My first morning as a writer in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, a few springs ago, I followed a short, steep dirt track behind the old military building that was my new temporary home. The path was edged by grasses still green, and poison oak still green, and flowering yarrow, and tangles of empty blackberry brambles. Pale eucalyptus like very tall, very slim ghosts stood around in the fog. To the west, a wedge of blue and gray ocean between hills and sky.
The path—it is actually a section of the Coastal Trail—winds northwest behind the Headlands Center, past the brackish lagoon and its white herons, across Rodeo Beach and into the headlands. If you follow it, you can stride atop columns of radiolarian chert, layers of settled silica skeletons of tiny marine plankton folded beneath the weight of sandstone, shale, and basalt, shifted upward over millennia through the slow sliding of plates along the San Andreas Fault. The Gulf of the Farallones stretches westward into the Pacific. From there, words that convey an uncontainable scope come to mind: an expanse, a reach, a spread of ocean.
I think about my time at the headlands frequently these days. I am buffeted by the news, political upheaval, fear. I miss the quiet space, the time to write. To buy groceries each week, I rode my bicycle up Bunker Road, out of green solitude into Sausalito. Returning to the headlands through the Baker-Barry Tunnel, a stack of cars waiting to leave or enter, one direction at a time, I left the world behind. In its absence, that month I lived at the headlands, I talked to great horned owls. I wrote thousands of words. I woke in the morning to sparrow song, joy.
The seclusion of the headlands compound was not established with artists, or their joy, in mind. The old violence of tectonic upheaval made a natural vantage point from which to survey the open threat of the ocean. The Baker-Barry Tunnel was not built in 1915 to throttle traffic, or keep the place for coots and coyotes, but to transport enormous guns to Fort Barry. The batteries are still there. Anyone who has walked or hiked the headlands has seen them. They are cement, tunneled into the hills. Heavy-walled and metal-gated storehouses for guns and ammunition that were constructed as the early-20th-century United States contemplated the annihilation of a world order, they are also weirdly organic: the curved roof of Battery Townsley’s concrete gun emplacement, green and red rust-streaked walls, melt into the land. A rectangular doorway cuts into a sloped earthen berm, its walls angled with the hillside. The batteries were meant to be invisible from afar, to blend into the landscape, an amplification of its natural features. Almost a century after their construction, they are the natural features. It should be disorienting to come across these massive structures that held massive destructive potential. But it is not.
The shape of land becomes the shape of nations. With enough removal from the violent force this always entails, a nation becomes, again, just land. But if you look closely, you can see the indelible plans of state-making. They are fundamental to this place, structural.
To live in this country, in the world, is to live in the ebb and flow of violence. There is no place that won’t be touched by conflict, at some point in time. The grass was still green when my residency at the headlands ended. Fog on the ridge, eucalyptus standing around. I lived there, and hike there still, during a time in which it is a protected—not a defensive—place. Where poets and writers and hikers and surfers and shorebirds and hummingbirds gather and converse. The bunkers and batteries are still there, I mean, but so is their future. There is so much joy in knowing that time passes. That tunnels may someday lead only into space. Not empty, full of birds.
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