Letter from San Francisco

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Dear Leelanau,

The first time I visited the California coast was in 1920. I know, you’re thinking, Wow, I never knew Kathleen was that old. So, let me explain.

My father gave me a book for my 10th birthday called, Keeper of the Bees, by Gene Stratton-Porter. The story is set on the California coast of the 1920s where a First World War soldier is in a veterans’ hospital. Told he’s going to be moved to a rehabilitation center, one rumored to be infested with tuberculosis, he leaves the hospital, thinking that if he’s going to die he wants to be surrounded by flowers and the sound of the ocean.

Living on Sleeping Bear Bay it wasn’t hard to imagine the Pacific. The sound of Lake Michigan pounding the shore and the fragrant hoary puccoon and cries of the seagulls are not that different.

Gene Stratton-Porter had a gift for capturing the way a delicious tomato, hot from the vine, can engender healing; how the hum of the bees in the hives can be soothing at the deepest level of one’s being; and how taking care of something — in this case, bees — can bring back the desire to live that war may have damaged.

The next time I visited California was in the late 1960s when I went to see some friends. We crossed the majestic Golden Gate Bridge at midnight, all lit up like a magical harp, and drove out to Muir Beach. California was the Otis Redding song, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” the Woody Guthrie song, “California’s a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in and see …” and, the classic, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

For years in my Michigan kitchen, I had a tea tin where I kept the crayons used by my growing children. The tea tin had a Maxfield Parish print on it and the words, “California Dreaming”. My two oldest children, perhaps influenced by subliminal messages, found their way to the Bay Area and established themselves.

After my last child left home for Connecticut in 1999, I accepted an invitation from the William James Foundation in Palo Alto to be a member of their Artists in the Prisons program. My room was in a 1950s-era motel on the edge of the Pacific. I slept on an air mattress on a concrete slab, lulled to sleep by the reassuring thrum of the ocean.

One night, after driving up Highway 101 from Soledad under a full moon, much of it along a coast awash in the scent of wild fennel, I finally wended my way down to my room, in past the calla lilies and night blooming jasmine, falling instantly asleep, only to awaken in the morning and see that all of my neighbors had piled their belongings up in the parking lot. They told me we had just missed a full moon tide that could have floated me and my air mattress right over to Japan.

There was an ocean lagoon near my room and I used to walk around it in the mornings to see the river otters. Otters have big, beautiful, brown, soulful eyes and are quite tame. They like to eat lying on their backs in the water, cracking open clams or crabs and nibbling as they float. California and Michigan both became states relatively late, Michigan in 1837 and California in 1848, and there are still places in both states where it can feel suddenly almost like a wilderness and that’s what that lagoon was like in the early morning. One morning there was a giant whale, the size of a bus, washed up on the beach.

I liked the drive down to Soledad on Highway 101, the old Spanish Camino Real, the Royal Highway. This was when I would plan how to engage my students. I had a litany of things to encourage them. I told them that the pen was mightier than the sword; that America was like a dysfunctional family and they were the like the child who was “acting out” but might the sanest one in the room when the family went in for counseling; that anger and lack of awareness and bad luck had brought them to where they were but that with the power of writing they could transcend the walls, could transcend time.

Many of my students had done bad things, but I believed there was a place of true human goodness in each one and knew that we could build on that. I was open about this. I knew I sounded like a missionary but I didn’t care. I knew I was being monitored and didn’t care about that either. There was no place in the prison that there weren’t cameras, sometimes visible, often not.

The students wanted to know about my life and at first I was afraid of this but eventually I simply lied about the specifics — my address, my children’s names — and told the truth about the river otters and the tea canister. That’s what they wanted, the sense of normal life. I told them about my father’s love for roses. You might think this is boring, but they didn’t.

I praised my students often and honestly for the work they did. Sometimes the work was wonderful but even when it wasn’t it was wonderful that they did it. I gave them the gift of my attention. I found books suited to each individual, books the libraries were giving away and old Sunday New York Times. My students began to produce writing that was better every time I saw them. “You have time for thought,” I told them, “Not everyone has that.”

The El Camino sometimes went along the coast, going up the hills through the fog and the redwoods and sometimes went out into the Salinas Valley along fields of artichokes. In the early dawn I would arrive at the Soledad McDonalds for coffee and an egg McMuffin. One foggy morning there were several buses in the lot. It was a minute or two before I saw the armed guards come in and realized the busses were full of prisoners chained to each other.

That morning at the prison they wouldn’t let me bring in my teaching materials. They made me take the free books for the prisoners and the Sunday New York Times back to my car. My supervisor blew up at another artist for being late, a nice man who was not late. I decided not to have lunch with my supervisor, as I usually did, telling him I’d forgotten my coat at McDonalds and had to go get it. This was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth.

On the drive home that night I thought about the smell in the prison that day, sort of like a smell from toilets, but not exactly. It was more like the smell of copper pennies or a child with a fever. I thought that maybe the salty fog was working on the stone and metal of the building.

That night I emailed my supervisor and told him I would not be returning to work. He begged me to change my mind but I lied and said that something had come up, back in Michigan, and I needed to go home.

A few days later I learned there had been a riot in Soledad. The busses had been moving prisoners thought to be troublemakers. The reason I couldn’t take in my teaching materials was that prisoners could use them as body armor to protect themselves from beatings by the guards. The copper penny smell had been the smell of fear.

I was packing to go back to Michigan when I got a call from the San Francisco Jail’s Resolve to Stop the Violence Program (RSVP), asking if I’d be interested in working there and also with homeless children in a Saturday program in Richmond. The next 10 months were some of the best teaching of my life. So many of the students — all ages, all walks of life, all colors, all nationalities, all backgrounds — were able to become happier and more hopeful. Self-expression is about self-empowerment and doing it in a group, where there’s acceptance and encouragement, gives people stronger spirits.

The children had their work displayed in Kaiser Hospital and the RSVP students read their work in a final ceremony which was aired on National Public Radio. A few days later I visited the river otters, maybe for the last time, and my beloved children, not for the last time, and drove back across the country.

Did I leave my heart in San Francisco? Pieces of it. But that’s a good thing. Like the keeper of the bees in the story from my childhood, I had lost myself in the work of taking care of something else and learned that a good place is not about the place, but about how one lives in the place.

Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). Her letters from Romania, London, Istanbul and Amsterdam have appeared earlier this year in the Glen Arbor Sun.