Weeknight Cooking: California Salad

With more limited time to cook these days and an upcoming trip to San Francisco on the horizon, the mind has a tendency to wander sometimes quickly over the pictures of recipes to prepare and turns them Californian.  To midwesterner, California cuisine is nearly as otherworldly to the imagination as considering French.  Like Mediterranean, Californian has evolved from regional roots; as the French style gathers in its rustic towns agriculture from the likes of the Pyrenees, and cheese from its lowland pastures, San Francisco seeks out its local sustenance from the native agriculture up the bay at Point Reyes, and counts on those cows to produce world class dairy.  The parallels continue on, seafood from a cool shore, sunshine from a generous sun, and as many invested chefs as there are restaurants.  We would like to visit Tyler Florences Wayfare Tavern and see how his powerful style

translates from cookbook genius to the real thing.  We could see a salad like the Smoky Sea Scallops with Avocado-corn Salsa showing up on the menu – a recipe I just tried last night for preparation – a great admixture of things that could become Californian with a few adjustments.  The picture in the cookbook shows blackened scallop, avocado, corn and tomato.  The combination looks good, so why not take inspiration from the components and put the salad together in a way that might be successful?  Although my preparation was simplified, if I were to Californianize I would take fresh shrimp, rub them with a Mediterranean concoction of spices, sprinkle with lime juice, and stick them

over a running flame on a beach fire as the seagulls squawked in jealousy above.  I take several handpicked cobs of corn from  the Point Reyes Pierce Farm, open the shucks, lace them Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam, same spices, maybe a touch of paprika, and let them blacken over the same fire

then cut down their sides leaving the kernel dice hot over the plate.  Now the sand plovers are squawking in unison as they comb the beach and the tide is slowly rising up over the lip of the berm of the sand.  Avocado, hand picked from Morro Bay Avocados, diced and also slightly dripped with lime juice, spread out over the plate for texture and substance.  Many other ingredients could be added over the top at this point, to further Californiafy, (garlic, some heat with peppers, cilantro) but I would choose a homemade batch of buttermilk dressing from the Point Reyes Creamery, made of crumbled

blue cheese, sea salt, pepper, chives, sour cream, buttermilk from the local herd, a pinch of vinegar.  By the now the Pelicans have smelled the aroma and are circling with very wide beaks above awaiting our departure so that they may find their own leftover California ingredients.  It would be time at this point to douse the fire, pack the beach picnic and gently lay the utensils down into the floor of the rowboat and oar off around the still calm spit into the mouth of the Estero and glide on into Nick's Cove where time has stopped at 1930.

Salmon with Aunt Mae's Miso Sauce

"The sun had risen, the sky was clear.  I crouched among the rocks, perched like a seagull on a ledge, and contemplated the sea.  My body felt powerful, fresh and obedient. And my mind, following the waves, became itself a wave, unresisting, submissive to the rhythm of the sea." from Zorba the Greek







The old man continued that there were as many ways to fish as their were fish in the sea and the estero.  "There is the line I lay off the peak of the great cliffs here at the very head of estero where the ocean moves through the tidal flats; there is the line I lay off the shore, the dock or even my row.  But there is only one pure form of fishing, the way that all ancient fisherman know, fishing with the fish themselves." He picked up his cedar plank platter and for the first time in half an hour they could see what it was the great cook had been preparing.  The small cabin of the bar smelled of the insides of the ocean itself.  "Every fish should have its own story.  I fish alone and I fish for only one at a time,"

he continued. "You may not believe that this fine fellow cost me five hours and nearly my life."  He set down onto the bar nothing more than a cut piece of cardboard and lay down the quadrants of the pink fish over the top then squeezed the rest of the remaining half of the lemon over the skin.  The men quickly set down their brown bottles and picked up the fish by hand bit it like a piece of cake. Yesterday morning I reached the Point Reyes coastal rocks at low tide.  It was a fine day for the running of the line of silver and I could see their backs shining into the estero.  I back oared around the sea side of rocks where an eddy had formed in between what looked like the mouth of an opening to a small cave at low tide.  As soon as my shrimp on the hook landed on the water a pair of large wrench like jaws took the shrimp down low and I could tell she gulped it but instead of moving along with the line of the pack, she headed back out to see temporarily, the zagged back into shore, twirling my line around one of the point of the massive cliff rocks.  I had no time to spare.  This was 40 pounds, all muscle, and had a head for freshwater." The old man grinned and tipped his hat while the two others sat there enjoying their cheeks filled with the very fish for which the story was being told. "I tossed anchor for the row and jumped up onto that rock letting the line stay taut by the tension around it, then leaped into the bay, keeping my pole up above the surface as best as I could, while reeling to capture

tension again.  As I caught back up with her weight she was pulling me through to the shallows – I just kept reeling and breathing.  The terns and gulls began to circle me as if a seal.  There was no more than two hundred yards to shore and I rode her into the mouth of the estuary and could feel the warmth of the fresh water soaking." The two men, I could see, actually began to listen and visualize the extravaganza of the image that was being painted before their eyes.  'This old man,' I could just about imagine them saying to themselves, 'very likely story.' Yet they too knew of the great journey up the coast to whale cove, the true landing point of the great Sir Frances Drake in 1579, and his will to live upon the ocean as if it were a giving being. "Two fallen cypress had created a temporary bridge across the narrow neck of the estero.  There is where the great Chinook had run out of cunning options.  My line was strong, I could now touch the bottom of the sandy shore. I was already most certainly wet and

so I ran to her and dove onto her, her body half exposed now in the shallows.  From a distance, I suppose, some poor birdwatcher could only see an old man viciously dive and wrap his arms onto something that wasn't there, but she was. I picked her up, gave her one last hug in my arms and took her onto the beach with me for a short rest."  The old man grinned again, then stole a good swallow from one of the men's beers.  "And what about the boat?" the other man alarmed in question.  The old man's eyes squeezed and his temples bulged.  He set down his fish and meandered out to the side door overlooking the bay with his binoculars.  "Well, right where I left her of course. Now, did I ever tell you about Aunt Mae's miso sauce?"

What to Find at Point Reyes, CA

May 26


Nick's Cove, located on west shore of Tomales Bay, looking out over the peninsula of Point Reyes National seashore, is an enduring symbol of California coastline culture.  A grand platte of land that started as a ranch possessed by President Lincoln chief of staff from the days of the Civil War, sold again and became a shallow water landing that came to host a variety of trades such saddle making, duck raising and dairy farming.  As the widespread migration to the west coast continued, so too did both the need for more transportation and the need for a more sturdy farming community to support the bustling new city of San Francisco only thirty miles south of the shore and bay.  The North Pacific Coast Railroad constructed tracks right along the shorefront at the cove back in 1873, soon followed

up a modern highway in 1930.  These transportation links north, but especially south toward the population, opened up the dramatically beautiful and abundant shorelines to tourism, commercial fishing, and an entirely new level of tourism.  The potential of the cove, and its similarity in landscape of coastline easter Europe, brought the Yugoslavian family of Nick and Dorothy Kojich to the area,

where they proceeded to give Nick's Cove its namesake and its more permanent lure for tourism, hospitality, and a very authentic fisherman's wharf style restaurant that now not only serves at the road front restaurant, but at the back end of the pier fishing shack which has been touted by travel magazines as one of the top 20 hotel bars in the country.  As the tide churns inward and out over the

flats below, the sun shines over the Reyes cliffs or the fog hangs low and thick over a calm bay, Nicks is as much a part of the regional country and history as any other, serving also as gathering hub for locally grown farm products, cheeses, seafood.  Recently, head chef Austin Perkins along with the GM have installed what they have called The Croft across the highway – a fully functioning and kitchen stocking garden.  The visitor, then, can descend on Nicks and have very few reasons to leave, as it is cottage hotel, restaurant, fishing landing, hiking hub, bikers highway.  For a city that boasts more thoughtful gourmet restaurants than any other in the country, its residents might make the fairly short trek out of town to get a taste of real California.

What to Find at Point Reyes, CA

"The sea, autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece. Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea." from Zorba the Greek




A crisp team of clouds had quickly risen up above the surrounding cliff lines of Tomales Bay at Point Reyes. I had opened the door of the fishing shack only a moment ago while it had still been

unnaturally sunny, and the gulls had circled around the bespeckled water as if keepers of treasure.  I could see old man, who they simply called "Old Man" standing with his back to the bar over an open coals cooking telling a story to two other men sitting at stools wearing fishing caps.  I did not want to interrupt just yet so sat-in at the other side.  The first tinking splatters of rain began to sound at the roof.  "You see, there was the old days, before anybody took record, when the chinook were so thick

moving up the Sacramento River and as far north as here at Reyes that I used to leap off of one side of the bank and jump across the massive backs as large as rocks!  I tell you, along the way across I would merely have to scoop one up in my arms, no pole!" He finished this last part with a deep guttural laughter with his right hand, holding a cooking tongs, swirling about in the air." Now those were the days for the fisherman. Now it takes me four days to bring in a hundred pounds. I care for them as my own.  You will not find the Chinook here on the menu every night.  They come from ocean to your plate."  The two other men looked to have no visible reason to argue.  The old man's fishing exploits were legendary, and what had brought me here in the first place.  He took to ocean nothing more than a simple oaring boat for days at a time, challenging virtually every known warning to avoid in these volatile waters.  There had been one stretch that he had gone missing for seventeen days, no communication, and the Coast Guard could not find him at sea.  He had provisions for no

more than five days, but returned, on the eighteenth day without a rail for a seat but instead three hundred pounds of the great Chinook still flopping to such a degree that his boat listed at every knee high wave.  It was reported but never verified that the old Man had been shoved by 90 mile an hour winds as far northward as the Columbia River in Oregon where he said, famously, 'I had struck a line of silver a mile long, tied my line to the lead, and followed it into the great unknown river.'  The shack had begun to smell like the purest of elements: the fish, the sea, the rain, the lemon that he had continued to squeeze over his precious catch.  "Now, let me tell you how I make my miso!"

Bird Journal

May 19


Simply sitting out on the back deck the sky this time of year looks something like a sunny aviary airport.  Researchers now know that birds navigate not by any one sixth sense but by a very complex unified combination of sensory mechanisms.  Birds have tremendous sight and as they fly from nest to feeding zones they take visual snap shots of the various landmarks in landscape.  Take a precocious migratory bird from nest several miles away and they will find home by utilizing those burned images.  Birds can smell their particular region as well; various regions contain various flora and fauna and birds can follow those senses as well.  Also built into the main frame of the bird is an ability to detect thermal transitions and flows of the earth and wind patterns so that we could easily imagine a bird, high above in a flock, literally feeling the surrounding area getting warmer as it makes its great journey from Canada to the Midwest, for example.  The backyard aviary airport, then, indicates that birds find good foliage here, good housing sites, and most importantly they think its warm enough to safely start flitting about with nest morsels.  Besides the hawks, warblers, vireos, orioles, robins, two mallards, the cardinal and the hummingbird, it was the case of the elusive Eastern Bluebird that was most interesting in the backyard stage presentation as what looked much the golden breasted but blueish winged bluebirds landed on the top gutter of the house and looked down on us as though we were the intruders.  We binoculared and still the colors matched to what we thought was that of the bluebird yet, as it took off its wing pattern seemed longer and more prongy at the tail.  We matched the online birdcall with what we were listening to.  No such luck.  The common barn swallow, although quite dramatic in its own right, had been swooping aggressively across the

backyard skyline swaying off any foreign intruders like people...much in the same way the red-winged blackbird likes to harass the crows back up into their bluffside trees.  It is said of the barn swallow that they have become one of the most common users of manmade nesting sites of all the birds, very rarely seen any longer finding homes in trees or bushes.  The bluebird, by contrast, is very particular about their homes, needing a certain height, space and slight opening in the field or grassland.  Their old nemesis, the common swallow, likes the same thing and they often have to fight it out.

"I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It was almost daybreak and raining. A strong sirocco was blowing the spray from the waves as far as the little cafe, whose glass doors were shut.  The cafe reeked of brewing sage and human beings whose breath steamed the windows because the cold outside." – Nikos Kazantzakis from Zorba the Greek





The sun shone down from the sky above Point Reyes so bright that he said he could not believe just yesterday the fog was so thick that when he tossed a tennis ball up twenty feet he lost it, it blew a foot to the left, and it bounced off the cliffside and somewhere into the jagged shore.  There was only one real fishing shack at Nick's Cove, and it had turned, many years ago, according to the old man, into a mostly unknown tavern for the last of the straggling fisherman past the fishing hour along the north coast.  It took three minutes to walk from the shore over the dock and to the shack, which stood on what

seemed thin stilts, albeit a protected bay.  A few fisherman, and one fisherwoman, stood out on the deck before front door smoking pipe and cigar, as anybody would imagine.  The cliffs to either side of Nicks Cove were like solemn yet elegant guard against virtually everything imaginable out beyond its influence.  Waves here churned like mad; wind gusts could burst to 130 miles per hour at its peak, and trawlers could notoriously get caught inside the treacherous admixture of wind and fog that would leave them tipping like silly tops against the rocks at the head of any cove or shore.  What did I know of such things?  The sea, of course, was chaos compared to the barely lolling waves of lakes or even

most rivers.  Three more men opened the driftwood door with tall cans in their fists.  Their ruddy faces matched the roughness of the ocean only yards out from the reach of the backside of the shack itself.  I first met him as the fourth man out, the old man who lived here, and who had, for so many years, travelled this top end of the western coast as though as if it were the globe, finding deserts in the beaches, mountainous terrain in the sea cliffs, rivers in the meandering estuaries, and any foreign sky you could conceive at the touch of the finger above.  "When is the last time you've paddled along a sea lion?" he asked, picking me out as I approached, knowing, I am now sure, that I was there to observe

and knowing, at the same time, that I likely had never done such a thing. "You see, along these waters out there, not everybody knows, that if you are caught paddling next to a sea lion, you are bait twice."

Garden Journal

May 14

It's not as pleasant a task to deadhead tulips at forty degrees as it would be otherwise, but with limited amount of time at the lawn that is a garden, it is something that has to be done.  Getting down on hands and knees onto clumped, cold, and wet bark, digging in to shovel the unfriendly weeds or sheering old wood stalks is the kind of work, my gardener agrees, is not usually the stuff that inspires children to "get into nature." Yet, as we both agreed, to see for oneself every last inch of plantings, from tulips to roses to hyacinth and fern, is like assessing the layout of any interior room inside a house, with all of its attendant nuts, bolts, screws, lighting fixtures, missing tongues and grooves, etc., etc., but that the difference is that the tulip and rose are living and ever-changing.  To secure their

future is something like taking care of hardy yet cute children, the very thought process, I suspect, that ties all those who participate in the cultivation of nature shares.  And so I was told to deadhead my bloomed tulips out front; clip them all down close to the origin of the stem, which allows for the teamwork of energy between sun, soil and seed to dedicate its time to germination under the surface, not at the head where the stem had just dropped.  So far, in this small little yard garden of ours, I have combed, yanked, raked and torn out some twelve bags of fallen or dead debris.  It keeps coming, and that is its beauty.

What to Find at Point Reyes, CA

May 17


Spring and summer won't be the months to spot the once famous Marin County Coho Salmon making their way from open ocean to estuary and finally up the creek at Point Reyes – they are most likely to be seen in December and January – but what a show they must have once been.  Before widespread

commercial fishing and agriculture, the west coast used to virtually teem with these very dynamically critical 'anadromous' fish whose life cycle primarily consists of swimming and feeding in the open ocean, but that make their way back to freshwater annually to give birth.  "As they make their way upstream to spawn, females take on a bronze cast while male salmon turn dark red and develop an enlarged, hook-shaped upper jaw....Salmon reproduce only once in their lifetime; after salmon spawn, they die. Some live only 24 hours in freshwater; at most, they spawn 21 days after entering the stream."  This near mythical life affirming ritual by the fish would have been highly anticipated

by all and everything surrounding its arrival.  Grizzly bears, at a time in the past when they still lived here, certainly would have eyed the stark pink streaks swimming seemingly directly toward their own habitat; the Miwok Indians native to the coast here would have depended heavily on the fish stock; not to mention that once these fish predictably die at the end of their route, they serve as heavy natural fertilizer and sources of nitrogen for plants.  The story of the Coho, however, is primarily described in the past tense: nearly 94 percent of the Coho population has declined since the 1940's due to a variety of reasons.  The most verifiable problem for the Coho – and that which has turned its numbers to a threatened species – is the sharing of the shallow coastal waters with the needs of agriculture and its residual runoff and damming.  Naturally occurring southerly currents have also moved through a cycle of waning intensity and changed the dynamics of water levels at Point Reyes Seashore.  The visitor can still see the occasional Coho in the months mentioned above, especially Olema Creek

thanks to a newly determined rehabilitation project headed by the national parks service, some habitat restoration is being constructed and monitored. As the volunteers of such projects would point out, the first step to habitat restoration is first an understanding of the history of the species, a visitation would help, and a desire to curb practices of other resource users.

Nature Journal

May 15



The question often comes up...where to hike or walk or bike...and a similar answer usually comes in response, especially in early spring, bird season...why not along the Brices Prairie trail above the back waters of Black River, where, at any given moment, the visual landscape could fill Bluejay, Cardinal, Geese, Crane, Heron, Eagle.  The brightest little star, so often seen along the Midway banks of the naturally occurring (sometimes burned) prairie, where the brush and grasses have grown at just the right height and offer just the right, ready to peck and eat, seedbeds for little dashing American Goldfinch.

Goldfinch, male and female

Like any little superstar, these little ones shine beyond any course thicket that they may peck and hide behind, flitting about the sedge grass and swampy basswoods, seeking their seeds, flashing across the gravel trail like streaks so fast that the binoculars have a difficult time apprehending. Even as the surrounding bushes are still seeking full foliage, the Goldfinch, shining by the noon spring sunshine, is an invitation, we tend to hope, to the season to come.

On the Yahara A-Z

G.


One of the more fascinating parts of now living on the bottom side of a city bridge at Rutledge street is that we get to see who has most popular pizza delivery cars in town, as they continuously buzz by the house.  The little rooftop advertisement on the car signs give it away on this part of town – Glass Nickel Pizza, down a few blocks on

Atwood (a block or two from Gail Ambrosius Chocolates) is most certainly the place not only to get delivery from but as we see in pictures and passing by, also to walk to and hang out inside.

Glass Nickel is an old-school pizzeria, a place that was founded by a couple of guys who loved the neighborhood and loved making pizzas for the neighbors.  The area of the building at Atwood is one of the oldest in the city, not far from the old, and then famous, Hess Cooperage at nearby Schenks Corners.  The name of the pizzeria is a bit more elusive – not having anything to do with any significant symbolic feature of the east side of Madison, but instead Glass and Nickel are partial spellings of each of the owners last names.

What to Find at Point Reyes, CA

May 15

Located on the great Pacific flyway, Point Reyes National Seashore astonishingly holds the most diverse bird species counts of any other national park in the U.S.  Over 490 species of birds can be spotted here throughout the seasons, which translates to 54 % of all North American birds, a number that is larger than the totals of 40 other states!  Some birds are residents, some purposefully migrate

Great Horned Owl, Point Reyes

here or stop over but, interestingly, some land at the rugged shores of Point Reyes as accidental tourists, blown so robustly by the winds and pushed by ocean currents that the inborn navigational instincts of several birds are thrown off and birds that otherwise might choose another climate find themselves at Drakes Estero or at Abbots Lagoon where resident species such as Double-Crested

Abbots Lagoon

Cormorants, Snowy Plovers, Marsh Wrens, Bluebirds, Towhees, California Quail, Red-tailed Hawks and the Majestic Great Blue Heron

Great Blue Heron Abbots Lagoon

mingle with summer birds like Brown Pelicans, Caspian Terns and enormous Osprey.  Winter birds such as Merlins, Gulls, Sanderlings and even the Falcon

Peregrine Falcon

call Point Reyes home.  The sheer magnitude of the abundance of bird species here is dependent on the fact that where freshwater meets ocean water, in estuaries, salt marshes and mud flats, all forms of plant life thrive.  Marsh vegetation such as cord grass, pickleweed and salt grass can produce decomposed bacteria for fish which, in turn, serve as the food source for so many waterfowl.  The violent tides that push and pull from the vast Pacific inward toward the estuaries serve as a sort comb and filter to serve nutrients inward toward the animal life, then eventually sweep it back out in the churning current, creating a sort ready made smorgasbord of food.

What to Find at Point Reyes

May 11


Back in 1579, as Sir Francis Drake would have just finished sailing the Golden Hind along the western shore of the continent all the way up to Alaska then back south due to impassable ice, he would have settled into a bay at Point Reyes utterly teeming with wildlife.  There had been very good reason that the ancient Miwok people of

the Bay area had settled here and thrived – we might even say, happily as a civilization (compared to the Spanish and English conquerors who brought military domination, forced religion, and exploitation of resources) – because of the abundance.  Grizzly bears were then bountiful in this region, attracted to the open range unlike their counterpart the black bear, which likes the thicker forest.  Deer of

all sorts, bobcats and mountain lions, not to mention surfacing whales, clumps of beached seals,

and even the occasional southern roaming great white shark.  And although they may not have witnessed this, about 20 miles offshore from the Point Reyes Lighthouse lies an underwater island called Cordell Bank, which sits on the tip of a long granite peninsula.  The island, including some 526 square miles around it, has been since deemed a sea life sanctuary.  Extreme shipping frequency in the ocean and extreme habitat loss on land has transformed what was once one of the more prolifically abundant landscapes on earth to something that reveals only small parts of its former glory.

Nature Journal

May 8


The Black River is nearly currentless on a calm day – waves calm, windless, the sun then settles down on the legs as you float along on kayak.  The backwaters of the upper Mississippi River teeming Sandhill cranes, the red wings, and scattered mallards.  Because the water is high you can nose into the brush of otherwise elusive marshlands through broken timber and upturned stumps.  Every square foot, as you slowly glide across the surface, slow and easy strokes, a carp rolls below and leaves streaking ripples through the lily pads.  Turtle heads poke up to peak then dart down into the shallow duckweed just as quickly.  Yet of all of this, the truest grand finale is the giant raptors eagles dangling from the crusted old growth overlooking the backwaters.  The young, unlike the more visually obvious bold white head of the mature eagles, blend into the dreary May timber.  As we approached the underbrush of a water thicket, suddenly a shadow leaped and sprung from a dead branch above our heads.  The wing spread of even the two year old is as mammoth as anything we see in these parts of the upper Mississippi, as the flap is slow and body bulky across the open sky above.  We follow through a barely cut trail in the backwater reeds.  It lands.  We follow. We watch its bulk on the branch as it leaps again and circles back around us, only feet above, the king of the river sky.

What to Find at Point Reyes, CA

May 8


How the bay below the Point Reyes sea cliffs came to be called Drakes is a seemingly unlikely story.  The Spanish influence of the western American seaboard is a well known story – the Spanish had

Modern Drakes Bay

been exploring the south American continent as part of trade, plunder and religion for some time – but Sir Francis Drake, an English sea captain and privateer, was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth in 1577 to circumnavigate the globe and wherever possible harass the Spanish fleet and and settlements along the western edges of south and north america.  And so the great journey began in Plymouth England, scuttled along the northern African coast, across to Salvador South America, underneath Cape Horn and finally northward, toward the virtually unknown waters of Lima, Panama and stretching out, like a bow, the western U.S., finally landing at the San Francisco Bay area.

Stories vary, and historians dispute, but Francis Drake, in his renamed ship the Golden Hind, likely landed at what they called Nova Albion (New Britain) below modern Point Reyes seashore.  Drake's fleet had been decimated along the long and taxing journey and, in order to complete the last stretch of the trip west, the Golden Hind had to careen for repairs for six weeks in the naturally protective bay north of San

Golden Hind Replica

Francisco in order to carry-on.  "On September 26, Golden Hind sailed into Plymouth (England) with Drake and 59 remaining crew aboard, along with a rich cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasures.  The Queen's half-share of the cargo surpassed the rest of the crown's income for that entire year.  Drake was hailed as the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth."

As the visitor to Point Reyes will hopefully attest, as you walk around the abundance of the landscape, tour the wildflower trails, visit the descending steps to the lighthouse, and overlook the vast lush panorama of nearly old-world farms and ranches, it will be only a slight imaginative leap to picture some 425 years ago as an enormous, if embattled, ship of the sea landed, tipped itself purposefully radically sidewise for the sake of hull repairs and engaged the local tribes in trepidation.  It might not have been thoroughly understood by Drake's paltry crew, especially after such extreme hostility along the upper contours of South America, but the Coast Miwok natives

Artistic rendition of Drake's crew and Miwok at San Francisco area

indigenous to the area were an ancient and peaceful hunting and gathering tribe that sought no trouble with the white strangers but instead tended to approach with local offerings.  It would be this voyage that opened up the ocean routes to San Francisco for English speaking people.  San Francisco would become the epicenter of the merging Spanish and English cultures as we see to this day.