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.

Bio Notes for Brian Kervin

For all you North Bay folks, Neil O"Neill and Maureen Hurley will be on the air live reading poetry (and music) on The Learnin' Kirven Show April 6th, from 4-6 pm at KWMR West Marin Community Radio  at 90.5 FM Point Reyes Station, and 89.9 FM Bolinas kwmr.org (live stream). Maureen will be reading poems of place, growing up in West Marin, highlights of our upcoming CPITS' 50-year anniversary, West Marin kids to read their poems. Neil will talk about coming to Marin in the 1970s, Ross Valley Players, his 30-year gig with Bread & Roses, and play some music.

I began to write Brian some bio notes and it got out of hand. Bloggy material, it is.

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

Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey once sent me rather unusually inscribed checks to purchase some new age tarot cards I was selling. My job at Western Star Press, located in the basement of Alice Kent's big Victorian house in Kentfield, was sorting old tarot decks. 

 

My best friend's mother, artist, Rosalind Sharpe Wall and Alice Kent's brother, Bohemian, John Starr Cooke made a New Age Tarot deck, The New Tarot: a deck for the Aquarian Age (1969).

(See poet-librarian Jim Carmin's Facebook post and photo, about unpacking a VCR tape from Ken Kesey for the Multnomah Library Special Collections. Shall we say, it was, um, an acid-colored and tie-dyed VCR tape? Jim's post was the source of inspiration for this blog post. Once again, thanks Jim!)




There's not much on the internet about Alice Kent's brother, John, or the The New Tarot for the Aquarian Age, for that matter, which is odd, as John, friend of Timothy Leary, William S. Burroughs, and Paul Bowles, a disciple of Aleister Crowley, was revered as a sufi, he had the shakti. But I found this second-hand description of interest:

The New Tarot aka The Tarot for the Aquarian Age 
This deck is very different from most Tarot decks. The Majors have all been renamed and the suits are Blades, Serpents, Pears and Stones, which represent air, fire, water and earth respectively. The Majors are radically different; The Fool is called Nameless One, The High Priestess becomes The Mother, The Lovers becomes Unity and The World becomes The Virgin. All of the trumps are like this with the exception of The Hanged Man. The court cards have the normal names (Page, Knight, Queen and King), but the pictures do not show people. The Minors do not show scenes, rather they show the number and the requisite number of pears, serpents etc. The deck comes with 3 books, a 150-page guide which explains the reasoning and symbolism on each card followed by a short question and answer section for each card. The symbols were supposedly given to the designer during Ouija board readings in 1962 and 1963 and the deck was purportedly predicted by Madame Blavatsky in her magazine Lucifer. The second book describes a spread called The Game of Destiny, and the third book is a small booklet, similar in size to most deck booklets which describes a game to be played with the deck called The Royal Maze. The deck has its own box and the boxed deck and the books come in a larger box. © 1997 by Michele Jackson (the link is dead).

During the early 60s, John was living in Carmel. The Ouija board medium who/that channeled the deck to John, was called the One. So they called the deck The word of One. In 1964, a posse of psychedelic rangers traipsed down to John's place in Cuernavaca, at the foot of Popocatapetl, in Mexico, to work out the details. 

The New Age brujos delved into the occult with a little help from LSD, datura and magic mushrooms, to shepherd in the New Age. And then they brought it back to the Haight Ashbury. Which, in turn, led to the Human Be-In...that's where I come into this story, as I was there with my mother, who knew Timothy Leary....

And Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were fed LSD treats courtesy of the US Army. Which led to electric kool-aid acid tests where other pranksters could “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” And the incarnation of Further in her day-glo splendor (and, yes, I boarded the bus when Ken stopped).

John and Rosalind designed the Tarot deck, Roz did the artwork. She wasn't very good at drawing or painting people as I recall... But she persisted with her painting throughout her life. I inherited a big box of her brushes, paints and tools when she died. The odor of rancid linseed reminds me of her.

My job was sorting and making up the decks to make them whole. And I do mean sorting—the printer had a serious mishap or played 52-card pick up with hundreds of decks during the final print run. Wheee! Talk about not having a full deck....

Though the cards were officially out of print, orders were still coming in. After all, this was THE tarot deck for the Aquarian Age. My tedious job was to send people missing cards, and  make up new complete decks—which required finding all the cards, and sorting them into major arcanas. Those images inhabited my waking and sleeping moments. Especially the burning ouroboros. Ad infinitum.

I didn't dare tell my mom about this rather particular job as my mom and Rosalind were arch-enemies on the highest wiccan order—they had a falling out over this deck. My mom had designed her own deck. They traded notes, then realized that they didn't see eye-to-eye on intellectual matters of the occult.



Ken and I struck up a correspondence of sorts. I told Ken that my mom, whom he likely knew, made me read his books. (She got around—and perhaps unofficially qualified as a Merry Prankster, as she probably dropped acid with Timothy Leary whom Nixon dubbed "the most dangerous man in America").


When the Beatnik scene died out, my mom embraced the next wave. She became a well-tuned psycho-delic card-carrying member of the "turn on, tune in and drop out" crowd. She made me read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was young, in order to better understand what her manic-depressive illness was like. 


Ken must've been impressed with that story, as a consolation prize, he sent me a signed complete set of a poetry & prose journal he was editor of, called "Spit in the Ocean." Much of it was beyond my comprehension. But I was a late bloomer. I do remember pausing over a grainy photo of the original Further, the magic bus I had once hitched a ride on coming home from high school—driven by Ken Kesey himself. What a strange trip that was.


Ken wrote me that the bus broke down and was rotting in the lower south forty pasture on his farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. It was the original Further. Maybe even during the Summer of Love. Who remembers, who cares? It was then. And this is now. It's always now but memory has a way of sneaking in and curling up on a sunspot when you're not thinking about it.

Further, the 2nd (painted in the late 1980s), proof that you can go back home again.

I was also distracted by Ebbe Boregaard outside my window, who was stripped down, a bronzed Viking god, rebuilding the front steps of the old house, telling me stories of restoring his Egyptian scow and poetry. Little did I know that the gods of poetry were beginning to develop the plot on my becoming a writer. I was 17. What did I know?


I didn't save Ken Kesey's letters or the books. Or rather, my first boyfriend Sweet old Bob Hamilton, ran off with a redhead named Dulcie, and all my books—he was the "literate" one who got me into this mess to begin with. Someone out there has them and is probably wondering who this "Maureen" was and why Ken Kesey sent them to her. 


Perhaps they'll turn up in a special collection somewhere. Perhaps it's just a spit in the ocean after all.


See my post: Hitching in Marin during late 60s, early 70s

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.

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