3rd excerpt from "867-5309:the song that saved my ass for a while" this is about Muir Beach way back when and then some

During this period we moved to a house back in the woods near the entrance to Muir Beach. There was an old plywood camper shell up on blocks next to the creek. We covered it with plastic tarps and used it for a sweat-lodge. We built huge bonfires right in the dirt road and tossed on steel engine heads and fuel pumps, whatever was lying around from our perpetual automotive repair efforts. They’d get red-hot in the flames. We would crowd naked into the camper, our feet tucked up on the narrow side benches. Six fit in there, but it was tight. The last one in slid the glowing engine parts with a shovel onto a metal tray on the floor. We’d sprinkle water on them. The heat and humidity were stifling. Ciambotti would invariably fart loudly and laugh; everyone else went, fuck you! Cheezus H. Kee-rist! You tryin’ to gas us? We sweated and sweated. This was supposedly healthy. We needed it to cleanse our blood of the cheap wine we drank. When we’d had enough steam and fart gas, we’d crawl out and jump into the icy creek for a moment, then stand around naked and steaming in the bitter air. This wasn’t southern California. It was cold at the beach. The creek would flood periodically. One morning when the creek had broken its banks and spread all the way across the valley, Ciambotti was up early, salvaging guitars and other stuff floating around his room. He was wearing nothing but a pair of knee-high rubber boots.
I took a tool shed in back of the little house for my personal domicile. When I moved in I disturbed a large clan of fat, sleek rats who had been living with impunity under a rotting chest of drawers. They actually challenged me, rearing up on their hind legs and growling and hissing at me! But I had a broom. Out you go, rats! We also had skunks who would come into the house through holes in the old house’s walls and eat butter off the kitchen table. You gotta let skunks do their thing. They’re loaded. In my rat-liberated shed I made a bed and a desk using logs cut from the surrounding woods, an old door for under my Goodwill mattress, and driftwood from the beach. The shed didn’t have any insulation, but I got a little pot-bellied wood-burning stove from the surplus store. It made the shed cozy, if smoky. I ran an extension cord from the house for electricity. I loved that place. When you don’t have much, it doesn’t take much to feel like you have it all.

The government annexed Muir Beach in ’69 as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It was an inevitable move, and I suppose not really a bad one in the grander view of things. The GGNRA protects hundreds of thousands of acres of coastline and adjacent lands from wanton, unbridled development. If the coast wasn’t preserved, there would be a blanket of gazillion-dollar houses shrouding the steep hills of the shorelands of Marin and Sonoma as far as the Mercedes and Volvos could drive.
But it was the end of a brief, free era. The cabins were demolished, and the Tavern was, too. On New Year’s Eve, 1969, a local grizzled ex-biker (and small- time hood) set fire to the debris pile of redwood decking and knocked-down walls. It made a magnificent, symbolic bonfire. Nobody bothered to put it out. It was a cold, wet winter. By morning it was a smoldering ash pile, nothing standing except the stone footings and steps and a chimney to mark the great place where the rum-runners and hippies had had their days in the sun and nights in the fog. It had been the unlocked building of my childhood. In years to come the beach would still be a cool place; the last free-running dog beach on the coast, until that was ended as well by the Park Service and zealous, over-amped environmentalists. I would live there in the 90’s, on top of the hill above the beach in a very nice house with two Explorers and a Beamer in the driveway. Highway 1, the road where there used to be a car every once in a long while making its winding way around the hairpin turns above the three-hundred foot drop-offs, became bumper to bumper on weekends. By the time everybody finds something really cool, it’s gone. It’s strange, but it seems that finding it is what makes it go away.