Monaloca

January 29-31

About a month ago Joey heard a random factoid on the news: Point Reyes Lighthouse (just an hour up the coast from San Francisco) is the foggiest place in California. We have a lot of fog here, so I was dubious… until we spent a couple nights in Olema, a tiny town at the entrance to the National Seashore.

That morning we had left the isolated redwoods of Big Sur for a relaxing drive up the coast, stopping along the way at sleepy, sea-side towns like Capitola and Half Moon Bay before winding our way through West Marin. Here, the big towns have maybe a couple hundred people, and Olema is only in the double digits.

We arrived at our B&B at dusk to find the innkeeper gone, a note on the door, and a key “hidden” in the porch bench, and the entire house to ourselves. We had a hard time finding a place to eat (it seems a lot around Point Reyes closes on Mondays and Tuesdays), and by the time we settled in the living room in front of a log-burning stove and with chocolate-covered almonds (me) and port (Joey) at our sides, the only sound we heard above the crackling wood was the wind whipping against the trees outside. It felt magnificent, eery, and peaceful all at once.

The isolation sweeps even larger onto the Point Reyes peninsula itself. We started the next day with a walk along the Earthquake trail, a short path that leads to the epicenter of the 1906 earthquake. Two sides of a fence, 20 feet apart, show the magnitude of the rift that was created just 100 years ago. Later we drove around 40 minutes to the end of Sir Francis Drake Blvd to see the lighthouse and elephant seal colony at Chimney Rock. Along the way we passed endless fields of rolling green, ranches steeped in solitude with cows that roamed the narrow road, and empty, wind-blown beaches that stretched to the horizon in both directions. All the while a high grey fog hovered over our heads and salt air tingled our noses.

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