Seadrift at Stinson Beach innundated by waves

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.

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. 

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. 

Postcard, ca. 1962, bt Mike Roberts, Stinson Beach Historical Society

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.

Ferryman’s shack, from Bolinas looking toward the mainland, 1904 SBHS

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.

This is supposed to be an 1898 map, but they’re the same map—the writing’s the same.

Christian Burkhardt: Almost Amish

While weeding through an old suitcase full of my grandmother's yellowed newspaper clippings, I found an article on an old friend, a neighbor I used to know a long time ago. A dark clipping of Christian Burkhardt & his horse Brandy pulling a custom racing cart along the backroads of the San Geronimo Valley—a familiar sight during the 1970s.

Christian and I used to go on long trail rides over rough  fire roads starting out from Forest Knolls. One time we went all the way to Mt. Tamalpais along the San Geronimo Ridge, to Alpine Dam, via the the Meadow Club, in his two-wheeled racing sulky prototype made from a bicycle, wire mesh, and aluminum strips drilled out with big holes (to keep the cart light).

Or sometimes we'd go up the Lagunitas fire roads near Kent Lake along Bolinas Ridge, to Bolinas Mesa, and onto what is now called the Palomarin Trail. We'd trot past Double Point, Bass Lake, Olema, etc. The miles flew by, the open air stung our cheeks, we'd pack a lunch and take off down the open road, not knowing where we'd end up.

I taught Christian the English names of plants. I pointed out a primitive plant, Equus, I'd say, pointing to Brandy's tail, horsetail fern (Equisetum). He'd reply in German: wassercandlen. His father was a famous botanist, they were born in Germany, so it made sense that Christian would know the German names of plants. English was his second language.

Christian was super smart and had many odd notions. He was part eccentric, part geek, and almost Amish. He wanted to harken back to a simpler time that never was. Christian once built an entire Model A Ford from scratch, because he could. But he wouldn't drive it. He was somewhat steampunk'd decades before it was reinvented. But then the entire family was most original in thought and manner. The saying, They broke the mold when....applied to the Burkhardts—all of them. Like the Amish people he admired, Christian wanted to be simple, he wanted to be plain. In fact, he did eventually apprentice with the Pennsylvania Amish community.

Christian Burkhardt and Brandy with his prototype buggy made of bicycle parts.

Christian lived with his parents and grannie on a house on a knoll that his father Hans had designed, made of river stone, cement, and floors with radiant heat. Hans loved the trees, and managed to build his house around them without resorting to scorched earth practices. Christian built an elaborate treehouse in a Douglas fir, with cathedral windows, electricity, a record player and a telescope (much to the dismay of Stephanie Stone's parents). That gave Christian quite a reputation. The Stones invested in bedroom curtains.

I don't know what part of Germany the Burkhardts hailed from, but Christian's grannie didn't speak a word of English and she too was pretty eccentric. I remember being shocked when Christian told me that when she was a young girl, his grannie was an ardent fan of Hitler; when he came to their village, she broke her arm falling off a chair cheering for him. It probably saved her life. 

When I was a teenager, I'd found a Nazi dagger up our hill, buried in the dirt above our spring. Our neighbor, German Consul, Old Man Latendorf must've been hiding refugee Germans in the woods. The story goes, when things got too hot, and he too went into hiding, my Irish grandfather stepped in as acting German Consul. First, my high school math teacher, Archie Williams, shook Hitler's hand after he won the Olympics gold medal with Jesse Owens, and now Grannie Burkhardt?

When we were cleaning out my grandmother's house last month, my uncle found the old Nazi dagger, but it was so rusted, he threw it out. I should've saved it, the little black and white enamel swastica was still recognizable, but I didn't have the heart to keep it. It was tainted with too much history. I wasn't expecting it to resurrect and intersect itself here in this blog. But I digress...

Western view from Mt. Barnabe toward Camp Taylor. we grew up on the other side. —Wiki

Back to our backroad explorations. Christian Burkhardt and I discovered that we could cover amazing distances in the racing sulky, much farther than if we were riding astride our own horses. Brandy, a dark mahogany bay Morgan with black points, a white sock, and a star on his forehead, could trot for hours. My horse had died a few years before, so I was truly horseless, no longer riding for Rafter L Ranches, and I welcomed the chance to travel my favorite ridges again.

On the way home from the Mt. Tam ride, we bit off way more than we could chew: we were late leaving Mt. Tam, it was so glorious at the top. A friend of mine, Dale Walsh, was working at the fire lookout, he invited us up and we spent the afternoon gazing out over the ridges of the Bay Area.

Coming back around Alpine Lake to the Meadow Club, we crossed the Fairfax-Bolinas Road, to pick up our fire road home, but took a wrong turn, and ended up on the top of Pine Mountain at sunset. Fantastic views of Mt. Wittenberg, Elephant Mountain, Big Rock RIdge. But we were on the wrong ridge that divided the middle arm of Kent Lake like a peninsula.

I told Christian we needed to veer to the right, and take what looked like a chaparral-lined goat track, but he wanted to stick to the main fire road. He said it made more sense. There was no arguing with him. He held the reins, so...off we trotted to the west. Then towards the south. Wrong way. I threw a fit and got us to turn back towards San Geronimo. But we discovered that there was a fence in the way. We lost valuable time searching for a way back though the fence as we didn't want to backtrack all the way to the Meadow Club. We were also running out of daylight.



We needed to get onto the right fire road that followed the crest of San Geronimo Ridge paralleling Sir Francis Drake Boulevard (the old Northwestern Pacific Railroad bed). I found a portugee gate of sorts, a mend in the fence; we were able to lift the sulky over the barbed wire, and sneak Brandy through a gap in the fence. I laid my vest over the lower wires so he could see in order to step over the treacherous wire. Good thing it was a full harvest moon to light our way. Otherwise we would've had to spend the entire night on the ridge.

After the second summit, I was never so glad to see the first sure landmark, the pygmy sargent cypress forest, and the ghostly serpentine outcroppings. (The San Geronimo Ridge was either Marin Municipal Water District watershed, or privately held ranch lands in those days, now the Gary Giacomini Open Space Preserve is accessible via the Bay Area Ridge Trail. See photos at the Bay Area Hiker's blog. A recent post is on Trailhiker's blog.)

To download this PDF of San Geronimo Ridge, go to MCPOS

I can't remember where we came down off the ridge, but I think it was by De La Montanya's place—we called it the deer camp road (there was an old deer camp on the ridge overlooking the lake, it ran into East Sylvestris fire road and dead ended at Meadow Way in San Geronimo. Of course none of us ever knew that the names of fire roads, or that they even had names. Google hindsight is a wondrous thing.

It was far too dark to follow the ridge to Forest Knolls even under a full moon. To come down off the ridge down Tamarack, or by the Nielsen's place on Resaca Road would have been positively suicidal in the dark. By the time we reached Arroyo Road, it was well after midnight. I was so cold, I wanted to trot alongside the sulky, but I had such painful chillblains, I could barely walk. I was never so glad to get home.

We didn't know it at the time, but when we didn't return home by darkfall, the families began to worry. Christian's father, Hans had sent the sheriff out looking for us, we were gone so long. Even my grandmother was worried, and she never worried much about me coming home after dark. The horse always brought me home. Christian caught hell for being out so late—they thought we'd been injured or killed. No cellphones or GPS back in those days, let alone, access to topo maps, we really were miles from civilization.

Poor Christian was socially gauche (as most adolescent boys are). He was always the little kid who lived down the road. He used to tag along after us when we went out riding. About the only thing we had in common was a love of horses.

I used to give him rides to SF State when we were attending college there during 1974-75. He helped to pay for gas and bridge fare so I was glad for his company as it was a long commute from Forest Knolls to Stonestown.

Christian didn't know his own strength. One time he twisted the door handle right off my old '58 Volvo panel van, not realizing it was locked. But he was also a mechanical genius, so he welded on a new shank and fixed it, not quite as good as new. But close. The handle drooped a bit. I offered to teach him to drive but he steadfastly refused. He didn't want to have anything to do with combustion engines whereas I was always under the hood trying to keep the damned car running.

Christian's father Hans, a botanist, was a pioneer in the process of cloning orchids. He'd hybridize and divide the orchid buds with a scalpel and put them in test tubes filled with coconut water. The orchid clones had to be constantly agitated in order to grow. There was a riot of rare orchids blooming all throughout their house. Christian's mother, Hannah, a quiet dark-haired woman of otherworldly charm, was his lab assistant. She was probably a doctor as well. There was much I didn't know about the Burkhardts.

The Burkhardts left the San Geronimo Valley and moved to a remote valley along the Noyo River during the late 1970s or early 80s. Their nearest address was Sanctuary Station, an unscheduled freight stop on the Northwestern Pacific Railroad freight line, now California Western Railroad line. The Skunk Train took them 20 miles to Willits or to Fort Bragg for provisions, but they were self-sufficient. The fire road into Sanctuary Station and Camp Nine was impassable during the wet season. I visited Christian a few times, as an activist poet friend of mine, Mary Norbert Korte, a former Dominican nun, was their nearest neighbor, and we held several rather wild California Poets in the Schools conferences at Mary's place.

The California Western Railroad, a Mendocino County heritage railroad that parallels the convoluted narrow Highway 20 (Fort Bragg-Willits Road). The CWR runs 40 miles along the Noyo River and Pudding Creek, crossing 30 bridges and trestles, and two tunnels. Northspur, 11 miles north of Comptche, on the confluence of the North Fork of the Noyo River, is the only watering hole, about half-way from Willits. Otherwise there's not much by the way of civilization in the canyon.—Wiki

Dr. Hans Burkhardt was an environmental analyst for Mendocino County, which was in the midst of clearcutting wars, disastrous for the Noyo River canyon. Hans' efforts led to the formation of the Mendocino County Forest Advisory Committee. He wrote a booklet, “Maximizing Forest Productivity” that outlined sound forest practices to sustain a healthy vibrant industry, but corporate forest owners branded him an extremist, along with marbled murrelets, northern spotted owls, EarthFirsters and Judi Bari.

The steam and diesel-powered Skunk Train, on the California Western Railroad.   —Wiki

When I was visiting the Burkhardts, poor Hans was nearly felled by a redtail hawk who mistook his shiny bald pate for dinner. Hans managed to live to a ripe old age of 75, fighting the good fight against big lumber. He's been gone ten years now. The Mendocino woods have lost a champion.

I heard that Brandy was killed by a car...but I'm not sure if that's true or not. I imagine it happened while Christian was driving one of his custom buggies. It would've utterly devastated Christian as he absolutely doted on that horse. I envision Christian living on that homestead deep in the Noyo forest, inventing all sorts of useful and harebrained contraptions. But our madcap buggy rides was surely the stuff of dreams.

Woodbutchers and carpenter poets: Remembering John Haines, Stephen Torre, and Ebbe Borregaard

Whatever happened to poets John Haines, Stephen Torre, or Ebbe Boregaard? I often used their poetry in the classroom when I was just beginning to teach poetry with CPITS. They were my gods of poetry. John Haines, I didn't know, other than from afar. I met him at a poetry reading, probably in Port Townsend, ca. 1982, I don't remember where—but I took a liking to his poetry of place. John was a homesteader, and the poet laureate of Alaska. A visual artist, when his paints froze, John began writing poetry.

Stephen Torre was an elusive lumberjack of a poet, with a deep husky voice that frayed the edges of my wilderness. He referred to himself as a wood-butcher (a term made infamous by my friend Arthur Boericke's off-grid book, Handmade Houses), but there was nothing incompetent about his writing. I first met Steve with Susan Kennedy and Mike Tuggle at a benefit reading in Cazadero. His Navarro Ridge poem was an epic tribute to the woodmen of the past. In 1988, I invited Steve to be a guest poet for my poetry residency on Sonoma County history at Mark West School in Santa Rosa. Sparks flew, but nothing kindled. All the little boys went wild for him too—for them Steve was a mythic mountain man. There's almost nothing on the internet about Stephen Torre, or Bolinas poet Ebbe Borregaard either. These raw, untamed men predated the internet, but I just wanted to date them, feel their two-by-fours, sawsust on my tongue.

Ebbe, who once wrote under the pseudonym, Gerard Boar, I knew long before I became a poet. He was rebuilding the porch steps for my employer, Alice Kent. I was working for Western Star Press in the basement of their Victorian mansion in Kentfield. My job was the antithesis of exciting—sorting and packaging mixed up decks of New Age tarot cards—a colossal publisher's nightmare of 52-card pickup, make that 84-card roundup. As I sat by the window mindlessly sorting cards to fill standing client orders, Ebbe would tell me stories of the Egyptian dhow he was rebuilding in Bolinas Lagoon, and generally mesmerized me. I was young. He worked with his shirt off, and looked like a bronzed Viking god. The way his muscles rippled beneath his skin. Pure poetry. Probably the roots of my poetic awakenings. Poets be like gods.

rev. & expanded 6.15.19

Preparing for the Summer Solstice

Father’s Day and Verona's birthday, the actress as Lady MacBeth, cannot distinguish between stagelight and perfumed sky; she weeps for the death of her 60 years. The day burns lust-red. We raise champagne glasses and read poetry to the sky. The guest proves this on film for posterity.

A young Peruvian offers an armload of long-stemmed red roses to the actress. I pin a rose to his lapel and come to understand that brief moment of bronzed youth is disguised as a name. We compare ages. Sing the old songs to keep from falling off the earth, recreating the words that dreamed us into being. Verona blows out the candles. We run naked into the sea at sunset.

Floating in the chill depths below the Mesa, we look back at the North American plate. Mt. Tamalpais, place of my conception. Nothing came between my mother and father: this is why I exist. The moon slides over the water. Bioluminescence scribes itself upon the waves. Our tongues answer the ocean.

The suicides of Bolinas: literary invention proscribing reality. A woman boasts she was the last one to speak to Brautigan. I think of Lew going off into the forest. No heroes, words failed them. Sick to death of the intertextual “I”, I vowed not to write about love, and so, became mute; but the poetic Left has sacrificed the author. We need a new altar for the new millennium.

Afraid of the nunneries, I was a deliberately bad child. I collected an insurance of venial sins—white lies—to keep back that abiding fear of God’s prison gate. I thought “zounds” came from the slurring of “God’s wounds.” As did “swoon.” Wounded, we’ve lost the group art of oral tradition. Blame St. Augustine, the first man to read without moving his lips.

The slow sibilance of speech went underground, the death of the spoken word. The monastery scriptoriums fell silent. The esophagus interred in the sarcophagus; subterranean words devoured the silvered sleep of bones. My father died silent in winter, alone on his birthday. A stranger by choice, his heart failed him. Word of his death restores something of my father to me.

We bring in summer, talk about ancestors. The names we carry into the future. Pegasus wheels across the sky. Orion no longer hunts. The Bear dances. A name spoken, a gift crusades into the west. I want a dragon constellation for the dragonslayer. A name place where eagles come to land. Like a cloistered lady-in-waiting, I swoon from the scent of kisses. Orpheus’s tongue in our ears. Other than ourselves, we have little to offer; no talismans or silk scarves. The enduring song of the storm approaches.

At the end of the millennium, protocol demands we exchange sexual pedigrees. The dread acronym: subtext and context. I weep for the extinction of spontaneity. Dress code: who’s got the raincoat? No longer embarrassed, I come prepared for any storm, though months may pass without sign of precipitation. Except it could be any century.

Wounded, we heal a little of ourselves on this raft, ride the transitory night to completion. We don’t take issue with futures, take no prisoners. Only small translucent sacks flung in the midden heap for some future archaeologist to contemplate. Donning my habit, I celebrate the longest day, my vows clearly written—protean words spilling onto the page.


1999, revised 2000

Bolinas Journal: Easter Monday

Easter Monday, after last night in Forest Knolls, I headed to Bolinas to escape the cigarette smoke, my aunt is a chain smoker, only to find Herman Berlandt and Verona Seiter in bed like two little mice after midnight. Too tired to return home, I headed off to the monk's cell, a toolshed with a bunk, to sleep like a babe, dreaming of Celtic hero warriors. 

I kept saying in my sleep they forgot about Eochaid. What about him? As if saying his name a millenia after his death would resurrect him. (Eochaid means horse). 

I slept long and hard, perhaps nine hours, I haven't been able to do that in ages. I was glad to be free of the oak pollen dusting my roof, I can at least breathe a little more fully, escaping the itching eyes. Perhaps that is why I dream so hard. Who is Eochaid Feidlech, the high king of Ulster, and why is he haunting my dreams? This is what comes of reading about the ancient Celts until all hours. 

How many years has it been since I took that anthropology class at SF State? 20 years ago, and it's just now jelling? Though much has come to light since 1976, I'm still reading an anthropology book published in 1957, working backwards from the skeptics, and tempering the work of new age nonsense, and wannabes, with a more enduring science.

Herman brings me a cup of coffee. Verona's a little miffed that I had barged in last night, but I didn't want them to think I was a robber. We catch up on gossip Saturday's River of Words event was a six-hour marathon success. 

A San Francisco six-year-old won the national poetry contest. It was about sun and clouds and Susan Sibbit was his poetry teacher. I guess none of my kids placed. Poet Laureate Bob Hass is doing a good job, says Herman.

Now I am more fully able to comprehend the information on the Celts now that I've walked the ancient shores and have swum in the Danube, and visited the museums of Europe, and Eastern Europe and Russia. It all comes into play, what I recognized as Celtic place names, in other languages. I don't understand the many languages of the museums I visited, but art only needs the language of the eye to find recognition. 

To think I have been to Bohemia, the Russian steps, the Ukraine, finding artifacts that spoke to me of my own culture. Connections to the Caucuses, and the Pontic Steppes. Horsemen of the steppes, wagon burials, Bosnia, reference to the Scythians and the Cimmerians begin to fall into place. 

I am a surviving member of the Celtic nations, having something in common with Native Americans, folk customs nearly lost, due to repression by the Anglo world. Always, we come back to the horses as central to our culture. 

And the horseman who came from the East to destroyed Gimbutas' matrilineal culture? Now I must read of this too. Do our ancestral memories contain the memory of treks across the steppes, on tarpaulins in southern Russia, Indo-European warriors from the Asiatics steppes?

Inverness Fire

Yesterday I spent quite some time working on my obsessively long prose poem to my neighbor, Sonny Lowe, Obsession, after I returned from the Mendocino Woodlands. Like the Inverness fire, it's growing by leaps and bounds and shows no sign of ending.

I haven't had a chance to write in my journal since I came back from the Mendocino Woodlands. I came home to the big Inverness fire and to O.J. Simpson's acquittal. There was little news to be had in the deep woods, but on Tuesday we did get the news of O.J. Simpson. The woods couldn't filter that injustice out, it was so atrocious. 

Meanwhile 12,000 acres of Bishop Pine went up in smoke as the Pope gave mass in the pouring New Jersey rain, drenched believers filling the football field.

Last night I went to a party with Verona Seiter and Herman Berlandt at Zoravia Bettoil's flat in Pacific Heights, she is a Brazilian artist. Full moon over the San Francisco Bay took our breath away. A magical night.

We danced the samba, the lambada, with the Latin American ex-pats. Zoravia said I can move my hips like no other. I am flattered. I guess. She said that she thought that she could gyrate and flick her pelvis, until she saw me in action. She said every man's eyes were glued to my hips. I was wearing the ruffled tea dress from my 25th high school reunion, which helped. The Brazilian Consul wanted more than just a dance in the moonlight.

That complement coming from a Brazilian from São Paulo is a compliment indeed, but then I had reason to move like that. The more I hurt inside, the harder I danced, rejected by my neighbor Sonny and his latest skank, Pat. Because of them I am somewhat homeless, she is now living with him, invading my space with her negative energy. I can't be at my home anymore. This is why I danced so hard.

Herman and I snuck off to Bolinas on Sunday. And I tried to find out if my friends were burned out. At the American Red Cross in Point Reyes, I find Stephen Torre's name on the roster. The fire left his house standing, miraculously, since it stands atop Drakeview Estates Road, at the ridgeline. His neighbor, Van Morrison, lost everything. His place burned to the ground. Even the gold and platinum records. Bob Hamilton and I once almost bought the lot next to Van's place but there was no water.

Steve's house was listed as habitable but he did not show up for the Russian River Writers' Guild Monday night reading, nor did Kathy Evans. Oh well. I called her to see why she didn't show up for her reading, and she's having a hit histamine reaction to the world, and to the smoke. I give her the allergic saga, how works the immune system.

Meanwhile, Steve is in British Columbia thinking he has no home. I tell her it's still standing. Kathy can't believe it. Stress levels threaten to undo us all. No way to reach Steve.

Anyway, to catch up on things, last Sunday afternoon, Herman and I hiked from RCA Beach to Palomarin Beach. There were very few people on the trail. We didn't realize we had hiked so far north. 

Behind the roped off area, was the fire zone. The park rangers were quite surprised to see us, saying we'd hike to a fair distance. The park is closed as the trees are still sizzling. And looters have invaded, making their mark. There are cops everywhere. The rangers rifle, a symbol for martial law.

We can't see the fire, but my voice begins to hurt by nightfall. We hiked up one creek to a waterfall. Herman, for all his 72 years, is surprisingly agile. He continues to remind me of my grandmother. How odd. How we used to go on long hikes and adventures without any real preplanning. They just happen. 

Herman too likes this spontaneous approach to dailiness, we are invincible. We spend Sunday night in his cabin on the Mesa. A nice dinner of salmon and couscous. I always take it upon myself to cook most meals, treating Herman. I suspect Verona does the same, but I like to cook for him. Maybe it's the female thing. He purchases most of the food and does the dishes, so it's a decent exchange. 

I've been managing to keep away from home because of Sonny. Which means my life is changing. I don't have my home anchor anymore. Sonny's son Nathan hardly ever visits anymore and wonders why I'm never home. I explain, it's not forever. Yesterday Nathan's mother, Cindy, came to get him, leaving Sonny and Pat alone, and I growl. 

I've taken to flipping him off whenever they drive by. Safe within the walls of my tiny cabin, I'm living between two places—my cabin, and my truck, my bags are always packed. Bolinas is my refuge, it's becoming my new home, and I am on fire, raging against betrayal, and the injustice of it all.

Bolinas Journal: Labor Day at the crossroads

Labor Day in Bolinas. A parade and drum circle at the crossroads. A chalk circle mandala.

Yesterday, we went rowing in the lagoon. Herman and Verona were content to be bickering passengers. Herman was finding arguments and everything Verona said. As usual I was the one rowing against the tide and wind.

The lagoon and the creek were beautiful. It's good to periodically get a view of the land from the water, it puts everything into perspective. Houses diminish, the streets, the cars, the people become invisible—even the pounding hammers lost their barking.

Today's the big Bolinas Labor Day street party and I'm alone here.

Verona and Herman went back to Novato early and I was too tired to return home to cook dinner. I read until 10PM and nodded off to sleep. I only had a 12-hour day, so I had lots of wild dreams and slept until nine AM. It's unusual for me to sleep 11 hours unless something's wrong.

It's as if the ache has settled in my hips, I don't think it's depression, it's more like physical contact. The outside and inside worlds colliding.

September 4, 1995 Bolinas

Bolinas Journal: Labor Day Weekend

Journal Entry: September 1, 1995 Bolinas

Last night, over for wine, I read some new work to Herman Berlandt who said I have a very distinctive voice and style. He notes the image, voice, language, emotion, intellect, philosophy, social theology, even political, the layers I try to include.

Yesterday on my way to Bolinas, I stopped off at Point Reyes, at the vet's office to see if I could get a prescription for Panalog, and worm medicine from Dr. Fisher. I'd written a note explaining how I had lanced and treated the cat's leg wound, having massaged the puss out from between the muscles. I irrigated it three times a day with HCl. I kept wanting to write it in shorthand but I can't remember the periodic table formula and confuse it with the formula for bleach.

So I knocked on the door though it was 6 PM. A cleaning woman answered, and I handed her the note for Dr. Fisher. Then I said disbelievingly, Debbie? She looked dumb was about to close the door on me, then changed her mind, saying she had changed her name.

She said she was known these days as Nina. Now she had to explain to the two younger women who this Debbie was, yes. And she nearly tried to shut the door on my foot and the past as well.

Debbie Howard, who was a friend from my childhood, and I talk about old home week. We gossip for a good two hours. She and Sarah live in Inverness. Their brother Guy lives in the city and has two kids. One's going to Harvard like his grandfather, ken, and their little sister, Jennifer, too has a couple of kids.

When I got to Bolinas I told Patrick Flynn the stories, and he wondered what the moon was in. We seem to have all these crazy meet-ups while the moon is in Sagittarius according to the Bolinas Hearsay News

My horror-scope reports an adventurous road trip was about to happen, and so it did. All the way to Bolinas. Yes, I'm feeling lighter, Jupiter is the planetary ruler of Sagittarius. Gemini and the moon squares that Virgo symbolic fire. We walk down to the Bolinas Library and dance to grunge music until the cows come home, I can barely make it back up to the top of the Mesa.

_______

With powdered lime I purify the outhouse, dusting it white, the piles of shit slowly climbing towards the toilet lid. Herman says lime is the secret, but the stench greets us anyway. I admire that ongoing whitewashed sculpture.

There's something to be said how we daily contribute our communion. There is beauty even in shit, the layered rosettes of toilet paper bloom against mountains of dung, and the sun warms our legs as we sit and survey the garden of what we will later eat. The bowels letting go of the burden of our eating existence.

Verona goes over her lines as Eleanor of Aquitaine. I listened to her pain, the irony, he who imprisoned her, loved her. But he was meant to rule, so he imprisoned her for waging war against her husband.

Herman in Verona ask about my love life. I have no ready answers to give, for I created the distance between us. Vorona asks if it's better to have meaningless sex with someone you don't love, or live in a sexless country.

Herman says the distance between Sonny and me has more to do with that sexual potential, of what might happen, rather than a lack of desire. Verona tells me if he keeps going back to the ex-girlfriend, and has been picking fights, he's afraid of commitment, so the trouble between us is sexual though there's no sex between us. Therein lies the rub.

What would I do with my life if there was no possibility that I would fail? Herman asks me. And I can't get past that domestic laundry of wanting to be with someone, be it Sonny and Nathan, knowing there'd be times when I'd go crazy.

But if I had the option of having both the domestic and the artistic life, what would I choose? It's more than what I have to give, give up my art even when it doesn't come to me easily? I remain loyal to it.

Herman notes that I'm not producing much these days, but it's strong and succinct. What would happen if I was able to live my dream? Well, the element of surprise always arises, how would I survive? Words like "but" and "how" are open to interpretation.

Steve Torre Workshop, Mark West School Poem fragments

BOLINAS RIDGE

I remember finding charge stumps
still glowing with red eyes.

I had no way of knowing
if they had been smoldering
from a recent burning,
or if they had kept a fiery vigil
all those years
long after the loggers were gone.

3/17/1988

in the morning sun
we watched the old guys
split the cedar shakes

Thwock!

Turn the stump

Thwock!

Turn it again turn

To keep the grain even, he said

The sweat drizzled his whiskered cheeks,

And I sank deeper into the lake.

Like loggers we rolled the logs
below Shafter Dam in the greening pond.

Have you ever noticed the fields by the coasts
punctuated with charred stumps?

Machines with spiked teeth
stripped the bark from trees
as if they were made of eggshell,
instead of wood.

I abandoned my own farm
and a friend runs cattle there now.

The horses they chewed on the barn
until it fell back into the earth.
Unseasonable sawdust
and the mare, Binty choking on that splinter.
Poetic karma.

long shadows of barns

straddle the thin peninsula 

from Tomales Bay to the Pacific 

On Tomales Head 

walking along the windswept land 

the lonely whitewashed barns 

cattle and rocks grazing 

on the windswept grass 

We are losing a landscape of culture

look to your place in the landscape 

your childhood 

I never found the wilderness 

though I spent five years looking for it 

until I realized I was looking for my lost childhood.

What I've lost is like a Kodak snapshot 

with its off blues and deep reds of the 50s 

my mother's carmine lipstick, 

the floral skirt that later became pillows for the couch

People living solitary lives 

personal history 

skin changing imagine

Along the windswept land
solitary whitewashed barns
rocks and cattle grazing
on the matted grass.

Long shadows of barns
straddled the thin peninsula
from Tomales Bay to the Pacific.

Families nailed row after row
of abalone shells to the sides of barns,
not realizing they were finite.
My aunt remembers how the car,
lost in the fog, was also nearly lost
to the sea on Tomales Point.

The horses would chew the sides of the barn
until its back broke and fell back into the earth,
broken spine and unseasonable sawdust
the final splinters lodged in the gray mare's throat
fell her as well.

Schools of tule elk
the extraordinary curve of horn
ancestors
a coyote pelt nose down on the wall

Our shadows watered the sawdust
our eyes all bloodshot
our hearts like a blast of wheat
through the clear ribs of morning
light sank through my body
like alder and pine
and sheep biting the red clay
as the huge cable snapped
gutting the darkness
 and I saw the sun standing
in a pool of ravens

there is no bridge in Hayfork
the big bowl of the Valley
is surrounded by mountains.

3/18/1988

Stephen Torre workshop 

WAYFARER

     The boat lay fixed, resting on the rope,
     the deep bosomed ship, fast at anchor. 

                                      —from Beowulf

How many years has it been since
Ebbe rescue the drydocked Egyptian dhow
from the battering ram and burning?
I remember the story about how he had to wait
for the full winter moon and king tides
to float it up the shallow channels of Bolinas Creek.
Its carvel-built sides furrowed the bay mud,
as it sailed under stars.

In the darkness of winter, his wife
Angela, sat sewing the sails by hand,
the painted sun blazed on the walls
of the loft as the heavy fog
tongued the windows and doors.

Ebbe hammered his poetry into that boat.
And each year it was not quite ready,
needing more revision and finishing
before the spray of the sea
could baptize that sailing sun.
And his girl-child needed tending-to
on solid ground.

Soon she will be old enough to sail —
she's the steadfast anchor
that keeps her father surely shored.
In his arms, her slight weight
is a more solid metal than iron.

7/9/1984

LETTER FROM BILL BERKSON

LETTER FROM BILL BERKSON

Today I got a letter from Bill Berkson.
He says, it's been a while. Too long.
Not much has changed—
He says, Ebbe is still around,
and Will you come to visit soon?

How that time has come and gone,
vanished beneath night's cover,
just as if it never had been.
The wanderer said,
The story never changes much,
only the times are different.

7/9/84