Comet's Birthday Party

Comet was one of the town's tie-dyed ladies, and was turning sixty.
Word got out that she was having a party at her house on the Bolinas Mesa.
My freeloading head was filled with visions of snacks, weed and booze, when word reached me. I arrived to find the party in full swing at around 8 pm - many of the celebrants having been at it since early afternoon.

There, I found my friend George Marzocchi, (jazz-sax man and French horn player extrordinaire), Zane (a young guy that lived in his camper truck on the Mesa), The Fondue Brothers, and about forty other assorted locals.

There was a very large vat of a potent orange colored 'Punch' (aptly named) which had been spiked with acid, and everyone but me had been dipping into it with total abandon (acid was off the menu for me, following a few bad trips).

As folks succumbed to the influence of Marin homegrown, LSD, and high test booze, the volume level of the party escalated. People took up various exotic instruments - the beer bottle flute, the boot-to-floorophone, the tabletop percussion array, and the armpit fartachord. More mundane instruments i.e.: guitars, & harmonicas, also found voice.

After a couple of hours of this auditory havoc, the next-door neighbor showed up at the door.

Herman was a small, bookish man, with tufts of gray hair and thick glasses - a little sensitive to rowdiness - and was clearly aggravated by the intense reveling of his sexagenarian neighbor.

He stood at the door, mildly irate and asking for a little consideration. He was given assurences, but as soon as the door was closed the volume of the party seemed to instantly go from '10' to '11'.

In about 20 minutes Herman again appeared at the door demanding an end to the cacophony.

This time he was met with jeers and taunts, as the celebrants stood up for their inalienable Bolinian right to raise hell. Herman left, steam rising from his tufted pate, and the party raged on.

As aforementioned, Bolinas has no police force of it's own. It's a Bohemian little town, governed only by the Board of Public Utilities Directors (B-PUD), themselves the cream of the Bohemian crop.

The nearest law enforcement authority is the Point Reyes branch of the Marin County Sheriff, whose officers wanted as little to do with Bolinas as possible. Their hope was that this den of counter-cultural nutcakes might self-destruct in the absence of any authority - the Darwin Effect. This was hardly the case as Bolinas flourished in it's near anarchy.

The call had gone out however, as Herman resorted to the most despicable measures a Bolinian could stoop to. Pt. Reyes dispatched a car to attempt to coerce the party-ers into a more civil state.

The cops showed at the door, and politely asked that the noise level be greatly reduced.

A mere two Sheriff's officers against a crowd of inebriated Bolinians was a major mismatch. The respect level was less than zero, and these two hawgs were met with the same taste of derision as shown to the weasel that had summoned them.

An argument ensued at the door between George Marzachi, and the officers. The crowd packed around George, as he staunchly defended the right of all Bolinians to burn down a good Saturday night.

As he was engaged in moving Oration, Zane slipped past the officers and slunk down the long walkway which was flanked on each side by a six foot redwood fence, out to the muddy road.

There, he found the Sheriff's officer's green and gold car idling away in the damp evening air, radio crackling , inviting him... irresistibly beckoning...

Reaching into the car, he removed the mic from it's clip. Depressing the talk button, he began repeating in his best Joe Friday deadpan, "One Adam Twelve, one Adam twelve...".

Meanwhile, the discussion between George and the cops was heating up and arrest was being threatened.

Hearing Zane's refrain on the radio, the dispatcher in Point Reyes became highly alarmed. Unable to raise a coherent response, several cars of backup were urgently sent.

George had spat some epithet that crossed the line, and the cuffs were employed. The officer's grabbed George and pulled him out the door, shoved him against the fence abutting the walkway, and began the Miranda incantation.
As they turned to hustle him out to the car, infuriated revelers poured out into the narrow walkway behind them.

At this point, the cops saw Zane, with microphone in hand, standing at the driver's door of their car.
"HEY!!!" they hollered in unison.

Zane to dropped the mic and start jogging down the muddy dirt road, into the darkness of the well-timbered Bolinas Mesa.

One of the officers took out after him, leaving the other to handle George and the crowd. These guys weren't big city cops for good reason. The crowd closed upon the cop and began tugging at George, determined to rescue him from the clutches of the Evil Empire.

The cop called out to his partner, who broke off the chase and rushed back to assist.

By this time the crowd had gotten the upper hand in the struggle and George was wrested from the grip of the law. The cop who'd chased Zane saw the melee in progress and panicked, pulling his gun against the superior numbers of the crowd.
This only served to inflame the revelers, most of who's reasoning was severely bent now by the euphoria of acid, booze and weed. Not so much though, as to not realize that the gun was a bluff. The cop was in a no win position and couldn't pull the trigger, period.

As the crowd taunted the two shaken young officers, several more cars arrived on the scene. The crowd spilled out onto the road and began hurling objects at the new arrivals.

A donnybrook ensued, with eight cops wrestling thirty stoners in the mud of Alder Road. The scene was chaos - lights flashing, people hollering and floundering in the muck, and in the middle of the whole throbbing mass stood Comet, gray haired flower child in her flowing dress, peaking on at least 1000 micro grams of LSD.

"Stop this!!! I love you!!!" she plead with the grunting, mud-smeared combatants.
"I love you!!! Make love to me" she cried, and with a hand on each side of the bodice of her long, tie-dyed dress, she ripped it away and it fell to the ground. She was naked as newborn. She'd obviously had a radical mastectomy, and revealed one very stretch marked, droopy breast.

The image was sort of stunning, and the crowd of mud wrestlers fell into an awkward silence. No one quite knew what to do.

"Ma'am, please put your clothes on" said one of the Sheriff's officers, dryly.

Though extremely stoned, I none the less knew better that to wrestle with cops.
I 'd stood amongst the amused spectators, but as the cuffs came out and people subjected to arrest, I took it as my cue to discreetly exit out the rear of the house.

I was later called as a witness at George's trial. The courthouse was at 'Big Pink' (Marin County Civic Center - scene of the Angela Davis trials), In San Rafael. After sitting in a room for three days and never being called to testify, I was dismissed along with the case.

I was paid $25 a day for my time, and considered it the easiest seventy five bucks I'd made in my young life. Beer money, on the County!

Red Haired Susan

The name says it all. You could see her coming from over the horizon - and woe betide you if she was coming from behind the wheel. Susan was the incarnation of Janice Joplin - but without the voice to sing her tortured soul. She was a trust-fund baby, with enough money to buy her boyfriend a bronze Porsche, and then replace it twice after he wrapped it - and then another - around trees off the shoulder of Highway 1. Three cars in two months. She ran out of affection for the boyfriend long before she ran out of funds.

Billie Holiday sang, : "when you've got money, you've got lots of friends - crowded 'round your door...God bless the child, that's got his own..." Susan and her entourage held court in her expansive living room, in her lodge style house on the Bolinas Mesa. The booze was an ever flowing fount. Cocaine and other powders were like a snowy blanket, laying piled up in drifts on tables around the house. The party never ended at Susan's house - even as she would fall into her room, bleary eyed, and beyond control of her physical and mental abilities. Often, as she lay semiconscious in her room, utterly wasted, & near overdose, revelers from the other room would slither in to relieve her of the cash which was stuffed in uncounted wads in her purse & pockets.

Susan's breakfast consisted of fresh squeezed orange juice, mixed with a pint of 151 proof rum. She was always proud of how healthful the fresh squeezed orange juice was, as if to note that she had some little corner of will for self care left.

Susan died, predictably, in her bed. Her autopsy revealed that she had ruined nearly every major organ - stomach, liver, pancreas, kidneys, heart & lungs - with the uncontrolled flow of smokes, fluids, powders and pills into her addiction riddled body.

Susan was a lost child, trying to live without love. She tried vainly to buy it from a circle of self obsessed friends, too enamored of her wealth & willingness to see (or care) that they were exploiting a dying woman.

Susan was twenty eight, when she passed away.

My own attempted provincialism

It was a sunny, lazy Bolinas day, with only a couple of cars parked on Wharf Road. The scratching activities of a couple of dogs provided the bulk of the action.

Next to the bar there was a sidewalk leading up the hill alongside the building, back toward the long buildings which constituted the Bolinas Hotel, on the wooded hillside behind Smiley's. The gravel parking area for the bar and hotel was adjacent to this walkway, with the bar situated to the east of the lot, and the hotel to the north. Separating the parking lot from Wharf Road was a concrete retaining wall, just the right height for sitting on, shaded by a scraggly cedar tree.

Much of the important social spin of the town happened under this tree. Here was the site of many breakups, and reconciliations; the site where surfers recounted the day's tales of glory, weary locals unwound after a day's work, the latest jokes were told, and locals played the dozens - all of which happened to the ever-present accompaniment of canned Budweiser. This place was simply called, 'The Wall'.

Here, I was planted this day, whiling away the long hours with my illicit can of Coors (iconoclast that I was) in hand. On such absolutely dead quiet days as this, the boredom could be both exquisite and excruciating. Any event, no matter how mundane attracted interest.

On such days any car not recognized as indigenous attracted negative attention. Local kids would spit out the worst of all possible slurs at any hapless outsider who chanced into town; "TOURIST!!!"

Regardless of it's actual velocity, any such car was always judged to be traveling at an inappropriate rate of speed. If slow, then the car's occupants were judged to be gawkers, intruding on the inalienable Bolinian rights to peace and privacy. Faster drivers were reckless speeders whose vehicular assault upon sleeping dogs and playing children (not to mention hapless drunks) was met with the battle cry: "SLOW DOWN, TOURIST!" by incensed citizens.

As I took refuge from the baking California sun, sitting on The Wall, I heard the approach of a vehicle. The distinctive 'vrooom!' of it's engine and the weighty crunch of it's tires forecast that it was a truck, even before it rolled into view. Shortly, sure enough, a 60's vintage large red pickup came blasting down Wharf Road, at a shockingly high rate of speed.

By now I considered myself to be a local, having been around long enough to have acquired a nickname and a job (Scowley's resident slave). Thus it was with this sense of civic pride that I blurted out the obligatory, "SLOW DOWN, YA FUCKIN' TOURIST!" as the truck careened around the bend in the road just a few yards beyond Smiley's.

Smug in the sense that I was among the elite who could lay just claim to the righteous judgment of the wretched tourist intruder - a keeper of the flame of Bolinian autonomy, I settled back against the trunk of the cedar tree and took a long, slow, self satisfied swig of my well deserved brew.

...Life is sweet when you have a home - a place of belonging, where values are uncluttered - where right is right, and principals worth standing up for... These people who think they can just move in on anybody else's homes and behave anyway they want have to know that there are people who will stand up for what's right and fair! This is Bolinas, by gawd, not the back streets of some urban slum where pea-brained jerks with a stick shift and too much horsepower can burn rubber anytime they feel like....

My thoughts were shattered by the rude sound of tires sliding on loose gravel.

The big, red truck loomed before me now, having apparently turned around at the end of Wharf Road and headed back the other direction, stopping abruptly in front of Smiley's. The door opened with an angry creak, and then thudded closed with strong punctuation. Moving with swift authority , a rather large, fifty-ish man in a military looking hat and with blood in his eyes strode from around the truck. Approaching to a point so close that I could have counted the gray hairs in his short, pencil thin mustache, he pointed a stubby index finger directly into my startled face.

"Listen you little piss-ant" he began in a tone faintly reminiscent of an earlier conversation with a person wearing a similar hat, "whoever the hell you think you are to tell ME to slow down, you oughta' be awful gawddamned sure of just who your'e talkin' to ya little jerk! I been Fire Chief in this town longer then you've been outa diapers, an' if I want to drive a hunnerd n' ten gawddamned miles an hour, I'll gawddamned well do it , ya little JERK!" he wheeled and returned to his driver's seat so rapidly that I could have sworn I felt a back-wind, and with another emphatic spin of his tires, his truck sped off.

I decided that maybe in this instance, I should resist the impulse to yell after him.......

.................................."SLOW DOOOWN!!"

David Sorrels

David Sorrels was a scrawny, long haired, denim clad, guitar picking clown.

David's mother, Rosalie Sorrels, is a songwriter's songwriter, from the tradition of Rambling Jack Elliot, Woody Guthrie and Utah Phillips.

Their kitchen became my second home - a place where one could drink Rosalie's homemade sangria, & be a fly on the wall, entertained by the likes of Jerry Jeff Walker, and Arlo Guthrie as they joined the ongoing parade of visitors through that home.

David & I had a penchant for sharing - whether it was George Dickle #8 whiskey, a new tune, or even each others' girlfriends (not simultaneously...) . David & I shared riotous times as we made weekly runs in his old Dodge split rimmed stake truck (Hezekiah) to the Russian River & Mendocino county. There we would cut firewood, felling dense overgrowths of oak, eucalyptus, & fir. We fancied ourselves as lumberjacks & drunkards - in all the best traditions of those two closely related avocations. Usually far too hung over to safely handle chainsaws & splitting malls, we would none-the-less tackle our work with mirth & prankishness, hauling back several cords of wood for sale, which would usually go to fund the next week's drinking.

David had a pensive & moody side - which was entirely unspoken. He was closed mouthed about his troubles, even among his closest friends. One night, while I was away during a year spent working in Santa Cruz, He went to another friend's house & borrowed a roll of electrical tape and a hose.

It was my late friend, Doly, who found him pulled off in his truck into a thick patch of brush alongside Mesa Road, the following day. He had gone to this spot, & quietly finished his quart of George Dickle, as he taped the borrowed hose to his exhaust pipe & then gassed himself at the wheel of Hezakiah. His death tormented me for many years, as I never had the chance to mend a very minor broken fence that had stood between us at the time. David was 23.

On a briny shore...

Tide pool

First replenished by

thrash of big water

hammering jagged reef

receding for a while

pulling away in service to the moon

revealing the serene

Here water lays in pockets and folds

Rocky lap of seashore

Aquaria naturalis

comes to simmer in the afternoon

then cools in the shadows

of fortress cliffs

Where steeps the life-broth

starfish gropes under purple stone

anemone spreads green tendrils

When shadows fall upon the pool

Little fishes dart

blinding fast into kelp leaf

stranded maiden’s hair

Where chiton grips the mossy rock

and hermit crabs climb on shards of lace

in periwinkle cones

and density of life is deepest deep

in a shallow pool

on a broken shore

in the waning light

of a salten day

Steve

Provincialism

Shortly after my arrival in town it became apparent that my presence was found by very many people to be less than desirable. Being a shame-based person, I was all too ready to personalize this as being essentially a reaction to the unlovable, dislike-able person whom I then believed that I was (In my advancing age, I've learned to embrace my unlovable, dislike-able self, and even flaunt it...). I was to learn, in time, that this was the general reaction to all outsiders, and that the levels of this resentment were only slightly contingent upon one's place on the social escalator.

'Locals' were those who's families had lived in town long enough to have preceded the counter cultural influx of the late sixties, and generally were property owners and had either a business or agricultural stake in the town. Many of these people strongly resented the "hippy element", and were largely pro-development. Business and residential development were seen as economic opportunity - the natural way of progress, and among the rights and blessings of the American way of life.

Thus their provincialism was expressed as general hostility toward the hippy element, many of whom were attracted to Bolinas in the late sixties as they fled from the urban world in search of 'alternative lifestyles'. This term, which today is a buzz phrase for anything from gay culture, to Boulder Colorado's granola-think, to the enclaves of neo-nazis in their Idaho retreats, was a little clearer allusion to a detour from the mainstream culture's 'get a job / get a family / get ahead / get a watch / die' limited options.

While the entrenched generations of natives were hoping for the routing of the more recently arrived young, these more recent arrivals were quite fixed on the notion of keeping out even newer arrivals. Everyone, it seemed, had an ax to grind with someone, and each had their own rendition of what paradise meant, and who the spoilers were.

"Tourist" was a slur to most of the newer generation, a name which called up the objectionable images of cars jamming Wharf, Brighton and Terrace roads on hot summer days - horns blaring rudely at dogs who were too accustomed to sleeping in the streets, and greasy, leering men with binoculars who stood along the overlooks, drooling at the sight of nude sunbathers as if at a Tenderloin peep show.

Plans proposed by the county to widen Highway 1 to improve access to West Marin County were seen as a declaration of war by most in Bolinas, and were met with outcry and demonstrations of vehement protest. A contingent of local guerrillas (now known as the Bolinas Border Patrol) carried on a low level sabotage operation in this war on tourists, steadfastly cutting down each sign the Highway Department erected pointing the way into town from the main highway.

The county would put up signs on 4x4 posts by day, only to have them hacked off at the knees by night - the chainsawed remains left in shards, like body parts at a grizzly murder scene. The county would erect signs mounted on steel posts by day only to have them hacksawed down by night, or even more dramatically dragged from their concrete footings by truck and chain. The battle grinds on even today, each firing it's volleys every so many weeks. Sign up....sign gone.

Interestingly, while the size of the population has fluctuated little (owing in large part to ongoing water and building moratoriums) a significant percentage of the populace turns over on a steady basis, with one leaving and another taking his or her place without missing a stride. Those leaving were often highly vocal in the anti-newcomer fray, but after the setting in of the reality of a life spent hassling with high rents and the logistical problems related to living in relative isolation from the mainstream world, they would finally throw in the towel and move to places closer to jobs, families, and accommodations.

Bolinas proves to be a siren for many - alluring and seductive, but soon reveled to be a tyrannical mistress who takes her lovers hostage. Boredom runs high during the long, gray rainy season, and the small world of a small town becomes a glass house where all are privy to the most intimate details of each others' lives. Often, those who rode in on a tide of high ideals and communal zeal rode out on a backwash of disillusionment and resentment as the reality of Bolinas fell short of her promise. So, in rides the next wave, who fall spellbound into the whirl of Bo-culture, and soon are quite busy with the task of keeping out the next wave of newcomers which threatens this little Valhalla they have found... yet another turn on the circle.

Timothy's Song

Timothy Stephens was a painter...

I lived in a cabin that I built on his property in Bolinas, Ca. for most of a five year period during the mid seventies. Together we struggled through times of bad breaks, worked crappy jobs for short pay, & had some of the finest of hard times. I painted more than one picture at his urging - inspired by his example.

Tim & I would often hustle & scrimp together enough money to drive his truck down the coast to the border, at Tijuana. There we would park, & then venture into Baja, Mexico by bus for ill advised, but somehow survived adventures.

Tim was a very fine painter. He once painted a picture of his former wife from the neck to the thighs, as she was nine months pregnant. The body was a strange luminescent green, with details that at first seemed oddly convoluted. But then, on closer examination, the fetus inside was revealed, with the umbilicus, and looking deeper the heart & internal organs of mother and fetus, until, on deep concentration, one could see through to the mother's spine. Stepping back from the painting, the images again merged into the form of the mothers swollen, nude belly.

Tim was troubled by his ongoing battle with his former wife for continuing visitation rights with his two sons. During this period, in 1978, he was arrested on drug related charges. While the matter was pending, one sunny day he went into San Francisco, thirty miles to the south of us, and leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge. He was thirty Years of age, at the time of his death. I miss him to this day.

......Timothy's Song

((C) 1979, Steven M Nelson)

Brush that caresses the canvas

Colors stream

The eye commands the hand

To show the unseen

The easel stands in a cellar

there it remains

visions of heaven & hell

Just so many stains

Timothy, your eyes could see

your vision was so clear to me

Painter in the dark

I heard the beating of your heart

Tell me why the world turns creation into chaos?

Tell me why we crucify the ones who come to save us?

Tell me why your colors

have to stand upon an easel in the dark?

Though the paining is vaunted

still the painter is haunted

his palette has gone to gray

No longer inspired

now the brush is retired

and the pigments are put away

Wipe the tears from my eyes so that I may see

the resplendence of his colors and symmetry

Paint in light now on your odyssey

Be at peace, Timothy...

The Earlybird Cafe

For Danny...

...This is the song we did everywhere we went, whenever we did our duet thing.

I had a little shack on the Bolinas Mesa, about two miles from the bar in town. Most nights I was too lit up to make the walk, so would stagger across the street to Scowley's restaurant, climb in the window of the pool room, and sleep on the pool table. Since I worked in the restaurant, I would simply wake up in the morning, & get busy. Often, Danny would be up & around, & would show up at Scowley's door while I was still mopping the floors & prepping the kitchen. He'd come in & make a pot of coffee (mud) & hang out until the cook showed up.

At that point we would usually find our way to the old upright piano in the pool room, & would spend the next hour or so singing & playing for the breakfast crowd.

The breakfast crowd often included people such as Jerry Garcia, Jesse Colin Young, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alan Watts, & assorted other famous types. It wasn't uncommon for someone to show up with a six pack & a guitar, which usually sent us into a day of jamming & foot stomping.

Both of us were really prone to looking back on those times wistfully, especially as the years went by & life became more complicated. Whenever we were together, through the years, we would sing The Earlybird with great fondness for those times.

Listening to the lyrics of the song today, it carries so much more nostalgia, & a certain eeriness. We used to introduce it by saying, "...and now, a happy song about death." The song was written by a guy named Lane Teegan, who's claim to fame was flipping burgers at The Trident, in Sausolito, as taught to us by Frank Fee....

The Earlybird Cafe Everybody's laughin' at the Earlybird Cafe I've been headed there since yesterday, I believe I've lost my way Charlotte's there in organdy, Billy's there in suede Y' know that money's in their pockets, & all their dues are paid there's wine on every table, & food on every plate well I hope I get there pretty soon, before it gets too late Someone asked me what time it was - I told him it was now he asked me just what that might mean, but time would not allow so I gave away my watch to a passing businessman I hope he understands me now - I've done the best I can But it was getting early, as I rushed away from there with that ancient earth beneath my feet and new dust in my hair So I went on down the highway to the other side of town my clothes was gettin' wrinkled, & my socks was fallin' down but I could not stop to pull them up, for fear that I'd be late so I kept on runnin' down the road until I saw the gate - of the Earlybird Cafe, glowin' golden like the sun everybody they laughin' & callin', "Come on in, we've just begun !" So I went on in, & I set right down, & I ordered me up some wine y'know the talk was fast & clever, & the women all was fine Charlotte asked me where I'd been with my jaded ivory eyes I told her I'd been hung up, with some begger in disguise She laughed like temple bells, she kissed me on the cheek & said: " It's hard to be alive sometimes....... but it's easy......... to be dead!"

(Recording of Doly & I kicking out The Earlybird on an old piano, circa 1977)

DANIEL (DOLOMITE) W. MATHIS, age 47, passed away in Melbourne, Fla., on October 6th, 1996. "Doly" was a performing songwriter noted for his strong tenor voice, and tight rhythmic keyboard stylings. His songwriting style spanned all genres, from country rock to jazz. He attended high school in the East Bay area of Contra Costa County, Ca.. His strongest musical influences were from the artists of the West Marin County area in the late 1960's & early '70's, who were his contemporaries at that time; such as Jesse Colin Young, Rosalie Sorrels, Huey Lewis, and Steve Miller. He lived in the town of Bolinas, Ca.,for several years, where he spent much of his time entertaining, surfing, fishing, & developing his unique song stylings. He toured nationally, as a single performer, and with several bands, Sharing the bill with artists such as Jim Messina, Taj Majal, Asleep at the Wheel, and John McEuen. Doly lived in the Denver area intermittently from 1977, through 1995, also residing in Juno, Alaska; Breckenridge, Co.; Idaho Springs, Co.; Ft. Meyers, Fla.; and Nashville, Tenn., during that period. Known for his imposing stature, (6'3", 360 lbs.), and colorful tattoos, Doly was also gifted with a swift and disarming wit, which won him friends from all walks of life. He suffered from numerous health problems in the recent past and suffered cardiac arrest on October 3rd. He was removed from life supports two days later, and died peacefully, surrounded by friends and relatives on the following day. He is survived by his sister, Susan Martinez, of Vallejo, Ca., and a host of friends and admirers.

I ll always hold in heart the exceptional love that we two brothers shared in our wayfaring lives together. He was my sidekick, & my partner He was my teacher, and at times I was his. He is embedded in every note that I play, & all my fondest memories. Danny's ongoing infection was clearly the result of the abuse of contaminated IV drugs. Although he died with fourteen days clean, Drug addiction ravaged him, & stole him from us all.

Song for a White Wave

Song for a White Wave

...And so the rushing tide takes me out
and mingles me with the sea
back to the womb of wombs, I dissolve
Sandpipers cry, and frantic, run the beach
I hear only saline waves
and calmly dissipate

Into that sea which is your heart
I gladly tumble on the rocks
and give to you the secrets laid bare beneath my sands
All the brine and fragrant air
vital breath of life
I drink as if a broth, and am revived

How I love the thrashing surf
and starlit glinting sand,
every tangled driftwood given to the shore,
every scalloped shell that alights upon my eye
filigreed and etched by tide and time
- your gifts of endless life abiding

Taking each enameled shell that fancy strikes
immersed into the wash that is my heart
I hold them to the lucent sun
and gaze upon the hues revealed in deep pearlescent scape
then leave them back upon the beach
that it may remain as I so love

I will wade into the warming sea
and feel you lapping at my sides
gently slip into your depths, and swim then at such leisure
I will give myself to every course and current
trusting you to set me back
tenderly upon the shore

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