The ’60s, Revisited

Sometimes you need to look at where you’ve been to see where you’re going.

San Francisco was the beginning of my journey, all those years ago, when I left my parents’ home to become a TWA Hostess, a starry eyed girl filled with dreams, eager to experience everything life would show me. I came into my womanhood here, the yearning of my true self expressed and formed.

The path led me to the people who became lifelong friends. My first friend was Nancy. She was everything I wished I could be: tall, thin, blonde, blue-eyed, artist, Aquarian. When I admired her art, and said that I wished I was an artist, she assured me that I was. “Your life is your art,” she said.

In 1965, she and her husband, Carlo, bought a beautiful, but rundown property in Larkspur. The previous owners had a pet store and kept their stock of birds in the redwood house built in 1900. They spent months cleaning it before moving in. The interior of the house is also redwood, and Nancy painted only the stairwell and one of the downstairs rooms. I remember helping paint it, each slat a different shade of lavender interspersed with pale yellow. Nancy’s art form is collage, and the house is decorated with her numerous pieces.

Carlo was a dentist and had an office in North Beach. After hours it was a gathering place for old Beats and the young Hip. Over the years, their home became a gathering place for intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians. Carlo was a student of Hinduism, and Swamiji Satchitananda and Yogi Bhajan, were guests who stayed there to give series of lectures.

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Nancy and Carlo groomed the hilly acre the house sits on into a lush oasis. Wisteria hung in cascades of purple and white from the retaining wall all along the driveway. Carlo used bamboo as natural screens to create areas to sit in quiet conversation, or contemplation, and hard labor to trim and clear overgrown shrubs to reveal the view of Mt. Tamalpais.

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There is so much to learn when we are in our twenties, about life, about the world, about relationships. There were fun times going to concerts, seeing the great new artists of the times, learning how to care for our bodies and of those we loved with healthful food, consciousness expanding conversations over dinner, and creating art. There were concerns for the world: using our voices for peace rather than war, for Civil rights, the environment. At the heart of it was the relationships that tried and tempered us, learning what it means to be an individual in a changing society.

Nancy and I have been friends since those days. While I moved around, she remained in Larkspur, loving caretaker of the home and property that I think of as a monument to the ’60s. Though our life experiences have taken us in different directions, the bond of love and friendship has not diminished over the years.

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Not long after I arrived in San Francisco, I met Bryan, a dentist in practice with Carlo. He lived in Mill Valley, and when we married, we bought a house there. Two years later we bought a fourteen acre holly and Christmas tree farm in Sebastopol. Our son, Luke, was born during the time we lived there.

When we moved to Sebastopol it was a quiet agricultural community, its main crop Gravenstein apples, and its motto, “The apple capital of Northern California.” At the time, there was an influx of young people looking for alternative lifestyles, living off the land. We bought produce from farm stands, and staples from a co-op one of our neighbors started.

I learned to bake bread, and can the abundant produce from the garden. I planted my first organic garden shortly after Luke was born. One morning I heard planes flying nearby. Looking out the window I see crop dusters spraying the surrounding apple orchards. I was devastated, and realized that one’s garden is only as organic as the neighbors’ orchards.

The house we lived in was yellow adobe brick. From the front terrace there was a sweeping view of the Napa Valley, all the way to Mt. St. Helena.  The lower part of the property was planted in holly trees, and the driveway was lined with jasmine. I loved to walk down to the mailbox carrying my baby, breathing that delightful fragrance. Outside the kitchen window was a manzanita tree with its red, peeling bark and waxy flowers. To me it was heaven on earth and I loved my life.

I wanted to see Sebastopol and the homestead. I expected change, but not the kind I saw. The town was teeming with tourists. It has become a Disneylandish version of an old fashioned American town, nothing like the little farming community I knew. I took Bodega Hwy to find the road where I once lived. The farther I got from town, the more rural it became, but where were the apple trees? Many of the small farms were now planted in grape vines, the land leased to wineries.

The road I had lived on was unrecognizable. I drove up and down it several times looking for the house. It had been visible from the road, gently sloping up to a knoll. Now the holly trees are gone and the lower property is overgrown with tall pines and other trees. When I found the address marker, I took the narrow driveway up. There were people sitting on the terrace. I lowered the car window and said, “I’m sorry to intrude. I used to live here and I wanted to see the house.”

The woman was gracious and not only invited me to join them, she treated me like an honored guest. A sturdy brick house, it hadn’t changed much, except for the art studio that she’d added on, and the updated kitchen.  We sat in the living room, she wanting to know all that I knew about the house, me feeling the life I lived here.

Besides the holly, the jasmine and manzanita are gone, and the view to Mt. St. Helena is blotted out by the tall trees.

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The traffic was bumper to bumper down to Larkspur, my heart breaking by how much the countryside had changed. The road that once was flanked by open fields and rolling hills, was now lined with big box stores and shopping malls. I last visited Nancy twenty-one years ago. Larkspur had grown quite a bit then since I’d visited in the mid-’90s, but the growth and density now in Marin County shocked me.

Drought and the threat of fire are palpable. Years ago, when the drought became serious, the electric company cut down the wisteria on Nancy’s property, the beautiful blossoms that once lined the path to the house, gone. Trees have been cut back or removed; the bamboo chopped down to the nubbins.

A teacher once said to me that all progress is change, but not all change is progress. I know we need housing and jobs, but it’s my opinion that unrestrained growth is a major contribution to the climate crisis we are experiencing.

I took the ferry from Larkspur Landing to San Francisco and walked from the terminal to North Beach. The area looked pretty much the same, even the building Carlo and Bryan’s office was in, but it was crowded. There was a live jazz concert in Washington Park, across from the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. The Park was filled with people. Some sat talking in groups, some walked dogs, a group of young men tossed a football.

It was hot that day. I kept thinking of a quote by Mark Twain, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” I remember those cool, foggy summers, now a thing of the past.

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The morning I left Larkspur, it was already ninety degrees. I wanted to take a close up look of the Golden Gate Bridge before crossing it. When I arrived at Ft. Baker, at the base of the bridge, a thick plume of fog filled the mouth of the bay, shrouding most of the bridge. The sound of foghorns moaning filled the air. I’m happy to have spent five days with Nancy, and for the lessons learned in the years I lived in the Bay area. I remember a saying from the EST training I took in the ’70s, “I used to be different, and now I’m the same.”

I drive past Vista Point and onto the bridge. In farewell, I glance in the rearview mirror at the Waldo Tunnel, the rainbow entrance to Marin county. Tucking my memories away in a special corner of my heart, I drive into the fog and the mysterious future.

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