The San Geronimo Valley is a very special place, with a sublime beauty and aura -- and a history and personality all its own. It is a part of West Marin, but also the cultural and physical buffer between the West Marin coastal villages and the rest of the world. When residents of West Marin say that they are "going over the hill," they mean they are crossing through San Geronimo Valley and then over White's Hill into Fairfax and the beginnings of the rest of Marin.

Phil Arnot is definitely a part of the San Geronimo Valley. His life there mirrors the stories and changes in the Valley. For that reason, and because Phil is a very interesting human being in his own right, this month's interview is with Phil Arnot, remembering San Geronimo Valley, as well as his own life.


The interview took place on a Saturday afternoon at Phil's quiet cottage on a dead end gravel road in the hills of Lagunitas. His cottage has been there since the 1920s and has changed little. It has the patina of time and love of place. Even though the bathroom has been modernized, a computer added and a new wood fireplace keeps the place warm on a windy, cold day, the table we sat at was the original family table, around which the family congregated long ago. Photographs of Phil, his family and treasured wilderness scenes line the walls. Phil is a noted photographer and also an author of well-known wilderness guides. Fortunately for us all, he is also the owner of a terrific memory


Remembering the San Geronimo Valley
Every summer and Easter vacation, from the age of 2 to the age of 17, Phil Arnot and his family went to his grandmother's summer cottage in Lagunitas. There, his grandmother hosted the family. Mattie, his grandmother, had bought the property in 1926 for $4,000 and had the cabin built. She was a teacher and actually lived in Berkeley most of the year, but hosted her family at the Lagunitas cottage in summer.

In those days, the Valley was lightly populated, with most cottages and houses used only for the summer. The Lagunitas grocery was there even then, though ownership has changed many times over the years. The grocery store shared space with the post office, and the big sign that can still be seen on the side of the building, Lucas Valley Dairy Company, was fresh and new. The dairy delivered fresh milk to the residents. The milk had thick cream on top and you had the choice of either shaking it to mix the cream into the milk, or spooning off the cream for other uses. The dairy also delivered ice, because most people did not have refrigerators.

There was a telephone line in the Valley in the mid-30s, and Mattie's cottage was on a party line with most of the other cottages. She would crank up the phone and get the local operator, with whom she could chat a bit about local happenings before asking to be put through to someone somewhere. The prefix was Glenwood, although the actual 3-digit number has been forgotten.

As a 4 and 5 year old, Phil's mother would take him to Sausalito on the auto ferry from San Francisco. From there, with the conductor keeping an eye on him, he rode the train that meandered through Corte Madera, Larkspur and other villages, including Lansdale Station, to Fairfax. From there, the train used a trestle to get part way up White's Hill to the tunnel to the Valley. The Lagunitas station, no longer there, was across from the Lagunitas grocery.

The train was taken out of service in 1936 because the owners saw the handwriting on the wall - the Golden Gate Bridge was under construction, and they foresaw the coming ascendancy of the passenger car. Before that happened, however, Phil remembers the "gay blades and debutants" of San Francisco coming over on the ferry/train combination to live it up at the nightclubs along the train line. Nightclubs existed at Shafters (within the state park now), Jewel and Caesar's (the building off to the right in the trees, just as you now start to go up the hill from Tocaloma to Olema.) The train went on to Point Reyes Station, by going to the left, around the hill, following the creek.

In 1933, Phil's mom and dad were building a house in St. Francis Woods in San Francisco, so they sent Phil to live with his grandmother in Lagunitas for a semester at the Lagunitas school. He was enrolled in the third grade at the Lagunitas school, which was where the San Geronimo Valley Cultural Center is now. The offices were once schoolrooms, and the parking area was unpaved and little used. Sir Francis Drake Blvd was then a meandering road through the Valley, with little traffic or danger. Half the kids, he said, came to school barefoot. His grandmother took him hiking all over the hills of the Valley and further afield to Mt. Tam. He learned to love the outdoors.

I asked Phil about "community" back then and was surprised when he said there wasn't much "community" in those days because most people were only there for the summer. His grandmother occasionally played backgammon and cribbage with the other ladies there in the good-weather months of spring and summer. He also mentioned that house fires seemed to happen a lot back then, with little that could be done to contain them. Many a cottage was a burned out shell.

Phil recounted that the San Geronimo Valley was originally a Mexican land grant to a Don Rafael Cacho. Don Cacho sold the rancho lands to one person who sold it to the Lagunitas Land Development Company. One of the owners of the Valley, probably a Mr. Millard, had a "ranch house" in Woodacre, a 2-story white structure on Railroad Avenue. At the turn of the century (the last century, that is), the Lagunitas Land Development Company began cutting up the land and selling parcels, which is how Mattie got her cottage. Development increased in intensity as the years progressed, even to this day. It is actually pretty amazing that the Valley, so close to East Marin, has remained relatively free of suburbia. Although we must all be vigilant about much more development, Phil says.

In 1958, they built the golf course at the same time they finished "fixing" Sir Francis Drake to make it the straight line it is presently. There was an old ranch house still on the golf course until around the 1980s, when George Lucas bought it and transported it to his property on Lucas Valley Road.

In closing this chapter of the interview, I asked Phil how he saw the San Geronimo Valley now, in 2007. Was it a disappointment with more houses, more people, more traffic? Phil thought for a minute and then said that even though the Valley was more open then, he feels the Valley is still closer to the old times than to a suburbia. After all, he said, we were at that moment sitting in a cottage built in 1926, on a gravel road among deep tree cover, unable to see any neighbors. He said the biggest changes in the Valley have been the huge increase of fast traffic, especially on Sir Francis Drake Blvd (with hordes of bikers as well), and the change in vegetation. I asked him what he meant by that and he told me that "back then," the Valley had less infill of trees and shrubs. It was more open, probably due to a natural fire/recovery cycle, now suppressed. Fortunately, he doesn't see any of all this from Mattie's cottage on the hill.



Activism

Phil Arnot was a registered Republican from 1949 to 1954, when he changed affiliation to the Democratic party. Before that, he was a B-17 pilot in World War II, where he experienced aerial combat and saw first hand what fascism could do to people. During the post war period, he went to UC-Berkeley, working on a graduate thesis in Political Science. Ultimately, he chose to go into teaching, which was his mŽtier until his retirement. During his tenure as a teacher, he became an advocate for what he believed to be true:

"I started teaching as a moderate Republican in 1951, changed to a moderate democrat by the middle 50's, moved on to become a liberal democrat by 1965, and, with the Vietnam War acting as a kind of catalyst, became a moderate radical, if there is such a thing, by 1966. Today I am totally alienated from the United States government, whichever party is in power, and, with exceptions, from mid stream 'middle' America." (Quote from his autobiography/2001)

He told me that there had been an actual moment when he says his eyes were opened to see things in a new light. It happened in the summer of 1955. It was a book with the title, "The Struggle for Indochina" by Ellen Hammer. Along with his reading in the New Republic, and much more, he became an advocate in the classroom. His advocacy was sufficiently restrained and he always presented both sides to important issues. He tried hard to instill in his students the ability and desire to ask questions of those in power - something not found often or elsewhere in those days. His sister, Nancy, was an activist all her life, beginning with animal welfare and adding important public issues along the way. Phil always credits his sister with being a huge influence in his life.

In the latter part of his teaching career, he tackled the danger of nuclear war, both in the classroom and on the road. In the 1960s, he joined the first anti-nuclear march in Palo Alto. He began educating himself on the issue and became more and more involved in the movement to protest against the nuclear arms race.

Upon retirement in the 1980s, he devoted himself full bore (except when he was in the wilderness) to his advocacy. He joined Physicians for Social Responsibility as a speaker. Even though he wasn't a physician, he said, his father was one and he talked his way into the group. He remembers going out over 50 times during a two year period to speak to large and small audiences alike all over the Bay Area and beyond. Having heard him speak several times, I can imagine he was quite effective.

Along the line, he realized that the subject of imminent annihilation via out-of-control nuclear proliferation was a downer, depressing the average listener. I can see that. So he created a slide program, "Save the Earth," with beautiful images, and music, to counteract the depressing aspects. It worked! The slide program became an instant success!

Next, via a professor at UC-Davis, who was a close, life-long friend, he got involved in the sanctuary movement for refugees from Central America during the murderous Contra/Sandonista times in Nicaragua. He became part of the protection for the caravan of cars that took political refugees on the last step of their journey, from Davis to Canada. After that, it was a natural step to actually go to Nicaragua to work with Citizens for InterAmerican Cooperation. He found himself traveling in enemy territory to set up a fund-raising slide program for the organization.

I asked him if he was scared doing that and he honestly said yes, sometimes, but that he always told himself that he had survived WWII as a pilot over Germany and that if he ever came face to face with the same type of ethnic hatred as did the Jews then, he would act and not sit back. Acting and speaking out became an imperative.

It is still an imperative, but different, he said. He told me that he still advocates and tries to get others to act too, but that he has become somewhat "discouraged" since 9/11. He said that he sees that the average American can be divorced from what is happening around him or her, through consumerism or just plain laziness of thought. He said that he and his WWII friends friends had risked their lives over Germany to stop the very process he sees happening now in this country so easily. e cannot understand wh He cannot understand why people do not stand up in the streets en masse and say NO, ENOUGH. He told me that he had lived through the "worst" of the 20th Century horrors, but that the present casualness in the face of what he considers a creeping neo-fascism in our government is the scariest in his life. But he will keep on keeping on.


World War II and Paris

For Phil, Pearl Harbor changed everything. The Nazi's declared war three (3) days later. Phil was 18 in 1942, and the draft age was 20-21, which became an issue since so many young men wanted to sign up. Suddenly, the draft age was lowered to 18! Phil joined the Army Air Force on December 7, 1942, one year to the day after Pearl Harbor. He became a commissioned officer, a 2nd lieutenant at the age of 19 in 1944. He headed for Las Vegas, for training on the B-17 bomber, graduating successfully in June of 1944. Then (temporarily) Ardmore, Oklahoma, which he remembers mostly for a lovely young lady who happened to live there, who liked flyers. He remembered her name and more, but I am restraining myself from including all that in this interview.

Soon, he and his bomber crew were on a B-17 from Lincoln, Nebraska to Bangor, Maine to Goose Bay, Labrador, to Iceland, then to Wales (this was the era before jets, with lots of stops for fuel). Then a train to Bomber Base at Thurleigh, 8 miles outside Bedford, north of London.

He and his crew, in a formation of 12 B-17s were assigned to bomb "official" sites, not civilians, but, as he said, one never knows. As to thoughts about the right or wrong of the whole thing, he said that he just wanted to survive at that point, and thought of himself and his comrades while in the air. He was a co-pilot because of his age (20); the pilot was 25! But he ended up piloting anyway. He knew that the most dangerous things were anti-aircraft and the German fighters. So his squadron regularly tried to keep a tight formation, wings nearly overlapping, in order to foil the fighters, who didn't like going up against such formations, preferring "lost sheep" or loose formations in order to pick off individual bombers. The only thing one could not truly guard against, he said, was the anti-aircraft, which was a crap-shoot. A lucky hit could finish him off.

"The danger of it all is more real to me now than it was at age 20, because I had the confidence of youth," he told me. I asked him if he ever regretted killing someone with his bombs, and he said he never knew or wanted to know exactly who was under his barrage of bombs over Germany. His mind was on his life. "There's no such thing as a good war," the said. "But this was a justified war," he added. "We were up against the most predatory, imperialist, ruthless military power we have ever faced," he explained. I could not help myself from asking him to compare the dangers to the "War on Terror." He told me that some of the danger is real, but that our government is creating and increasing the danger by foolish and bogus actions. He said that the present "bad guys" don't have the same level of military might or danger against us as the Nazis. At least not for quite a while, but that our actions are doing their best to help them improve their chances!

I asked him what his most memorable remembrance of that time was and he answered without hesitation that it was VE Day (May 8, 1945) when he flew low over Paris, up the Champs-Elysees and low by the Arc-de-Triomphe with thousands of French waving and screaming and crying below in the densely-packed streets. Sounds like a movie, doesn't it? But he actually lived it, I thought with a smile. He has been back to Paris only once since.


Wilderness

The first time I met Phil Arnot, he was a wilderness guide in the Sierra Nevada. Not just any wilderness guide, but the best and most "out there" wilderness guide. That was in the late 80s, when I myself was into "out there" trips in the wilderness, backpack strapped to my body. He, of course, had been at it decades before me. He climbed, and he was careful. He was the best. No question. By the time he retired as a guide, he had lead at least 80 non-climbing 7-14 day backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada, Alaska and in South America mountain regions. For those of you who don't know about such trips, I can tell you that the weight of food for 14 days in a pack, with water and essentials, going up thousands of feet of elevation each day, means the whole group had better be in great shape, but that living, literally, in snow and ice can depend on your guide. He was good, even great.

He started at age 3 on Mt. Tam and in the San Geronimo Valley, hiking with his grandmother. He was always in great shape and is still in great shape even with rebuilt knees. He says, "my experiences as an individual and as a guide in wilderness areas have been the most joyful of my life -- and that's saying a lot."

Before he took on guiding backcountry, he was a climber starting back in 1946, after the war. He cleansed himself of the war by being in the wilderness. He did technical climbs with his brother, Sheldon, and other friends, of the east side of Whitney, the Clyde Minaret, the 19,995 Huyana Potesi in Peru, 20,320 Mt. McKinley, the North Palisade, the more difficult north side of Shasta multiple times, the southeast side of Banner, Rainier, Adams and Shuksan. And so on and on. Over and over. He is a real-life legend in the mountains.

I remember once taking a personal one-on-one trip with Phil for ten days in the Sierra Nevada in the month of October in the mid-90s, with the cold and snow on our heels. We started on the west side, went almost to the east side and then turned around on another high route. We built fires every night to stay warm, no matter the altitude. We saw one person the whole time and he seemed a bit crazy, saying he was living on air alone. As we exited finally, it started to snow behind us. One day, in mid trip, we came to a high cliff and he said there was a beautiful lake on top of the cliff. We had no ropes or equipment for that. He said, "I can get you up there to see it." I remember that day like it was yesterday. I agreed, yes, we should do it. I myself could not see how we could get up there, but he just knew. We climbed up (with day packs). It was beautiful. Getting down was another issue, but we did it and laughed as we did it.

There are hundreds of young people that had their lives changed from the 50s on by Phil when he took them on backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada. Many a city kid, seeing and experiencing the backcountry for the first time, redefined themselves and opened up their life potential. After retiring from teaching and leading trips with high school students, Phil led adult climbing and backpacking trips at Mt. Shasta, the Sierra Nevada, in Point Reyes National Seashore and Alaska, as well as spending as much time on his own in wilderness areas.

PhilArnot is the author of Exploring Point Reyes, Point Reyes: Secret Places and Magic Moments, The Mystique of the Wilderness, Yosemite: Secret Places and Magic Moments, and High Sierra - John Muir's Range of Light.