When the pandemic began in 2020, I found myself in the unincorporated coastal community of Bolinas, California, population 1,483. My reasons for being there were tenuous at best. You could say I was there because of an image, or a series of images, or a series of words that had produced those images.
On a discount cart outside a bookstore in Manhattan the year prior, I’d found a used copy of the poet Joanne Kyger’s collected poems. Like Kyger, I “want[ed] a smaller thing in mind / like a good dinner.” The hulking maximalism of New York was starting to wear away at me, and “I [was] tired of these big things happening / they happen to me all the time.¹” In Kyger’s lyric I found a specificity of attention that I began to crave, as if it was a chemical dependency.
Kyger lived in Bolinas, CA, for ten years. Some artists congregate in Provincetown or Marfa: Kyger had found in Bolinas her own provincialism. The more I read of her, the more I traced a connection between her openness of her affect — its bemused simplicity — and the spirit of the town itself. Her life in Bolinas seemed beautifully quotidian. It was one in which the simple activities of planting a row of peas, or washing one’s hair before walking down to the ocean, could make a day, or a life, meaningful. Kyger had edited the local newspaper, the Bolinas Hearsay News, and she’d run communal writing groups at the public library. Bolinas, it seemed, was a place for a poet to collect and describe small things, from iridescent abalone shells washed ashore on Agate Beach, to the minutes of a town council meeting in which various sewage treatment options were discussed. Anything in the right place with the right eyes could be beautiful. There was something particular about this place. I couldn't get Bolinas out of my head.

I began to thrill in the knowledge of Kyger. I loved bringing her up in conversations about the Beat Poets (“yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard of Gary Snyder but you should really check out this woman he was married to...”). I read her poems aloud at potlucks, even read a poem of hers aloud to my therapist once. When I first encountered that copy of Kyger’s collected works — with the title As Ever, so simple it made me emotional — it was just a few months after she had died. Her 2018 memorial service was the first event I ever attended at the Poetry Project in New York, an institution and community that I now couldn’t imagine my life without. As the snow fell outside the church on St. Marks Place, the poet Cedar Sigo read from There You Are, his wonderful collection of Kyger interviews and ephemera. He described afternoons in Bolinas with Joanne with tea and watercolor paintings, shafts of sun falling through the windows.
Bolinas could never be as beautiful as my fantasy of it was, but I didn’t know that yet.

During my first week in the tiny town, I visited the offices of the Hearsay News. Their one-room rented headquarters shares a building with the water supply company, across the street from a quail farm. Up and down the surrounding mesa are eucalyptus trees, Buddha statues, surfboards on top of cars. A current editor showed me the ancient printer where they crank out daily issues. On the front of each page of the printed paper is a weather report, a list of local birthdays, a calendar of events at the community center.
“This belonged to Allen Ginsberg, actually,” the young woman said, lifting up a red and yellow prayer shawl that lay on top of the printer like an altar cloth. “He got it in India in the 1970s, I think.”
She went on to tell me that since the newspaper still isn’t technically registered as an LLC, despite having been in operation for decades, they can’t offer paychecks. Instead, they give all their editors and printers a $50 weekly voucher for use at the Bolinas People’s Store. The store’s name gestures towards a sense of democracy — bulk products at a discount, worker-ownership, something. But Bolinas is a place of slippage between image and reality. $50 at the people’s store might only get you a kombucha, a few sandwiches, a couple pieces of produce. During the next few weeks of my stay, I became accustomed to driving half an hour to the nearest Trader Joe’s with a deep sense of anticlimax.
One afternoon at a picnic I met a student named Amy, visiting for the day from San Francisco. She was similarly entranced by Bolinas, a town so small and so self-sheltering that there was in fact no road marker for it. Only one US I highway sign by the lagoon, almost camouflaged by eucalyptus, bore a trace of the town’s name. A yellow arrow pointed left to neighboring Point Reyes, while the rightward arrow had no descriptor, only a scribble of white paint over where a name might have been. Over it someone had drawn a peace sign.
Amy had written her undergraduate thesis on a 1971 oil spill in Bolinas and the resulting efforts to clean it up. The endeavor had been led by a group of artists and recent Bolinas transplants, all of them white and most of them independently wealthy. They’d drafted a municipal legislation they called, simply, The Plan. I couldn’t tell if Amy intended to commend this group or critique them on their saviorism.
Kyger was among this group, along with a slew of prominent Black Mountain, Beat, San Francisco Renaissance, and New York School poets — Lewis Warsh, Ted Berrigan, Philip Whalen, Joe Brainard, Alice Notley, and Anne Waldman, to name a few. In his review of the recent On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (50th Anniversary Edition), Cedar Sigo writes that the poetic accounts of the Bolinas coterie “feel like well-placed mirrors hanging in the midst of utopia.”
Now, it is near impossible to live in Bolinas affordably, as an artist or otherwise. The Bolinas Community Land Trust, a nonprofit which rents out affordable housing, relies on donations from vacation home owners, who come to surf. Was it utopia, even then? Ted Berrigan, in 1973: “Bolinas, in the final analysis, for you, for me, there is alas, quote unquote No Use.”

My own rented room, located on a nascent communal land project above the mesa, was a cob hut unattached to running water or internet. Often, once the initial awe of Bolinas wore off, which it quickly did, I felt haunted and alone. I sunk down around myself, facing the pain of this displaced nostalgia I’d been carrying. Was I yearning for something that hadn’t existed since 1975, a sliver of a sliver of a fantasy?
At night I had dreams that were too animate — mushrooms shooting out of the ground blooming and decomposing in fast motion; a glossy, dark stallion drinking from the lagoon before turning to look directly at me. I woke sweating in the middle of the night, murmurs of the Pacific against the ridge like sinister whispers.
A friend of the head gardener, who’d stayed in a yurt on the land for a few nights while pruning the fruit trees, said he’d had “majorly crazy dreams.” He said it was because the land was on a ley line — a bridge between two major tectonic plates.
The longer I spent in Bolinas, the more the faultline between image and reality slipped. The town itself was a “well-placed mirror” showing me all of the loose threads I had left behind in New York, all of the ways in which I had been avoiding myself. I thought of the title of another one of Kyger’s poems, “The Test of Fantasy.”²
“‘OH OH the life I am entangled in.’ / Four sides of it,” laments this poem’s speaker, “so, out of the lifelessness that was around her... she thought, Why not fantasy?” And for a while fantasy may indeed be a useful strategy, an aid to creativity, “trying to push a little life in...the works of a storyteller.” But it is not long until “the four walls of the room and ceiling become apparent again.”

On one of my last nights in town, unseasonably cold, I drove down to the community center for an event I had seen advertised in the Hearsay News. “Frequencies and Psychology,” read the hand-written blurb cryptically. It was a lecture by a man in a fleece vest who had developed a software that, he said, could induce positive brainwaves through sound frequencies. He said that through continuously listening to these frequencies (528 and 471 Hz, to be specific), he had been able to self-treat severe social anxiety. “It was debilitating,” he said, “and now I feel fine, like I can walk into a room and be myself.” We reclined on mats on the floor as he played a series of droning resonances over the loudspeaker. I wasn’t convinced.
He and his wife weren’t Bolinas locals. I suspect they had driven over from the city based on how polished they were. His wife, too, was a budding wellness entrepreneur. Blonde with a winning smile, she sat at a merch table by the door, selling her homemade herbal balms and tinctures.
Outside, one of the two restaurants in town was closing. Through its darkened window I saw Amelia, whom I had met at a potluck on my second night in town. She wiped down a table, placed the rag into a pocket of her apron, and flipped the Coast Café’s door sign from “open” to “closed.” Amelia had grown up in Bolinas — one of the few ways, I was learning, to truly belong here.
I drove down Olema Road, past the lagoon, long, black and glittering. To my right was the narrow road that took you up Mount Tamalpais. Going “over the hill,” was how Bolinas residents often described it. To leave this enclave and venture towards the relative civilization of, say, Mill Valley, was to leave behind the sense of eternal youth that Bolinas seemed to promise. Hence the phrase — “over the hill” — with its gestures toward the creaky difficulty of old age.
Halfway up the summit of Mount Tamalpais — you had to park and take an unmarked trail — was an autonomous community called Druid Heights. The prominent Zen Buddhist writer Alan Watts was said to have lived here. I had been told by one of my landmates not to visit Druid Heights unless “the vibe was right.” Miranda had ventured, cautiously, only after she’d been living in Bolinas for a year. She brought her acoustic guitar, closing her eyes and strumming an offering at the gate. Her friend bore a beat-up book of Beat poetry, which he lowered to the dirt.
“You have to be very conscious, otherwise they won’t let you in,” she said. Whether she referred to the spirits of the land or a literal group of wizened old-timers who guarded the site, I wasn’t sure. But anyways, I was both new in town and already on my way out — I would try nothing of the sort.

Notes

¹ Joanne Kyger. As Ever, pg. 134. Penguin Press. 2002.

² Joanne Kyger. “The Test of Fantasy,” Places to Go. Black Sparrow Press. 1970