The Bolinians Pt. II

In our last episode we left the wasted, exhausted, pale, cold and near-dead Russian fur hunter Dimitri Pavlovich in the arms of his lithe and adventuresome teen princess of the Miwoks, who had a wonderful lyrical Native American name that meant "she who spreads her wings", which Pavlovich mistook for "she who spreads her legs" and interpreted his salvation as a sign to start a new race of peoples out in the dark grey Monterey pines, towering redwoods, coastal rushes and reefs where the magical dancing octopi pirouetted across the tidepools to the music of the north wind. And the babies like rabbits came streaming forth from the loins of Pavlovich's little leg spreader, as well as from all her sisters, cousins, aunts, mothers and grandmothers, as the former fur trader still lusted after pelts of all sizes and shapes. His harem produced dozens of short, swarthy little bruisers with the broad, flat faces of anvils, foreheads disappearing under thick black boar bristles and necks disappearing into upper torsos so dense and powerful that they had to step sideways through the doorways of their redwood bark teepees. Pavlovich, whom natives called "man with the forever erection" soon had the equivalent of an NFL football team to his name, 5 boys to every girl, and he was only 25. If he kept up this prodigious, furious pace the entire Pt. Reyes Peninsula would be crawling these pinebark-skinned monkeys with hair like the tree trunks every possible shade of madrone, bay, redwood, willow and ash, ropey and uncooperative as the tules at the head of the Bolinas Lagoon.

When Pavlovich turned 35 he looked around and realized that indeed he had brought forth upon the world a new race of beings, each of them in their raw, primitive, animal beauty as terrifying as a saber-toothed tiger or a rabid, half-starved hyena, ready to rip the throat out of any breathing creature that crossed it's path. It was not that these pre-Bolinians were born mean, rather it was when they eventually went to the water's edge on a quiet, still, morning, the fog blanketing the lagoon like a fisherman's sweater, and gazed upon their own smashed up monkey faces and looked into their own yellowy eyes peering back at them from the glassy waters that they became mad. Why were the other kids in the tribe so genuinely kind and friendly-looking, with wide stupid smiles, strong bright teeth and dimpled cheeks when they, the sons and daughters of the regal Russian, looked like vicious starving rats?

Eventually the pre-Bolineans began to resent the pleasantly plump, happy acorn-grinding fish-spearing Miwoks and began to withdraw from the tribe, slowly disappearing into the dense groves of seaside cypress and pine and into the coastal caves to live a lonely, feral existence, leaving their many different mothers and their one white-skinned father, "Man With Forever Erection", back in the village on the mesa above the sea. The village that, unbeknownst to Pavlovich and his harem of Miwok maidens, sat on a prime piece of real estate now owned not by the Russians as Pavlovich had hoped, but by the Alta Californians, once of Spain, late of Mexico and now naming every damn thing in sight.

One clear bright winter morning Pavlovich was awakened in his giant bed of coyote, otter, seal and bear blankets by a vaguely familiar sound, a sound he had not heard since his days at the Tsar's summer palace outside St. Petersberg, the sound of lowing cattle. "Beef on the hoof?" he mused insensitively, for one of toasty brown maidens in his bed was a bit of a heifer herself. She ran out, naked, and so did he, only to be confronted by what looked like a conquistadore on a jet black steed, El Gran Jefe de Rancho las Baulines, Gregorio Briones.

And thus began the infamous battle, the battle that has been stricken from the history books,the Pt. Reyes tourist pamphlets and the official record of the National Seashore and remains only in the deepest recesses of the battered Bolinian brain, The Battle of Bolinas.

(You won't want to miss Part III, will you?)