Vermont to Point Reyes CA
It’s the dead of winter at our home in Montpelier, VT. A Nor’easter has blown through. It’s 10 below on many days. In our early 60s, mid-winter has become a grim huddle around the wood stove.
So for the fourth year in a row, we left, to Point Reyes, a national seashore, a giant park off the coast of California, 30 miles north of San Francisco. We work remotely in the morning when the east coast is alive and humming, then hike in the afternoon.
And what did we find when we arrived?
Except for the weather - A place very similar to the one we left!
Point Reyes is actually a national park, a National Seashore to be exact. There are only 10 in the U.S. Others include Cape Hatteras, N.C. and Cape Cod. Point Reyes is 100 square miles, 80 miles of coastal seashore and miles and miles of hiking trails. The park was established in 1962 at the urging of forward thinking conservationists that put a bill on President Kennedy’s desk.
The resulting legislation put the land under the care of the National Park Service. The political compromise enabled the creation of the park while allowed several large cattle ranches to remain under long-term leases with the park service. That deal - controversial to some because of the environmental impact of manure on waterways - exists today.
The result is a place that shares much with Vermont:
A population dedicated to protecting the beauty of a place
Point Reyes has the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. We have the Vermont Land Trust and a unique quasi-governmental organization called the Vermont Housing Conservation Board. The tension between land conservation and commerce exists here, just as it does in Vermont. On Saturdays, the Tesla people from SF are here in droves, lining up at the coffee shop and the fabulous bakery. It is similar to when COVID hit the east coast and it seemed everyone with a weekend ski house in Vermont was suddenly a full-timer with kids in the schools. Real estate prices skyrocketed and tensions mounted.
A dwindling population.
Back in Vermont, our school sports teams are combining in order to get on the field. Small community schools, the bedrock of the towns they call home, are merging or closing. This leads to hour long bus rides over the mountain for many. Kind of like the ride for ranch kids here to the high school in Tomales, CA.
Local
Two bakeries, a great grocery store, Sushi nights on Wednesdays, a fabulous bookstore, a surf shop, ubiquitous art, a “walking’’ school in the heart of town and a park to sustain us. This describes both places. At about 8,000 residents, we are bigger in Montpelier, so we actually have three bookstores, a coffee shop bakery that feels like Brooklyn, an 80-acre park above town that just expanded. And our Saturday farmers market is the best in the state. Of course there is a vanilla mall outside town with a Wal-Mart. But the downtown is surviving, even prospering.
The town of Pt. Reyes Station is under 1,000 residents. But it has mountains that protect it from runaway commerce and the shopping malls of Corte Madera and Petaluma.
Community
Both Vermont and Point Reyes have a local newspaper determined to glue together a community buffeted by COVID, an unstable national political system and hyper-efficient capitalism that threatens old world values. Our local newspaper editor gives out his cell phone number. He gets daily demands that he resign so we can live without his editorial policies. (And he generally shares those demands on Facebook!)
We both have a local radio station that gives us news in a disaster. We both are focusing on the lack of affordable housing. Vermont is one of the whitest states in the union and is struggling to welcome immigrants. The latino community in Point Reyes is half the school population and does the jobs the whites won’t do. It’s not perfect, but there is a cultural integration here that we don’t yet have in Vermont.
Shared struggles
Not enough affordable housing.
A growing homeless population.
Dairy farms going out of business.
Health care costs skyrocketing.
The growing gap between rich and poor.
Politics
We in Vermont have kept the Trump insanity out of our politics for the most part. Facts still matter. But we have our conspiracists and a robust anti-vax group. Our legislature is very Democratic. But we have a moderate Republican governor who rejects Trump and his followers and wins praise for forging a middle ground based on information. There is no statewide mask mandate but he does hold two Covid educational press conferences a week broadcast live for everyone over the public radio station. He wins re-election overwhelmingly. Our Republican Party has rejected their own governor and embraced the crazy side. But Bernie Sanders wins re-election with 80 percent of the vote, many of them rural conservatives.
Much the same in Marin County here, where Congressman Jared Huffman works to protect shoreline from oil exploration and development. The governance here is from the county level, where Vermont governs via the towns. In most places, you can only see your politicians on TV, in both VT and Point Reyes you can see them on the street.
History
My wife and I came to Point Reyes to escape the cold and embrace the local community. It didn’t take long to realize that the landscape and culture I am enjoying so much is due, in part, to Vermonters who came here long before me. Vermont and Point Reyes are linked by a common family - the Shafter Brothers. I’m not sure whether to brag about that or apologize. The Shafter Brothers, for good or evil, came here from Vermont to make their fortune, suing to win control of the entire place. They won. And the resulting landscape reflects their operation of dairy ranch leases to the immigrant families who came here. We are not here to take over as they did, just to blend in and enjoy the fruits of a wonderful community. But the Shafter’s impact on this community is all around us and hard to ignore.
In the end, we hang on, moving ahead, doing the best we can, knowing it’s not enough. Two places on opposites coasts, but united by shared values carved out of ledge and granite in Vermont and hills and seashore in Point Reyes.
