Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus (A GeoEx eBook)

Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

Lost & Found: A Pilgrimage to Point Reyes

mostly without a plan, but there was one place that I knew I wanted to visit: the heartwarming hamlet of Point Reyes Station, an unincorporated town of 350 souls that serves as an informal gateway to the Point Reyes Peninsula, and that I visit almost every August with a small group of students for a one- day in-the-field travel writing workshop. I’d had to cancel that workshop this year, of course, but when August arrived, some homing instinct was still directing me there. So I decided to make my journey on Aug. 12, exactly a week before the day that I was supposed to visit with my class. I might not have any students this year, but I could still make my pilgrimage to Point Reyes! Unlike my previous close-to-home pilgrim-forays, the 12th dawned overcast and gray, the clouds like a woolen blanket covering the day. But cloudy skies can confer beauty too, I thought as I drove across the bay, noting the water’s blue-gray sheen and the pearly luster of the hillside scene. I exited the highway onto Lucas Valley Road and followed that winding thoroughfare past golden hillsides where herds of black and white cows grazed and stables where sleek horses stood and stared. At one point the road narrowed even more and my car wound under dense, overhanging, enchanted-forest trees, past wooden cottages tucked among the redwoods and other evergreens. After an hour I reached Point Reyes Station. When I entered the town, I was surprised to find about fifty people out and about on the town’s one main street. A couple of restaurants had set up tables outside and two dozen diners sat happily talking and eating. Patient patrons queued along the sidewalk at my favorite scone stop, the Bovine Bakery. Another line waited at Toby’s Coffee Bar, and shoppers gathered at the entrance to the Palace Market. As I always do, I parked outside the Cowgirl Creamery, which has been producing delicious organic cheeses for almost three

was driving home from the beach, about five minutes inland, I passed a bride in a brilliant flowing white wedding dress, flanked by her parents, walking to a home where I surmised her wedding celebration was about to take place. In her blossoming radiance, she seemed to embody the spirit I had sensed throughout the day. While we are all intensely mindful of the terrible losses the wildfires have wrought, I found resilience, gratitude, and hope everywhere I looked in Point Reyes. Buoyed by these findings, we have decided to publish this account now, as a reverent reminder of the fundamental importance and healing grace of these precious places, and as a testament to the power of people and landscape that we celebrate wherever we travel in the world, and that sustains us through even the most challenging of times. A UG. 12, POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE—A few months ago I decided to take advantage of the pandemic to visit close-to-home attractions that would normally be overwhelmed with visitors. In June I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, an odyssey that I had been meaning to make for decades—and that offered transformative, multi-layered lessons in time and place. Last month I hiked into the heart of Muir Woods, another world-class wonder that I had wanted to visit for years; that pilgrimage immersed me in a world of sanctity, serenity, and eternity—and bestowed a soul-expanding encounter with a 600-year-old tree. For my most recent pilgrimage, I decided to visit the Point Reyes National Seashore, a place of idiosyncratic outposts and wildly beautiful coastscapes that I have come to love in my four decades here. Located in Marin County about an hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, this 71,000-acre peninsula curls greenly around Drake’s Bay into the Gulf of the Farallones and the boundless Pacific beyond. With such a vast territory to explore, my plan was to travel

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