Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Sometimes our worst nightmares, personal and political, turn out to just be complicated stories still in progress.
Sep 24, 2004 | After a rainy morning yesterday, both sun and clouds were out in the afternoon when several friends and I headed through California's West Marin corridor, past meadows full of cows and horses, and hills of dry lion-colored grass. We drove through the small rural towns on the way to the ocean, out to an eccentric little town on the coast that prefers to go nameless. I lived there for eight years in the mid-'70s, when I was still an out-of-control alcoholic -- but in a good way, I had thought. A festive way. I got drunk every night, and took a lot of drugs, which sometimes expanded my mind, but other times caused me to accidentally sleep with other people's husbands. I hurt a lot of people along the way. I had some great friends, and my father and brother lived nearby, and I really began my life as a writer there, describing the mountains, the beaches, the tide pools, the marvelous hippie values of the community, the pelicans. But then when I was in my mid-20s, the world came to an end. My father died in our cabin above Duxbury Reef, half an hour's walk from the Bolinas Lagoon, where we went birding every week.
My friends and I headed to that lagoon yesterday, which was very rare for me, as I have stayed out of town for most of the 22 years since I left. It's way too painful there, filled with the huge, gaping absence of my father, and with the faces of people who loved me, or didn't, whom I hurt so egregiously, or by whom I was hurt. But I still have a couple of friends there, and one of them is named Megan Matson, who was the 9-year-old girl I wrote about nearly 30 years ago, in my first novel, "Hard Laughter." She is now the mother of three children and one of the co-founders of the Mainstreet Moms Oppose Bush (MMOB), along with Caroline Quine, Arlene Allsman and Greg Hewlett, all of whom will surely get great seats in heaven. What began as a few mothers helping women in swing states register to vote has grown into a thriving grass-roots organization.
The MMOB send out packets of pretty stationery, envelopes, decorative stickers, sample letters and the names and addresses of unregistered women voters to volunteers all over the country. Then the volunteers write to the women who thought they didn't count, and they tell them that they do.
The MMOB were having their first fundraiser, a picnic near the lagoon, and they had invited me to do a reading. I've been back to town since I left, but I hadn't walked to that lagoon in 22 years.
My friends and I headed down a private path that led from the town's main road. I almost immediately started to get a Twilight Zone feeling, a sense that I was not walking into an old nightmare, but into a fairy tale. I was going back to the place from which I had fled -- which should always tip you off that something mythical may be in the works. And secondly, a man appeared in our way, who asked rather cryptically, I felt, "Do you know where you're going?" It was very David Lynch.
We had no idea where we were going so he directed us to a meandering path that led to the water.
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