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Old Point Reyes Schoolhouse Homework Report
by Karen Gray
July 10, 2006 - Summer is in full bloom on the Schoolhouse Compound. The hills in the distance are a glistening gold with wild oats and grasses gone to seed. The California poppies are on their way out while the tall lacy fennel with its yellow flowers is gaining height. The teasel are in bloom above the dry grasses. The delicate pink godetias, "farewell to spring," are setting seed on the road cuts. The quail are moving cautiously through the grasses in coveys with their young in tow as a mature male is standing lookout and calling. The bumble bees have joined the honey bees in the garden. My tomatoes are in bloom, just beginning to set fruit. The first tiger swallowtail butterflies are drawing nectar from the budlleia flowers. The hummingbirds are madly competing for territory around the feeders and doing their dramatic swishes and dives from high out of the sky. They make quite a racket in the garden during the day.
The regular summer weather pattern is back, too. The fog rolls in some nights to muffle sights and sounds. In the morning it turns ragged then vanishes with the warmth of the sun and bright blue skies. Other nights are clear, and this week we've got a shimmering full moon that rises over Elephant Mountain. After the moon sets, the Milky Way is dense and sparkling across the night sky. Those who can stay up long enough to watch are rewarded with shooting stars and sometimes the howling of the coyotes in the hills to the east.
In the hedgerow the blackberry brambles are loaded with blossom and green fruit. This will be a bumper crop for blackberries after the heavy late rains last spring. My blue elderberry is laden with clusters of green fruit. Lots of song birds are nesting in the thickets including the wrens.
Down the road on Saturday mornings our local farmer's market is filled with fresh flowers, fruits and vegetables. Locals and visitors mingle in the sunshine as their shoulder bags fill with newly dug finger potatoes, onions, lettuces, herbs, strawberries, nectarines, breads and cheeses. The jams and chutneys shine in their jars. By noon it's all packed up and gone. About that time I marvel at the brightly colored bicyclists who come in off the road where they have been wheeling along in tight groups that start shortly after dawn and arrive later in town ready for fuel. They sprawl on the sidewalk not looking nearly as exhausted as I would expect and then, somehow, find the energy to pedal all the way back- to the city.
Weddings and family reunions are peppering our summer with celebration and drama. The bocce ball court is the frequent site of shared good times. So is the fire pit. The bread oven in my garden baked home made pizza for the last wedding; the next group will be roasting a whole pig on a spit next to the barn. Lots of music and dancing under the soft lights on the patio.
The chickens in their neighboring coop are laying like mad. We've got pale blue and khaki green eggs, small white ones with a pointed end, and large brown rounded ones from our aracaunas, silkies, and barred plymouth rocks. There's a surplus of comfrey in the garden to feed them now. The spangled polish rooster is still in charge, clucking at his hens to eat while he stands over them, the presiding caretaker. Most mornings there's a small guest or two standing rapt outside the chicken yard.
As I look across the end of the bay to the wisps of fog draped over the Point Reyes Peninsula shrouding Inverness from view I realize that this land has been my home for thirty-two years now. It was an overgrazed cattle pasture with an old ranch road running past the schoolhouse to the town's redwood water tank when we bought it. As was the custom on ranches, people made their own landfills: the garbage of generations had been buried in pits all around the school house - we dug up an old wringer washer, among many other things, from what is now the lawn. We had moved into the local version of a midden. Once in a while we still find an old rusty spike from the 10-gauge steam train that ran up the coast taking the kids to high school in Tomales
I felt a visceral sense of homecoming when I moved onto this land. The fruit trees and old roses that matched the varieties in my neighbor's gardens - clearly grown from cuttings with no money changing hands. The narcissus and amaryllis that had been coming up through the hard dirt every year without help from any gardener's hands except the original ones that planted the bulbs over a century ago. The lichen encrusted silver fence posts that still support the rusty barbed wire of the pasture. The wind and rain have eroded them to the point where each one is like a sculpture standing in the grass, its curves following the hard round lines of knots in the grain. These were the landmarks of my childhood on the ranch, my grandfather's place in the verdant San Joaquin Valley when it was defined by orchards and fields as far as you could see to the base of the Sierra Nevada.
A lot has changed since I moved here, feeling such familiar ease with my Point Reyes neighbors who had spent their lives in the country. Lots of the old timers have died and their kids have built lives for themselves in other places with more opportunities for them. That early sense of a sleepy town with a hand full of main street merchants serving the locals is long gone. The pace of life is much faster. I no longer can with my neighbor in the summer nor does she come over to pick a few fava beans and some fresh chard from my garden to put in her minestrone. She died a couple years ago taking a powerful sense of shared roots with her. She had grown up on her family's produce farm in the country outside of Rome where three generations shared the same ranch house on three levels.
But the landscape here is still rural. The sense of being enveloped in rolling hills and pastures is still here. And my gardens have kept me rooted to my family past. I still make blackberry jam from the hedgerow every year. I still bring in the fragrant narcissus every fall when they come up along the barbed wire fence. And I especially think of my lost home when the "naked ladies" emerge, leafless, from the parched dirt in August, wafting their heavy sweet fragrance over the air. Those ladies bloomed through summer photos of my family in the San Joaquin Valley back four generations of rural life. They are for me a kind of marker in the landscape, not just of my own history but the rural history of California. Wherever I see naked ladies blooming in an open field I know that a farmhouse once stood there with a homemaker who planted the bulbs of beautiful flowers for the sheer joy of their bloom.
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