Bolinas Sunrises and Solstices
Memories of a hippie childhood
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.
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.
Happy solstice 2024, and glad midsommar — happy midsummer — to all.
For an addendum to this piece, addressing the possible incongruities in it, please see:
Addendum to Bolinas Sunrises and Solstices
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.
For an earlier essay on Bolinas, please see:
Bolinas
When I moved to my little village in the Swedish countryside, I realised that in some ways I was giving myself a do-over of the key years of my childhood. I lived in Bolinas, California, from when I was 7 to when I was 12. This was in the 1970s, when the hippie era was still in full swing a…
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I am not sure what to make of little you hitchhiking to school at dawn. It seems you were perfectly safe, in one of the continent's most beautiful places, which you had mostly to yourself. I wouldn't have wanted your childhood, but that's because I didn't have the wildness of it. A happier childhood than mine in a big white house that sat behind the only fence in town like a castle behind its moat.
Lovely!