Plaskett Rock

That sea stack off the beach is Plaskett Rock. It carries my married name, because the Plasketts have been looking at it since 1869. The gulls kept its crown white, and my husband Ed and his brothers built a way to the top and scraped the guano for the gardens of Pacific Valley.

First-rate fertilizer, free for the climbing. A family that farms a rock in the sea is a family that wastes nothing. And the bluff out there, above the rock, is where Boat Day happened, the holiday that beat Christmas.

Two of the Plaskett boys once rowed out through the surf and hailed a passing steamer, and after that the schooner Confianza came down from San Francisco on her rounds with everything the coast could not make: bolts of cloth, tools, medicine, green coffee by the hundredweight. When she showed on the horizon everything stopped, the whole valley gathered on this bluff, and a wire chute ran the cargo up from the water, and the livestock too; the children never forgot the hogs swinging over the sea on the cable. I was in that crowd, in my good hat, with my sisters, and so was the man I married.

The bluff is a beautiful place to walk. It is level, and you can follow the ocean's edge easily along the deer trail. Stay on the trail, and keep your hands off the shiny leaves in threes, green and red, that look like a small oak.

That is poison oak, and the bluff is full of it. Ed's house looked out on Plaskett Rock and the highway to the end of his life. He was born in 1881 in the house above Jade Cove, a birthplace the records call Gorda because Gorda was the post office and close, and died at ninety-one, in 1973, the same great age his grandfather William Lucas had reached, and he is buried in King City.

My grandson tells the rest. When the grandchildren woke in the morning, Ed would fill them in on how many cars had passed Jade Cove since first light, north and south, counted from his chair. Well into his eighties he took the boy fishing at Jade Cove with thick woven string, the hooks tied on by hand and rocks for sinkers.

Bait was plentiful, and they dined on abalone pounded soft with a hammer and fried in flour, salt and pepper. Yum, says my grandson, and he has not changed his mind.