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Queer

Last Days in Petrolia

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My final days in Petrolia.  I’m home now.  The exhausting 11 hour drive.

Stopped in San Francisco for lunch.

We must have climbed the steep hill to Alexander Cockburn‘s Tower ten times a day, getting ready for Daisy’s first paying guests.

By the time we were finished it looked magnificent.  Beating rugs like Victorian chamber maids.  Oiling the redwood kitchen.  Making beds with fresh white linen.  Sweeping cobwebs off the windows.

Giving succor to the inner butler that lurks within.

Here is the sculpture that decorates the path:

Here are the fossilized fish that decorate the bathroom:

Here are random pictures I failed to publish earlier:

Categories
art Dogs

Lost Coast Lost Boy

The Wild Cat

Humboldt County.  Lost Coast.  The Wild Cat.

I let the dogs out into the beautiful garden.  The Little Dog caught and killed a large rat in the orchard.  Dude tore it out of his mouth and shook it until its guts were all over his red fur.  They looked very pleased with their murderous selves.

Daisy and I huffed and puffed up the steep hill to The Tower.  Her father collaborated with local craftsman to build this beautiful space.  Originally built to disguise two ten thousand gallon tanks fed by spring water this tower can now be rented (click here) on Airbnb.

Alexander died less than a year ago.  It is a strange and wonderful experience living in his comfortable home.

We have been exploring.  All weekend we dropped in at community events: private and public parties.  The Mattole River Restoration cookout and dance, a wonderful wedding anniversary party where they made their own Grappa in a copper still.  A young cook from Oakland roasted pig and served it by an open fire under white canvas awnings.

The following day they called us to taste the gin they had just made in the same still.  Last night a local intellectual cooked us home-grown free range chicken and home-made pink grapefruit sorbet.  On Sunday morning we bought basil mayonnaise, catnip and tomato starts from the Petrolia Farmers Market.

Mattole Restoration Project Party

Young Chef

Anniversary Party

Petrolia Farmers Market Painted Map

Most of the Lost Coast is designated wilderness within the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park and the King Range National Conservation Area.  Remote beaches backed up by steep cliffs and mountains.  King’s Peak reaches an elevation of 4,088 feet only three miles from the Pacific Ocean.

The King Range has risen 66 feet in the last 6,000 years due to the meeting of three tectonic plates: North American, Pacific, and Juan de Fuca, just off the white cap coast.  The land on the North American plate is being piled rapidly upward.  Its grey crumbly sandstone creating beaches of pristine, black sand.

On the beach we meet a few passers-by.  We meet hikers who, by law, keep their food in locked plastic containers.  Bear proof.  The containers looked like the barrels atomic waste is stored in.

We needed cleaning supplies.  We drive an hour to get them.  The road from Petrolia to the Victorian town of Ferndale is perhaps one of the most beautiful roads I have ever traveled.  Hogweed, ancient ferns and Douglas Fir.

Ferndale was founded by Danish settlers.  The 19th century houses are really well-preserved.  The history of the town inextricably linked to tinned salmon and logging, both of which have gone forever.  The trees cut down, the salmon extinct.  We saw two huge trucks loaded with old growth tree trunks but apparently they come from small ‘sustainable’ forests.

Daisy’s father said:

Start with the word “sustainable.” These days fund-raisers and grant-writers string it round each sentence like an adjectival fanny pack, bulging with self-congratulation. Mostly, the term is meaningless or a vague expression of hope. In the case of timber, it’s a haphazard and often highly debatable designation that amounts to little more than a vague pledge that the timber is not virgin old growth.

We stop in at the lumber yard to buy laminated boards for Daisy to paint.  We are served by a fresh-faced youth.  I ask him if he’ll ever leave Ferndale.  He says, he’s a small town boy.  He doesn’t want to leave.  I understand why.

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Categories
Photography

Daisy Cockburn

Daisy Cockburn

Categories
Queer

Petrolia

Daisy

I promised that I wouldn’t write about where and who I was staying with… it feels like I am boasting.  But… here I am staying with Daisy Cockburn on The Lost Coast.   We met thirty years ago at Phil H’s house on Langton Street, Worlds End, Chelsea.

Daisy’s house/compound, filled with unusual and beautiful things collected by her father Alexander Cockburn, leaving his only child this house in Petrolia.  Alexander was a disruptor, a magnificent political writer.  Alexander died last July after a long illness.

Collecting the most extraordinary ceramics, eclectic paintings the decaying house is a warren of red wood improvements and additions.  James built a tower on the hill… I’ve not yet visited.  The ceramics are mostly by LA based ceramist Jim Danisch.

Daisy’s mother is the writer Emma Tennant.  Her cousin is Olivia Wilde.

I drove from LA.  Through San Francisco.  The last 60 miles along perilous roads in the dark.  Tarmac Roads that suddenly give out to treacherous gravel.  Past the magnificent redwoods that even in the dark… are extraordinary.

I slept in a huge bed built on a wooden platform.  I slept like a giant redwood log.  At night, I can hear the Mattole river moving quickly over tiny gray pebbles.  This morning we all… dogs too… swam in the cold clear water.

More pics tomorrow.