Birds Of Bodega Bay

My friends Zach with his dog Puli had returned to see me a couple of times, as I expected they would. I got to know them both much better, more so with Zach of course, as Puli couldn't have told me much except with his very expressive body language. Okay more of a tail language. It never stopped wagging at such wild speed I almost feared it might come flying off.

Zach is quite different. His body language is far more subtle. Mainly with his eyes and his smiles, both constant and intense, as expressive as Puli's tail and the paw he kept offering me. If I didn't accept it he would nudge my knee until I took it and make a bit of fuss to thank him. In a way he kept interrupting the conversation; I didn't mind though. Not often I am shown such devoted love and adoration! Here I go again, I was going to write about the conversation Zach and I had, but I kept talking about the dog instead!.

As Zach's mother is American, the family is in America quite a lot, at least once a year, most years more often. And their home town is San Francisco, the city, or California I am most familiar with, where I visited more times than the others. I was once there for 3 months, not in the city itself, but only 12 minutes' train ride from there, more like metro except it's not underground. So we talked about this particular place called Bodega Bay, which we both know; and which brought back bitter sweet memory for me but, that's another story, a close chapter.

Bodega Bay is a little town, north of San Francisco, more like a fishing village really, a bit like Roses which I now call home. Getting to Bodega Bay is like reaching the end of something. The kind of urban core where the highway stops, seeming like there's nothing more further on. One of the reason this little place is well known is because of it's most charismatic attribute, where some of the sequences of Alfred Hitchcock's cult movie 'The birds' had been filmed there. The topography of this place seems to possess an abstract atmosphere, somewhat end of the world sort of 'feel' to it. Was it the place that created the film? Or the film that had created this place?

Some scenes were filmed over the bay, but the most dramatic ones were shot in the village itself, around the only school there, with the birds pursuing the children who were running and screaming. Zach told me the school is closed now, but the exterior is well preserved, with a memorial plague on the wall recording it as the place where the film was made. The solitude of this little monticule produces a strange sensation, a seemingly habitable and live place but presented as a of décor something happened more than half a century ago. A place evokes the past without being in a state of apparent decomposition.

The American film industry does not usually conserve their film sets or locations, accustomed to the systematic destruction and reconstruction. In rare cases this happens like the school of Bodega. One realises that film memory is another element applied to a landscape, as important as a tree, a house, a human geography or mineral topography. Or a bird, like the ones still flying there and we look and think of them as descendants of those that had created our secret terrors.

We could have carried on talking for hours about California, but Puli began looking a bit bored with so much talk and no action, so we took a walk at the beach, so that Puli could entertain himself running wild chasing invisible rabbits, while we continue our reminiscence. Or was it each other's private memory?

Tags:birds,bodegabay

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