The Coast

A city, three lives, four decades, poems, drugs, booze, hippies, love, lust, loss— just keep moving. Some relationships linger across decades and continents, no mater how much individuals change. The links between Patrick, Joanna, Daisy, and San Francisco, though stretched, never snap. San Francisco and the Bay Area are at the heart of this story about three lives evolving over 40 years. When Patrick discovers San Francisco in the summer before the Summer of Love, he is old enough to be drafted for Vietnam, but too young to buy beer. His innocence extends from women to psychedelics. The city will tutor him. Joanna is a Bolinas poet, Daisy her 10-year-old daughter. In a world of lost families, they invent a simulacrum. The city is not just streets and seascapes, but events and the people drawn to and shaped by it. It is North Beach and the Mothers of Invention, City Lights Bookstore and LSD, Hammett's after-midnight fog and the Golden Gate. Patrick leaves and returns, leaves and returns to his default base. Patrick, Joanna, and Daisy— their histories are entwined with the history of the city. Those were perilous, shifting times, and they rowed their boat through the heart of them.