More than 20% of the total population of unhoused Americans lives in California. In Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America, journalist Joe Kloc offers a near-decade-spanning chronicle of an alternative community that makes its home across the bridge from San Francisco. The community there, known as “anchor-outs,” have been living in a flotilla of houseboats since the Gold Rush.
In the face of ongoing struggles, the anchor-outs sustain a fragile, floating culture. They have “Pirate Church,” in which they gather at picnic tables and read selections from Torah and the New Testament. They make delicious food, which they freely share. They have pets, including Siamese cats. They grow vegetables in barrels. They choose to live an alternative way that has appealed to literary icons like Alan Ginsberg and Shel Silverstein. Drugs, extreme poverty and death are common—but so are public celebrations of natural beauty and helping hands. Kloc’s description of Camp Cormorant, a tent community established near a public park during COVID-19 pandemic, is especially memorable. A woman named Sunny ran a kitchen. Food was donated. Bathroom procedures were established. The pathways were neat, and people lived calmly together. And then they were evicted and relocated by the city.
Beyond a kind of ethnography of this community, Kloc’s book offers a firsthand perspective of flashpoints over the past few years. Kloc observes and historicizes the escalating conflicts with the city of Sausalito regarding property rights, waste and environmental impact. Boats are regularly ticketed, seized and destroyed. The relocated Camp Cormorant, while closer to public restrooms, was also near the very site where many of the boats of the community had been crushed, a sound that was audible from the relocated camp. The camp was permanently closed in 2022. By the book’s end, almost everyone Kloc knew at the start of his reporting had died or moved. The city has ordered all boats to be removed within three years.
Lost at Sea sometimes gets mired in the details of local politics, which can be challenging for an outsider to follow. Still, Kloc’s sensitive book is a testament to the many ways that people care for one another, however imperfectly, and a record of the sustaining power of community.
