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!"