Drinking from the Well of Creativity
This post is 1111 words long
On my last Artist’s date I followed a Tesla down Divisadero around 7am on a Saturday, both of us headed over the Golden Gate Bridge. I don’t know where the Tesla was off to, but I was headed to a spot on the side of the road about a ¼ mile north of Stinson Beach. I saw it at least six months ago, when driving O to a birthday party in Bolinas. It was a pull out on the highway where, out of the corner of my eye, I could see people taking large blue containers out of their car and pushing them up against the side of a mountain rock. A fresh water spring, I assumed. A place I’d always wanted to visit and drink from.
When I was little we lived near a bay and across from it, about one mile from our house, was a little spring where people including us used to get their water. Then one day the spring was deemed a part of the private property of the owners of the land parcel above it and we stopped getting water there. My artist date; always going back to the closed off well of my childhood.
Time-lapse: When I was 25 I worked at the Hudson hotel as a cocktail waitress for about 6 weeks, which was about how long I had to work there to pay rent for the whole summer. This was not because of the hourly pay or even the tips but because of the price of the cocktails that were paid for occasionally with cash. At the end of the night let’s just say about five of our drinks were accidentally registered on the computer, and it seemed like we sold hundreds over the course of the evening, then that would mean we’d have about 100 more of cash in our hands for the night. Our black dresses. Those little black purses that hung out our hips. It was no problem for the manager to void out just a few. Then we’d go down to the village in a cab and drink vodka and tomato juice drinks for dinner at 2am. Am I making this sound too fun? I’ll just remind you and me about the smell of bar rot that we’d pretend was a new bit of information every time a high paying customer had the guts to bring it up when they ordered.
On one of these cab rides downtown with my fellow waitress who was a raw vegan and as wispy as a fern, revealed to me that she firmly believed in the Illuminati. Not just that there were a group of greedy elite capitalist evil doers that ran the world. No. It was also that they were actually not human forms but instead alien lizards. I still went with her one afternoon to eat a burrito with cheese made from cashews. It was a different kind of high.
I’m thinking of her as I’m driving to the cliffs over Stinson beach to check out the fresh water springs that flow from inside of rocks because, in the bit of research I did I found some comments about the well from visitors. The first few were positive and then someone said that the pipes that lead out of the rock were contaminated and that people shouldn’t gather water there. Someone else replied — claiming there were two sets of pipes, one that gathered water directly from the rocks and another that filtered rainwater from the ground to the ocean tide pool below. This person, named Chris, seemed to both know what he was talking about and also his website included mention of these creatures from whom our rights to fresh water had been stolen and capitalized upon. Not aliens or lizards but yes, the illuminati. Maybe it was that same cashew cheese high I was after, but his comment made me more likely, not less, to drive down highway 80 that morning.
I worried on my way there whether I’d know which pipe was which and also why I was so worried about contamination to begin with. When I arrived it was clear there was nothing at all to worry about. The spring was cared for. There were three copper spigots coming from the red rock, in a line, and underneath each was a little wooden stool, set up to hold whatever size jug you put under it. The water from the pipes hit the logs in a happy little stream. There was a small bridge to the rock and offerings of flowers and shells at the edge next to each faucet. Clearly the spring was tended to and the water was being used on the regular.
I watched from my car at first while a motorcyclist pulled over and washed his face at the rocks, wiping down his neck with his hands and then redoing his ponytail. He put his mouth to the stream and took a nice long drink. Then he got two water bottles from his backpack - one a plastic commercial water bottle and the other a proper metal storage one and filled them both up.
Watching this I felt both embarrassed for feeling worried but also embarrassed for being so excited about something as simple as a little fresh water spring.
A few moments later a woman in soft linen and comfortable crocks grabbed two large gardening buckets from the back and set them on each log.
“Every once in a while it gets contaminated- but you can see it’s clear. When it is, they put up a sign,” she told me when I chatted with her. In her case her electric had just gone out, which she said meant her water was also out, so she had come to the well because she needed to. But she confirmed that one person, likely Chris, cared for the spring and that just a couple years ago there was just one pipe in the rock. Below the road, she tipped, is a hot spring that gets dug out whenever there is a minus tide and the water bubbles up there.
The Yelp reviews of the hot spring she’s referring to are both grateful and not. There’s a literal hot spring you hike to during low tides where you soak under the stars, says a five star review. What’s there not to like? Someone disagrees, citing aggressive naked hippies who crowd the springs in the small windows of available time that the water can be soaked in at this location.
Did I drink the water? I did. It tasted like nothing which felt like a privilege.