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| A knockoff of 1908 map, below. No Kent Island & the sandspit is almost an island. |
As we batten down the hatches, pummeled by a series of mega-storms pounding the coast, low lying coastal villages are being hammered by massive waves from Crescent City to San Diego. Capitola has lost its pier along with several buildings. Pacifica lost massive chunks of sea cliff, those remaining coastal houses are being licked clean by the sea. Global warming has arrived. The sea levels are rising.
Exposed Stinson Beach was hit hard by the storm. Especially the Seadrift housing development. Massive waves washed right over the sandspit, like rough tongues scouring the houses. That sandspit should never have been built upon. Bolinas Lagoon was already compromised by siltation from logging, and when Seadrift was dredged and widened with a second lagoon and manmade spit during the 1950s and 60s, it led to stagnation and the demise of the once vibrant Bolinas Lagoon.
Weirdly, rising seas from global warming may help to restore Bolinas Lagoon, created eons ago by the movement of the San Andreas Fault, along with Tomales Bay. After the 1906 quake, a sandspit was thrown up across the formerly navigable mouth of Tomales Bay, where sailing ships once entered. How did it affect Bolinas Lagoon? Still looking for an older map that might give a clue as to the mouth of the lagoon.
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| Google map of Bolinas, dredging and landfill of Seadrift changed the ecology of the lagoon. |
At one point I tried to look up Stinson Beach on old maps to see what the Stinson Beach sandspit looked like—when it was merely a spit. Houses were being built during the 1950s and 60s. Not a particularly ecologically-minded era. I wanted to see if it was an actual tidal island, a sandbar. I suspect the causeway where it attached to the mainland (the Stinson Beach parking lot) was ephemeral.
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| Bolinas Lagoon filled in to create Dipsea Rd. & Seadrift Lagoon, 1960. The causeway is visible. SBHS |
On some of the old maps, Bolinas Lagoon is depicted as a deep harbor. What really destroyed Bolinas Lagoon was all the Seadrift dredging. You could see the lagoon dying in the late 60s, early 70s. It took a long time to stop the “improvements.”And then there was that nonsense about making another fancy-schmancy island for an exclusive Disney enclave? Was I imagining that? Long time since I even thought about it.
In the way-back days, during the mid 1970s, before I was a poet, I was friends with San Francisco Renaissance poet Ebba Beauregaard, (aka Gerard Boar) friend of Jack Spicer, who was rebuilding an Egyptian dhow at the Bolinas Lagoon Marina. By then, the lagoon had silted in so much, he had to wait for a full-moon king tide in order to float his boat in and out. The rudder wouldn’t clear the mud.
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Ferryman’s shack, from Bolinas looking toward the mainland, 1904 SBHS
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And apropos of nothing, one November night we built the cement retaining wall at the Kent place near Wharf Road, across from Kent Island. Ebbe was foreman, mix-master of cement, my boyfriend Bob was master of the wheelbarrow, I was the grunting. The Frost Moon was our lantern as we waited for ebb tide to build the berm.
The mud excavation and the laying down of jute gunnysacks filled with cement, anchored with rebar was back-breaking work. In addition, it all had to be done when the king tide was at its lowest, which was at midnight. The unstable putrid bay mud squelched and threatened to swallow our boots. We worked through the night, under the full moon, miserable, and wet, while curious
Bay ghost shrimp crawled out of their long burrows nestled in the sulphuric mudbeds to see what was going on. The sandbags settled in the mud as we drove rebar spike through them to anchor them from the incoming tide. I was never so glad to see the dawn.
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| 1908 map of Bolinas Lagoon and Seadrift sandspit/island. No Kent Island, no causeway. |
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| This is supposed to be an 1898 map, but they’re the same map—the writing’s the same. |
WAYFARER I have other poems of Ebbe Borregaard too, somewhere. Ebbe quit writing in the late 60s. But he was a solid writer, and mentor; friend of Robin Blaser, JoAnne Kyger, and Jack Spicer. I remember JoAnne telling stories about all of them on the Mesa, at Richard Brautigan's treehouse. Bill Berkson, and Bob Creeley lived down the street from Herman Berlandt on the bluff. I loved hanging out in Bolinas, I also had no idea I'd become a writer. So I didn’t take notes.
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