When I was growing up south of Los Angeles, anything north of, say, Santa Barbara seemed like Alaska. Or, almost. Certainly up above San Francisco was mysterious and exotic. On first visits, way up around the Mendocino Coast things appeared truly beautiful, gorgeous unto being paradisiacal. Looking out from any coastal bluff, the vast blues of sea and sky spread out, endless rolling green and brown hillsides and canyons dropping down after miles of moist redwood valleys. We’d drive around aimlessly and just camp wherever we wound up, in “real campgrounds” but more often just pulled off next to the road in any spot with a view, or down on a remote beach. It all seemed a sort of shangri-la, populated by earthy, hip happy healthy humans and vast open spaces full of other exotic species living in harmony.
Little did I know.
That was the 1970s, when the vanguard of back-to-landers and cannabis agriculturalists found their spots and built that much-abused word “community” out of widespread hideouts. By the 1980s, though, some things were starting to tatter.
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