the essence of them.

Bolinas is taken straight from the ghost of John Steinbeck, an update on Tortilla Flats, where the most important forces are those of love, and lust, laughter, faith, fear, and passion. Bolinas wears these on her sleeve, unashamed in the face of the greater world of our time. That world which values it's technology , productivity and profit motives above fat chickens, Father Cribari wine, and the blithe warmth of exceptional company.

While Orwell's dumb world of limited language and canned mass entertainment slowly becomes a grim, self-imposed reality in the greater world, Bolinas seeks in it's own sometimes wrenching and self absorbed way a greater quality of living.

I have stories to tell you, of where we have been together, and of where we are now. I can tell them only from my perspective - though they're my stories as well as ours. I tell them as an offering of love - like the mural I offered some thirty years ago, now sadly, and like these stories - a memory only. I hope that you find them a message of reassurance, not as some comparison weighted with then-vs.-now value judgments, but as a point of reference. I hope to remind you of how you came to be who you are (from the limits in time and perspective of my arrival and passage), and to share with you my sense of optimism about your fitness to meet the changes which many of you seem to dread, but which are so inevitable.

My dedication may be all that remains of that painting, but it stands today as the same one I give these writings.

To the people of Bolinas: you have given me shelter from the stormy world. Words cannot express my love for ALL of you. I therefore dedicate in your name, and give to you these stories, with love,

..................................Backyard Steve