“Keys on the Counter” by Chris Bray

The sign on the gate doesn’t say what you’ll find behind it, but it also doesn’t say to stay out. It isn’t locked anymore.

If you go through, a half-mile of driving will take you to another gate, open to people but closed by a cattle guard.

That hazy gray-blue strip behind the hills on the right is the Pacific Ocean. The sign on the left says to watch for kids and dogs, but you won’t find either. You won’t find anyone. There’s a garden, with a greenhouse, neatly laid out but now untended.

A few tomato plants inside the greenhouse are flowering, but there’s no one to water them. They’ll die as flowers. Past the garden are the houses. The doors aren’t locked.

The bedroom windows look out onto the ranch buildings down the hill.

But you won’t find cattle.

And you won’t find ranch hands, though you’ll see signs that they worked here.

Cattle ranching at Point Reyes began in the 1830s, or maybe a little earlier, and then began again under new land title in the 1850s, in the American era. People who ran the ranches on this oceanfront land about an hour north of San Francisco talked about the distant past when their great-grandparents were the stewards of the place. When you talk to the current generation, they tell you about their childhood here, thirty or forty years ago. The last ranchers are clearing out, now, and most are already gone, following a lawsuit by environmental groups that argued against grazing on public land. The people who walked away from this ranch left the keys on the counter for the National Park Service, but no one has stopped by to pick them up.

And now they’re gone.

Have been traveling. More soon.