Gregory Cole Hewlett, who protected Bolinas from environmental catastrophe and overdevelopment, died on Aug. 19. He was 82 years old.
As much as anyone, Greg cemented the future of Bolinas as a pastoral, community-minded coastal village, rather than the commercial marina destination it might have become. A trained social worker and capable carpenter, Greg was a rough-and-ready activist his entire life. He was at the center of the band of educated hippies who discovered Bolinas in the late ‘60s, then spent their limited money and limitless energy cultivating a self-sufficient community determined to repel outside interests and unwanted visitors. Among his claims to Bolinas fame, Greg was the most notorious of the many locals who took down the sign pointing Highway 1 drivers to town.
“He spearheaded so many things that are now just taken for granted in Bolinas,” said Harriet Kossman, his former partner.
Greg was born on Dec. 6, 1939, and grew up in the commuter town of Maplewood, New Jersey, where his father ran the weekly newspaper. Greg Hewlett, Sr., a self-described radical liberal, had been an Associated Press reporter and an intelligence officer before returning to his home state to edit and publish the suburban paper. Later, in 1975, the elder Greg and his wife, Betty Hewlett, followed their son and daughter, Susan, to Marin, where they settled in Seadrift.
Greg studied social work at Middlebury College and became involved with civil rights activism, registering voters in the South. In 1962, he married Nina Currell, and the couple had two daughters while Greg worked as a social worker in Newark. In 1967, the young family traded in their pink Cadillac for a Volkswagen bus, which Greg quickly painted with flowers, and headed west. After a spell working as a carpenter in Mill Valley, he discovered Bolinas and never left. Nina quickly did, however; she left the family for a surfer she met and moved to Hawaii.
Greg understood that he had found a unique place, but his arrival in 1968 coincided with a burgeoning $10 million plan that would have reshaped the town. The Bolinas Harbor District, an assemblage of the town’s longtime residents, envisioned a floating marina at the mouth of the Bolinas Lagoon, complete with a heliport, hotels and shops, just as a freeway was planned on the coast to bring in more visitors from San Francisco.
In his 1998 book, “Saving the Marin-Sonoma Coast,” Audubon Canyon Ranch founder Marty Griffin wrote about Greg’s earliest involvement in the fight against the marina plan. New in town, Greg would hang out at Smiley’s and pick up what news he could from the harbor planners.
Greg, “a regular patron and an avowed enemy of progress, monitored their loud conversations,” Marty wrote. “He heartily approved of Audubon’s do-nothing plan for the Bolinas Lagoon.”
Late one night, Greg called Marty to alert him that the county planned to condemn Kent Island, giving the harbor developers a chance to take over the last piece in their puzzle. The news gave Marty a leg up. Audubon Canyon Ranch bought the island and convinced the county to preserve it as parkland. Voters in Bolinas later dissolved the harbor district altogether. It was among the most important maneuvers in protecting the West Marin coastline, and Greg was the fly-on-the-wall who made it happen in the nick of time.
But it took a disaster to galvanize residents’ protective instincts into a movement. On Jan. 18, 1971, two Standard Oil tankers collided in a dense fog under the Golden Gate Bridge, unleashing 800,000 gallons of crude that soon slicked every beach and inlet from the East Bay to the Marin coast. Volunteers descended across the Bay Area to help rescue birds and clean up, a landmark moment in the nascent environmental movement. In Bolinas, residents, including Greg, used hay bales and logs to create a makeshift boom across the mouth of the lagoon.
“There were all these out-of-work hippies looking for something to do to save the world, and here it was,” said Michael Rafferty, a longtime friend.
Some of those hippies, including Greg, his sister Susan, Steve Matson, Russ Riviere and Peter Warshall, capitalized on the momentum of the oil spill response to form the Future Studies Center. In a small second-story office in the white clapboard building that now houses the Bolinas Museum, the Future Studies group discussed the threats they saw to the town they had come to love.
Later that year, Greg and three other Future Studies members staged a kind of coup to take over the development-friendly Bolinas Community Public Utility District. A recall vote removed three sitting board members, giving the untrained young conservationists a majority and a chance to realize their vision for the town.
“Most had seen their own hometowns—small communities with open space—consumed by uncontrolled development,” Susan wrote for an exhibition at the Bolinas Museum.
Greg and his cohort went to work keeping development at bay. As soon as their terms started in November 1971, the new board members passed the water moratorium, a ban on new municipal hookups that has lasted more than 50 years, beating a legal challenge and stifling the potential for population growth.
The harbor plan had died, but Bolinas and Stinson Beach still planned to expand their sewer capacity with new lines to accommodate thousands more residents. BCPUD had to find a way to reroute its effluent out of the Bolinas Lagoon, but the new board wanted to keep the solution small. Greg was inspired by a system of sewer ponds he saw on a trip to Napa County and suggested building something similar on a 90-acre open parcel on the Big Mesa. The four ponds now treat downtown’s wastewater in succession before the cleaned water is used to irrigate surrounding grasses.
Far from being off limits, the sewer ponds were like Greg’s backyard. Harriet recalled him swimming in the final pond to demonstrate the system’s effectiveness. Just before the ponds were first filled with wastewater in 1975, he and Steve Matson decided to drive Steve’s orange B.M.W. around their rims, the way skateboarders use empty swimming pools.
Then-fire chief Jose Silva caught sight of them. “He saw this orange object bouncing in and out of the ponds, and came roaring over there in the fire truck,” Steve said. “But we knew him and he knew us. He said: ‘Oh, you boys!’”
“With Greg,” Steve said, “I had such a long history of fun, stupid events like that.”
The Future Studies members worked as a group to realize their vision of a quiet, sparsely populated Bolinas in harmony with nature. But Greg was among the group’s most committed and hardworking organizers, and was never afraid to get his hands dirty.
Greg and Steve were the first to ward off tourists by taking the Bolinas sign down, Steve said, in the early ‘70s. Years later, after dozens of others did the same thing, Greg may have been the only person to ever face real legal repercussions for the act. After a long night of drinking in 1988, he and neighbor Greg Holm decided to tear down the 35th such sign installed by Caltrans. But they walked into a trap. As soon as they had uprooted the sign from the dirt—this one hadn’t been planted in concrete—undercover officers jumped out of the bushes and cuffed the men. Because of a prior possession conviction, Greg faced jail time.
“Our action was more civil disobedience than vandalism,” he told the Light that year. “Whatever agency wasted our tax money to deliberately provoke a community long opposed to road signs is both petty and vindictive.” He wound up paying a small fine and completing community service. The following year, Bolinas voters passed a ballot measure advising Caltrans to remove the sign once and for all.
Greg did carpentry work for a living, and he built a home for himself, Harriet and their son, Ben, in Paradise Valley. A group of six families have lived communally in the valley—on a huge, secluded shared property off Horseshoe Hill Road—since 1973. For the first 10 years, they had no electricity and tried to be completely self-sufficient. He and Harriet raised pigs, learning about farming as they went. “We’re from back East, we weren’t farmers,” Harriet said. “This was all new to us, and we didn’t have money, so we managed other ways.”
Today, all the original tenants besides Greg still live there, and Ben lives in Greg’s former house. Before his death, Greg lived in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the jungle highlands of southern Mexico, for 16 years.
Friends and family offered several explanations for his leaving the country. After working on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, which tanked after the so-called “Dean scream” incident, Greg “started to hate American politics,” Susan said. And he was frustrated with the influx of tech millionaires and billionaires to Bolinas. But Greg also developed a special affinity for Mesoamerican rainforest after tagging along with Russ Riviere on a botany trip to Veracruz.
About a week before his death, Greg suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, Steve said. He died at his home in Mexico.
Greg is survived by his sister Susan, his son Ben, his two daughters Kelly and Debbie, and his grandson Josh.