Muriel Murch’s travel pieces have taken me to a sanitorium in Buenos Aires, the hustings of her native England and, now, to her longtime adopted home north of the Bay Area. In part because of her British accent and cozy style of reading aloud, her pieces sound idyllic. They are worth listening to not only because they evoke distinct locales precisely like all good travel writing but also because they radiate a homey serenity I associate with an “inner Bolinas.”
“Around Tomales Bay” isn’t earthshaking. Murch describes Memorial Day two weeks ago when she drove up the coast with her husband. Along the way she observes, “The stakes of the oyster beds lie half exposed along the shoreline. The fishing boats and yachts anchored in the Marshall harbor bob gently at their moorings, taking the day off from their duties of working draft horse or joy ride seaside donkey.”
Forget the oily waters that have recently killed oysters and wrecked the shoreline after BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Murch’s countryside is unspoiled, and her plans to purchase some Free Range Muscovy ducks on a four-hundred-acre organic farm in Bodega are unshaken by California earthquake tremors. Neither is her odyssey to Sonoma County aglow with the yuppie aura that has settled over towns north of Santa Rosa like a wine hangover.
Segments for Murch’s weekly radio show, “Letter from A. Broad,” are loaded with local color, pitched to an audience renowned for its Marin County chic. “Around Tomales Bay” is savvy and “green”—but it’s also good enough as writing to satisfy a demanding national audience of public radio listeners.
A Car Trip Up the Coast
James Reiss
Posted on June 11, 2010 at 09:05 AM
Muriel Murch’s travel pieces have taken me to a sanitorium in Buenos Aires, the hustings of her native England and, now, to her longtime adopted home north of the Bay Area. In part because of her British accent and cozy style of reading aloud, her pieces sound idyllic. They are worth listening to not only because they evoke distinct locales precisely like all good travel writing but also because they radiate a homey serenity I associate with an “inner Bolinas.”
“Around Tomales Bay” isn’t earthshaking. Murch describes Memorial Day two weeks ago when she drove up the coast with her husband. Along the way she observes, “The stakes of the oyster beds lie half exposed along the shoreline. The fishing boats and yachts anchored in the Marshall harbor bob gently at their moorings, taking the day off from their duties of working draft horse or joy ride seaside donkey.”
Forget the oily waters that have recently killed oysters and wrecked the shoreline after BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Murch’s countryside is unspoiled, and her plans to purchase some Free Range Muscovy ducks on a four-hundred-acre organic farm in Bodega are unshaken by California earthquake tremors. Neither is her odyssey to Sonoma County aglow with the yuppie aura that has settled over towns north of Santa Rosa like a wine hangover.
Segments for Murch’s weekly radio show, “Letter from A. Broad,” are loaded with local color, pitched to an audience renowned for its Marin County chic. “Around Tomales Bay” is savvy and “green”—but it’s also good enough as writing to satisfy a demanding national audience of public radio listeners.