Addendum to Bolinas Sunrises and Solstices

Memories of a hippie childhood

Thanks to everyone who read, liked, or responded to last week’s post with memories of sunrises and summer solstices in a small town in California.

That post was written off the cuff, and I learned so much from the responses. I wanted to say thank you, and also to post an addendum.

The original essay is below; the addendum follows.

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Bolinas Sunrises and Solstices

June 20, 2024

Photo by Julia Kerner on Unsplash

For part of my childhood — maybe three or four years (or maybe just two or even one — it’s hard to know now), I slept outdoors almost every night, rain or shine, on a deck that my parents had built outside my bedroom door in Bolinas.

My parents often slept outside too, on a deck outside their own room.

In the mornings, the dog would walk joyously around the house to both decks a little before dawn. She would start with my parents, then continue on to me. When she arrived she’d snuffle her nose close to mine to say that it was time to get up.

I’d kiss her smiling dog face and get dressed while she went around to the doors of my brothers’ rooms, and a few minutes later we’d all gather by my parent’s deck in the grey pre-dawn light.

Together we’d walk the ten minutes or so down our dirt road to its end at the edge of a cliff, where we’d stand and watch the reds of the growing sunrise reflected in the wild waters of the Pacific ocean.

When I think of the best moments of my childhood, those walks to the sea, following nights full of stars, in which I’d have woken briefly every few hours to note the progression of the constellations and the Milky Way across the sky, knowing more or less what time it was by how far they had gone, are among them.

The best moments would include experiencing the night sky intimately in a way that I’ve rarely been able to since. Spending the nights under a dense mat of stars, the major constellations merely the brightest rather than isolated as I usually see them now, and a detailed Milky Way whose center and cloudy edges were completely discernible.

The best moments would include being greeted by the dog, who would be full of happiness that it was morning and that everyone would soon be together. Sometimes greeted by the cat, too, though she was more aloof and usually came by during the night instead, to sniff at my face for a moment or two and receive a pat before going back to hunting field mice in the grass around the house.

The moments would include the sound of the rain on the tarp that I’d pull over my sleeping bag and right over my head. My sleeping bag was actually a “mummy sack” — a half-length sleeping bag, meant to keep an backpacking adult warm up the waist, combined with a parka over their torso. It was more than long enough for me. I also found the name, “mummy sack,” endearing, and told people about it proudly and often.

The best moments would include standing there at the edge of the cliff at dawn with my family around me, including the dog, all silent as the sun rose behind us and the sky and water took on new colors. We’d walk back home in the clear light, knowing that soon the fog would begin to roll in off of the sea, and that we would be living in a cloud — a stunningly beautiful, deep gray cloud — for a few hours, until it began to burn off at around 9 am.

Sometimes the fog wouldn’t come; and sometimes it would come and stay, magically, all day, so that one could take walks in it and imagine that the world was nothing but fog, all-enveloping.

I don’t know how many times those family sunrise walks took place. In my memory they were every day for years, but it’s possible that they only happened a few times. I lived in Bolinas from when I was 7 to when I was 12, and though some memories are clearly tied to specific years and ages, others are free-floating.

The years sleeping outdoors could have begun when I was 8 or when I was 10; the daily walks to greet the sunrise could have lasted for years or for a week.

I do know that for a couple of years, likely not the years with those morning walks, I would get up around dawn and hang around by myself for a while, not knowing what to do, and finally start walking down towards the school, a mile or so away. Sometimes the janitor would drive by and stop and offer me a lift, and we’d arrive at the school together at around 6 am. I’d sit on the steps of my classroom and read until the other children started to arrive a little before 8.

Bolinas was a very small town, and everyone hitchhiked all the time, almost always getting a ride with someone they knew. I wouldn’t have thought of it as “the janitor” giving me a lift, but rather as the person it was — I have forgotten his name now — who was working as the janitor at the school at the time.

Our first two summers in Bolinas, in the hour or so before the dawn of the midsummer solstice, my parents bundled all of us into the car — I still in my pyjamas — and we drove around the lagoon that separated Bolinas from most of the rest of the world. Then through the sleeping town of Stinson Beach and up a winding road to a quiet look-out spot near the top of nearby Mt. Tamalpais.

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

I’d have fallen back asleep, in the back of the wood-panelled station wagon, but be roused to come out of the car a few minutes before the dawn, and stand with the others to see the light appearing over the Pacific ocean.

We must have turned to the east to see the sun itself as it came over the horizon, but I don’t remember that: what I remember is the changing colour of the sky over the sea, at the start of the longest day of the year.

Photo by Slav Romanov on Unsplash

Happy solstice 2024, and glad midsommar — happy midsummer — to all.

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Addendum

I think that many adults, when thinking of their childhoods, have a fairly clear overall image into which individual memories fit in.

For much of my adult life I did too, but my memories were confusing in ways that seemed a bit unusual.

I had an overall image of a free, independent childhood among interesting people amid stunning natural beauty, but the image didn’t always match my remembered emotional experience, and that confused me for a long time. I read any reference that I could find to the place where I spent that part of my life, trying to figure it out.

A year or two ago, an analogy came to me. I think in analogies; I use analogies as a core part of teaching; sometimes I think that I make sense of the world through analogies. The one that occurred to me about my years in the little town wasn’t sophisticated, but it helped to make sense of things, or at least to provide a framework that one could use to make sense of things.

Here it is:

I’m not sure if you ever came across a block puzzle as a child, or if you did, if you remember playing with it?

It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, but it is made up blocks, each face of which has a part of a different picture on it. In all, six different pictures can be made by putting the matching sides together in the correct way.

For instance, here is a picture of a deer in such a puzzle:

And here is a picture of a wolf, made from the same blocks:

My analogy was simply this: that I had created an overall image of a period of my life that was a bit like the picture below:

For a long time, I assumed that this was unmistakably an image of a deer, with some of those odd anomalies that happen because the world is an irregular place.

But with a block puzzle, all six of the images exist simultaneously. If I pull together all of the anomalies in my overall picture, as accrued during the years described in last week’s essay, I can create a complete wolf from them also.

The glory of the analogy is that neither the full deer picture nor the full wolf picture is inaccurate. The deer is a true solution of the puzzle, and so is the wolf.

Both solutions also co-exist; neither cancels out the other. Both are always part of reality, on the physical blocks that make up the puzzle set.

In last week’s piece, the first non-bookish, straight-up memoir that I’ve written on this platform, I gave readers a version of the mostly-deer image, above.

I think that most read it precisely as I’d read it all of these decades, as a picture of a deer with something that sort of seemed to hang in with the rest, but maybe not, and it’s hard to tell.

Or even if it seemed to not fully hold together, the piece may have left the impression that the writer was unaware of any anomaly or incongruity. (That’s due to lack of skillfulness ay my end.)

I am glad that last week’s writing succeeded in sharing the overall image of an exceptionally beautiful time and place, as it truly was. And of beautiful experiences. That was a primary goal.

But I didn’t want to leave anyone wondering about the possible incongruity in the picture, because that exists too. I suppose that I especially didn’t want to leave anyone who may have had similar experiences thinking that I myself saw only a complete deer.

Thanks for reading.

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For an earlier essay on Bolinas, please see:

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Many thanks to

Ann Kennedy Smith

,

Mark Bramhall

,

Nick Hornby

,

Emma Hemingford

,

Deborah Vass

,

Jacqueline Saville

and

Tina Lee Forsee

for recommending Pen, Book and Garden: Notes from Linnesby to their readers.

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