I’ve come back again to Bolinas. You might say that the highway bent its long smooth anchor about my neck and then stopped. The once famous but massively forgotten Pied Piper trout freak of the Sixties who wrote that phrase blew his brains out in the house next door and lay unmissed for more than a month. His longtime publisher, who must have been an English major, said he died of “American loneliness.” A physician might have noted alcohol dependence, severe depression, and easy access to a Smith & Wesson Model 28 revolver. By all accounts, he had devolved into a bad drunk. But that was long ago. Bolinas, the American literary scene, and every other kind of scene have moved on so far since then that the winsome writing and the horrific death might as well have never happened. The klatch of Black Mountain, San Francisco Beat, and New York School poets who gravitated here to populate a “psychedelic Peyton Place” (Ed Sanders, c. 1969) are all history, too. Frances McDormand and Joel Coen have replaced Grace Slick and Paul Kantner as the town’s celebrity couple doré–a complex differential, maybe an improvement, it’s hard to say. Yet the view from Terrace Avenue of the azure Pacific straight down the San Andreas Fault to the Golden Gate is still worth whatever it takes to get here. You would still want it to be the last thing you saw in this sad and wicked world.
Bolinas burg is much the same as in Brautigan’s time, with the giant caveat that even a 900 sq. ft. tear-down bungalow is probably worth at least a million dollars. There’s been another gold rush “over the hill” (Mt. Tamalpais, that is) in S.F., a sprawling mother lode with the highest density of billionaires in the world. So except for the alkies loitering outside Smiley’s saloon and the hard luck cases camping in junkers parked along Brighton Avenue—Bolinas traditions that go way back, like the nasturtiums—many of the resident hippie relics are worth a lot of bread. A stalwart Land Trust and a public utilility board act as politburos to preserve what is affectionately referred to as the town’s “soul,” which amounts to being a living museum of New Left ideals, a countercultural Old Sturbridge Village. The atmosphere can feel xenophobic to visitors, but it’s a rational reaction against vampire capitalists. (Marin has a deep history of property swindles. What ever happened to the Miwoks and rancheros, anyway?) Point Reyes National Seashore and decades of success at quashing local development have created the illusion of a remote village that is anything but. It will probably take an actual cataclysmic earthquake or wildfire to change the property value calculus—the mere threat, very high here, never makes much difference. Despite this real estate warp, Bolinas has fended off the kitsch despoliation that befell Key West after a similar halcyon era half a century ago. Meditate upon the difference between Gary Snyder and Jimmy Buffett. And no cruise ships. If there is another place in America with a nonprofit gas station, I would like to know where.
This morning around 5 o’clock a fire started in a storage shed next to Smiley’s, burning out the lot between the bar and a shabby house worth maybe 3 zillion. Fire engines came all the way from Nicasio, apparently without turning on their sirens, allowing me to dream serenely nearby through the commotion. An accident like this might create an opening for In-N-Out or Dogtopia in a less vigilant community. Here you can relax and go back to your manuscript. If reports are confirmed that one of Bolinas’s “below the radar,” a.k.a. homeless, people started the fire, then the compassionate tone of debate about affordable housing might stiffen slightly. But the king salmon are running offshore. Surf is up at the Patch. The President is a crook. You better find somebody to love. Plus a big wad if you want to own.
in memory of Richard Brautigan, 1935-1984, and a few fine Paradise Valley cutthroats of summer 1974
