By Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, May 20, 2020
Bolinas, California, is not a place one finds oneself by accident, in part because it is a place that must be found. Out on the edge of the North Bay of San Francisco, off a main highway, it can be approached only by narrow roads that have the form of waves: byways through the eucalyptus, snaking drives along the dry cliffs of the coast. Not far beyond the blackened trace of last fall’s fires, a hairpin turn leads to a swerving road down a thick peninsula between the sea and a lagoon. Bolinas, population sixteen hundred, is at the heel, like a town that has drawn back and back and now has nowhere left to go.
For fifty years, this place has marked the center of a blue America where big business and invasive government are subjects of equal distrust. The town’s virtues, its residents believe, flow from shared intentions and a close-knit community. In 1976, the journalist Orville Schell, a resident, published “The Town That Fought to Save Itself,” an account of Bolinas’s efforts to chart its own course in terms of life style and growth. (Schell, who reported on China for The New Yorker, in the late seventies and eighties, also co-founded, in Bolinas, the humane cattle farm Niman Ranch.) The town is best known for its 1971 moratorium on new water permits, which was done in the name of resource management but had the happy effect, for locals, of making development almost impossible to sustain.
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