The Man with the Van

I went in to Amazing Grace Music on Miracle Mile in San Anselmo for some guitar strings and a smartly dressed older woman with brassy permed hair and long red nails greeted me. She said she was minding the shop for a friend, they had their own music store in Fairfax.

We got to talking and she gave me tea and bikkies —Walker's shortbreads. Then she sat me down for a good natter, while her husband dressed in tweeds from another century, reclined in a chair reading the paper, holding his pipe reverently. 

She asked what I liked to play, I said Irish music. She was quick to tell me that she was Irish too. From the north, she said. I remember being shocked to learn she was from Northern Ireland, as our family was about as southern Irish as you can get, without falling into the Atlantic Ocean. 

I looked for horns, and found only the kindness of her blue-violet eyes, Violet Morrison was well named, I could see that she was once a beauty, with her red  hair and lacquered nails. She said she was once a cabaret singer in Belfast. I told her of my grandmother who raised me, from Bantry, and how she taught me the old Irish rebel songs.

When Violet found out that I had walked all the way from Drake High School to the store to buy strings for my precious Martin, and had no way home, she called up her son to give me a ride out to Forest Knolls as he was living in Inverness. 

I climbed into the battered white van hugging my precious guitar to my chest. I had no idea who he was, this man who was sullen and refused to speak to me the entire way home. Made me feel obliged. Like I was a real bother. I never spoke to him again. 

Later I found out it was Van Morrison. Though I very much like his music, I'm not a fan of Van the Man with the van.

RIP, SS Pt. Reyes, victim of arson (photos)

RIP, SS Pt. Reyes, victim of arson.

Iconic Tomales Bay shipwreck, the "S.S. Point Reyes," an old military transport cum salmon fishing boat, has been a photographer's wet dream since at least 1998. The fishing boat snoozing on a sandspit behind the Inverness market, was a real fixer-upper. You know how the story goes. One man's manaña complex is now a tourist destination. Supposedly it was pulled up onto the sandbar during the 1980s for a little R&R and renovation that never happened. It became an iconic destination. The "S.S. Point Reyes” was slated to be removed by the NPS, but thundering hordes of irate photographers rallied round the vessel, and saved it for pixellated posterity. 

It reminds me of that other rustbucket, the S.S. Minnow stranded on Hwy 58 in the Mojave Desert near Tehachapi. Ironic that this iconic boat was burnt to the ground by an overzealous photographer, intent upon snagging a spookily lit night shot, he back-lit the wreck by lighting spun steel wool, And the resulting sparks ignited the bone-dry punky wood. What was he thinking? 

I can’t find original photo, from the PT. Reyes Light. Merrel Rocca Sr.

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

Aviémore, Scottish Highlands, 2008, photos

Aviemore, Scotlish Highlands, 2008. Not sure of the date. We took a weekend jaunt up to visit Christine Ross’s relatives in Beauly and Inverness. This was enroute to her cousin’s place in Aviemore. I stitched together two moving car photos to make a panorama, but the hill was really that purple with heather in bloom, you could smell the honey in the air. Nothing prepared me for the sheer amount of heather in bloom, and its heavy scent. When I was in Inverness when I was young, there were heather patches, not entire mountains in bloom.

The above photo was at a rakish angle and was missing the far left bit when I straightened it up....so I nabbed a corner from this photo (below) to extend it. You can see the seam, if you look carefully. Also, what was I thinking in those days, cropping stuff too tight, and then NOT saving the original image? Pah!

Huckleberries

MY cousin Sineád and I went huckleberrying on the Autumn Equinox at our secret spot on Inverness Ridge near Tomales Bay, where we used to go berrying with our grandmother. Hard to believe so much time has passed since I hiked the highlands of the other Inverness, Scotland. I once thought that 20 years was a widening gulf—impossible to retrace extant memories of childhood. Here, at Tomales, it really is like Loch Ness; in the pine forest we’ve strange white deer from China instead of the red deer. Instead of Nessie sightings, the San Andreas Fault stretches its monstrous length northward and great white sharks relentlessly patrol the mouth of the bay. My grandmother said Nessie was a coelacanth—Gaelic ceili, for “singing” fish. As a child she remembered the fishermen catching the rare singing fish in the North Sea. From the isthmus, we could see Point Reyes in the distance, a mountainous corona against the shimmering sea, separating Drake’s Bay from the raging Pacific—a misnamed ocean!

The weather at the Point is capricious. Once my aunts and uncles went out to the headlands to gather abalone. Caught in a whiteout of tule fog, they nearly drove off the cliffs. Only the urgent whispering surf on the rocks saved them. Offshore fog rising like a vast wall against a sky where tiny fishing boats disappear into its maws, makes me think of a Chinese silk scroll, or a painting I once saw in the Tate Gallery by Turner. The wind-ravaged bishop pines, draped in the pale traces of Spanish mosses we once used as green tresses, took a severe beating from last year’s storms. So many uprooted trees met an abrupt end—we used them as aerial pathways up the steep hillsides. This part, primordial as the beginnings of time, unscathed by the devastating Inverness Ridge inferno that blackened the hills for miles. But the resilient land is again clothed in the succulent grasses the deer favor at sunset.

Neruda wrote Death is an admiral on a ship. . . Many shipwrecks along this treacherous coast. We found hand-forged square nails, slow crawling moonsnails, and pottery shards in the lagoons and on the beaches of Limantour Spit. The natives of Point Reyes and Bodega Bay thought the sailing ships arose like white birds from the belly of the sea, and the white-skinned explorers—ghosts. They tried to sing away the apparitions of the otherworld. They had no words for this, other than the arrival of death.

Because this peninsula is now public land, Point Reyes National Seashore, we’re not supposed to gather anything: huckleberries, or moss-covered antlers. Short, thick branch: a fallow deer’s. Non-native, like us. We lugged our 2-year-old nephew, Seán, through the undergrowth. He plucked each berry like a little king appraising jewels in sunlight, then greedily fisted them into his mouth until he was tattooed with violet juice. Returning the memory of those who came before us, we re-enacted an age-old ritual, gathering berries before the fall—no matter that our skin is white, not red.

My aunt will make pies and ice cream, our teeth will be indigo-stained for days (like my fingers). How Pictish! The berries, so labor-intensive (cleaning takes longer than picking), we make jokes, compare them to caviar, as we drop them from silver spoons, polishing them, black pearls on purpling terrycloth towels. But it gives us an excuse to be together, like in the old days. We’ll eat pie and have tea from the Blue Willow teapot with a cracked spout. Later, we’ll go to a party at the Straus farm across Tomales Bay on the barren, grassy Marshall hillsides and make gallons of huckleberry ice cream with their cream fresh from the dairy. Jungle-lush Inverness Ridge is part of what’s left of the granitic Pacific Plate, while Marshall with its thin red soil of Franciscan strata, is part of the North American Plate. Two continents divided by a thin bay, different as night and day.

© 1997 revised 2000 Maureen Hurley

White Deer

My grandmother and I used to traipse along Inverness Ridge each fall to pick huckleberries, and for a glimpse of Old Man Ottenger’s exotic white deer and the spotted fallow deer; but the National Park Service took the land from them, parcel by parcel—destroying most of the dairy ranches in the process.

The NPS gave the land to the public, tore down historic farm buildings, killed off the exotic deer: non-native species. If the alternative was a future of tract-housing, then they did a good thing, taking the land, but what they destroyed in the process was a thriving community of farmers and ranchers—for the greater good of tourists and their easy dollars.

But most of this land commuting northward at 2 inches a year along the Fault, is so far from civilization that its isolation is its salvation and its reward.

Trigger-points of memory: a certain angle of light reposes on the blood-red roses splayed against the limed wall of an abandoned farm. A bleached redwood wine vat holds the music of spring water plashing into the mossy trough where cattle and deer come to slake their thirst at sunset. Generations of barn swallows sip and weave the air into arabesques. No one wants to look at the moral dilemma: ranchers—treated like the Coast Miwoks their forefathers displaced—offered land treaties in the form of 25-year leases. Polyester tourists, also a non-native species. Rarer now to see the white deer.

Once while rough camping, I saw a big white buck in the night mist—an otherworld apparition of white on white—his antlers tining the haloed moon. But another kind of darkness hid in the pale Albion moonlight.

A sudden chill, a premonition drove me deep into the arms of pine boughs as truck lights severed the darkness. The silhouettes of two men illumined by red tail lights filled me with unseasonable fear. . I heard shots. Saw them leave. I was so afraid, I curled into the arms of the old pine and shook with fear.

At Limantour Spit death’s admiral was waiting in the staccato report of poachers’ guns—like Chinese firecrackers—the night they shot Ranger Kenneth Patrick for the rare white deer hides. Like the dried penises of white tigers, the deerskins were destined to be sold as aphrodisiacs and for healing magic to the highest bidder in the black markets of China.

© 1997 revised 2000 Maureen Hurley

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.