We laughed over dinner in the Village at Bodega Bay. The shrimp scampi and grilled asparagus, plated to perfection, tasty beyond belief, remembered to this day. Brothers and wives, six old carriers of fading memories, sat together chatting over wine and fancy local cheese.
From our comfortable hotel suites we gazed at the wind-surfers sliding around the quiet harbor today, heard children talking in the shade, walked up to vista points, smelled the salty spray, wondered about our futures fading fast day by day.
Talked about our surgeries, our children's escapades and failures, our trips to places faraway, our dead friends and family erased from time, and our petty habits that directed our minds.
The grassy hills, carpets of green, a few wildflowers of early spring, spread over smooth rounded mounds of earth bordering this quaint smallish bay.
We walked and talked, ruminated, reflected on what we once saw and what we missed. Since we all had worked, saved, invested, and retired, lived in California all our lives, in a peaceful time, our experiences reflected our conservative bourgeois lives.
We drove south along Highway 1, along the lush hills encasing narrow Tomales Bay. Forests of fragrant eucalyptus trees, dense, flaky barked, for miles and miles as far as one could see. Dead pointed arrow-tipped leaves spread thick beneath our booted feet. Eucalyptus seed pods, gnarled and round, twisted in our fingers fragrantly.
The shallow Tomales Bay was calm, subdued, and colored in shades of gray. Drivers in the traffic from Frisco, escaping city life, streamed steadily though these rural scenes, past hip cafes, and souvenir packed shops. Headed up the coast, kind of lost, but not, just pretending to be explorers or adventurers ... but they were not. Just folks with cash, like us, tourists on a weekend lark.
Below the slender 15 mile long Tomales Bay estuary, Deep Below, under miles of salty rocks, crawling slowly, pushing-pushing, inching along, invisible and real, the Immense San Andreas Fault. One side of the shallow bay moves northwest, the other side shifts south. If the San Andreas Fault faulted, split, rifted, strike-shifted, exploded, rock and rolled ... the earthquakes would send tsunami waves to the height of young Madrone trees, and slash Inverness, Marshall, and Point Reyes Stations to rubbled ground! Leaving broken houses, wrecked cars, rotting herring, salmon, eels, sturgeon, halibut, and human bits scattered all around. Always a disastrous possibility!
Yet, I did not worry, can't fret about every unpredictable or unknown threat. Just enjoyed eating a fine carnitas tamale and flirted with a Hot Tamale Lady in a Olema cafe; that's It! Little time to dwell on Death ... the inevitable ultimate Rift.
My brother and I gazed to the South, wistfully, at Sonoma State Beach, near where the Russian River empties down into the Pacific Sea. We were older, wiser, but listing steeply toward our ends from disease. Memories from 2019 ... crumbling.
This poem is one part of:
At the Edges of the West
Highway 101 and 1
Memories of Pacific Coast Places
By Mike Garofalo
25 Steps and Beyond: The Collected Works
By Mike Garofalo
