Tomales Bay in California: excellent camping
Early trailer adventures, continued
The next time we took the trailer out, we went to the coast. Applying the lesson we’d learned the hard way at Burney, we checked the weather beforehand. The report called for sunny and in the fifties and sixties which was easier to plan for. We packed accordingly and took the Casita to a place we’d scouted on one of our drives: Lawson’s Landing in Dillon Beach, California.
Dillon Beach is a very long half-moon marked by the mouth of long, narrow Tomales Bay at one end, which reaches inland for miles. Dunes ebbed and flowed from the bay’s opening to bluffs where a small town of the same name was scattered over the slope like a handful of tossed dice.
Our campsite was right on the water. Mike backed the trailer up to the break wall, and sitting in the bed I could look out the back window of the Casita directly into the still, briny green expanse of Tomales Bay at high tide.
The site was in full sun, and it was a bright day when we arrived, so I immediately slathered on lotion and put on a hat. We extended the built-in shade awning off of the trailer, a new experience for us that immediately yielded a small patch of shade accompanied by the sound of the laminated canvas flapping in the wind.
Our dog promptly rolled in the sand nearby and assumed the powdery beige of the dunes, where hardy grass grew in patches like a teenager’s beard. Seagulls perched on the break wall nearby, eyeing us for edibles, their beaks sharp as scissors and their rapacious eyes even more so.
Lawson’s Landing is a big campground and RV park with hundreds of sites that has been in operation since the nineteen-fifties, and it was crowded on a weekend. Mike went crabbing off the dock, returning to roots he remembered from growing up in this area and living only a few hours away forty years ago.
Taking a walk through the area, I was struck by the way people advertised their alliances via flags, logos, bumper stickers, and other means.
A margarita flag with ITS FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE snapped in the breeze; a blue banner urged COEXIST, and the back of one of the trucks was set up with two flagpoles on the bed: a red confederate flag decorated with a snake and Don’t Tread on Me, and an upside-down American flag.
I walked an extra a distance from that campsite and the truck’s owner in his Keep Calm and Carry Concealed muscle shirt.
I continued on, meandering out of the RV parking area in spite of evidence of loose cows, one of my few phobias. Cow patties liberally sprinkled the sandy path, and hoof marks tracked the edge of the bay, a silty expense littered with sand dollars and clamshells, pockmarked with the mysterious breathing holes of mollusks.
A little boy ran up to me, asking to pet my dog who was an attention getter with his soft fuzzy coat and pop-eyed grin. The kid showed me the bucket of sand dollars he had picked up, and I told him how much our kids would have enjoyed doing what he was doing, at his age, with a genuine pang.
They would ‘ve loved it here, roaming the flats with pails and shovels. Those years are gone, never to return—something that seemed impossible when I was living through those turbulent, busy years.
The boy had two more brothers who ran over to chat, and I told them that clams are hiding where those holes were, and that my husband and I are going to be trying to catch some later.
The boys’ mother, a wispy woman in a parka whose pockets were filled with snacks, approached us.
“Great kids. You’re so lucky.” When my kids were their age, I might not have thought so, overwhelmed as I was at the time. Knowing what I know now, I envied her riches. “This is the perfect place for them, they can run amok all day and go to bed tired.”
She smiled. “That's exactly why we’re down here almost every weekend.”
I waved goodbye to my new friends and continued on, enjoying the proliferation of California wildflowers: orange poppies, purple and yellow lupine, white yarrow-- edging the bay. The unfamiliar calls of tiny birds in the bunchy grass and the soft quiet lap of the receding tide made its own music. The light had a quality to it like gold dust filling the air, and the sky above was Madonna blue.
If not in Hawaii, I was still on a pretty darn good beach.
I passed two teens, talking animated animatedly, carrying bright plastic snow sleds and headed my way from a huge sand dune. They fell self-consciously silent as I approached.
“Were you sliding down the dunes on those?” I asked in delight.
One of the boys ducked his head in embarrassment. “Yes.”
“That sound sounds amazing. I wish I had a sled to try that.”
He slanted me a glance that was halfway an incredulous eye roll, probably picturing me attempting such a thing. I grinned right back. I’d try dune sledding in a heartbeat!
But how well I remembered their age, caught between the impulse to play like a kid, and the need to seem cool and mature.
Further on, I came across an abandoned short metal shovel used for clamming. I picked up the shovel and, on my way back to our parking spot, ended up meeting the mother with her busy brood.
She'd produced another child, a tiny girl of two or so, who was in no hurry to chase after her brothers. Instead the tot paused to inspect everything along the way, her mother patiently keeping pace with her. The boys ran far ahead, heading for the pier with fishing poles and crab nets draped around their bodies.
I like a mom who lets her kids be independent, staying near enough to prevent total disaster but far enough away to allow a full range of exploration. “I found this shovel on the beach. Do you think the boys would like it for clamming?”
“Definitely. Thanks.” She took the shovel, but the toddler walked up and pried it from her hands, promptly turning to dig in the hard, sandy road.
“You've got an independent one on your hands.”
“They all are,” she said.
That may be true to a degree, but her style of parenting lent itself to increasing that trait. As a child therapist, I always encouraged my clients to intervene in their kids’ play only when preventing harm was involved, to let children gain the skills they need for life in freedom and safety through experimentation and play. But that's not the fashion these days. Many hover over their children or give them screens until they’re unable to entertain themselves on their own, a trend whose repercussions will be shown in the decades ahead.
Later, Mike and I went clamming when the tide was fully out, paddling our cheap new Walmart kayaks (already modified by Mike to include paddle holders, pole holders, tie up brackets, anchors and floats) all the way out to a huge sandbar in the middle of Tomales Bay that was revealed by the receding tide.
The Bay’s water was the pale green of an appletini and teased by the tiniest of breezes, just enough to keep me cool. The long, sheltering arms of Point Reyes National Seashore reminded me of a green velvet couch we used to have back in the nineties, but this one was draped with feather boas of incoming fog and trimmed in lacy evergreens.
“What kind of clams are we looking for?” I panted, unused to the paddling but remembering the rhythm of it from our trip to Alaska and a memorable paddle in the ocean off of Glacier Bay National Park.
“Basically anything we can find,” he said. “There are horse neck clams and geoducks out here. Good eating. I'll make a cioppino with them and the crabs I caught today.”
Mike’s homemade cioppino is a family legend, his grandfather’s recipe passed down. My mouth watered at the mere idea, and being able to make it with crabs and clams caught just today would be amazing.
We grounded in shallow sandy water and climbed out of the kayaks. Mike removed the clam gun from his kayak. “We used to make these out of old fire hydrants with the bottoms cut off,” Mike said holding aloft the heavy metal tube with its built-in crossbar at the top. “Now these are cheap at any sporting goods store.”
We stayed out there longer than our bodies were really ready for, lured by the bubble and jet of hidden clams under the surface, the frenzy of working the clam gun over the anticipated spot, the workout of pulling the plug of sand and possible clam out up from the silty bank, and then plunging an arm into the hole to try to capture the frantically digging clam before it could get away.
Clamming is kind of like a treasure hunt for edible gold coins that can swim through sand.
By the time we called it quits, I was trembling all over, covered with sweat and silty mud, and wishing I’d taken that kettle bell workout class offered at the gym on Maui—because the action of pulling up the clam gun is pretty much like a dead lift.
The tide turned and we're still a long way off from our campsite against the freshening wind and tide, so we decided to walk the kayaks back along the edge of the bay. Mike, with his usual MacGyver-ish inventiveness, tied the two kayaks together with rope and slung them around his waist, walking them along the edge where they could float. I followed and pretended to be cross country skiing, pushing through ankle deep water in my rubber boots and herding the kayaks back into line when they grounded,
Needless to say, the nap we took on our cozy bed in the Casita had a quality of exhaustion like being clubbed on the head.
But later, the pot of cioppino Mike made for the two of us on our tiny stove? Sublime.
All in all, this camping trip was a definite improvement over the last one. We were getting better—or maybe we were just more at home by the sea.
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Have you experienced the variety of characters to be met when camping?