Going Coastal

The national seashore begins 25 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge, and it must drive developers crazy to see it just lying there, virtually empty. Its natural state is a tribute to former President John F. Kennedy, who declared that the peninsula should be saved as a national treasure. He set aside nearly 80,000 acres for public use.

The largest town at the edge of the park, Point Reyes Station, consists of a couple of dozen buildings that line both sides of Route 1. There's a great bakery, a few restaurants, a shop selling the crafts of local weavers, a studio for a photographer who has devoted his life to shooting the Point Reyes landscape, a surf shop, a grocery store and a combination organic produce/artist gallery/gift shop/feed store.

I imagine the town to be quintessential California circa 1950, but then I notice the building cornerstones from the 1800s.

On the entire peninsula, no buildings are higher than two stories. Small inns and cottages scattered around the edges of the park offer the only lodging, which might explain why, at the height of the tourist season, there are no jostling crowds of tourists on the streets, no traffic jams. Wide expanses of beach are so empty you feel as if you've found a private space.

We've rented for two nights a two-bedroom cottage at the Bar-Or Ranch, about a mile outside of Point Reyes Station, with our friends John and Emily and their daughter, Ellie. The 35-acre property, with three cottages for rent, is a working farm and horse ranch that is just getting off the ground. I'm amazed by the faith needed to imagine that the spindly little avocado and olive trees will one day produce enough fruit to pay off the mortgage.

The Point Reyes peninsula is known for its fog, but the area around Point Reyes Station is often spared. We hit three perfect, sunny days, with daytime temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s.

"How do people in California get tans?" my daughter asks on our first day there, and I realize that my Washington-born child associates tanning not with the rays of the sun but with stifling, oppressive heat.

For our first adventure, we head to the historic Point Reyes Lighthouse, built in 1870. We're looking forward to climbing the 300 steps from the base of the lighthouse at the edge of a cliff to the shore below. But at a crucial moment, John confidently proclaims that we should turn left at a crossroad, and we dead-end at Drake's Beach.

Point Reyes is so large, and roads through it so indirect, that you can't experience all it has to offer in three days. So we never get to the lighthouse. But we happen to reach Drake's Beach at low tide and find rocky pools filled with creatures.

Cheryl Bar-Or, co-owner of the ranch, has recommended that we get up early for the peninsula's best tide pools, at Ducksberry Reef. But thanks to our mistaken turn, we manage to satisfy our tide-pool needs at Drake's Beach without getting up at working hours. Anemones of various colors close at our gentle touch, and we watch for them to feel safe enough to reopen.

The starfish, I'll later learn, are not starfish at all. Such creatures don't exist. This is according to Angela Forgey, a marine biology student who is spending the summer at a field station near Mendocino and who invites me to join her on a exploration of tidal pools there. The orange and purple ones with rough hides are common stars, she tells me. The ones that are purple and smooth are leather stars. If they have five webbed arms, they're bat stars. Those things that look like flowers: nudibranchs. They use water to keep their shape, and if you pick them up -- which you shouldn't do because they're delicate -- they turn into a blob that looks like mucus.

But at this point, I still think there is such a thing as a starfish, and they are both mysterious and beautiful.