San Anselmo
I was reshelving my collection of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazines the other day and an address label fell off one of them, with a street name that I had forgotten and had been trying to remember ever since the last time I drove through San Anselmo and realized that although I knew I’d lived there for a bit I could no longer point out the street I’d hiked up and down so many times. I must have still had my subscription going when we moved there. I looked the street name up and traced the path on the map between there and a few other landmarks and it all started to come back.
The same year I was finishing high school, my dad’s apartment building was being remodeled, which meant all its tenants had to find another place to live for a while. As luck would have it, one of his students had a house he was trying to get rid of, and he arranged for my dad to live there as a caretaker until it sold. The house was in San Anselmo, halfway up a large rusty outcropping called Red Hill. Since I lived with my dad on the weekends, I’d take the bus there after school on Friday. It was about a two hour trip, starting with a Muni ride across the length of the city, then a transfer at the bridge, another at San Rafael, and finally a half mile hike up to the top of the street. The first time, my dad picked me up and rode with me so I could learn the route (although I still messed up the transfer at San Rafael on my first solo attempt), and as we started up the hill from the bus stop he pointed out a massive fence that concealed George Lucas’s house; I never saw our neighbor, although I think my dad might have spotted him in the grocery store once.
That house way up on there on Red Hill was the most remote place I’ve ever lived, nestled amongst wild cherry trees that dropped mostly-inedible fruits which had to be regularly skimmed out of the small above-ground pool in the backyard. The house was mostly empty, and we stayed out of the main level with its scenic views to ensure it stayed pristine for showings. The temporary caretaker quarters were in the finished basement, which had a small kitchen and lots more floor space than the studio apartment we’d vacated in the city, but very little in the way of entertainment – poor TV reception, no VCR, no cable, no Internet, and my dad’s book collection, which I could otherwise have spent the year reading, was mostly in storage. The set of bare essentials that my dad had moved in did include a guitar, which I was still an extreme novice with, but over the course of many hours practicing with xeroxed chordbooks and OLGA printouts I eventually acquired a level of basic competency that I probably wouldn’t have today if we’d had a working TV back then.
We spent a fair amount of time out of the house. The top of the hill was entirely residential, so we needed to walk down to the main road to do our shopping at the local Wild Oats, and be careful not to buy more groceries than we wanted to haul back up in one trip. Amazing Grace Music was also down there, and we’d go there sometimes to browse the instruments. Heading west for a bit along the road there was a little park, Creek Park, where one could enjoy the burblings of San Anselmo Creek. That, as far as I can remember, was all there was to do in San Anselmo.
Walking about an hour further west took us to Fairfax, and we did that pretty often, since it was a pleasant walk and there was a little more to do over there. I remember discovering a lot of good books at the Fairfax Library, including the Hitchhiker’s Guide series. There was a regular contra dance at the Fairfax Community Center, and that was my first real introduction to folk dancing and the wider Bay Area folk music scene, which continues to reverberate across different parts of my life to this day.