The Forest Knolls Free Store

The oddest things trigger memory. Proust was right. An advert for a reading & book party for Peter Coyote, a note on the Diggers triggered an avalanche of memory...with no purpose or storyline. A fragment, at best.

In the late 1960s, a friend of my mother's, Lynn Dutra, who was a landed/flighted Haight-Ashbury Digger, who manned the Free Store in Forest Knolls, at the top of Resaca Ave; or was it Rosario? Ron Thelin’s cabin? There really wasn't a store, just fleamarket stuff stored in boxes under the house. Not even a basement, but a crawl space under the open scaffolding of the summer cottage. So it was a store in name only.

Despite his girlish name, Lynn was anything but—he was one of these big burly brawny Viking types, reminded me of Ebbe Borregaard and was a very cool cat. I used to ride up the hill on horseback, he'd invite me to crawl around in the boxes of junk in the basement.

I still have treasures gleaned from his basement store. An etched sterling comb case and tortoise shell comp. Alas, I didn't realize this was the real deal and destroyed the tortoise shell comb. I've no idea where it's from, but it looks like an English pastoral scene on the cover of the comb. I don't remember what else I got from the Free Store, but I thought the comb was absolutely marvelous.

I remember being puzzled by the notion of Free Store, but the Bolinas Free Box (sometimes there's another one in Point Reyes) are permutation of the Free Store. I like to think that Freecycle too is a modern permutation as well.