by Rebecca Dakota
“Your name?
“McVey.”
“And your first name?”
“McVey.”
“Oh, then, your last name?”
“McVey.”
The clerk finally looked up, flooded with exasperation. “I need your full name.”
“McVey.”
“Lady. Please.”
“That is my name.”
“The form requires a first and last name. What is your other name?”
“I only have one name. McVey.”
“Okay. McVey McVey it is. Here you go.”
The woman with wispy white hair falling around her head like a tumbleweed halo took the form and reached for a wallet in the back pocket of her shorts. She crossed the room in a few quick steps and entered an office under the official brass sign, “Harbor Master.”Her bronzed hand delivered the form to another clerk, and she paid the rental fee for a boat slip in the Santa Barbara harbor, in cash. After traveling the coast for the last three years, this would be home for now. All set. She settled in and her 20’ boat would bob there day and night for the next six months.
As a young lesbian feminist, then in my twenties, I thought I was radical. My friends and I were not only marching up State Street in Santa Barbara for equal pay for women, for the right to have our own credit, for our bodily autonomy, but also marching in solidarity with union workers on strike, forming women’s centers, volunteering at rape crisis centers, bringing together resources for women experiencing domestic violence, advocating for racial equity. It was not quite yet time to fight for LGBTQ equality and environmental justice; those were still to come.
Camping in the Los Padres National Forest brought women together to recharge, recover, have some fun and laugh. Hiking most of the day, then eating brown rice and red beans, we relished each other’s company, singing and plotting the dissolution of the patriarchy late into the night.
There was McVey, settled on a log in the shade, wielding a sharp Swiss Army knife, totally engrossed in carving a small…what?I don’t remember what, only that I was fascinated as chips of pine fell around her feet. She seemed old, quietly wise, compared to the rest of us, probably in her 70’s, and there she was, using a knife to create something by hand. Her clothing consisted of sandals, baggy shorts and a weathered leather vest that hung unbuttoned.
I was in awe. Without looking directly at her for too long, I studied her. I soaked in who she was, her essential self:strong, clear, unbound.
Fifty years later, a lifetime, I look to her for inspiration. Activision through authenticity, through example. McVey McVey lives on
Rebecca Jo Dakota thrives in Albuquerque, NM, is still an activist (some of the same old issues, some new ones) and is blown away by photosynthesis.