Selling ‘Pirates of Sausalito’ at the Scene of the Crime

I was not especially looking forward to it. I enjoy the creative part of writing a book, but not so much the promotion. I’m not a natural salesman. Though I’ve become more extroverted than when I was younger, I still have enough introvert in me that the prospect of hawking my book for several hours to strangers can make me anxious. Plus I still have some of that midwestern modesty that was modeled for me by my parents and teachers.

But it was a sunny and gorgeous afternoon, my table was right across from the stage where a band was playing a peppy surf rock, so my feet were bouncing along with the beat, and I had a series of stimulating and enjoyable conversations with passersby.

I also sold nine books, one short of my admitted modest goal of ten. I passed out bookmarks too, which plugged the book and my website, and the next morning there were two online sales, which probably came from the bookmarks.

What was even better was that I was sitting in the very spot where parts of my novel took place. The scene of the crime, so to speak. That is, if you consider living on the bay without permits a crime. Yes, it’s a fictional story, but it’s based on true events, some of which happened in the Galilee Harbor area.

I sat behind a poster I made that asked the question, “Sausalito Houseboat Wars: What Really Happened?” When I noticed someone squinting to read the poster, I asked them if they knew about the houseboat wars. Many did not, or knew very little. One woman had just moved into a houseboat three months earlier, and had no idea of the tumultuous history. (There were exceptions, including an old man who said he had lived aboard an anchor-out for forty years.)

For those unfamiliar with this history, here’s a distilled version: After Marinship, the World War 2 ship factory on Richardson Bay, closed, boatbuilder Donlon Arques purchased the property — considered worthless and full of shipbuilding debris — dragged retired ferryboats onto the mudflats, and invited soldiers returning from the war to live there. Over the years, the houseboat community attracted artists, bohemians, beatniks, and hippies, many of whom built ramshackle floating homes. It was a shantytown — no permits, no sewage hookups, electricity running from long extension cords. In the late 1960s and through the 70s, the counterculture was in full bloom, and mulitple times, the city, county, and developers tried to clear out the houseboaters, who fought back with civil disobedience, street theater, monkeywrenching, and more. This conflict became known as the “houseboat wars.” Today, most of the houseboat community is as bourgeois as the rest of Sausalito, though Galilee Harbor is less so. But everyone is legal and permitted now and it’s hard to believe it used to be like a shantytown.

For more, see Sausalito Houseboat Wars: What Really Happened? on my website. There’s a slideshow of an author talk I gave in May that includes wonderful photos of the houseboat community and the conflict by Bruce Forrester and Pirkle Jones, as well as two colorful video clips from local TV news.)

After tabling at Galilee Harbor for several hours, I walked north along the waterfront, passing paddle boarders and swimmers as well as historic buildings and more houseboat harbors, I felt a strong sense of satisfaction that, even though I made up most of the book, I captured the zeitgeist of those turbulent times. It’s impossible to know for sure because so much has changed in forty-plus years and there was never one agreed-upon reality anyway, but as I told various versions of the story dozens of times Saturday, I felt increasingly confident that I got it mostly right.

One of the few ungentrified buildings from the Marinship area.

If you live in or near Marin County, you can buy the paperback at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Sausalito Books by the Bay, and Waterfront Wonder on Caledonia Street, also in Sausalito. You can also borrow it from the Sausalito and Belvedere-Tiburon libraries. You can buy the paperback online, and, through August, the ebook is on sale for 99 cents.