If left to my own devices I might have fallen into superstition: It’s just not meant to be! But that’s why I needed a pal, so our senses of fate & free will could clash at the right moment. We set a date to go, my last evening in Marin County before driving back to the desert.

I had a week to prepare, and to buy some jade and a brass pentacle to leave as an offering in Elsa’s house. The morning before, I took a long hike through the Headlands to an overgrown place labelled on the map as Sunny Hill Cemetery. It was the first burial ground in Sausalito but all of the graves were exhumed and transferred in 1892. There were only trees there. I sat and meditated awhile. I wonder if this is what Druid Heights will look like someday when all has disappeared, a grove of trees and a name on a map with little verification. At the rate things are going we’d all be lucky if we could just end up as forest.

Kelly and I meet for fish tacos in Sausalito and then drive together back to Druid Heights. I did nothing to petition the spirits or ask permission for this trip. I decided that I had made my peace last time and now was Kelly’s accomplice, whatever would happen would happen through his will. I’d initiated him and now he’d initiate me. At first we heard voices near the Mandala House, & I got nervous, but we paused & listened—more voices, maybe from a nearby trail? Kelly talked me through a fear inventory: I was afraid I’d be seen as disrespectful, I was afraid it would ruin any relationship I might have with Ed Stiles, who’d I’d been in touch with. We listened together, in silence. Calm. So we doubled back & climbed up into the brush toward what’s known as the Meditation Hut—we hadn’t paid it much attention before, but it’s very close to Elsa’s house.

It is a small hut with a bed carved in Roger’s distinctive, ornate curves, lots of little hidden storage space all around and beneath. Glass windows, partially stained glass, mostly shattered with shards all around, both simple and elaborate in different respects. We went toward the most prominent building & turned past a sunken porch, stepped up into a room w/graffiti that said: NOTHING IS INVISIBLE.

This is it! This must be it, I don’t remember this room! & Then, walking down the hallway and to the left—SURPRISE! WE WERE TRICKED BY DRUID HEIGHTS—and were in fact back in the Dragon house by another route. I laugh at the sense of humor here--how much trickery can happen in a short span, I imagine Roger Somers, the way he grins through glowing his saxophone as Pan in The Bed (1968).

There is another little cabin but it’s not Elsa’s house, just another guest house & then finally, I look very carefully, and see poking out from much mustard & tangled brush, another roof—THAT’S IT! Quoth Alan Watts in The Joyous Cosmology, written in this same place: “I am looking at what I would ordinarily call a confusion of bushes—a tangle of plants and weeds with branches and leaves going every which way. But now that the organizing, relational mind is uppermost I see that what is confusing is not the bushes but my clumsy method of thinking. Every twig is in its proper place, and the tangle has become an arabesque more delicately ordered than the fabulous doodles in the margins of Celtic manuscripts.” All told, Elsa’s house must not be more than 100 feet away from Roger’s. Five acres is not a lot for three different families and their tenants and guests.

Kelly uses his clippers to trim toward a path of stone steps, and little by little we clip our way through the mustard to the stone porch. This I recognize from the photos, and from her interviews in Word Is Out: Elsa’s house. Inside on the immediate left there are built-in shelves and I leave my offering there. To the left a little kitchen with a full wall of built-in cabinets—beautiful, not too decayed—and to the right a bathroom, small room, and bedroom with a little stove. Straight ahead is the largest room, a beautiful living room and stone hearth. In the GLBT Historical Society the week before, I’d seen a picture of Elsa from around 1958, and from this very angle, sitting by the hearth in candlelight.

On the built in bookshelves to the left of the hearth, we notice weird masking tape w/book titles written out in black marker. I photograph them all to remember:

The Tempest

The Way of All Flesh

Anthology of Contemporary California Poets

Sophocles

A Few Figs from Thistles

Be Angry At the Sun

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

The Doors of Perception

Secret Oral Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist Sects

Physiologie du Good

Clowns Houses

Journal for the Protection of All Beings

The Gist of Herbert Spencer

The White Goddess

Zen in English Literature

Toward Man: The Seven Arts

Orientalia Iovanieasia

Glands Regulating Personality

The Book of Repulsive Women

The Interpreters

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

What Have We Here?

My Life and Loves

Tao: The Watercourse Way

The Golden Bough

Sodom and Gomorrah, version two

Sodom and Gomorrah

I photograph these titles because I want to remember them, I have a thing for artist’s libraries—it happened when I visited Derek Jarman’s cottage too. I must be careful—I could easily surrender to this list and spend however long it takes tracking down and reading each volume in whatever edition Elsa was likely to have. But even that is a leap: who knows why these labels are taped here or what they mean? Who wrote them? They are not in Elsa’s handwriting. My desperation to disappear into research is not always an asset.

Beneath the empty shelves marked with tape, an old, tan, moldering hat—hers?

The house is totally stripped down to these details. It seemed as if it hadn’t been lived in, in a very long time. Whereas Roger Somers’ house had little details and additions—the desk in one room had a tray with padding added to it for a computer keyboard, and there was newer trash scattered there and in the Faye House. But not here. And no graffiti or offerings left—how long had it been overgrown? My friend Leilani said that when she was on her tour here over a decade ago, a downed power-line meant they could not enter Elsa’s house. We saw the same downed line but Kelly rightly said: There’s no way it would be a live wire, given the fire risk. Kelly also noticed that Elsa’s house seems to have the least embellishments—it was the most “normal” of all the houses, the woodwork inside simple, a simple cottage. And while it was overgrown outside, unlike the others, there were no signs of green life spurting up from the floorboards and taking over from within. It was very much intact, and very protected.

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