Coastal meandering

Marin County’s wild sea and tall trees, cattle ranches and oyster beds

July 19, 2009|Jonathan Levitt, Globe Correspondent

SAUSALITO, Calif. - I’m driving through fog, heading north across the Golden Gate Bridge, toward the Shangri-La lushness that is Marin County. The Golden Gate - the strait below me where San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific Ocean - was called that long before there was a bridge. In the fog there is barely a bridge.

Traveling around the country, asking people about their favorite places, and about their most beautiful places, I heard again and again about the rolling ranchland and wild beaches of west Marin County. Here, the almost 70,000 acres of windswept wildness at Point Reyes National Seashore coexist with cattle ranches, dairy farms, and small organic market gardens. It makes for a balance that attracts tourists content to enjoy the seashore, hike in the hills, and eat good food. Chain stores and rowdy revelers are nowhere in sight.

East Coasters tend to idealize the charms of San Francisco. It’s like New York but the rosemary plants last all year, they’ll say, or, it’s like Boston, but with moody fog and mild winters and all those steep streets.

The city on the bay has all those things, but it’s also crowded and touristy. So it is a relief to cross the bridge and be immediately surrounded by the peace of Marin. On my way north to Seattle I took a short ramble through the area.

Sausalito, within sight of the bridge, was once a fishing village, a hideout for rum runners, an industrial shipyard, and a groovy summer-of-love houseboat community. The houseboats are still here, but these days a tiny one sells for almost half a million dollars and rents for a couple of thousand a month.

Fish, a year-old boutique clam shack right off the docks on the harbor, has a mission to serve only sustainable seafood. I order fish and chips: wild Alaskan halibut battered with locally brewed Anchor Steam beer. It’s $22, a lot for a fried lunch, but everything is perfect and it’s nice to sit in the sun and smell the bay.

Thus fortified, I head into the wilds of West Marin. My first stop is Muir Woods, 559 acres of protected land including a couple of hundred acres of old-growth coast redwood trees right off the highway and only minutes from Sausalito. In the cool fog it looks like heaven but smells like perfume from the busloads of tourists brought to gawk at the trees.