I recently came across an old copy of On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing on Adobe’s shelves. Published in 1971 by the venerable City Lights Books, the collection is a cool snapshot of the back-to-the-garden existence led by a bunch of transplanted city poets in the late 1960s near a lagoon 30 miles north of San Francisco. You’ll find Robert Creeley, Bill Berkson, Tom Clark (RIP) and others represented.

Joanne Kyger, who passed away last year, became a pillar of the Bolinas scene, a feature of which was non-male exploratory spaces that were harder to come by in San Francisco and created by single mothers and women artists. In a 2013 interview in the Jung Journal, Kyger recalled “women’s peyote meetings” where “all these women came and took peyote, in this big open-air house. It was kind of a funny experience. I don't think anybody knew what 'ceremony' to follow. Someone [a man] asked, 'What should I do? There's all these women.' And someone answered, 'Well just pretend half of them are men.’”

It also reminded me of Dreaming As One: Poetry, Poets and Community in Bolinas, California 1967 - 1980 by Kevin Opstedal, which is an evocative, digitally available account of this Bolinas scene.

Engaging even for the unfamiliar, Dreaming As One contains tasty details and ridiculous anecdotes that reveal the minutia of how an artists’ retreat organically sprouted up in Bolinas: the boat builder that in a former life introduced Kerouac to Cassady; the rise and fall of local publications like The Paper and The Bolinas Hit, which included DIY LSD recipes in an early issue; the major oil spill that imperiled the Bolinas Lagoon, and had poets and Standard Oil workers teaming up to try and dam the mouth of the lagoon with hay. Crazy stuff! Highly recommended, and the chapters are short—easy to just dip in and out at your leisure.

From the introduction:

“One of the first things one might hear about Bolinas is the missing road sign. It is legendary. Sometime in the early 1970’s, no one seems to know exactly when, the sign disappeared. Caltrans replaced the sign, and it promptly disappeared once again. Actually the sign didn’t ‘’disappear’’, it was removed. This disappearing act was often attributed to the Bolinas Border Patrol, a shadowy ad hoc guerrilla organization which, depending on who you talk to, either does or doesn’t exist. Caltrans continued to replace the ‘’Bolinas 2 Miles’’ sign on a fairly regular basis into the 1980’s. The Bolinas Border Patrol dutifully removed the sign each time. Finally Caltrans just gave up.

On the mesa lies a grid of roads, most of them unpaved. Nestled in among the cypress, coyote brush and eucalyptus are houses—better described as cottages or bungalows, some no more than shacks, some prefab A-frames, or geodesic domes, while others are rustic wooden structures that seem to be a cross between a ranch-style tract home, a TV western set, and a Nantucket bed and breakfast. Various cars, trucks & vans parked along the road or in driveways run the gamut from rusted-out vintage VWs, late model pick-ups, and spanking new SUVs. As you drive along you catch a glimpse of a bumper sticker on one beat-up white Toyota pick-up parked on the side of the road - the bumper sticker reads ‘’Bolinas Border Patrol’’.

You get out of the car and look around. It was here, on the Bolinas mesa, that a remarkable number of important American poets made their home during the 1970s. Why were these poets, which together represent a solid core sample of the avant-garde poets of the time, drawn to this remote little California coastal village? It was, and is, a beautiful spot. The rural setting of the mesa, the little downtown area on Wharf Road, the lagoon, the beach - Bolinas is a special place and in itself is as significant a character in this story as anyone who lived there.”