Ode to the Vallejo, 2001
by Heide Foley

I moved aboard the Vallejo in 1997. I thought it was novel and groovy, something to remind one of the forgotten past. Others wanted to own it. I thought owning it would be like owning melancholy -once greatness, once potential, now muddied, pimpled, old. To own it would be to save it. To save it would be to change it. I loved it, but loved it dying. A broken feryboat over 100 years old.

But I have found that this boat is special. Full of love.

Under her weather beaten wooden boards she is strong. Records show an indisputably industrious career ferrying. Imagine SF before the Golden Gate Bridge. This ferryboat moved people in tophats and parosals, horses, buggies and carriages.

Indespensible during the war years to get folks to the factories - the six minute ferry.

The Vallejo is a tribute to the Turn of the Centry. She is a product of the industrial age, yet replaced by it as ferries became obselete when technological breakthroughs enabled major suspension bridges.

Moored in 1949 she was reinvented as a live aboard. Springing from a drifter's world of outcasts and waywards and those on the edge of society, the Vallejo is an irreplacable shrine to the 'houseboat community' of Sausalito. Her community was bonded by necessity. By the need to work things out in one's own way. A place for those to go who had no where else.

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg hung out here. Alan Watts owned it. Timothy Leary and the famous SF Oracle magazine held events here in the Summer of Love. It is an historical landmark in the path of the non-mainstream thinkers who still influenced the political/social/religous/literary world.

I thought that to try to 'clean up' the past seemed not only inadvisable but wrong. Wrong in the sense that her magic would be destroyed, her vibe would be lost, whatever truths were still living within the flacking paint of her walls would no longer be discoverable and the old world that had flourished there would be truly forgotten.

And yet too, I could see that there had came a point when letting her bask on her laurels had gone stale. She had been left alone too long. She was beyond lonely. She was dumb. Self ashamed. Empty.

The neighborhood around her was 'gentrefiying'. 'Little Hong Kong' behind Schoonemakers has taken to the earth. The marinas won't take 'live aboards' anymore. The city has passsed a law (again) to phase out the 'Anchor Outs' and the Anchor Outs are getting old and less able to save the fight. So, changes come.

Slowly that which becomes labeled 'unacceptable' is elbowed out by those wanting to accept something new. This is part of the duality we exist between; what to do with the past - what to do with the future? It is from this vantage point that change begins again on the Vallejo. There are new things afoot. What wonderfulness the new has wrot. Where there used to be silence and a demur of creaks and rotting timber there is fresh life, energy and sound.

One realizes the importance of reinventing oneself as the Vallejo goes, yet again, from a static to a kinetic state.