Each day I kept hearing more reports of new spikes in the corona virus. Governors around the country repeated the same mantra, but this time with more urgency and conviction: stay at home, wash your hands for 20 seconds, and wear a mask in public. I’m in one of those CoVid vulnerable groups and the stress was getting to me—I needed to walk along the bluffs of the Pacific Ocean and stare into the calming face of eternity and thought of going to Gualala.
To reach my destination, I drove past San Quentin where there’d been a recent corona virus outbreak following the transfer of untested prisoners from another state facility. As of this writing, twelve prisoners have died. I drove along the Shoreline highway past stands of Queen Ann’s Lace that contrasted with the summer’s golden hills, passed a billboard for a nearby casino urging, Wash Hands, Win Hands, continued along the winding curves of the Shoreline Highway and caught glimpses of views that the writer Annette White-Parks describes as a place where “the continent picks up her skirts and steps into the western sea.”
Gualala is approximately 100 miles north of San Francisco. It used to be home to the Kashaya Pomo Indians. It’s a town where homesteaders, arriving in the 19th century, planted orchards and logged tan oaks and redwoods, which are massive trees, bigger than anything they had ever seen. Outside my cabin where I was staying, are second and third-growth redwood trees; when I looked up, I felt a glorious vertigo.
One of my first stops was the Mexican Bakery in Gualala. They had WiFi and I wanted to let my daughter know I’d arrived. Afterward, I walked the four or five blocks that make up the central shopping district. Everywhere, people wore facemasks. Posters in every window of the Gualala Market told shoppers not to enter if they felt sick. Across the highway was the Surf Market that seems to cater to the motel trade, and next door, Trinks, a restaurant where you can get coffee and eat and drink on a lawn that overlooks the bluffs.
I drank good strong coffee, fueled for my visit to Cook’s Beach where steps wind around Queen Anne’s lace and stalks of yarrow. There were a few other people—I saw a little girl with a bright pink hat. Her family laughed and told me about starfish on the other side of the beach and showed me their photos.
Children build forts of driftwood along the beach. On the other side of the cliffs, I found starfish glued to rocks, and sat for a long time decompressing before heading thirteen miles up north to Point Arena, a place where people nail abalone shells to their fence posts. There were a few shops open like the Arena Pharmacy and also the nursery. A Black Lives Matter sign was posted in the window of the Arena Market, and in a local accountant’s window I read the message, Keep Calm and Shelter On. And in the storefront of the Woven Light Studio, a quote from Octavia Butler, All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.
The next day, more trails along the bluffs at Moans Creek, amazing views of cliffs scoured into fantastic shapes and all gradations of the color brown; The Lighthouse at Point Arena is now “by appointment only.” Blackberries are ripening. On the radio, free food to seniors and the disabled with pick up at the Gualala Community Center or the Veteran’s Hall in Point Arena. Wild buckwheat, paintbrush, and Angelica bloom along the bluffs.
I don’t want to leave the ocean and its constancy. But even so, the thing I will take back with me is this sense of being among people, none of whom I knew, but felt that if I had an issue, they would help me, a community who are taking care of each other during this terrible pandemic.
