Once in a while in the course of a lifetime one meets a person different from the usual, who stands out from the pack and sticks in the mind. For me, such was Marilyn Goode.
She was her own person, set her own courses, spoke her mind straight out and lived as she chose. From the get-go she lived in and close to nature, flora and fauna, with the frogs and lizards and insects and even giant tortoises, whatever critters came her way.
Before she came on the scene, her parents bought a good-sized chunk of Sonoma Mountain off Grove Street, which came to be known as Westerbeke Ranch. It was mostly raw land then but had two fresh water sources; a key factor in the valley if you’re going to stay and homestead, which they did. Marilyn’s early years were in both San Francisco and the Sonoma hills in summer. But the mountain absorbed her, and it was there in the redwoods, oaks, madrones, creeks and high grasses she set her roots and stayed for most of her days.
Initially I met her through our mutual interest in civic and environmental issues. The first big flap was over the battle of whether to sell a portion of City-owned Schocken Hill for a resort development. Those in the “No” camp knew it would set precedent for further commercial and housing development on Sonoma hillsides. Obviously, it didn’t happen. It took two years of heated squabbling, pushed mightily from behind by First District Supervisor Valerie Brown, who supported the outlandish project, but the people prevailed in an initiative vote, proudly led by Marilyn Goode.
The second city-wide civic bombshell was the Great Hospital Fight in 2006, over whether Sonoma needed a new hospital or could patch up the old one and get along. Marilyn was dissed as a pesky “little old lady in tennis shoes” by a hospital board member clamoring to have a whole new “state of the art” hospital, which the townsfolk would have pay for, of course. That shindig also took about two years of civic civil war. In the end we won, the ‘we’ being those saying just fix the old hospital and leave the gigantic debt money in people’s pockets.
In between these dust-ups, other political, environmental and social/cultural issues arose and there, too, Marilyn was active, both at public meetings and using her voice in our town newspapers. I’ve lost track of how many touchpoints I had with her on civic issues, invariably to my benefit in trying to be a more active, civic-minded person.
Yes, she was irascible, stubborn, very opinionated and doggedly judgmental. But she took the time to study non-violent communication, which in my view is a good pursuit, although I fail at it all the time. Marilyn’s response to that was, it takes a lot of practice and failure is built into it, like anything hard.
But maybe more than anything I got from Marilyn was her deep love of nature, its intrinsic importance and its preservation in the biological chain of life. She understood that nature was under siege, and it had to be protected and fought for. And she was always up for the fight, non-violently of course.
At Marilyn’s wake it was reported that as far as she was concerned, she’d just as soon be left out naked in one of the meadows of Westerbeke Ranch, and let the turkey vultures clean up the mess and be done with it.
Laughed ’til I cried.
Boy, how I miss Marilyn Goode!
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