Stranger Than Paradise
A houseboat in Sausalito. Photo by Andres Gonzalez.
Adam Sachs’s recent article in T Magazine on Marin County, CA, “the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place on the earth,” is worth a read.
An excerpt:
On the way around a dock we pass a line of big happy seals, bellies up in the sun. Some of the houseboats around here are repurposed lifeboats. The late Shel Silverstein once lived on a World War II-era balloon barge called Evil Eye. Others are mansions in miniature.
“This one used to have a heliport on the roof,” Merz says, pointing out a particularly grand example of the form. We pass the Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand’s elegant and tricked-out tug Mirene and another said to belong to the former Black Panther and mother free online pokies games of the late Tupac, Afeni Shakur.
Merz steers us out toward deeper water. A bearded gentleman waves to us. Informed of my purposes, he shouts across the waves: “Say hello to Abe Rosenthal!”
He rows to meet us in his own dinghy. It falls to me to break the news, gently, that Mr. Rosenthal has been dead for seven years. Unfazed, he introduces himself as Jeff, local resident of “many moons.”
“Why don’t you live out here if you really want to know about the place?” Jeff demands. “See, the issue is Sausalito. Kerouac and Cassady and all that, but they’re gone now! Now it’s about cash, and the place has become a tourist haven.”
It can be too easy to fall into conversations like this in Marin — and hard to start the ones you’d rather have.
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