LOST AT SEA

A sweeping overview of the “anchor-outs” living on abandoned vessels in Richardson Bay, on the outskirts of the wealthy Bay Area city of Sausalito, Kloc’s book unites personal narrative with historical context. A reporter and senior editor at Harper’s magazine, Kloc tells of the denizens of this latter-day Cannery Row who include “retired mariners, single mothers, runaways, addicts, and many others who have caught a bad break from which they haven’t yet recovered.” He is befriended by the self-dubbed “Innate Thought,” a fixture on the scene who uses his “encyclopedic knowledge of American maritime jurisprudence” to help fight the city’s attempts to remove these sailors from the sea. The author eats, drinks, and shares stories but resists the traps of condescension and false familiarity as he paints a portrait of inequities of “Chinatown”-like proportions that date back to the Gold Rush. Befitting Sausalito’s bohemian past, the raffish crew bait the powers that be, reminding them of broken promises to build a homeless shelter. However convivial, the largely white anchor-outs represent an unrepresentative sample, in keeping with Marin County’s history of de facto segregation, relegating Black shipbuilders in World War II to Marin City, a comfortable distance from wealthier neighbors. Their trials, while undeniably real, seem less dire than those of their compatriots in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District and other urban redoubts. But the book fulfills the author’s purpose of documenting this community “when they were under the greatest threat of their one-hundred-year existence. It is the story of what we all stand to destroy when unhoused and low-income communities are allowed to be flattened out of their humanity and…torn apart by ill-considered, profit-driven policies that ask them to pick up and move along, as if, in tearing down camp and scattering in all directions, they have nothing left to lose.”

Apr 16, 2025 - 20:01

A sweeping overview of the “anchor-outs” living on abandoned vessels in Richardson Bay, on the outskirts of the wealthy Bay Area city of Sausalito, Kloc’s book unites personal narrative with historical context. A reporter and senior editor at Harper’s magazine, Kloc tells of the denizens of this latter-day Cannery Row who include “retired mariners, single mothers, runaways, addicts, and many others who have caught a bad break from which they haven’t yet recovered.” He is befriended by the self-dubbed “Innate Thought,” a fixture on the scene who uses his “encyclopedic knowledge of American maritime jurisprudence” to help fight the city’s attempts to remove these sailors from the sea. The author eats, drinks, and shares stories but resists the traps of condescension and false familiarity as he paints a portrait of inequities of “Chinatown”-like proportions that date back to the Gold Rush. Befitting Sausalito’s bohemian past, the raffish crew bait the powers that be, reminding them of broken promises to build a homeless shelter. However convivial, the largely white anchor-outs represent an unrepresentative sample, in keeping with Marin County’s history of de facto segregation, relegating Black shipbuilders in World War II to Marin City, a comfortable distance from wealthier neighbors. Their trials, while undeniably real, seem less dire than those of their compatriots in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District and other urban redoubts. But the book fulfills the author’s purpose of documenting this community “when they were under the greatest threat of their one-hundred-year existence. It is the story of what we all stand to destroy when unhoused and low-income communities are allowed to be flattened out of their humanity and…torn apart by ill-considered, profit-driven policies that ask them to pick up and move along, as if, in tearing down camp and scattering in all directions, they have nothing left to lose.”