preview

Setting For Treasure Island On The California Coast

Decent Essays

As I ease into the yellowish water, sandy running shoes around my neck and small dog wriggling under my arm, I become aware of a faint and unfamiliar sour musky odor. This better be worth it.
I expect it will be. One-time Sonoma County resident Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have developed the setting for Treasure Island on the California coast. For many of my generation and older, that is the tale that launched a thousand ships, pirate vessels all, in dreams of sudden and incalculable wealth. Decades later, any hope of sudden material wealth has slipped away like fog under a midmorning sun. But a greater wealth hinted at in the book remains, even if it is only attainable during the odd vacation week every year – the wealth of enriching experience and wonder.
Which brings me back to the Sonoma coast and Gualala Point Regional Park. The park is a County facility, and offers one of the shrinking number of public beaches where dogs are welcome. Provided they are on six-foot leashes, that is. Such a diminishment of the dog’s world is nothing compared to that of the snowy plover’s. The plover is a six-inch sandpiper, nearly invisible in its shoreline environment, whose very existence is uncertain due to development of California’s coast and trampling of beaches and dunes and cryptic eggs in the sand. A dog’s merry chase may seem harmless – no bird caught, ever – and yet still doom another chance for a tiny bird’s future.
So we were happy to be on the beach with our dogs,

Get Access