The Monarch Grove...

Through the long, soggy winters, rain and mist and heavy fog breath life into the craggy coastal hills. There is no greener green than the color of those hills, and no deeper beauty than the sight of them. Their curves and folds so voluptuous as to give the name 'Sleeping Lady' to that part of the Tamalpias ridge which nestles the Bolinas lagoon, separating West Marin from that greater world known to locals as simply "over the hill".

Further to the south the craggy furrows reach down to meet the sea - gently at the edge of the lagoon, but forbidingly where massive cliffs buttress the shore. There the hills are deeply wooded with redwood, oak, and ferns as big as Buicks. The aromatic, loamy soil; black and red and moist, blankets the woodlands, laying like a giant ova, each falling seed a potent sperm, the earth eternally with child. A handful of this soil is a handful of life itself, a metaphor of the giant circle, as the bark and leaf and root of things past gives itself to the life of things now.

The lives of small creatures are nourished under lichened rocks and fallen trees, tiny salamanders, beetles and millipedes doing their little jobs there in the industries of nature.

Summer days are always cool in these woods, and winter days mystical and deeply serene in the thick mist. The rain whispers her secrets in the branches of the trees and brush, falling softly on the tender earth - except in those storms so hard driven as to anger even this most forgiving place.

In these storms the place to be was standing at the edge of Bolinas' sandstone cliffs, where the awesome pounding of the winter Pacific, and the mighty gales of her offshore storms gave one a clear perspective on one's exact place in the scheme of things. Only the most egomaniacal and arrogant avoid true humility here, as the forces of the raging seas and dark, violent skies hammer into one's very marrow the truth about our much vaunted significance.

Each place here possesses it's own depth of character, complex and multifaceted - The Monarch Grove, for example.

Splitting off from Brighton Road, Terrace Road begins it's ascent up to the Mesa, winding narrowly past houses planted into the hillside. Abruptly turning along the overlook just above Brighton beach, it turns in again and rises up through a dense stand of several acres of eucalyptus. Here is The Monarch Grove.

In spring, the vines of ivy and Nasturtium, emboldened by the past winter's elixir of rain and mist, compete to climb the trunks of these majestic trees, forming the thick carpet of leaves and brilliant flowers which covers the sloping terrain. It is as if the grove is decorated to welcome the annual influx of Monarch butterflies, for whom the grove is named.

Each year they arrive by the multiples of thousands, and fill the grove with a startling beauty. The bright orange, gold and black of their filigreed wings, the fiery reds and yellows of the nasturtiums clinging high up on the massive trunks of the eucalyptus - on a clear, blue spring day these sights and smells penetrate to a level deeper than bone.

Some have argued that beauty is not only a quality, but an entity, existing not purely subjectively but as a definable characteristic. Just as sound exists as vibratory energy even without ears to hear it, and light exists as radiant energy even in the absence of eyes to see it; beauty is posed too, as having an existence of it's own. If this is so, (though I won't debate it here) then The Monarch Grove would be held as evidence of it.

Amidst the blanketing vines and flowers, large clusters of ferns spring up. The sunlight cuts shafts of light through the trees, dappling the ground where they strike it with splashes of even brighter color. Hummingbirds dart about, sipping sweet, spicy mead from an endless trove of floral grails.

Walking through the grove at night posed it's own challenges for me, as by the time I was doing so I was most likely under the influence, and my eyes adjusted poorly to the remarkable darkness of the grove. It was exceptionally black owing to the dense canopy of the trees, which blocked out all but the brightest of full moon light. This left me blindly tapping at the pavement with my toes in order to stay on the curving road, until it emerged from the grove at the edge of the Mesa. Through the murk the quiet would periodically be rudely broken by the sixty foot fall of Eucalyptus nuts, about the size of acorns, which would strike the pavement with a sudden and frightening SNAP! Even more heart stopping was when on occasion one of these would drop soundlessly and bean me on the head or shoulder, inflicting a nasty welt, and for one alarming moment convincing me of my very imminent demise.

In the wind the trees groan and creak eerily, imparting the notion that I was in danger of being struck by something more serious than just an acorn, their spindly branches seeming more frail than they truly are.

The glory of the grove (by day) was tempered, however. The arrival of the Monarchs was immediately followed by a frenzy of mating, lasting for only a few orgiastic days before the butterflies would begin to fall, mortally exhausted, to the ground.

Even with my objective understanding of the natural rhythms in evidence, I couldn't escape feeling great sadness as I watched them flittering helplessly, in their death throes, having fulfilled their purpose and gone the great circle. Soon the grove would be littered with the corpses of thousands of these expired creatures, which would shortly be dispatched by the scattering wind and consuming earth. The blossoms of the surviving nasturtiums seemed for a time somehow not as bright, reminding me not so much of their own considerable beauty, but of the even greater beauty no longer playing on my eye.

Steve