I Won a Gold Solas Award for Best Travel Writing

From the shameless self-promotion department, I’m happy to announce that I won a Solas Award for Best Travel Writing. I won the Gold in the category of Travel Memoir for my story, “From Mill Valley With Love.” And here’s the story below.

From Mill Valley with Love

Bill Graham Plaza, downtown Mill Valley, CA I returned to my hometown, courting disaster. Like a warrior charging into enemy fire, I came here to endure a soul-crushing confrontation with my past and my present. Something good has to come of this. Sitting in the red brick plaza facing the Mill Valley Depot Bookstore, I see the slanting summer sun as the coastal redwoods scent the air. I see hillsides spilling into the village, thick with cedar, oak, maple, and California laurels. I see neatly preserved Victorians and modern boxes, half-hidden in the narrow, steep canyons of Mount Tamalpias above. The mountain rises twenty-five hundred feet above the village and her summit romantically resembles a sleeping maiden lying upon her back , her hair tumbling westward down to the Pacific Ocean. Yet I don’t really see Mill Valley. I don’t really see the plaza. What I can see is a boarded-up Greyhound bus depot and parking lot from the Seventies, where teenagers gather on a Friday night. Or I see the nine-year old me, crossing the plaza with five dollars of birthday money in my pocket for buying a tiny pair of gold earrings for my just-permitted pierced ears. The Beatles’ Love Me Do is the soundtrack. I study the shadow town that replaces my childhood Mill Valley and that of my Dad, who had lived here since the Forties. He’s gone now, at least physically, and I’m wreathed in sadness and grief. He’s not here anymore and neither is Mill Valley. And I literally can’t go home again. My family rents our childhood home to attorneys from New York. Today, pricey boutiques have muscled out the stationery store and the SonNapa Farms deli, which sold kids slices of pizza for a quarter. Worse, a fancy velo bike shop has replaced the Baskin Robbins ice cream shop, an icon of many Mill Valley childhoods. Happily, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a Catholic church my father helped build in 1968, still stands two blocks away. The sharp pain of losing my father transforms my hometown into something like the enormous ghost nets that fishermen lose at sea. Floating upon briny waters, vast and carnivorous, a ghost net pulls debris into its tangle, birds, fish, crabs, plastic, turtles, dolphins, whales. Then it sinks under its burden until it releases its debris into the depths and resurfaces to collect more. My grief lies lurking beneath the waves, floating aimlessly in an oceanic abyss of sinking and resurfacing. Forever. Fingers of fog reach over the Marin Headlands from the ocean in the waning afternoon and the plaza slowly empties, everyone heading home for Sunday dinner. Mill Valley has always inspired me, as I filled girlhood journals with notes of what I had seen or felt. And I’ve always been a storyteller, sometimes with great exaggeration. Just ask my siblings. But now, pen and journal in hand, I cannot write. I feel numb. Instead, I sit in the sun and imagine that Mill Valley is writing letters to me. The letter paper is colored light brown and scented with the musty odor of redwood groves from needles decaying in the loam. The ink is purple, a nod to my hometown’s Bohemian history. During the Fifties, Jack Kerouac once lived in a cabin with Beat poet Gary Snyder in the town’s Homestead Valley neighborhood. This historical fact always pleases me because my grandparents owned Homestead Grocery back then; I like to imagine that those two Dharma bums landed frequently in their store to buy cold beer or a loaf of bread. Or to shoplift. I begin to read my letters. They go something like this: Dear Little Catholic Schoolgirl In a Scratchy Wool Uniform, You are the daydreamer in the back of the classroom, gazing out the tall windows of Our Lady of Mount Carmel School. The wispy fog curls through the spiny tops of the redwoods on the high ridges. You watch them drift eastward from the Pacific Ocean and listen to “The Sound of Music†playing in your head. You are petite, sensitive and creative. During recess, you and a classmate harmonize to The Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know A Secret†on her tiny radio. Sister David Mary tells your parents, “Lenore always writes the most interesting stories.†The school bus always takes too long to arrive at your parochial school after transporting the public school kids first. You expertly time your run across Blithedale Avenue to Bennett’s five and dime to buy Pixy Stix, candy cigarettes and lumps of Gold Rocks gum, packaged in tiny muslin sacks just like a gold miner’s cache. You never miss your school bus. Next door, the Sequoia Theatre is showing a James Bond film, “From Russia With Love,†but you cannot see it. During Mass, the priest announces that the movie is condemned by the Catholic Church. It’s a mortal sin to watch it. Your parents build a mid-century modern home on a view lot cut from an old dairy farm owned by a man named Scott. At the end of your street, you, your little sister and brother discover a green pasture populated by black and white cows. They stare at you, ruminating near an ancient loading chute. Eventually, they disappear as more dream homes climb the hills. Before anyone awakens, your father leaves to fight the traffic across the Golden Gate Bridge into the Financial District so that you can grow up here. Often after a long day, he comes home, grabs dinner and heads out again, saying “I’ve got a church meeting.†He’s helping to build a new church in downtown Mill Valley. Below your street, two days a week a lumber train rolls by from the northern sawmills; garter snakes often sun themselves on the gravel bed. When you find a dead snake, you drape it upon two sticks and triumphantly march it down Azalea Drive followed by a pack of hollering neighbor kids. You and the neighborhood kids also destroy perfectly good legal tender by laying pennies, dimes and quarters on the rails. Then you all solemnly watch as the train rolls by, violently flattening your coins into impossibly wide discs. If you pick yours up off the rail too soon, you’ll burn your fingers and you learn that the hard way. In Mill Valley, kids run freely in wild places for picking blackberries or catching pollywogs in sloughs fed by the bay. Moms have no inkling of a Mill Valley kid’s whereabouts until dinnertime. Much less playing around trains or muddy sloughs. Some kids live on the slopes of Mount Tam in houses hanging off steep lots along twisty one-lane roads. Sometimes it takes a half an hour to drive up to visit a family there, as your dad’s car ascends to those dream house views. “It’s a nice place,†your dad says of one family’s home. “But what if you run out of milk?†I look up to the ridges woven with fire roads cut into the sage and stands of trees, quiet dirt roads running above the length of my town. As a kid, I know that I could hike all the way to Mount Tam’s summit and some of the bigger boys did. Dear Horse-Crazy Girl with the Stringy Hair, At the foot of grassy Horse Hill, you and your sister stand patiently at a barbed wire fence, waiting as the pastured horses lumber slowly downhill to your outstretched palms piled with blades of grass. Their velvety muzzles deftly wipe your palms clean. Some of the older neighbor girls have their horses and ponies to gallop alongside the railroad tracks. You beg your parents for your own horse and the answer is always no. But your little sister’s begging paid off; your parents agree to buy a two-hundred-dollar pony if she pays half. The mare’s name is Kia, a dun-colored buckskin with a black mane and tail and large chocolate eyes. You ride her bareback along the tracks at a walk, too frightened to gallop like the big girls. And you never ride on the days the lumber train rolls by because Kia spooks. She walks along peacefully, her head bobbing, ears pointing forward, the air heavy with the scent of sage. But she spooks anyway and bolts full speed down the tracks and you grab her mane and fight to stay astride her slippery bare back as her hooves pound the gravel. Terrified, you saw at her mouth with the reins but her head is too high and she won’t settle down. You slide right off her back when she cuts to the right to run up a steep path under the eucalyptus trees. You try to keep ahold of the reins but they speed through your fingers as she gallops away. Sore and humiliated, you climb the path, slipping on eucalyptus acorns, and trudge to the pasture gate where Kia stands expectantly, the reins hanging to the ground. You slip off her bridle and never ride her again. You are braver than you think. Brave? These days, I don’t feel brave. Sitting still with my emotions on this bench is about as courageous, or as foolhardy, as it gets. Dear Teenager In Bell-Bottomed Jeans Carrying a Doeskin Purse, It’s Friday night and you and your girlfriends are driving down Blithedale Avenue, blasting The Who. You join the public school kids in the bus depot parking lot to pile into vans, VWs and borrowed station wagons and head over to Frank’s Valley, between Muir Beach and Muir Woods. In a grassy meadow studded with oaks, kids drink beer, smoke pot and make out under the moonlight.  You never forget Frank’s Valley. One May evening, you and a boy ascend the system of stairs and hiking paths built by early city fathers to a viewing platform above the village. As an indigo twilight fades, a full moon rises and washes the five square miles of your hometown in silver. Dark forested ridges, which Kerouac described as a “roaring sea of trees,†line the valley, which ends at the mudflats and sloughs of Richardson Bay. You can see houseboats bob in the tide and the lights of Sausalito climbing towards Wolfback Ridge. Beyond, the lights of Highway 101 zigzag downhill from the Golden Gate Bridge. You and the boy draw close together against the chill. You are in love for the first time. You will never forget that boy. Ah, yes, boys. Now I understand why the Seventies had been so alarming to my dad. Across the Golden Gate Bridge, free sex and hippies made international headlines and drug dealers plied the streets of Sausalito, and, hell, even the Mill Valley bus depot. I’m sure he didn’t sleep much in those days. Dear 17-Year Old Adventurer, You climb to the top of Kite Hill after high school graduation as the traffic hums below. You take in the sky, the bay waters, the afternoon fog creeping over the green hills and tell yourself that it’s time to leave. The wanderlust gene you had inherited from your father’s DNA has tripped. When he offers you two choices for your graduation gift – a used car or a trip to Mexico – you choose Mexico. He understands; he had circumnavigated the globe before his twenty-sixth birthday. You are 17 and think it’s time to leave Mill Valley. Youth can be foolish. You come back but at 19 you leave again to live in Italy. When you move away for good with your new husband, your dad teases you, reminding you of an essay you wrote about how “I’ll never leave the shadow of Mount Tam.†Today, I realize what an unusual childhood Mill Valley offers its native children. In my youthful ignorance, I never appreciated how much I had thrived in such magical beauty, the perfect setting for a creative child. This notion sunk in later after traveling the world and observing children in Mexican slums or amid India’s poverty. Amazed by my incredible luck, I had lost much by moving away. So I write my own reply to these letters. Dear Lovely, Verdant Valley of the Mill, We are the daughters of Republican businessmen or the sons of Bohemian artists. Underneath the hushed redwood cathedral of Old Mill Park, you baptized us as we waded into Cascade Creek’s cold, clear waters, sinking our bare feet into the soft gravel bottom. We hopped from stone to stone, climbed the boulders lining the creek side and warmed ourselves in your random patches of sun. We thought everybody grew up as we did, under protective redwoods and enchanted fogs as deer grazed silently behind our homes. We thought everyone’s relatives came to visit just to see where you live. We never realized that people traveled to Muir Woods from the world over simply to see your redwoods. Now as adults we find clarity, appreciating how much your mountain’s bountiful springs and benevolent watershed, your lofty redwoods and open spaces had shielded us from the real world. And then I write another letter, a thank you note. Dear Dad, Please accept my endless gratitude for being such a dedicated father. Thank you for getting up early every morning to battle the traffic across the bridge so that your kids could grow up in Mill Valley. Thank you for meeting the challenge of raising kids during a time of cultural upheaval. And thank you for living in a materialistic society as a man of faith. Thank you for Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. It’s still standing. After reading my letters, I no longer see Mill Valley as a ghost net. Instead, my hometown transforms into something like Indra’s Net. According to a Hindu myth, the god Indra cast a net over the entire universe, affixing a multi-faceted jewel at each juncture that reflects every other jewel until jewels within jewels mirror the interconnectedness of the universe. Crafted of the interconnections of time and place, this multi-dimensional web stretches into an infinite universe and love connects it all. A girl is standing in the Bus Depot parking lot. A writer is standing next to her on the red-bricked plaza. And her father is standing next to her.