Cow Country

Years ago my wife and I wandered out of the community center in Point Reyes, California.  Staring at the night sky, I turned my wheelchair west, and we made straight for the back fence.  The night was young, even if we weren't, and this was the place to be.  The center, dubbed the Dance Palace, had mounted an evening of chamber music, and the two of us were high.  

We had emerged from the Palace, crossed the palace grounds and now gazed from the ramparts, which turned out to be a barbed wire fence.  Across the tidal meadow where Tomales Bay gives up seafaring and becomes pasture, horizontal lights burned in the blackness.  That's one of the things about Point Reyes, the night is more or less night.  Things get dark in a way they don't in my suburban neighborhood of Menlo Park.  That's among the reasons we come here.  

And this was another, gazing across a pasture after a concert, inexplicably excited, and now a little disappointed to see new construction in the grassland.  They must be condos, I told my wife.  How, I asked her, could developers get away with it in the coastal-commissioned, land-trust-protected likes of Point Reyes?  Dear, my wife said, those are sheds.  For cows.  Yes, now the glowing apparition across the fields came into pastoral focus.  The city never sleeps, neither does the dairy farmer, and without knowing it, I'd stumbled deep into the Point Reyes cow thing.

The Bovine Bakery.  The Cowgirl Creamery.  Murals with cows.  It's the local motif.  The cow thing makes Point Reyes.  Without it, in this era of haute tourism, the town would succumb to the chic.  But cows are all about squat nurturance, eating low to the ground, endless milk and manure.  With a life of chewing and re-chewing grass, it's hard for cows to get either rhapsodic or sprightly.  No cow ever jumped over any moon or even gave the matter serious consideration.  Cows keep us grounded, mudded and fenced.

Their faint spiritual presence added something to the chamber concert in the Dance Palace.  The artists were locals.  They had followed the path of all serious musicians, working where they could, including Portugal.  But now they were back.  They were here in their community, and for this moment so was I.  People are thin on the ground in Point Reyes and towns around it, but there were plenty of them here tonight.  That's why I had to linger a moment longer staring at the cow condos.  As tourists, we had stumbled into one of those rarest of American contemporary experiences.  A community event, spontaneous in feel, the laborious reality graciously hidden.  A cultural show of force.  Music hath charm if one lives in the city, but in a small community it has renewal.

The West Marin Music Festival was hosting a reception across the street.  Marlou and I wandered through the Tomales Bay Food Company, nodding to locals and feeling out of place.  A tall older guy leaned against a column, sipping red wine.  Throwing introverted caution to the winds, I parked my wheelchair beside him and muttered greetings.  Before we knew it, one Jewish guy had found another.  Wally and I.  

Two nights later, Marlou even found Wally and Julia's phone number.  Our dinner guests from Sonoma had suddenly canceled, and with the table in our vacation rental set for four, Marlou searched her brain.  She remembered part of the number, but in Inverness, that's all you need.  Wally and Julia came for dinner and stayed, in a manner of speaking, for years.  They were the older couple in our Inverness lives.  Then were the couple who had separately died and moved.  And by the summer of 2007 I was the guy in the wheelchair who was in Menlo Park phoning the Dance Palace.

To order tickets, I asked the volunteer who answered, where was the website for the West Marin Music Festival?  Canceled, he told me.  The Festival director was very ill.  Thanks, I said.  By the summer of 2008, I knew enough to check the Dance Palace website.  Still no Festival.  But there was the endearing Wesla Whitfield channeling the Gershwins and Cole Porter into West Marin.  So naturally Marlou and I channeled ourselves.  Wesla also leaves me high, this North Bay chanteuse.  And there's our shared experience of being mugged and shot in the spinal cord on Bay Area streets in the same era.  Another story.  

For now, it was intermission, and I was circulating, as much as a wheelchair can, among the Dance Palace crowd.  No, I don't know these people, but somehow I always want to.  And when I fall into a chat with strangers, well it just pops out of my mouth.  What happened to the West Marin Music Festival?

Yes, the director is ill.  But there's more.  The topic makes people uncomfortable.  I've stumbled into something and will never know what it is.  This makes me impatient.  I have to watch my response.  Ours is a consumer society, and we expect music festivals the way we expect FedEx.  It doesn't work that way.  When the directors of the Lincoln Center Chamber Series targeted Menlo Park for a summer festival, they dispatched a team of consultants.  When I tried to whip up local interest in the preservation of a shuttered movie theater, I failed miserably.  Community organizing isn't my thing.  Perhaps these days it's no one's thing.  Worse, I have no perspective on this and can find few who do.  Is it reasonable to find a new purpose for an old cinema ?  Isn't our town wealthy enough to expect this?  Maybe wealth has nothing to do with it.  Maybe Menlo Park's social capital is depleted, our imaginations impoverished.

Which is why I put my money on Point Reyes.  The ghost of the West Marin Music Festival is still kicking around.  I can feel it in the intermission crowds at the Dance Palace.  All it needs is....  God knows.  But I do know one thing.  I may be an outsider, but I do have a checkbook.  And it's remarkably easy to join the Dance Palace organization.  So why not?  I gave them a few bucks, they'll send me a few mailings, and who knows?  We'll be back there soon enough, me parting the intermission crowds with my wheelchair, like an old locomotive with its...cowcatcher.