Geographically, Point Reyes is not the westernmost point of the California coast—Cape Mendocino is. But spiritually, it seems a suitable spot to mark the end of our march toward Manifest Destiny. In its way, it is the most American of places still left to nature: lonely, rugged, proud, violent, romantic.
On a cool August morning, the sun pokes through the mist like a klieg light on the lighthouse that mans the outermost jetty of the Point Reyes peninsula, an odd triangle of tectonic refuse that appears almost pasted onto the northern California coast. A modest complement of tourists wanders around, most of them bearing looks of bemusement at this place that, while only 60 some-odd miles northwest of San Francisco’s hyper-urbanity, seems almost extraterrestrially wild.
San Franciscans call this secreted slice of west Marin County “the wilderness next door”—wilderness being no exaggeration. Though less celebrated than other California utopias of nature—Big Sur, the Mojave, Yosemite—it is, from a certain angle, more bewitching for its sheer diversity and its relative anonymity. The histrionic interplay of waves and shore creates just one of the environments that thrive here. Only a wind-aided walk away are the cornmeal-yellow pastures of sprawling dairy farms. Another trek leads you up steep inclines thick with redwoods and luminously green Douglas firs; still another meanders through countless wetlands and tide pools. People bird-watch, deer-watch, coyote-watch, and whale-watch here. And if that isn’t wild enough for you, this is some of the busier earthquake territory in the state—the San Andreas Fault runs more or less plumb through the place, and its dramatic shifts have helped shape the area’s curious history. If Point Reyes is an end point, its aboriginality and variety suggest a beginning as well. Observing the brackish tide pools that dot the coast leads one to ponder the possibility that this area just may have been ground zero for the primordial ooze.
We found Point Reyes the way, I suspect, most everyone from the Coast Miwok Indians to Sir Francis Drake to early communities of dairy entrepreneurs did: serendipitously. Attempting to avoid city buzz on our northern California visit, we decided to base ourselves farther north. Our only criteria: quiet, green, cool, near the ocean, and roughly equidistant from the city to the south, Napa wine country to the east, and Bodega Bay and Mendocino to the north.
The Point Reyes peninsula came into play only when we heard about a quaint hostelry in the region, the 83-year-old Manka’s Inverness Lodge, which boasts, intriguingly, of “honest beds.” Manka’s is located in the small burg of Inverness, which turns out to be the unofficial capital of this wilderness. Consisting of only the basics of turn-of-the-millennium life—a grocery, a pizzeria, a gift shop, and lawyers’ offices—Inverness barely qualifies as a wide spot in the road, but, as a place to sleep in an honest bed and plan the next day’s excursion, it fit our plans perfectly.
That is, until the place sneaked up and seduced us. All it took was a morning. We headed out that first day for a quick visit to the 130-year-old lighthouse and, just like that, our road trip was jettisoned in favor of exploring every gully, eddy, and summit of this exotic territory. And it did feel exotic. There was such an enticing thorniness to it, something that you couldn’t put your arms around but at the same time was begging you to try.
Not that anyone actually asked us to stay. Though Inverness is known as a weekend “resort” (more of a hangout, really) for San Franciscans, it has maintained the reputation without giving in to obsequiousness. People are friendly, to be sure, but no one seems that impressed with the fact that there’s a new Visa cardholder walking around town. “We’ll never become like Carmel,” a longtime denizen told me. “There’s a real resistance to growth and development here.”
There is also a distinctly working-class scent in the air—which you’d never encounter in, say, Sausalito or Stinson Beach or Mendocino. The area was settled as fishing and dairy-farming territory in the mid-l9th century, when west Marin County became famous for its cream, butter, and cheeses, and though both endeavors are less prominent in the postmodern age, they still define the place.
Of course, there is most definitely money here, too. Climbing the ridge behind Inverness and strolling down the winding, fir-canopied residential streets there, you encounter a fair number of upscale homes. Many are second residences, but they’re hardly the trophy houses of the nouveau riche. Indeed, most have an idiosyncratic, almost bohemian air: stucco bungalows of varying sizes cuddled up to rambling two-stories of redwood with steeply pitched roofs side by side with exemplars of the more ornate, bay-windowed style of San Francisco. None overwhelm their lots, and only a handful of the homeowners have dared to paint their façades in a shade more flamboyant than an earth tone. A true indicator of dogged individualists—of whatever class—is the presence of more than the occasional work of yard art, my favorite being a treatment of discarded sea buoys and abalone shells mounted along a picket fence.
The heady sense that we had stumbled onto a place that defied categorization only became more pronounced when we ventured into the imposing wilderness surrounding Inverness. And around here, the wilderness is easy to find—head in any direction for about five minutes and you’re in the heart of it. The Point Reyes region is proof that the often-maligned national park system is alive and well, at least in some parts of the country. (This is light-years away from bumper-to-bumper RVs in pursuit of Old Faithful.) Aside from the Point Reyes National Seashore, which covers the peninsula, the huge Golden Gate National Recreational Area winds up the coast of the mainland, and numerous state beaches and parks (such as the glorious cliffs surrounding Gualala Point) are sandwiched in between the federal properties.
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