North Coaster

North Coaster Writing — Photography — Marin and Sonoma Coast Travel Directory North Coaster A journal for travelers along the Marin and Sonoma coast Reviving the corps by Gray Brechin Page 3 Prayer to the Virgin by Jim Pellegrin Page 5 Caesura by Erin Rodoni Page 5 1-800-NO-SWEAT by Samantha Kimmey Page 6 Good eye, bad eye by Samantha Kimmey Page 7 Travel directory Page 15 Photographs by David Briggs Edited by Tess Elliott Published by the Point Reyes Light, LLC Box 210, Point Reyes Station, CA 94956 (415) 669.1200 ptreyeslight.com Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Reviving the corps By Gray Brechin On a train trip across the United States, the sight of millions of dead trees in the Sierra Nevada and Rockies is as shocking as the homeless encampments that have cropped up along Amtrak’s right-or-ways and on the sidewalks of cities like New York. I left the Bay Area in mid-October, just as it was engulfed in thick, toxic smoke erupting from uncontained wildfires to the north. The dingy pall recalled the Mount Vision and Oakland Hills firestorms of the 1990s, and the holocaust that swept down Mount Tamalpais into Mill Valley in 1929. Living as I do amid trees succumbing to beetles and sudden oak death on the Inverness Ridge, I see how sick our forests have become, and know it is only a matter of time before they ignite. Unless, that is, we can revive one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s best ideas. Roosevelt described himself as a grower of trees on his expansive Hudson River estate. He was, among many other things, a knowledgeable forester. Shortly after his inauguration in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, he persuaded Congress to create what he called the Civilian Conservation Corps to solve two crises at once—employing wasted human resources to reclaim wasted natural resources. During its decade-long run, the corps employed three and half million young men to plant over three billion trees. Racially integrated outside the South 15 years before President Truman desegregated the Armed Forces, the corps recruited jobless, indigent and often illiterate young men and gave them nutritious food, health care, education and hard work in some of the most beautiful places in the nation and its territories. The “boys” fought beetle infestation, blister rust and forest fires. They conserved soil, and were available to help in natural disasters. They also left a vast legacy of superb rustic structures in national and state parks and wildlife refuges (for whose expansion during the ’30s they were largely responsible). Many conservation corps vets recalled their public service as among the happiest times of their lives, and attributed the discipline it gave them to their successes later in life. After decades of tax cuts, our national, state and local jurisdictions are incapable of dealing with the ever-growing danger of conflagrations such as the ones that recently devastated the north counties. Representative Marcy Kaptur, of Ohio, has introduced the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps Act that would, once again, address both mass unemployment and our sick forests. It deserves our support so that we do not see an encore of what has so tragically befallen our neighbors and friends to the north. Gray Brechin is the founder and project scholar of the Living New Deal, based at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Geography. A resident of Inverness, he is the author of “Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.” 4 N O R T H C O A S T E R | Spring and Summer 2017 Spring and Summer 2017 | N O R T H C O A S T E R 5 Prayer to the Virgin By Jim Pellegrin So why am I praying to the Virgin? And particularly to this life-sized statue of the Virgin, clearly a good-looking, aesura albeit distracted and modest, C young woman? Could the answer By Erin Rodoni be as simple as love? Could it be that kneeling before her remember hearing about them, the babies my Grandma never had, what I am really asking for, I and though I’d never held such a seed in my body, I felt the want begging for, of them. Five children with ghost-spaces between. She believed is love? unbaptized souls went to Limbo, which to me meant low, To feel the softness so I saw them spread like mica in the soil beneath her roses, of her robes and in the gauze of grasshoppers that rose with every step caressing my face through summer grass. On my Grandma’s ranch, I watched as she leans forward a barn cat lick her living kittens clean, leaving some still over me, sacked. Little grapes, their mother’s warmth unreplaced by their own. to smell the sweetness When I bled, I locked the bathroom door. Later, I pressed a still- of her sex, frame of my only ultrasound inside my Grandma’s copy to reach beneath of The Secret Garden. Little unblossom, little mausoleum. the dated clothes I’m not religious anymore, but I grew up with God, and embrace her hips, the grandfatherly one who knew I was bad sometimes, to press her groin but loved me anyway, and I could always talk to. It’s a hard habit to my face, to break in the cathedral of my sleeping daughters, that consecrated dark her plaster lips curling, gauzed in white-noise, a halo of nightlight. My prayers are always ever so slightly, some variation of Don’t you dare, and Please. Somehow, I know he was a boy. into a smile The middle brother. So little now, so nothing. My daughters don’t know of discrete pleasure, the word God. They know earth and death and rain. They’ve watched as little white flecks that silent sleight of hand replace a caterpillar with an iridescent bud of surprise and delight of wings. They’ve seen me clutch a spider between paper and a plastic cup, drift toward the ground? only to crush a mosquito against their bedroom wall, its body smeared Is this what I am praying for? with our family’s mingled blood. They are learning to be merciful Of course it is. And what if doesn’t mean to be good, only powerful enough to choose. my prayer is answered? After our cat died my oldest kept asking Where is she? I know she’s dead Well, then, she will shake but where is she? First, I spun a heaven-place, then I changed my mind, her feet loose stood her barefoot in the garden and said Here, look down. and climb down The dirt is full of root and bone. Oh, my darlings we are so small. off her little pedestal, Lie down, back to summer grass. Feel how we are always falling she will take my hand into that star-spread black expanse. And feel too and walk me down the street the way the earth holds us and we are held. and lead me, hurriedly, urgently to her little sun-filled room This poem, first published by Global Anthology, won the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. where we will lay together on the the cloud mattress of her heavenly bed and remind each other, flesh to flesh, that we are not gods, that our lives are short, that we are put on this earth to be good to each other in this crazy way. Yes, that is my true prayer, so help me God, thank you very much ma’am, Amen! 6 N O R T H C O A S T E R | Spring and Summer 2017 1-800-NO-SWEAT By Samantha Kimmey If you call 1-800-NO-SWEAT you can get all your stuff moved from the house you live in to the house you’re going to live in, no sweat. In fact the moving company itself is called 1-800-NO-SWEAT. He just used the number as the name. He doesn’t own a home himself, but that’s all right, he’s happy to move your things. He’ll open the door to your home and close it but not slam it, and the first thing he’ll do is pack up all the things that break easiest, vases, china, all that. He won’t touch them bare-handed, although he always wants to because he wants to know what those things feel like, their coolness, wants to handle that perfect geometry, run the pads of his fingers along fertile curves blown into existence from infernal cores with the steady loving breath of glassblowers. But he doesn’t track his fingerprints all over those things because he knows you won’t like that. Instead he’ll cut a big hunk of bubble wrap and hide the first fragile object in those tiny blips of air taken hostage, and wrap and wrap until he can’t even see what’s inside anymore, doesn’t know what it is, forgets finally, which always makes him feel better. Then he’ll place it gingerly in a cardboard box, and he’ll do this over and over with all the fragile things, drowning everything in a sea of plastic bubbles, and he’ll put those boxes somewhere safe and out of sight while he does the hard brute labor of carrying all the shelves made of wood or metal or what have you that displayed those fragile things to the U-Haul, and his muscles strain and his back is starting to feel weird these days but his number is 1-800-NO-SWEAT so he tries to make it seem so easy.

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