It started on a whim: A pirate’s plank, just a nifty addition to
Rich Firato’s revamped backyard. A few toy ships, bobbing above
thrashing, foot-long koi. Then a mast. A skull. A prickly,
taxidermied pufferfish.
It started on a whim: A pirate’s plank, just a nifty addition to Rich Firato’s revamped backyard. A few toy ships, bobbing above thrashing, foot-long koi. Then a mast. A skull. A prickly, taxidermied pufferfish.
Seven years later, Firato struggles to explain Morgan’s Cove, the one-acre pirate wonderland tucked away behind his ordinary Morgan Hill home – a fantastical site that defies description. It’s not a store. It’s not an exhibit. You can’t buy tickets to it – but you might, if you could. Trying to introduce it, Firato dubs it “an island.”
He pushes open a bamboo gate onto a mesmerizing scene: Plastic skeletons swill from wine jugs, their bony fingers raking through chests of doubloons. Theme music rumbles from hidden speakers – the same music piped into Disneyland’s ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ ride, Firato says. Lurid green and purple spotlights coat clamshells, totem poles and a real cannon, under the wooden gaze of a mermaid clad in skull-and-crossbones bikini. Flamingo-pink fog pours over the deck.
“I don’t like to entertain,” Firato said. “Everything here is real quiet. Some of the neighbors don’t even know.”
“Rich wants to keep this low-key,” explained Douglas Penn, aka ‘Fisherman Doug,’ a handyman and co-creator of Morgan’s Cove. “But it’s too much to keep to yourself. It’s the best-kept secret in Morgan Hill.”
Web site markets “upscale pirate clothing”
At 4am every day, Firato wakes to scrub cobblestones, manicure palm fronds and maintain the eucalyptus huts that dot his fantasyland. For two hours, he labors over his creation, then goes to work. By day, he cleans office buildings as the owner of a janitorial company; by night he decompresses with a glass of red wine in his Captain’s Quarters, a gazebo meticulously decorated in buchaneer chic: yellowed maps, swordfish and gems.
Firato never intended to cash in on Morgan’s Cove. Besides, he’s sunk thousands of dollars into his fantasy, more than he could ever hope to bank. Nor does Firato seek fame: Shy and soft-spoken under a coarse black beard, the Morgan Hill man prefers to glory in his creation alone, or with a few select friends, than to throw it open to the world. This spring, he opened it to the Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce for a backyard mixer – only the second event he’s held there, after his son Nick’s high school graduation party.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” Firato said. “Whatever you’re imagining, began clearing out his then-dowdy, overgrown backyard. “It just fell in, and gradually became what it is.”
Every week, the two huddle over hastily-scribbled plans, jotted down on napkins, then leap up to bring their latest fantasy to life. Piece by piece, the Cove has developed, cobbled out of friends’ donations – a thrift-shop Jolly Roger, a length of rope, an outlandish feather – and the duo’s painstaking work, at least 20 hours each week. They’ve hewn handmade eucalyptus huts, hacked out of two 300-foot trees they felled themselves, and roped bamboo reeds into fences; Penn taxidermied a handful of turkeys himself.
Now, Penn wants to build a polyurethane foam cave and attach it to the back of Firato’s home, obliterating the last bit of suburbia from view.
“You look up and see all these straight edges and 90-degree corners,” Penn said. “We’d make the house disappear.”
Inside that house, Firato’s wife Julie shrugs, pleasantly amused by her husband’s obsession.
“I just have to rein him in sometimes,” Julie Firato explains casually. “We say the outside’s his, and the inside’s mine.”
His daughters, 17-year-old Giavanna and 11-year-old Alyssa, embrace the pet project with scarcely a raised eyebrow.
“We still can’t really explain what it is,” said Giavanna Firato, a Live Oak High student intent on studying fashion design, “but it’s a lot easier to get friends to come to your house.”
The pirate inside a mild-
mannered dad
“Rich strikes me as a pirate,” said Penn, describing the project’s genesis. “I think I brought the pirate out in him.”
He is, and he isn’t. A self-described clean freak, Firato doesn’t seem the type to walk hostages off planks, pillage ships or menace captives, a patch masking one eye. In nearly the same breath, Penn added, “He’s real mellow and quiet and calm and considerate, just the opposite of what a pirate would be.”
Firato has trouble pinning down what draws him to pirates. Before the maritime fantasy exploded in his yard, he didn’t consider himself a fan; what little he knows of nautical history, he picked up from Jim Campbell, the self-taught pirate historian and artist who pens the elaborate galleons that grace Firato’s silk shirts. And he’s never liked “pirate conventions,” which draw a drunken, foul-mouthed crowd, he said.
“That’s the crew’s job,” he said earnestly. “That’s not me. I’m the captain of the ship. I’m going to go sit with my lady, and enjoy my plunder.”
As the sun drops, Firato sets the tiki torches blazing, then surveys his homemade paradise: a thing that exists solely for its own sake, a fantasy of pillage lifted intact into tranquil Morgan Hill.
“I know how Walt Disney feels now,” Firato said. “How much joy it is to make all those things.”
