From the Beginning...

Welcome to the blog that celebrates the code of guidelines for pleasure seeking bohemians through the writings of J P Dooley.  This is an exerpt from the first chapter of his second book, Two For The Road, coming soon to Amazon:

"From the beginning there were things I recognized:  the smells of kelp and tar, the licorice scent of fennel rising up from the slough, the aromas of sage and mountain lilac brought down from the hills by the night wind.

A newcomer then, drawn by a branch of the University of California with a point break, but my head was somehow already there, the Santa Barbara Channel, a south-facing shore, bright with sunlight, moody with fog; I seemed to know it in my bones.

Not as actual knowledge or even intuition, rather an identity, someone I connected with when my bare feet touched the faint if only spirit imprint of his on old paths and in areas gone wild.  An aboriginal component of my own psyche, originally accessed through surfing, a person of the always-world, pre-industrial, pre-electric, who has never heard of Jehovah, Jesus, the Buddha or Mohammed, has not read Plato, practiced geometric logic with Aristotle, and does not know or care that he lives in America.

 

A part of me and also a fantasy, something I wanted and because I was young, let myself have.

He bathes in the sea, plays in the waves, finds crabs and stranded clams in tidepools, and an abalone washed up in the surf that I stick in my new day-pack and take home for supper.  He collects colorful Olivella shells and grinds off the ends, stringing them on old fishing line as beads.

He follows secret trails through autumn brown grasses, from which I view the heart of his world, in which he is a lone hermit: a few square miles of tidelands and swamp at the back of Goleta Bay, surrounded by rising hills and the steep wall of the Santa Ynez Mountains, at high tide a continuous shallow lagoon with spits and ridges of land that were once villages and camps, and a mound of white shale topped by the airport beacon, last remnant of an island near the mouth of the slough where a confluence of creeks flows to the sea, the site of a town with a thousand huts when the later Spaniards and missionaries arrived; they called it Mescalitán.

A generic Spanish name for places processing agave and places that didn’t, the possible mispronunciation of something else from another language; abandoned, overgrown and forgotten, it had been leveled in 1942 to build the runways of the Marine Air Station.

I learned that from local lore, along with the story of a very old anchor found high on the backside of Moore Mesa, above the estuary of Maria Ygnacio Creek that separated Mescalitán from the mainland.  No one knew where it had come from, though there was a rumor it had been used in the Mexican era to winch over and careen a ship in the calm channel behind the white shale cliffs.