Seeking the Soul of Marin

Tim the Hot Tub Repairman, a bit disoriented, shifts into park and studies his map book. He is searching for an address in Novato, a middle-class burg about 25 miles north of San Francisco. He swings a U-turn and pulls up to a house that looks glum, its yard unkempt.

Your correspondent is tagging along in search of the Marin County of legend. Tracking a hot tub repairman seems a logical first step.

This stop, however, feels like a detour.

The unsmiling woman who answers the door may own a hot tub, but otherwise nothing here says Marin. There is no way this woman was ever a flower child or a yuppie, contrary species that somehow achieved harmonic convergence in this mythic place. She has a big-screen TV in the living room and a son named Bobby with an Eminem poster on his bedroom wall.

Bobby looks about the same age as a certain Marin lad who recently worked as a Taliban warrior. He leads Tim out back to the ailing spa while his mother considers a question.

Yeah, sure, she knows how outsiders see Marin.

“Hot tubs and peacock feathers and cocaine,” she snarls. “And we’re all rich.”

And so what do you think?

“Bull!”

If some Marinites seem touchy these days, Tim offers a defense. “They’re nice people, real nice,” he says of his clients. After Sept. 11, he adds, he saw Old Glory all over the Northern California county, more so than up in Santa Rosa, where he lives. That said, Marin will never be confused with Middle America, especially now that John Walker Lindh has added to its legend. Once the world learned that the “American Taliban” began his strange odyssey in Marin, notorious for its do-your-own-thing ethos, many people thought: “Aha, it figures.”

Lindh “was prepared for this seduction not just by the wispy relativism of Marin County,” Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “but also by a much broader post-’60s cultural liberalism that gave his every step toward treason a feel of authenticity and authority.” Steele described Marin as a place “where all the cliche obsessions of shallow California . . . flourish without irony.”

Allusions to Marin’s culpability, or lack thereof, have been a staple of many articles and commentaries concerning Lindh. The online journal Salon offered the headline: “Insta-Traitor: Just add hot-tub water and stir.” The razzing reached a presidential level when former President George Bush piled on, describing Lindh in an interview as “some misguided Marin County hot-tubber.”

But do these words reflect reality?

There’s no question that Marin is a touchy-feely, target-rich environment. Where else have nature, spirituality, wealth and politics blended in such a frothy organic frappe? Consider: Early this year, opponents of a Sausalito bond measure for a new police and fire station were victorious at the polls after citing faulty feng shui, among other things. (Traffic was another concern, but that’s not what made it a Marin story.) Or this: Marin’s hottest new restaurant is an elegantly appointed vegan place called Roxanne’s, with no ovens or grills and specializing in “raw food cuisine.” (With wine and tip, figure $100 for dinner for two; reservations are strongly recommended.)

Romantics see in Marin a storybook enchantment, blessed by the eternal. Rising between ocean and bay, it’s an emerald terrain of mountain and valley, forest and meadow, kissed by a cool, wafting mist. The standard threshold to this realm is the Golden Gate Bridge, in all its grace and glory. Your correspondent opted for the side door, arriving via the utilitarian Richmond-San Rafael Bridge on a showery morning-and was greeted by sudden shafts of sunlight and a rainbow.

The land’s beauty has always cried out for protection and attracted free spirits who have delighted in sensual pleasures and embraced a back-to-nature lifestyle. And so it was in the 1960s that Marin gave birth to a custom in which celebrants shed clothing and soak together in steamy water in redwood tubs.

The overheated, touchy-feely lifestyle was served up in Cyra McFadden’s “The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County,” the bestselling 1977 novel that introduced the region’s mystical yet materialistic manners to the American public. McFadden’s deadpan parody delighted readers when it first appeared in installments in Marin’s weekly Pacific Sun. If not recognizing themselves, they certainly recognized neighbors.

Marin was not delighted, however, when NBC aired a documentary in 1978 titled “I Want It All Now,” which, as Pacific Sun publisher Steve McNamara later described it, “made it appear that Marin was largely populated by loathsome brats of all ages who lounged in hot tubs and stroked each other with peacock feathers.”

The Sun did an expose on the expose, branding it a “docudrama” with staged scenes. A media watchdog group censured the show as “journalistically flawed at essential points,” but Marin’s legend was secured.

For the record, former President Bush apologized for his swipe at Marin-after the daily Marin Independent Journal published readers’ reactions. But for some locals, what Bush the elder said mattered less than how he said it. “He called it MARE-in,” says Bob Canepa, president of Mill Valley Market, a family-owned Marin institution abounding in gourmet and organic specialties. Canepa, a Republican, sighs as he explains how Marin’s reputation for self-indulgent flakiness was just starting to fade. A Marinite his whole life, Canepa also served in the Marine Corps and was president of the local Rotary Club and a Cub Scout cubmaster. The market sponsors Little League teams.

And what’s so bad about hot tubs, anyway?

“I have a hot tub,” Canepa says. “I use it for my back. I have a bad back from years of lifting groceries.” Cartoonist Phil Frank of the San Francisco Chronicle reacted to the former president’s crack by dispatching him on a recon mission into “the alien landscape of Hottubistan,” where he meets a contact named Pilates.

“What do you want to know about?” Pilates asks. “Crystal healers, aromatherapy, channelers, inner-child rebirthing? You name it.”

It’s striking how Marin, statistically, lives up to its stereotype: white, wealthy, well-educated and liberal. According to the 2000 census, the county’s population is 247,289, mostly concentrated in 11 towns. Much of the county’s 520 square miles is shielded from development, as parkland or agricultural preserve. For all of the dramatic demographic changes that America and California have undergone since the 1960s, Marin has grown slowly and changed little. It is the richest of California’s 58 counties, with a per capita income of nearly $58,000. The average price of Marin homes sold in May was $944,000.

The slow pace of change means that Marin has more gray hairs per capita, with a median age of 41.3 years, compared to 33.3 statewide. As for politics, the county that launched liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer gave the current President Bush 28.6% of its vote, compared to 64.7% for Al Gore and a relatively hearty 6.7% for the Green Party’s Ralph Nader.

The census doesn’t count spas, but Tim the Hot Tub Repairman is not hurting for business. His morning appointments complete, we return to the San Rafael showroom of California Cooperage. A few customers meander about, inspecting sleek Coleman acrylic tubs with bucket seats and whirlpool jets. California Cooperage used to make only redwood tubs, says owner Theresa Bonagofski, but that changed with the times and new technology.

She explains that the company’s founders launched the business in the early 1970s by placing an ad in Playboy that attracted steady orders. Hot tubbing was sexy. When she bought the business 16 years ago, “it was still the party thing to do. You’d put in a hot tub and throw a party, and you’d be the No. 1 guy on the block.” But nowadays, she says, people just want to relax and relieve stress-one reason there are now hot tub outlets in Middle America.

Inside the spa showroom, two Marin hot-tubbers-an elderly woman and her middle-aged son-sniff aromatherapy samples. They select the Being collection with four fragrances: Awaken, Release, Enlighten and Reflect. The son shrugs: “It helps mask the smell of the chlorine.”

This doesn’t seem the right Marin either. Your correspondent, frustrated, heads for the library in search of clues.

The library is located at the Marin County Civic Center, an earth-toned complex lounging amid the rolling terrain of San Rafael. This proves a revelation in itself. A historic marker explains that it was one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s last commissions; the great architect said his plan was for the structures “to melt into the sunburnt hills.”

Today it seems that Marin could have embraced no one but Wright, the champion of “organic architecture.” But the 1961 groundbreaking was a political turning point, old-timers say, a triumph of progressives against an old guard that figured there was no reason to spend taxpayers’ money on a fancy out-of-town architect for something as mundane as government offices.

Inside the library, Marin’s heritage unfolds. While San Francisco boomed, Marin’s terrain shielded it from development. California’s dairy industry started in Point Reyes. Cattle were ranched and loggers took to the forest. A fishing village took shape in Sausalito and market towns served the farm economy. But even in the 19th century, Marin’s beauty cried out for preservation. After the turn of the century, when loggers and later a dam threatened a canyon of old-growth redwoods, Republican Congressman William Kent bought the property and donated some of the land to the federal government. Shortly after, President Theodore Roosevelt declared it a national monument, thereby creating Muir Woods National Monument. When the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, the continuing Depression and then World War II tempered growth. The postwar housing boom touched Marin but also energized slow-growth sentiment. By the mid-1960s, high demand for Marin real estate and low supply helped turn the county into a province for the prosperous-and ripe for satire.

The librarian points out a recent article in the Pacific Sun concerning Bobos, or “Bourgeois Bohemians.” Conservative pundit David Brooks coined the term for his 2000 book “Bobos in Paradise,” describing the emerging social elite that reconciled the countercultural ideals of the 1960s with the capitalistic strivers of the 1980s. In their hybrid culture, the book jacket suggests, Bobos consider “spending $15,000 on a media center vulgar, but spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign you are at one with the Zen-like rhythms of nature.”

So maybe Marin is a time warp where the America of the ‘60s and the America of the ‘80s smacked together in the ‘70s. Maybe Marin is the petri dish where the first strain of Bobos was created, rising like steam from a hot tub. But if that’s the case, if Bobos are taking over, whatever happened to the bona fide bohemians?

Surveying a month’s worth of Marin Independent Journals, your correspondent’s eyes settle on this headline: “Original Tubber calls Bush ‘Misinformed.’ ”

Up a snaking road from the town of Fairfax, then through a gate and down a short path, is an 80-year-old shingled home where hot-tubbing originals Al and Barbara Garvey have lived since 1966. Off to the side, under the branches of a tall pine, is a dilapidated structure of rotting redwood with a broken ladder leading to a decomposing 4-foot diameter tub that has been dormant for a decade. There is no historic marker, but the best intelligence suggests that this was the Eden of Marin hot tubbing.

“Our record was 17 people-15 adults and our two daughters,” Al says proudly, blue eyes merry. It looked like “a sea anemone,” he says, the way people leaned back to make room. “And when we got out, there was no water in the tub, no water at all.”

At 70, Al is a beatnik artist best known for carving distinctive doorways. On this day he is wearing the overalls of a locomotive engineer. Barbara, who is 67, carries herself with the practiced grace of a dancer. About the time they retired the hot tub, the Garveys took up the tango, which is why the hardwood floor of the living room is empty of furniture.

Eisenhower was president when the Garveys met while playing folk guitar in Chicago. They arrived in Marin the day John F. Kennedy was elected to the Oval Office. At first they rented a cheap cottage in Sausalito and then lived on a houseboat that Al devised by moving an old Navy building (purchased as scrap for $10) onto a barge. They later sold it and lived in Majorca, Spain, for a few years before returning to Marin.

The Garveys initially thought of their hot tub as a Japanese bath, like the one they had enjoyed with friends in Marin’s Stinson Beach. Those friends, however, invited only married couples into their tubs. That wasn’t the Garveys’ style. Bring your friends, they would say. Over the years, hundreds went into their barrel. Leaving one’s underwear on was a breach of etiquette. “We didn’t have many square friends,” Barbara says. “And I have to say, there were people of all sizes and shapes, and everybody without exception was beautiful without their clothes on.” Soon friends commissioned Al to create tub “environments” for them. Woodworker Ed Stiles came to the Garveys’ parties and built a few spas as well. It became a kind of native Marin art form, and so were the parties.

The Garveys can’t speak for others, but they say their parties were, all in all, rather innocent. “Oh, there was a certain amount of grass smoked,” Barbara allows. “But there was no free love or orgies going on. Not here, not ever.”

Some might suggest that the Garveys were co-conspirators in the creation of modern Marin, and thus the corruption of wholesome American values that led a young man so astray that he wound up as a traitor fighting for the Taliban. But how can that be, Al responds, when Marin celebrates the personal freedoms that the Taliban would suppress? If John Walker Lindh was rebelling against Marin values, is that really Marin’s fault? Isn’t that like blaming America for Sept. 11? Still, the Garveys agree that Marin is a funny place. “There are a lot of people with weird ideas,” Barbara says. “A friend of mine says, ‘Marin is where the young matron drives her Mercedes to the iridologist to find out if she has breast cancer.’ ” Barbara suspects a licensed physician would be more appropriate than someone who makes diagnoses by looking at an eye’s iris. “There are a lot of people with more money and more time on their hands than they know what to do with.”

The Garveys, however, aren’t among them. Their daughters long ago grew to be yuppies with children of their own, and now Al is ready to retire. The problem is, the Garveys say they can’t get by in Marin on Social Security alone. They bought their funky 3,000-square-foot home for $30,000, and who knows what it would fetch now-$800,000? Whatever the price, the Garveys aren’t selling. They figure the rental income will allow them to drive around Mexico in their camper and maybe settle in Puerto Vallarta.

“We like beautiful places,” Barbara says. Wherever they go, they’ll tango.

*

Scott Harris last wrote for the magazine about the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group.