A sinking paddle ferry, Stewart Brand, and a composting toilet
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
After the divorce, Milton Jonathan Hare moved to the houseboat community on the Sausalito mudflats and lived aboard an abandoned side-wheel paddle car ferry — white paint peeling, slowly sinking into the mud, with a drive-through carport on the top deck and the enclosed passenger deck below converted into a home.
Hare and his brothers made the journey alone at weekends, in an era when children still could: bus, BART from Shattuck, train to the Embarcadero, ferry to Sausalito, then a bus past the marinas.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
The mudflats were a lawless community of artists, anarchists and visionaries — among them Stewart Brand, who created the Whole Earth Catalog. Raw sewage was routinely going into the bay. Hare and his family worked alongside Brand and other residents to build a composting toilet, which is about as concise a description of that culture as exists.
On the sinking ferry Hare listened to his father debate pure Marxism with an older man known as Perot — hiding in plain sight, who had personally known Lenin and had been with Trotsky at his assassination in Mexico.
Sitting on the floor turning through 1930s revolution maps, a boy absorbed a first-hand account of how Lenin's maximalism and Stalin's totalitarianism hijacked what Marx actually wrote. It is not a common education.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Selma, 1965 — and the promise
Open →neighbourWhole Earth Catalog — and a neighbor on the mudflats
Open →the debates on the ferryKnew Lenin. Was with Trotsky when he was killed.
Open →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →