Andrew M.H. Alexander

Canoe camping at Point Reyes

Tomales Bay, Point Reyes
October 2021

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R. and I went canoe camping at Point Reyes this weekend, somewhat impulsively, to the boat-in sites on Tomales Bay.

I thought it would be fun. It was fantastic.

Just the fauna alone was incredible. We saw otters—a whole bevy, six, swimming down the beach, just a few dozen feet away from us. The first time I’ve seen otters in the wild, ever, despite being obsessed with them since elementary school. We heard elks bugling. We heard coyotes barking. They were barking back in response to the elk bugles. Incredible.

We saw seals. We saw pelicans. Some of them were flying just feet away from our canoe, just feet above the water. We saw egrets wandering around the shallows by the beach poking their heads down for snacks. We saw cormorants. We saw loons. I was astonished: I think of loons as Midwestern/Northeastern birds. But no, there were loons, and lots of them. We easily saw half a dozen. Apparently Pacific loons are a thing (a different species than the Common Loon).

I went tidepooling. I saw mussels, barnacles, anemones. Crabs and jellyfish. Some oysters. Tons of little sand volcano snorkels for whatever buried creatures are beneath. Lots of kelp.

At night there were bioluminscent algae. My first time ever seeing bioluminescence!

R. set up her fishing rod to troll from the canoe as we paddled over and back, but didn’t catch anything. She wasn’t expecting to. She didn’t have a saltwater lure. She tried casting from the beach, too, but still got nothing.

It was gray. Gray, foggy, misty, drizzly. Gorgeous. All the other times I’ve been out to Point Reyes it’s been sunny and hot. Not this time. That seemed fitting. It was exactly the weather I associate with canoeing. Plus: the firewood R. had b(r)ought (two bundles from the Home Depot in East Palo Alto) labelled itself as being from the Pacific Northwest. R.’s homeland. A place of cold, gray, and drizzle. It all fit together.

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R. had texted me a week ago: “Interested in some kind of post-atmospheric river outdoor adventure next weekend?” She had nothing particular in mind, she said, but “would be interested in biking or hiking or climbing.” I had been poking around, and saw there were some boat-in campsite permits at Point Reyes still available. I emailed her telling her that was something I’d long wanted to do, but “it’s definitely too cold/not the right season.”

“Is it too cold/not the right season???” she said.

So we pulled things together.

I borrowed a canoe and frictioned it to the top of my Civic with pool noodles and trucker hitches. We left Palo Alto around 11 on Saturday. We drove north on the 101 and over the Golden Gate Bridge, took Sir Frances Drake Boulevard to West Marin, stopped at the Bear Valley Visitors Center to get a campfire permit, stopped in Point Reyes Station, stumbled across the tail end of their final farmer’s market of the year, bought a chocolate chip scone (for me) and a peach hand pie (for R.), and then got to the boat launch (at Nick’s Cove, at the north end of the bay) around 3.

When we got the canoe off my car at the launch site—when R. first got a thorough look at it—we both just laughed.

The canoe had been lying in the backyard across the street, by T. and L.’s, house, in my co-op compound. It was the only boat I could find on such short notice. It had one seat, in the stern. In the bow were two 4x4 wooden fence posts bolted crosswise, with notches of unclear purpose carved out. Bolted to the gunwales was a metal frame with wheels—homemade, based on the welds and the cuts in the steel tubing. I tried to lift the canoe. It was the heaviest canoe I’d ever felt. Across the stern was another 4x4 fence post, sticking out a foot on one side, apparently as a homemade motor mount. There were multiple fiberglass patches on the inside of the body.

It seemed shallow-hulled. Was the canoe I grew up with really this shallow-hulled? Surely it couldn’t have been.

I sent R. a picture. She thought it would probably work.

I unbolted the metal wheel frame. I found a piece of roofing material lying around and duct-taped it to the 4x4s in the bow as a seat. T. helped me lift it onto my car.

“Everyone in the Dead Houses has a deep emotional attachment to this canoe,” he said. M. had bought it off Craigslist years earlier. He had used it on voyages around the Baylands. P. and Dead Houses landlord R. had almost used it in an amphibious bicycle race in the Oakland estuary. They had bolted wheelchair parts onto it to make it landworthy. Then they realized that you can’t bicycle a canoe on land very fast, but you can paddle a pontoon bike on water about as fast as a canoe. So they found a tandem bike on Craigslist, strapped 55-gallon drums to it, and used that. They won easily.

“When I was considering using the canoe last summer as my boat for Ephemerisle”—the libertarian seasteading more-Burning-Man-than-Burning-Man event on the Sacramento Delta—“I asked around to make sure it was OK. I wasn’t sure it’d work out, and I was worried I might sink it.

“P. said, ‘Sure, go ahead, sink it! That’s fine!’

“M. said, ‘Yes, please sink it! I have too many boats! I need fewer boats!’

“S. said, ‘That canoe represents everything about my failed relationship with P. Please sink it.’”

The water was choppy at first. The boat was riding low.

R., who spent more-or-less a decade as more-or-less a professional canoeist in Alaska, had brought her emergency throw line.

“If the canoe were any lower,” she said, “this would be a no-go for me.”

I didn’t tell her about how, ten minutes before she showed up, when the boat was on top of my car, I had found four holes drilled through the bow flotation compartment. I guess it was from the bolted-on-wheelchair-parts experiments. I had desperately run over to the Dead Houses wood shop to grab epoxy and fill them.

It probably would have been fine. I mean, people use this canoe all the time?

The water calmed down on the far side of the bay. It took an hour to paddle over and then down until we found a nice, uninhabited beach.

R. oversaw our fire and our food. Over the course of the evening, from 5 until bed at almost 11, we had:

As the sun was going down, we heard the elks bugling. It was dramatic and strange. The coyotes were barking back at them. The beach we were at was “Elk Fence Beach South.” It was right by the fence that keeps the herd of elk on Tomales Point from overrunning the rest of Point Reyes.

Once it was dark we saw stars. It had been cloudy during the day but after the sun went down gaps started opening. The Milky Way came out. We sat on the beach, at night, by the fire. The lights on the eastern shore were twinkling and reflecting off the still water of Tomales Bay. The water was calm. No waves. It was even more apparent hours later when I was trying to sleep. No lapping of waves. Just total silence.

And the bioluminescence!!!

R. was obsessed. She waded in the shallow water in her boots. Every time she moved, there was a trail of pointillist light, decaying after a few seconds. A blurred motion trail. Disturbance-activated ocean fireflies. She grabbed a paddle to play in the water with.

I didn’t have boots, so I squatted by the shore, cupping the water with my hands, and watching the lights turn on. We walked down the shore. It was incredible.

I had told my housemate M. a few days earlier that we might get to see bioluminescence. M. is Bulgarian and rarely prone to expressions of emotion. She lit up when I told her we might get to see bioluminescence. In the years I’ve lived with her I’ve never seen her, before or since, so animated. She said it’s the most amazing natural thing she’s ever seen.

Back at the campfire, R. started reading a brief for her Supreme Court clinic. The brief involved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the state secrets privilege, and the War on Terror. But she kept getting up every few minutes to wade around in the water more. The bioluminescence blinked against her boots.

“I feel magical,” she said. “I could do this forever!”

Three separate groups of canoers, or maybe kayakers, paddled past us in the dark. No headlamps. We could hear them but not see them. One said the bioluminescence would be even more amazing if he were on mushrooms. “I was thinking the same thing,” I said to R. She said nothing.

The fire eventually got smaller. I was impressed with R.’s focus. She built it from scratch and nurtured it, obsessively, with wide-eyed focus, all the way to the end, completely obsessed with complete combustion. She succeeded. The logs burned themselves all the way through. At the end there was nothing left.

Morning. Cold, gray, foggy. Misting on and off. There was a brief moment of bright sunshine, with the sun through a hole in the clouds, diffracting over the small headland at the south end of the beach, causing a huge, 180-degree rainbow. Otherwise everything was monochrome and blurry. The otters swam by and we got excited.

We had Earl Grey and another of R.’s campfire-baked foil scrambles: potatoes, red peppers, scallions, and then, added towards the end, cheese and salami.

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I glanced at my flipphone. S. had texted me. “I’m on my way back from a conference after-after-after-afterparty in a suburban London warehouse full of robots,” he said. “I also got to get mildly drunk with [PROMINENT JOURNALIST]: when someone at the preceding party had mentioned the robot warehouse, [JOURNO] popped out from under a desk where he had been hiding. I missed a party yesterday (w/ majority non-conference people) that apparently featured MDMA gazpacho.”

We paddled back up the bay and across. It only took us half an hour. The tide was in our favor. We loaded everything into and onto the car, drove to Point Reyes Station, went to a bakery and a bookstore, and then drove back all the way south on 1, over the Golden Gate Bridge and onto the 280.

There were downed branches everywhere from the huge atmospheric river storm a week before. R. just wanted to stop and collect endless amounts of firewood.

We got back to Palo Alto a little before four.

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