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.
So we did what the landscape bid us to do—we hiked. Through pastures and up mountains, through forests and along beaches, through land that ranged from barren to fecund, water so still you could use it as a mirror and surf so kinetic that it seemed possessed, sweet sea breezes and wind so fierce that it daunted our gait and shrieked in our ears. We came upon axis deer, wary but curious, and looked hard for (but, happily, didn’t spot) the mountain lions that occasion the upper reaches. We even saw a neon-hued garter snake wriggling into the underbrush—a sure sign to a Texan like myself that he’s found “the country.” A single morning’s hike had, it seemed, provided us with a sampler of America’s ecosystems.
While the monumentality of other national parks may overwhelm, the landscape of Point Reyes is intimate, accessible. Climbing through a forest so thick it was nearly opaque, we burst into a clearing, and from out of nowhere loomed the ocean, an expanse of shimmering gray-blue dappled with whitecaps—so close it almost brought on vertigo. Coming on the ocean this way, by surprise, is surely one of the most potent experiences in nature. It gives a sense that you’re seeing something for the first time, of being one of the original explorers.
As you draw close to the sea here, you also get the sense that if Sir Francis Drake and the others who first ran across Point Reyes were bedazzled by it, they must also have been a little frightened. The romanticism of exploration, a place like Point Reyes reminds us, was surely tempered by the powerful hand of nature—a scary, frequently lethal one at that. For amicable as nature here may be, it does possess a darker side. A sign near one of the beaches warns not only of riptides but of “sneak waves”—spontaneous surges of water that can swallow up an unsuspecting swimmer—and of great white sharks, which feed frequently in these waters.
Yet the nearness of danger only adds to the weird, aphrodisiacal quality of the place. Indeed, the natives seem to go out of their way to emphasize the natural hazards of life on the Point. Where else could you find Earthquake Trail, which runs along the epicenter of the devastating l906 temblor? And they regard the inhospitality of the coast as the region’s saving grace. “If that beach weren’t so rough,” a wizened old fellow behind the counter at the peninsula’s Bear Valley Visitor Center told me, “there’d be nothing but condos down there.” An ungainly confluence of climates, he explained, defines the meteorology of Point Reyes. “We don’t get as much rainfall here as people think,” he added, “but things grow here because of the humidity and the mist.”
Ah, yes—the mist. You know you’ve discovered a special place when it contains an easily recognizable metaphor for itself. The sun does come out here for the better part of most days, but the mist (fog somehow seems such an urban word, a San Francisco shroud) settling over the treetops is a constant companion. You retire to it and awaken to it. The climax of any given day is the moment that the rising sun vaporizes enough of the haze to show itself. Like this strange place, the mist is at once lovely and comforting, yet spooky and foreboding.
Foreboding aside, it’s very easy to settle in here. Within two days, we had downshifted to a wonderfully simple routine. A light breakfast from Debra’s Bakery in the nearby settlement of Inverness Park provided just enough fuel for a morning walk of four or five miles. We’d lunch on a picnic of hard salami, a variety of locally made cheeses, artichoke hearts, Kalamata olives, and tiny crackers of sourdough and rye bread—provisions from the funky Inverness Store. After our midday meal, we’d head out for another four- to five-mile hike. In the late afternoon, we’d return to our digs at Manka’s, where we sampled both the more private, restored Boathouse, overlooking Tomales Bay (filled with contemporary furniture and art), and a more earthy room (think bearskin rugs and plaid wool blankets) at the Main Lodge. There we had our reward for a long day’s hike—showers out on the back balcony. Truth be told, the best thing about Manka’s is not the lobby dog—a big, friendly yellow Lab named Louie—or the fine grilled venison or Dungeness crab in the restaurant, or even the incredibly cozy, large beds (honest they were). It’s the redwood shower stalls that sit just outside the back door of two of its rooms, wherein one can bathe surrounded by Douglas firs and the mounting evening mist. Feeling fit and tingly and very ecologically tuned, we headed out for dinner—at Manka’s (whose dining room serves fresh local produce, seafood, and game) or at one of a handful of more moderately priced restaurants in Inverness or other nearby towns. There we’d sample quirky local fare such as barbecued oysters or the more traditional fish-and-chips, or maybe just a big salad—a riot of fresh wild greens pulled from the undergrowth we’d hiked around hours before. (In the end, we would have been just as happy with a picnic for every meal.) By nine o’clock— thankfully deprived of a television and a telephone—we succumbed to a sweet sleep, interrupted only by the light clatter of rainfall.
It all felt a bit ’60s. I even found myself unaccountably whistling The Doors’s “Break on Through” and other oldies. In this hidden little paradise in west Marin County, I was recapturing an era. That alone was worth the frequent-flyer miles.
One afternoon along the cliffs that overlook the northern tip of the peninsula— which, as outdoorsman-author Phil Arnot has suggested, feels for all the world as if you are on the bow of a huge sailing vessel—I realized that Point Reyes has been kept so virginal for a reason. Ever since the white man ran the Miwok off to lay claim to the peninsula, some developer or another had had it in mind to subdivide it and turn it into another Gold Coast. But nature or man has always foiled such schemes: If it wasn’t the 1906 earthquake, it was the Great Depression or World War II that put serious development back where it belonged—in limbo. Finally, in 1962, the Kennedy administration saw the light and declared Point Reyes what it had already more or less proclaimed itself: a national treasure, a living reminder of where the American West began and ended, a gentle admonition that the nature we’ve never conquered is just as important as the wilderness we’ve tamed.