Deeds & Words

During the time period that Sarah Winchester lived in San Jose, the Santa Clara Valley was a bowl of orchards, famous nationwide for its fruit, particularly apricots and plums. Almonds were a big crop as well.  Winchester managed an orchard that was part of the estate, and sold apricots and prunes under her own orchard label, SPW Fruits.

This crank controlled the heat that went into the drying room.

Traditional lug boxes

Usually, prunes (which are just dried plums) and apricots were sun-dried, after being dipped in a mild lye mixture to get the skins to split. Sometimes, though, growers would speed up the process by mechanically drying them. This was a lot of work and could only be done in small batches. Winchester had a drying room on her property, although it wasn’t used very often.

Our guide on the “behind the scenes” tour, which demonstrated the running of the estate, warned us that the cherries were not ripe yet. The crows and small birds agreed with him; there was only one lonely, half-pecked cherry on the ground by the drying room.

The hippocampus fountain. And there I was, thinking hippocampus was a part of the human brain, and not a half-horse half-fish creature.

The cherub fountain

In the front of the mansion, the garden holds three fountains. I think there are, or were, a couple more in the back. When Winchester lived here, the front garden was less open, blocked off from the road by a tall hedge. Winchester’s preferred garden, based on photographs, was a little less formal and a little more natural-looking.

From the side. The two figures on the far left there are Grecian goddesses. One is Ceres; I can’t remember who the other one is — she looks kind of like a 1920s flapper

I enjoy the formal garden though.

The statue of the deer and the native hunter might be one of the things that sparked the theory/rumor that Winchester was atoning for the deaths of Native Americans at the hands of Winchester rifles. Looking at it, it seems to me that she just liked the statue, the same way she liked the statues of the Greek goddesses that are now at the front of the house.

In addition to three conservatories in the house, Winchester had a beautiful greenhouse and a team of gardeners that maintained her garden. Here, as in the house, she utilized ingenious ways to recycle and reuse water. Unlike some of her San Jose neighbors, Winchester seemed sensitive to earthquakes and the periodic northern California droughts. She prepared for both. If Winchester had not been a four-foot-ten-inch woman but a man, I think history would have celebrated her inventiveness and imagination.

Lucky Thirteen

The good folks who own the Winchester mansion, in San Jose, California, have engaged in a clever bait-and-switch campaign. On the Internet, on half-hour TV shows on the paranormal, and on billboards all along Interstate-80, I-99 and I-5, the Winchester Mystery House is hyped as the monument of crazy widow Sarah Winchester, who listened to spirits and built staircases to nowhere.

After you park in the parking lot across Winchester Street from Santana Row and next to Century 21 Cinemas; after you enter the large and chock-full gift shop and purchase your tickets for the tour; after you wait in the tree-lined courtyard for your tour to be called; after you meet your guide and begin to see the house, you find out that there was a lot more to Sarah Pardee Winchester than séances and the number 13.

Sarah’s History

Sarah Pardee was about 22 years old in 1862, when she married William Wirt Winchester, son of the president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Sarah was the daughter of a carriage manufacturer; an educated and cultured young woman who spoke four languages and played several musical instruments. William and Sarah had a daughter who died in infancy. William suffered from tuberculosis, and died several years later. Within a year of his death Sarah Winchester lost her mother-and-father-in-law as well.

This left Sarah with an extraordinary fortune and a broken heart. The rumor is that she visited a psychic in Boston and asked why her life had been filled with such misfortune. The psychic told her that she was being punished by the spirits of all those who had been killed by Winchester weapons. To make amends, Sarah was to move across the continent, find an unfinished house, and continue building it the rest of the days of her life. This would appease the spirits.

It is possible that this was the motivation for the widow’s move to San Jose. It might also have been that it was as far as she could get from the place that took her daughter, husband, and the whole Winchester side of the family.

The mansion was a work in progress her entire life. It has 160 rooms. Sarah Winchester did not draw plans, but she met with her head carpenter regularly to discuss what her next project or plan was. The amazing thing about the house is not the size; it is the quality and beauty of the workmanship. Sarah had what amounted to an unlimited fortune in those days and her annual income was about $365,000. She owned nearly one half of the Winchester stock, and all this was before the profit from the orchard she owned and managed. Our tour guide told us that she had $1,000/day income. To give that some context, Sarah paid her servants $3/day, and that was twice the going rate. To buy a rare and stunningly beautiful stained glass window, the most expensive window in the house, Sarah had to spend a day-and-a-half’s worth of money.

The front of the house with the post-Sarah Winchester-era formal gardens. Sarah had a taller hedge and a “wilder” look to her garden.

The Mansion Tour

Yes, there are doors that open onto walls, and, scarier, doors that open onto air. There are strange staircases, but frankly, the staircases are the most easily explained. We went through a  storage room that contains left over wall-paper (a type that was used on walls in the White House and on the Titanic, and is still made today—it cost $1.00/foot then, now it’s $200/foot) and many Tiffany stained glass windows that were never installed. The storage room was part of the original six-room farmhouse that Sarah bought and began remodeling. Our guide told us that we would be going to the remodeled hay loft, and, to get there, we would take “the crazy staircase.” The staircase has seven switchbacks, risers that are two-and-a-half inches high, and goes 110 linear feet to rise nine feet in the air. It’s like the strangest airport line you’ve ever shuffled through. The two-inch high stairs seem weird indeed until you remember that four-foot-ten inch tall Sarah suffered from severe and progressive arthritis. Suddenly the short, easy steps make sense, and so does the electric elevator Sarah had installed several years later.

There is a staircase that runs right into the ceiling. This looks more like a drawing or arithmetic error than any crazy-town spiritual design. If you know anyone who builds, they can tell you that staircases are not as simple as they seem, and that people frequently make mistakes on the geometry. If I were an educated, cultured woman who had messed up the basics on a staircase, I might blame the spirits too.

Winchester did like the number 13, and a web motif shows up in designs and stained glass throughout the house. Behind Sarah’s elegant second-floor bedroom is the “séance room,” to which Sarah allegedly repaired each night to commune with the spirits. Perhaps she did, but it is interesting to note that one window in the room looks down on the kitchen, at such an angle that tiny Sarah could see down, but someone looking up from the kitchen would not be able to see her, and another glass doorway looks down into the servant’s kitchen. Plainly that room served more than one purpose.

This is an example of the web design that shows up in wood carvings, leaded glass and stained glass throughout the house. It’s possible that it has some spiritual significance; or maybe Sarah just liked it.

Sarah also designed counters in the kitchen with grooves that run down toward the sink. When servants were washing vegetables or dishes, less time was needed to wipe down the counters afterward. Between the kitchen and the glamorous Venetian dining room, Sarah built a pass-through, so that servants didn’t have to leave the kitchen to carry food all the way into the dining room. Sarah also had a hydraulic piston in the house. It has its own room, and it’s installed above ground, horizontally. This is very unusual; most pistons were installed vertically, in the ground. Sarah had lived through the 1906 earthquake; clearly the piston was more easily worked on or repaired aboveground. Sarah made this choice probably for the safety and convenience of her workers. She also paid her servants, groundskeepers and carpenters three dollars a day (in cash) which was twice the going rate, and allowed them to have their families at the house. She was probably difficult to work for, but she made it worthwhile.

(I did wonder if she lost a lot of servants — no, I mean literally, lost. I don’t know how long it would take someone to learn that house, and I imagine a new serving girl, lugging a now-cold pot of tea and some stale cookies on a tray, wandering helplessly for days until she stumbled across the sewing room, or something.)

For Anyone With a Steam-punk Sensibility

Sarah was the daughter of a highly successful carriage manufacturer, and married a man whose company’s repeating rifles changed the face of warfare. It isn’t surprising that she was interested in technology. She seemed to have a practical and technical mind, and was forward-looking in lots of ways. The house is set up for passive water-recycling (water from the plants in the conservatories fell onto the zinc floor, through the drain, and was recycled in the gardens; water from the hydraulic piston that lifted the freight elevator was also recycled.) She had a gas plant and gas lines to the house several years before it was common. Later she wired the house for electricity. Inside the house, Sarah had a call box in the servants’ quarters; a button pressed in any of the main rooms rang a bell and dropped a card in the servants’ rooms. Years before alternating current, this device ran on batteries.

The second elevator, an Otis, was electric-powered.

The Winchester mansion also had a garage with a built-in car wash, complete with a boiler and a hose suspended from the ceiling, much like self-service carwashes today… only this was built in 1910.

The boiler used to heat the water to wash that stubborn mud off the fenders of Sarah Winchester’s cars

Just like we use today. By the way, that’s Jim, our “behind the scenes” tour guide

I wish my garage were this neat.

The Winchester mansion is a place where the technology of the time was used practically and innovatively. Anyone who wants to write a steam-punk novel, and “push” Victorian era tech in some way, could use this house as a template.

Crazy as She Wants to Be

Sarah Winchester probably was mentally ill. It doesn’t seem like she was schizophrenic or paranoid; I think now we might consider the need to keep building more of an anxiety or impulse disorder – maybe a weird type of hoarding impulse. The old saying seems to be true — if you are mentally ill and wealthy, we tend to call it “eccentric.”

The estate also has stunning gardens and fountains. Pictures are coming!

“Heroes and Icons” included three short features. The outstanding documentary of the festival showed in this time-slot, and that is A Flicker in Eternity. This film stands out because of the powerful voice of Stanley Hayami, a Japanese-American youth in the 1940s, and because of his excellent and charming sketches, which are used to great effect in the film. The film-makers animated some of them, adding movement to a story that depends largely on the voice actors who read Stanley’s words and those of his sister who fills in the rest of the narrative.
Stanley was fifteen when he and his family, who owned a successful nursery in Glendale, California, were interned in a camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Stanley drew pictures of the camp, and of his house in California. He was a thoughtful boy who wondered about his place in the universe (“a flicker in eternity” comes from a journal entry); and he worried about his grades and passing algebra. When Stanley got older he was “strongly encouraged” to enlist, becoming part of the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, a Nissei regiment that was the most decorated army unit in WWII. Stanley’s story is tragic. It is not, unfortunately, unusual. A Flicker in Eternity brings Stanley back to life for 26 minutes.

Sharon Yamoto and Ann Kaneko directed A Flicker in Eternity. This film is available on DVD and I recommend that you go buy it right now.

Lil Tokyo Reporter is a period-piece, a gently fictionalized short film about Sei Fujii, a Japanese American in Los Angeles. Fujii, a real historical character, ran a Japanese language newspaper and radio broadcast in Little Tokyo. In this movie he confronts the gangsters who are running a “gentlemen’s club” and fleecing the Nissei farmers and growers of their hard-earned savings. The film is beautiful. In the Question and Answer section at the end, I was surprised to find out how much of the film was CGI. They could not find a neighborhood or a back lot anywhere that had the right look, and the director informed us that there wasn’t a single real car in the film. The costumes were beautiful. This film was directed by Jeffrey Chin.

The last film was a brief – 12 minute – homage to Keye Luke, famous for being Charlie Chan’s “Number One Son” but also for being the real first Kato in the 1940’s Green Hornet serial. Luke’s film career was long and huge; I was surprised to find out how many films he had done. Keye Luke, directed by Timothy Tau, was shot in sepia tones with period clothing and dialogue, but a contemporary sensibility and a bit of a nod and a wink to the modern audience. For a bio-pic, this was very refreshing.

Linda with the DisOrient Banner

Last weekend I saw 19 movies in two and a half days.

Before you do the arithmetic and tell me that this is highly unlikely, I should explain that several of those were short films. Two, in fact, were each just six minutes long.

DisOrient film Festival is held in Eugene, Oregon. The Festival’s mission is to present “honest portrayals of the diversity of the Asian American experience.” Asian, in this context, includes Pacific Islander, which is why I was at the event. I had come up to see my friend Linda Kane’s documentary Nona Beamer; a Legacy of Aloha.

If I say her film was great, you will think that I am biased. The movie played to a standing-room-only crowd, though, and the entire selection committee, and most of the volunteers, told Linda how much they liked the film. After it showed, a half dozen people came up to her to share their experiences with Nona Beamer, a well-known music and hula teacher in Hawaii.

Linda’s film, at 90 minutes, is a full-length feature. The festival offered three sets of short films, categorized by theme. Saturday morning’s theme was “Family Dramas.”

Basketball Meri Jaan, by Veena Hampapur, was the first 6-minute film. Yeshodhara immigrated from India to the US (Dallas?) thirty years ago, She talks about how isolated and alone she felt… until she discovered the LA Lakers. She and her grand-daughters watch the Lakers, and the three of them go to a home game. All three women discuss the way the love of the sport has bridged not only cultural, but generational divides. In six minutes, Basketball Meri Jaan touches your heart and gives you lots to think about.

Reiko’s Hina Dolls is a 15-minute fictional film about a Japanese family who has moved to Canada in the 1930s. They cherish a collection of Hina dolls. Together, they face devastating loss and the threat of internment after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The little girl who played Reiko made this short film come alive. Kamiko Matsui, the director, was available to answer questions after the films were over.

Paulina  follows a Cambodian teenager in Washington DC as she comes to grips with the realities of her father’s gambling lifestyle. Of the morning short features, Paulina, directed by Cayleen So, was the most polished and professional looking. I’m sure we will be seeing a full-length feature film from So pretty soon.

The Commitment, directed by Albert Chan, is about Robert and Ethan, a gay couple who are adopting an Asian-American baby (Robert is Asian American). A sudden obstacle to their plan forces them to re-examine their own relationship. I liked this one better when I learned that it was based on a read couple’s experiences.

My Mother’s Jade, by Irene Young, explores the tension between a rebellious teen-aged girl and her Chinese immigrant mother.  This was “inspired by actual events.” The dialogue was anachronistic; the girl refers to her white boyfriend’s cigarettes as “cancer sticks”– an expression I haven’t heard in 20 years. To prove that he is a complete sleaze, the boyfriend calls her “my little won-ton.”  The mother’s story about her jade bracelet, a piece she saved up and bought for herself, and the tales of the spiritual properties of jade, are wonderful, though. The movie seems to end on a cliff-hanger; will the girl choose tradition (her mother) or the sleazy white boyfriend? The choice never really seems in doubt to me, but the emotion between mother and daughter felt genuine throughout.

The festival was held at the Bijou Theater in Eugene, on East 13th Street. It is staffed 100% by volunteers, and it seems like they should have been frazzled, but everyone was uniformly friendly, helpful, funny and always willing to go the extra mile. In one case that extra mile — or those miles — went all the way to Portland, when one film-maker got stranded because, due to the sequester, his flight was cancelled with little notice. A volunteer drove up and got him. At the end of the festival, another volunteer drove Linda back to the airport instead of just dropping her at the shuttle, which Linda had suggested. These people love their movies and their film-makers (and their audience).

Saturday afternoon’s theme was “Heroes and Icons.” There I saw the second-best film of the festival (Linda’s was the best, of course!) called A Flicker in Eternity.

Interstate 5 Northbound has 798 exits in California. I think — there may have been one more past the town of Hilt, just before the Oregon border. Still, that’s a lot of off-ramps.

One of my favorites is somewhere around 783. It’s called Henley Hornbrook. Henley Hornbrook sounds like the name of a derring-do hero in a melodrama.

Somewhere in Tehama County, there is an exit for Easy Street and Shamrock Avenue.

Before that, another favorite of mine is Mountain Gate Wonderland Avenue. It turns out that Mountain Gate is the name of small town, and Wonderland Avenue is an Avenue. Wouldn’t it be cool to live on Wonderland Avenue?

One of the benefits –joys — of a retreat is that you don’t have to worry about the details of everyday life. For instance, EarthRise offers three meals a day during a retreat or a workshop. The dining area is part of the Community Center, with meeting rooms, a patio, and a large and airy open place for meeting, eating, or meeting and eating.

(Did I take pictures of the wonderful food? No, I did not.)

Our retreat group got together at meals and Cathy did some kind of a check-in with us after we finished eating. Other than that, as I said, we were on our own.

The food line started here.

I was expecting good cafeteria food. Instead, I got great food. I would have been happy with any of these meals if they had been served in a moderately priced Marin County restaurant.

The art exhibits rotate.

Friday night we had salmon. Spouse and I are terribly spoiled about salmon; we either have fish that Spouse caught himself on his fishing vacations, or salmon from Dave the fishmonger at the farmers market.  This salmon was not as good as that; it was still darned good. It was served in a ginger soy sauce (you could get soy-free if you needed it). On the sideboard as well was butternut squash, cooked until just tender, with fresh herbs and dried cranberries. At every meal except breakfast, there was a huge salad of fresh spring mix (local, no doubt), dressed with tasty and light dressings, and bowls of toppings alongside; sheep’s milk feta crumbles, sunflower seeds, chopped nuts, raw veggies.

The downstairs area.

Saturday night we had purple and green broccoli and chicken, roasted red potatoes, an aoli sauce for the potatoes that I didn’t try, and a big old salad.

The chef came out from the kitchen and stood by the door, answering questions and asking some, each meal. Vegan portions were available,  gluten free was available also.

Desserts were simple and scrumptious. One night dessert was just a selection of home-made cookies; Saturday it was berry and apple crisp; Sunday lunch had baked apples for dessert. All yummy.

The center is flanked by an organic dairy and Tara Firma Farm, an organic farm about two miles northwest of the center. Marin prides itself on its local organic food (Sonoma County does it better, but don’t tell them that), and the center is clearly tapped into those sources.

Breakfast included oatmeal, homemade granola, berries and fruit, scrambled eggs with fresh spinach (great way to get those spinach nutrients!). Nothing elaborate; everything fresh, balanced and delicious.

The beverage station.

Coffee, tea and hot water was available all day and all evening (or until it ran out, I guess) at the first window in the dining area. Although there were no promises of snacks, every time I went tin there I found a bowl of fruit or a plate of cookies available the rest of the day.

The dish room.

The dining area is also laid out with some real thought to the use of the space. That’s pretty rare.

As you already know there is always one (sometimes two) silent tables. People may want to read or journal; some folks are on personal retreats and want to have their meals without interacting with others.

Meals were a vital if subtle part of this overall wonderful experience. Thanks, EarthRise, for your great chef and kitchen staff!

We moved the salt and pepper, so they are out of order.

On Saturday night, after dinner, we gathered briefly and played part of a word game. Cathy gave us each nine pieces of paper. Well, really, she gave us nine business cards. Cathy was without staff support during the weekend, and she was doing triple duty. She is the Executive Director of EarthRise, and she was working as the ED part of the time; she was facilitating our retreat, and Saturday evening she had the on-call phone for the caretakers, who had to go to a memorial service out of town. That she managed all of this is testimony to her ability to focus.

Anyway, nine pieces of paper. Our instructions were to write a word or a phrase that we liked. There was no more direction than that. (And that direction, by the way, got me into some trouble.) We wrote out words and put then in the basket. Cathy mixed them up and then we each drew nine words.

Unfortunately, there the game ended. Cathy suggested that we could let the words inform our writing, if we wanted to. In other retreats, she’d been a bit more directive. Not with us, though.

This picture and the following have nothing to do with the post. I just like them.

A bit more did happen with the words when Silvia Nakaach joined us with one of her musical instruments. She played and sang some of our words with us. She tried to get us to sing, with limited success at first, but Silvia is a determined and patient teacher and soon we were singing along.

Labyrinth… structure… hmmm.

We did keep our words. Here are my nine:

• Surprise
• Polliwog
• Visionary
• Universe
• Tangent
• Snuggle
• Sweetie pie
• coordination
• lofty

“Universe” and “polliwog” were words that I contributed.

“Snuggle” had already appeared in the rough draft I wrote at the retreat, before we drew words; and a version of “lofty” had too. (I used “loft” as a verb;  ”the winds lofted her,” or something like that.)

“Tangent” forms a rhyme with a word I contributed, “plangent.”

I’m embarrassed to say that I found myself more drawn to the texture of the cards and the things I could build with them than the words themselves. The cards had all been folded in half so that we drew without seeing the words. This meant they would stand up. I built a mini-business-card Stonehenge with mine. I tried to build a house, but it kept falling over. Perhaps that’s a metaphor on my need for structure.

Friday night I walked the labyrinth before I went back to my room and wrote. Saturday morning, I got up shortly before sunrise and walked up to take some pictures at dawn. The center is so quiet that I could hear traffic noise from Highway 101. It was like white noise, not an annoyance. Two crows flapped across the sky and perched in one of the oak trees.

 Sunrise at EarthRise

The oak trees are in some distress. Some have succumbed to oak death. Cathy said that there has been a lot of discussion at the center about what to do. They have cut down a lot of the dead oaks and neatly piled the wood, but they are not using it as firewood. In fact, she said, when they had a sweat lodge a couple of weeks ago, they had to buy firewood. There is a lot of discussion about what to do for the trees. Cathy is an administrator and an astrologer, not an arborist, so she felt like some of the conversations had been too technical for her. One theory is that the bay laurel trees, which are also native, somehow contribute to the oak disease and that the bay should be removed. Others think that this might be a natural process and to leave everything alone. this discussion actually goes to the core values of IONS and EarthRise. Do we reflect on the consequences of our actions before we take them? Do we try to live on earth with some humility?

I went up to the labyrinth and took some sunrise pictures. At the labyrinth, the graded road/trail veers left and goes up the hill. The views were breath-taking. A bit farther up I found the trail to Guardian Rock. This trail curves back along the ridge, with green and silver vistas to west and east.

At each meal, there is a table with the “Silent Table” sign. It means what it says; you sit there if you don’t want to talk. the people I saw there mostly were reading or writing. After dinner, someone put the sign on the piano. It was too good to resist.

Approach to EarthRise

Edgar Mitchell was the pilot of the lunar module on the Apollo 14 Mission. The sight of planet earth from space profoundly shifted his view of the world and the universe. When he returned to earth, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). EarthRise is the Institute’s retreat center, situated in Marin county, just over the Sonoma border, on San Antonio Road. It’s up in the western hills, flanked by dairies and organic farms.

Among the many programs the centers offers is a seasonal writing retreat (spring and fall). My friend Kathleen took a personal retreat there and told me about the center, and I found the writing retreat on their website. It sounded like exactly the kind of event that I had promised myself I would attend once I retired.

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In the dining area, kitchen staff Lisa and Josh are cleaning. Lisa says, “I know you’ll think, ‘Oh, no, it’s OCD Lisa,’ but when you put the salt and pepper back on the table, please line them up so they face the same way.”

Josh says, “Oh, okay. Like, next to the plant?”

“No, not really,” Lisa says. “I mean, the salt should be closer to the kitchen and the pepper should be closer to the wall.”

“Um…” Josh says, “Really? Customers notice that?”

“Not consciously, but they respond to the subliminal sense of order.”

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Drink station in the dining room.

Dylan, who sent me my “orienting” e-mail, was thoroughly friendly and helpful. The administration center, meeting rooms and dining area sit on a hill in a grove of oak and bay trees. Lodging is about a quarter of a mile away, in a different grove of oak trees. Unless you have  a disabled placard for your car, you park up the hill from the dormitories and chalets. (You can bring your car down to unload and load.)

The roads are smooth and well-paved, but the 197-acre property is honeycombed with hiking and walking trails.

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I look at the salt and pepper at the next meal. The salt is closer to the kitchen. The pepper is closer to the wall.

A retreat is not like a workshop, a fact I didn’t completely grasp until shortly before I left to drive now. Cathy Coleman, our facilitator, suggested a few writing exercises or prompts after lunch and dinner. We were encouraged to get together at meals. Other than that, we were on our own.

Oak

I like structure. The act of writing, to me, is an act of creating a structure. Word choice, sentence length, choice of tense, voice, rhythm, these are all elements of a structure. Beginning, middle, end, that’s a structure right there. I didn’t know how well I was going to do in this unstructured situation. I had avoided bringing books to read, except for one, but — oh, look! — I forgot I had a box of books in my trunk. And, I had my laptop and the center has wireless. The possibilities for distracting myself were practically endless.

That isn’t even including the photo opportunities; the gnarled oaks curled against the sky, the endless rolling green hills, the wild iris, the blue-eyed grass, the silver s-curving meander of the Petaluma river, the tiny white wild flowers, the English daisies, the snap-dragons, the strange scalloped green grass, the rocks dappled with fractal patterns of lichen, the deer, the crows, the labyrinth, the garden, the chickens, the bushmallow, the lizards, the sunset, the sunrise.

Sunset and vapor trail.

I hiked or walked every day. I took 200 photos. I finished the draft of a short story.

Assemblage sign for a shop in Inverness

My friend Linda is visiting from Hawaii, and I hung out with her most of Monday. It started with a  quick visit with Linda’s daughter Tracey, her four-year-old Liam and seven-month-old Kahlia. Liam was too active for me to photograph!

Linda and I got started on our ramble after lunch at the Thai Kitchen, right next to Oliver’s Market in Cotati. This is a small café with a simple lunch menu. Linda had the Thai-style barbecue chicken and I had chicken red curry. It left my mouth glowing, without knocking my taste buds into a coma. I call that good. The place has about ten tables, reasonable prices for lunch and a pleasant waiter.

From there we headed southwest, to Petaluma. We turned right on D Street, driving past the beautifully restored Victorian cottages (and mansions) that line that street. A ways out of town we crossed a border and entered a strange and foreign nation – Marin County. The rolling hills were Irish green, dotted with shaggy black cows.

We stopped in Point Reyes Station. I haven’t been there in fifteen years, probably. The town was nearly twice the size I remembered it. We turned left onto Highway One, and there was the village I remembered – I guess I’d call it Old Town now.

First stop, Point Reyes Books, a wonderful, eclectic bookstore. Linda gravitated straight to a box labeled “Artist papers;” damaged books and periodicals, sheet music, and printed pages in other languages. She scored a 1920 National Geographic book on dogs, filled with line drawings and lush color plates. Linda is a collage artist among other things, and this is perfect for her.

I found a book called 642 Things to Write About and picked up a copy for a friend; I got Elaine Pagels’s newest, an analysis of the Book of Revelation; and a book on Buddhist writings.

Point Reyes Books

Storekeepers in Point Reyes Station were not particularly friendly. Despite our shiny plastic and our folding green currency, something in our accents or our clothing marked us as auslanders. I’m not sure why. Linda looks like she just got here from Hawaii, one place that even Marinites will acknowledge is as cool as Marin. I drove up in a hybrid car, I wore all natural fibers, and I come from west Sonoma County, which means I ought to be able to pass.  Maybe it was my watch, which is just a Timex, not something hand assembled by a Fair Trade collective of Bavarian watchmakers who donate 3% of their profits to the Slow Food movement; or maybe it was my shoes, which were just shoes and not made from recycled 2-liter plastic soda bottles (I have a pair of those, by the way, I just wasn’t wearing them.) Whatever it was, they could tell I was an outsider.

No barking. Yes, some waggish Pt Reyesian did change the P to a B on every stencil.

Although several of them would not return smiles, they did condescend to take our money, so I suppose I should be grateful. The toy store guy was friendly; and the woman who worked in Vita’s, a strange and delicious store/gallery, was pretty nice. Two guys outside the Bovine Bakery joked with me about my camera. “Oh, no! It’s the paparazzi!”  I assured them that I would respect their privacy.

Crows of Point Reyes Station

Limantour Beach is a long shallow crescent south of the lighthouse. To get to it we drove up through the hills, pausing for stunning views. It was cold. The water looked like clouded silver. We shared the long stretch of pale gold sand with a few humans, a happy dog and several large and relaxed seagulls. Over the dunes, in the marsh area, we saw mostly crows.

On the way back we stopped at Zazzle’s in Petaluma for dessert. Linda had a 3-berry cobbler that came in its own ramekin. I had the indescribably self-indulgent chocolate mousse. It’s served in a chocolate flower, piled high with fluffy dark chocolate mousse, with a subtle after-taste of some kind of liqueur. It was easily enough for two people, finished with a dollop of whipped cream. It also had a maraschino cherry on top, which I left. I brought about half of it home for the next day.

 No, I don’t know either. An art installation of some sort with a crab carapace on the top.

Just like the old days, sitting at Linda’s kitchen table drinking coffee, our conversation ranged all over the place; movies, documentaries, making films, film festivals, grandchildren, dogs, whether women use more pronouns and articles in speech than men do (the shaky premise of a book I am currently reading)… care and treatment of cameras, Thailand, the Netherlands and the Nebula Awards (which was actually the result of a misunderstanding), Chinese artists, Marinites and their quaint customs, and the color of sunlight on water.