The four Mexican men, Arnulfo, Javier, Filogonio, and Rafael, made themselves at home on the farm in Bolinas with relative ease. Bolinas is isolated, but it’s tolerant in its own way, with many of the virtues of small-town America. When I lived there, twenty seven years ago, Bolinas had a first-class bakery, a great community newspaper with a distinctly local voice, its very own “vigilante group,” and a generous helping of village idiots.
I liked to go to the bakery at dawn, to get a cup of coffee and a couple of warm croissants for breakfast. That’s where I’d pick up a copy of the local paper, The Bolinas Hearsay News.
The name on the mast head said it all— no absurd pretense of “journalistic objectivity,” no reporters to pay, no advertisements for sales at Macy’s— just straight ahead hearsay contributed by the readership. Yes, the New York Times has a bigger readership and a bigger reputation, but I’d give the Bolinas Hearsay News a Pulitzer Prize for small “d” democratic principles any day. A reader could find anything in the Hearsay, from scores for the Bolinas girls’ soccer team’s game against Mount Tamalpais High to rumors of an upcoming police action by the county sheriff. One memorable article was a list written by one of the town’s socialites, numbering all the people she’d slept with who had herpes. For many readers in this free loving town, news of this nature was perhaps of more signal importance than updates about which side was winning in the Middle East.
The town’s vigilante group styled itself the Bolinas Border Patrol. Their symbol was the mosquito, and they made it their job to chase degenerate dope thieves out of town and protect the honest, hardworking marijuana growers. It was also their mission to rip down the road sign on Highway One that would point stupid tourists to “Boboland,” as some Bolinians affectionately called the town. I enjoyed Bolinas, but I also enjoyed the fact that the guys on the farm called Bolinas “Boblandia.” Bobo means a naïve or half-witted person in Spanish.
Like enforcement authorities everywhere, the Bolinas Border Patrol had its share of successes and failures. Yes, the vigilantes were able— at times— to channel the forces of peer pressure and expel those reckless individuals in Bobolandia who ripped off other people’s weed rather than grow their own. But the Bolinas Border Patrol was fantastically unsuccessful at protecting the town’s anonymity. Because they insisted on destroying the road signs that pointed the way to Bolinas, and because they attracted media attention by vandalizing a Caltrans bulldozer that was poised to widen the exit off of State Highway One to Bolinas, the Border Patrol gained the town lasting fame as “the town that wants to be a secret.”
If they failed at achieving obscurity, the town fathers succeeded — Alert to lawyers! This IS hearsay! — in exorcizing the community of a noted sex offender. Gossip had it that (name deleted on advice of counsel), a lecherous old-fart, and scion to a prestigious local family, was interrupted as he attempted sexual congress with a horse that was being boarded on his family’s ranch.
This much is fact: The Bolinas Border Patrol drove a pick-up truck in the town’s Fourth Of July Parade that sported a stenciled outline of a bearded cowboy on the door, with a profile very much like that of (name withheld on advise of counsel), pictured taking a horse from the rear, overlaid with the internationally recognized symbol of a red circle with a line through it that means “No!” in every language. Everybody cheered and waved little American flags as the pick-up made its way down the street. I didn’t see the alleged offender around town much after that.
Jane was a more difficult free-spirit for the town fathers to deal with. The word was she came from a well-to-do family, and that in her youth she’d attended a fancy boarding school on the Continent. In her adulthood she was an artist, and she heard voices. She was given to arguing with dogs. Sometimes the dogs were amiable to Jane, and sometimes she thought they were rude.
“Don’t kill Jane!” she’d scream, as she walked down the street past a confused dog. “Don’t Kill Jane!”
She was such a local luminary that there was even a local punk band called “Don’t Kill Jane,” named in her honor. Once Jane heard a dog swear vile oaths at her as she passed by on the sidewalk. Seeing a pick-up truck parked with the keys still in the ignition, she jumped behind the wheel and careened down the street in pursuit of the offending dog, trying to crush it flat. The tolerant citizens of Bolinas leaped for cover. Hearsay had it that the Bolinas Border Patrol ushered her out to where the sign didn’t stand at the intersection of Bolinas Road and Highway One, and told her to take a hike in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. I’m not sure if that really happened, but she was gone for a while. Jane was back, and in good spirits, when Arnulfo, Javier, Filogonio, and Rafael moved on to the farm.
Jane took joy in regaling herself with talismans of nature, the way a shaman might. In the front yard of the Bolinas Bay Bakery, for instance, there was an ancient rose tree surrounded by a mulch of redwood bark. Jane would stop by the bakery every day and select pieces of bark to tape to her body, so that she would resemble a tree sprung from the earth. After a while, there was hardly any bark left in front of the bakery. Jane picked seagull feathers up off the wharf to weave into her hair, and she applied seashells from the beach to her shoulders as epaulettes.
Arnulfo and his three companions were country folk from rural Nayarit, and, like Jane, they appreciated nature. They could scarcely believe the number of deer that ran wild through the fields on the farm, eating the crops with abandon. Back in Mexico it had been very rare for them to encounter a deer in the campo. Of course the Spanish word for deer is venado. Our word “venison,” for deer meat, is a cognate with venado. Both the English venison and the Castilian venado descend from the Latin verb venari, meaning to hunt. Venado means, quite literally, “the hunted.” This linguistic felicity had been lost to most English speaking Bolinians, and the deer wandered the community brazenly, posing ornamentally among the ferns and alders along the creek, pruning the radicchio in the fields on the farm, and stopping to eat the roses in gardens all over town.
Except by those of us who depended on the harvest to make a living, the toll the deer took on the farm was given little thought by the natives. The English word “deer,” descends from the Old Norse dyr, meaning wild animal. It’s easy for English speakers to confound “deer” with “dear,” from the old Saxon deore, meaning precious, or even the cuter homonym “dear,” which comes from the corrupt Latin dio mio, for “my god,” as in “dear baby Jesus.” Or maybe it’s just that most Americans cried when they saw Bambi as children.
At any rate, the guys on the farm couldn’t help themselves when they saw so much meat on the hoof, so they shot the venado for dinner, one by one, as the opportunity presented itself. To avoid the scrutiny and blowflies, the crew took to dumping the heads, feet, guts, and hides of the deer they dispatched in the brush along the side of the creek that ran through the farm. This program worked well enough until Jane, on one of her ecstatic rambles through nature, encountered the decomposing remains.
Jane had covered her face with a thick coat of Vaseline, as was her custom, and she plucked tufts of deer hair from the hides and stuck them to the goo. She had a head dress on she’d fashioned from aluminum foil— the better to receive telepathic messages with— and to this shining skull cap she affixed antlers and ears. That evening, thus attired, she walked into the circle of our Mexican farm workers as they sat around their camp fire cooking tacos, and began to address them in fluent Peninsular Castilian. The men scattered in terror like dry leaves before a whirlwind, and when they collected themselves up, it was to come and beg me to make sure that the bruja, or witch, be banned from the farm.
I went to my boss. “This is serious,” I said. “The guys are freaked out. They say that Jane is possessed by demons, and that if she comes around again spouting magic, they’re going to go up to Napa and get jobs in the grapes, where this sort of bullshit doesn’t happen.”
My boss considered the problem from all angles. On the one hand, he didn’t feel like telling Jane what to do. He didn’t mind that she wandered around on his property, as long as she didn’t hurt herself or anyone else. On the other hand, as an employer, it was his job to look out for the welfare of his employees, and if they had concerns about their safety, he needed to address them head on. Of course, he wasn’t likely to get very far by telling the guys that Jane was only an artist working in a shamanistic medium. It was a simple conflict of cultures. Jane had only wanted to talk.
So he turned to his wife. Like Jane, my employer’s wife was an artist. She worked with textiles, and made huge woven wall hangings with pile so deep they were almost three dimensional. And like Jane, she had come from the east coast, and she too had attended prestigious private schools and had toured Europe. As a second language, she spoke Italian, not Castilian, but she could perhaps speak to Jane as one artist speaks to another, and convince her to follow her spirit up different paths, up different creeks, away from the deer guts or the shack where Arnulfo, Javier, Filogonio, and Rafa lived.
Whatever she said, her diplomacy worked. The guys stayed, and their brothers, cousins, and uncles began showing up, looking for work too. Napa viticulturists had to rely on other men to pick their grapes.
But I almost forgot to tell you about the village idiot.
There was a gentleman in Bolinas by the name of Eat Dog. Mr. Dog played a little guitar, sold a little weed, cooked on occasion for Scowleys, a little restaurant on mainstreet downtown that stood opposite the bar called Smiley’s, and tried to live a stress-free life.
One cold, rainy night, about 9:00 PM, I was alone in the Bolinas laundromat when Eat Dog came in, soaked to the skin. We said “hi” to each other and then he went down the wall, from dryer to dryer, checking each machine until he found one that had been used recently and was still warm. He dug some coins from his pocket and bought a little carton of detergent from the vending machine. Then he stripped naked, put his wet clothes in a washer, fed a few quarters into the machine, and stepped into the warm dryer on the wall to wait for his laundry to finish washing.
The door to the laundromat opened again, and another gentleman entered, dressed in a conservative coat and tie, and he was soaked through from the driving rain. He announced that he was running for the office of Marin County Supervisor, and he offered me a sodden wad of campaign literature that listed his county-wide endorsements and extolled his virtues as a potential public servant. When I declined to take a pamphlet or promise him my vote, he went to Eat Dog’s dryer and knocked on the round glass door. Eat Dog dismissed him with a wave, so the candidate checked the rest of the dryers, opening the doors and peering in, one by one, looking for votes. I ask you, what kind of idiot politician thinks they’re going to attain high office, going door to door like that?
copyright 2009 Andy Griffin
photo from The Chronicle of the same Jane Andy refers to. Andy didn’t have a digital camera at his side during his youthful working days in Bolinas… so this essay will have to be mostly photo-less. -julia
Two Small Farms CSA: most pick up sites have room! Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and other summer treats are just around the corner. Cooking classes and Upick days for current members, too!
