ELEGY FROM THE EDGE OF A CONTINENT
PHOTOGRAPHING POINT REYES
Introduction
New Year’s Day, 2005
In the darkness before the daybreak of the New Year, I bend down and kiss the cheek of my sleeping son, my love, my little light. I breathe in, consciously, as if trying to bring in a measure of his being, as if to inhale his faith in me, and become the man he thinks I am.
And then, after a kiss and some whispered words for my wife, my hearth, my anchor, who knows not why I go but loves enough to let me, I’m out the door and on the porch.
I sit there in the cold, on my red steps, lacing up my hiking boots and marveling at the street. There is a stillness this morning, an expectant hush that reminds me of Christmas, of the Christmas before Christmas, when everyone is still in bed. Under the streetlights, the dark, shining leaves of our magnolias look strange, funereal, like plastic bouquets in a mausoleum. The trees honor the old year while the revelers sleep it off.
How our minds make the world!
Late last night I heard those revelers from my darkroom, worlds away. Without any self-consciousness there in my sanctuary, I put on an absurd brogue, and offered them a poem:
I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
And the young lie long and dream in their bed
Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,
And their day goes over in idleness,
And they sigh if the wind but lift up a tress:
While I must work because I am old,
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.
Happy New Year everyone.
I have a picture of old Yeats up there in my gallery of saints–I pinned him to the wall with a thumbtack. His lips are slightly parted, his eyes focused on some faraway thing. It’s the expression of a man who’s left his body behind for a life of contemplation. He’s got good company, Yeats does, among this motley bunch of friends I never knew. I must admit I took a certain pleasure in the matchmaking. I fixed up the Buddha with Hank Williams, Lao Tzu with Van Gogh, neighbored Nietzsche with Jesus and St. Francis. Here’s Johnny Cash and Kierkegaard; I imagine they’d get on all right, but Salinger and El Greco? Whitman and Schopenhauer? Who can say? Here are my photographer brethren: St. Ansel and Brassai and Minor White–could there ever be a better name for a photographer than Minor White? And here is Edward Weston, who died before I was born and yet, still he is my mentor.
Edward, the first time I saw your pictures, they stayed with me such that for days afterward, whenever I closed my eyes, I could see afterimages floating there in the dark, all those shells and rocks and trees and torsos, dancing behind my lids, burned into my mind. They frightened me, your pictures. For how could they hang there on that wall, trapped behind glass, and live? Impossible. And yet they did live; they lived within me as I stumbled around half dazed in the light, muttering to myself, vowing to myself; it is that that I want to do for the rest of my life. And I’m trying Edward–I’m really trying.
Here are more musicians: John Lee Hooker, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis… How many photographs have I printed to Sketches of Spain? I couldn’t count them. But I swear if someone ever asks me why I make my pictures look the way they look, I’ll tell them I try and make them look like the sound of Miles Davis. It’s preposterous of course, and yet, it’s perfectly true. It’s that timbre that I’m after, that timbre that’s ethereal and lonely and solemn and beautiful all at once.
I don’t imagine Miles ever made it to Point Reyes, but he should have. He could have made its ode.
Lately, I’ve been considering taking down my saint’s gallery and returning to the austerity of a blank wall. All those eyes up there are making me a little nervous.
Just what do I want from myself anyway?
It’s been said that a photographer’s darkroom is an external representation of his mind, that it is his inner self outed. If that’s the case, I’m afraid I’ve drifted a few strokes past eccentric, and float now in darker quarters.
I’ve begun to write on the walls a little.
They’re admonitions mostly, reminders to myself. Awhile back I spray painted the word Attention in huge black letters. I laid it on too heavy though, and the paint ran down, escaping the bounds of its message. Now the old rebuke looks vaguely sinister, all those spidery drips like dried up blood.
Late last night, I heard the revelers from my hovel, celebrating their new year as I stood in the dark, loading sheet film into holders. I didn’t resent their jubilation. Each thing in its turn.
One might be surprised to learn just how difficult it is to get a darkroom dark. Sealing the windows wasn’t so bad. I painted the panes flat black, then wedged thick pieces of cardboard into the frames. Then, for good measure, I sealed the whole thing over with opaque black plastic. It was the door that proved the real challenge. Even with thick black plastic sheets hung on either side, somehow the light always found its way in. After countless trials, I finally discovered that the only solution was to seal myself in with duct tape.
I’ve mounted a louvered vent in the door so I can breathe. For bodily functions, I take care of things like an astronaut. I carry it out. I have an old water bottle I keep in the corner. I’m discreet.
I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it’s a little unsettling to be trapped like that, but I always figure in the worst case, if some sudden panic descends, I could always kick out a window and dive out into my backyard, out into the blackberry bushes.
As far as the darkness itself goes, I rather like it actually. And I’ve found that my other senses have become accentuated, as if to compensate. Music is wonderful. And I’ve learned to do a lot of things–surprising things–without being able to see anything at all. For instance, I’ve become adept at the delicate task of loading sheet film into holders. The manufacturers cut tiny notches into a corner of the film, so that you can tell which way the sheet should face. The notches also signify the kind of film that it is. It’s like a sort of Braille. Each film has a unique notch code, something like: deep v, deep v, little square, or else: half moon, half moon, shallow v. It’s tricky at first, but with enough practice it becomes second nature.
My darkroom is listing like a sinking ship, a condition which lends it a certain lurching, funhouse quality. Squatting adjacent to my detached garage, its construction is at best haphazard. It was obviously built as an afterthought. Judging by the lack of foundation, I’d guess it was originally intended to be a potting shed.
The place really is sinking into the earth. Some of that’s my fault. I haven’t cleaned the roof gutters for years, so when the rain comes, it pours straight down the exterior walls into the dirt, collecting there in an ever deepening trough. Every season that water-side wall droops a little lower, while the other walls–the ones clinging pitifully to the garage–remain fixed in place. I imagine the whole thing will eventually tear itself in half.
In any case, the standing water isn’t helping the mold situation. Neither is the humidity. It’s like a jungle in there, at least in the summer, when the sweat rolls down my face and drips into my developer tray.
All the metal in my darkroom is coated with rust. It’s a peculiar sort of rust, supple, almost velvety. It makes me think of antlers.
There are chemical stalactites hanging from the bottom of my sink.
My darkroom’s a science experiment.
Sometimes, the heat and the combined smell of mildew and photo chemicals gets so bad I have to drop to my knees and take a breath through the vent, just to keep going.
The winter months are no picnic either. Oftentimes then, it’s so cold back there I can see my breath. I have a terrible time keeping the condensation from fogging my glasses. Not to mention my enlarger lens. I’ve actually started to hold my breath when making exposures, so as not to risk defusing the images with mist. I have a little space heater but only use it for emergencies. It tends to tax the electrical load and makes the enlarger light waver, which in turn throws off my printing times. And anyway, I can’t help but think that running such an appliance with all that liquid sloshing around is a bad idea. One can imagine…
If the ceiling of my shanty were but an inch lower, I’d have to shuffle around all stooped over like an ape. As it is, the lack of overhead has forced me to print sitting down, with my enlarger resting on a squat table. I had to amputate the legs to make it fit. I’ve since come to learn that hardly anyone prints sitting down, but I didn’t know that when I started, and since I’ve always done it that way, for me it’s not a hindrance.
With the exception of my heroes wall and a few pictures of my own tacked up (the ones that didn’t make muster), my darkroom is a strictly function-over-form affair. There’s a clothesline with wooden clothespins for hanging up film to dry. The sink is a born-again laundry tub that sits on a plywood board with crumbly red bricks for its base. Wires are everywhere. Cords of every color snake up the walls and hang overhead, wrapped together into bundles with old bread ties and picture wire. Banks of power strips dangle from rusty nails.
I have a whole household’s worth of electronics plugged into a single outlet.
I even have a microwave oven for drying test prints. Old St. Ansel taught me that trick.
On the floor, beneath a rotting, antique table, its top slowly warping like a record in the sun, are stacks and stacks of old, curling prints. I go through them once in a while, like a geologist sifting through strata. The further down I go, the farther back I get. My pictures of Point Reyes run deep. Interspersed though, I find little slices of other times, other places, other experiences. Here’s Mono Lake. And here’s that big Southwest trip I took–speaking of strata, there’s the Grand Canyon. Lord it was cold that day! I remember setting up my camera at an overlook, and then abandoning it there while I hid in my car to keep from freezing. I sat in the passenger seat, blowing on my numb hands, trying to guess which way the clouds would go. Then, at what I was sure was the decisive moment, I’d leap from the car, run to my camera and make the exposure–what joy! Here’s St. Louis cemetery number one, in New Orleans. We went there after the terrible thing happened; here’s my wife there with haunted eyes, her face bathed in a beautiful storm light.
Maybe it’s not geology after all, but psychology, these prints kinds of phrenological artifacts. Seeing them all together like this, certain obsessions do seem to surface. Just what is it about shipwrecks and ruins and dead trees and statuary and empty places? And what’s with all the birds?
Certainly that Freud bobble head doll on the counter–the one my father gave me for Christmas–isn’t divulging any insights.
What is for sure though is that what unifies these orphaned prints, besides of course their being a piece of my mind, and further, representations of the world at large, is the fact that they are, all of them, failures.
Adams used to say that the negative is like a musical score, and the print of that negative is a performance of that score. The expression is essential. Sometimes he’d take weeks to work on a single picture.
Often, I’ve found that it’s the simplest photographs that are the hardest to print. It’s the ones that rely on being not too dark and not too light, but just exactly, perfectly, right in the middle. It’s the subtle ones that get you. You make a print; it’s too dark; it’s drab and flat and lifeless. And so you make another, but this one’s too light; it’s washed out; it lacks substance. And on again and again, back and forth, until it seems you’re after a mean that’s shrinking as you chase it, searching for an edge the width of a single molecule. Exposing a sensitized paper to light, sometimes it comes down to tenths of seconds, a tenth of a second separating a print you’d share with anyone from a print you’ll tear to pieces. And just when you think you finally have it–that’s when someone starts a load of laundry in the house and the power surges through your little shack and all your hard won times are thrown off and you have to start all over.
Sometimes I just want to burn the whole thing down.
There’s no time in a darkroom, or at least, the time there is not related to that of the outside world. In the dark, with only the red safelights on, I might as well be out at sea in a submarine. I walk through my backyard under the midday sun to enter, and when I come out again, I’m afloat in the stars. I gauge time by way of record albums; five or six makes a healthy session. I have two clocks; the times on each are different; both are equally wrong. I salvaged one of the clocks from a box of my childhood stuff my mother gave me. It’s a panda bear, with eyes that sweep back and forth to mark the seconds. Man, I tell you, if that bear could see, he’d have seen a lot; a little boy playing in his room, and then, all these years later, that same boy become a man, working now in a different room, drinking and muttering to himself. But through it all my panda remains serene. When I got him his ear had fallen off, but I found it and glued it back on. My son helped me. He loves to come in and watch that bear. He loves to come in and face the dark.
On the wall near the door of my darkroom, safely above the chaos of the countertop, above the duct tape and batteries and rubber gloves and chemicals and tools and CDs and the Freud bobble head and the beer bottles–there hangs a framed text. It’s calligraphy on parchment paper, faded now, for it was done by my mother a long time ago, before I ever made a picture. It reads:
It was the best place to be, thought Wilber,
this warm delicious cellar, with the
garrulous geese, the changing seasons,
the heat of the sun, the passage
of swallows, the nearness of rats,
the sameness of sheep, the love
of spiders, the smell of manure
and the glory of everything.
Amen E.B.
I drive away from the house with the windows down. The air is clean and sharp. There was a storm last night. Broken sycamore boughs litter my street. The pavement is wet from rain.
Neil Young sees me off. I ring in the New Year with Tonight’s the Night. When Young recorded this in 1973, two of his friends had just died from heroin, and his voice is so mournful and ragged and off kilter and earnest that you can’t help but love him; you can’t help but feel he’s a friend of yours.
I brought this album on my big Southwest trip. It was one of ten. Some might think it masochistic to embark on a four-thousand-mile road trip with only ten record albums, but my idea was that, through repetition, the music would intertwine with the places such that when I returned home, and even years later, playing it would bring me right back. And it does. Young’s voice floods me with memories, of that holy hour I spent by myself at Delicate Arch, of the cemetery in Chloride, Arizona, of that cold night in Williams on old Route 66, snowed in with the power out, of Death Valley–of sunrises at Zabriskie Point, of sitting on my dusty hood on the briny shores of the Salton Sea, drinking warm cans of flat Tecate. It all comes back now with the immediacy of a scent. Unforgettable.
The stoplights seem especially loyal this morning, changing on in their rhythms though there’s no one around. They’re almost heroic.
I pull into Jack in the Box and there’s a dead possum in the drive-through. When I tell the kid at the widow he barely even feigns interest. I’m pretty sure the poor creature will be there all morning. What an ignoble end.
But back on the freeway it’s like there’s no one else in the world. The road’s so empty it almost seems civilization might have ended last night, and I in my little room; I missed the whole thing.
I pass a car lot with a huge American flag hanging limply over a row of black utility vans lined up like caskets. I pass a miniature golf course with a windmill and a castle and a tyrannosaurus rex. Here are gas stations and storage lots, hot tubs and tractors, casinos and the backsides of bleak motels. And here’s the Friedman Brothers’ billboard; “IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, YOU DON’T NEED IT!” God I hate that sign. Every time I pass it I try and come up with stuff that they don’t have. Love! Sex! Sheet film! Salvation…
I do enjoy this drive, though, in spite of everything. I never tire of it. I even like the depressing parts. For without them, where would the joy be in leaving them behind?
Now and again I pass a rural stretch, an odd holdout. Here is a ramshackle farm in shorn brown hills. Here are some stock ponds. Here are some cows. Then more fast food.
And a scorched field, with two iron staircases spiraling up to the sky like outstretched arms. I’ve been meaning to photograph that forever.
I exit into Petaluma. It’s an old town, Petaluma, at least by American standards. Even discounting the Miwok who lived here first, it’s the oldest settlement between San Francisco and Eureka. The town’s big boom came in 1879, when resident Lyman Bryce invented the chicken incubator. Not long after, Petaluma fashioned itself “the world’s egg basket,” where, promoters boasted; “six million hens lay six hundred million eggs.” The town inaugurated National Egg Day in 1918, an occasion celebrated with a parade led by an Egg Queen and her court of chicks. There was even a chicken rodeo.
I turn left at the old Wells Fargo Building, built in the twenties in the Neo-Classic Revival style. Like a lot of the banks of its time, it was meant to look like a Greek temple. It’s actually terra cotta. In any case, it hasn’t been a bank for a long time. Currently, it houses an antique store named, aptly enough, Vintage Bank Antiques.
Petaluma’s pasts are evident at every turn, especially to one searching for them. Here’s a row of 1880’s ironfronts, thought at the time to be impervious to fire, an assumption proven wrong when most of San Francisco’s own iron-fronts burned to the ground after the Great Quake of 1906. Here is the Masonic Lodge, a grand, three-story Victorian affair, capped with a copper clock tower–the inner workings were brought around the Horn by boat. And here is the Mystic Theater, a music venue once a silent movie house, one of the earliest in California.
The times are stacked atop each other here like the old curled prints in my darkroom.
And in a sense, Petaluma’s past is my past as well. My grandfather owned a shoe store here. Southwick’s was at 155 Main, not far from the clock shop. Awhile back I tried to find the address but it seems that 155 was lost in one of the remodels. And anyway, Main Street’s not Main Street anymore, but Petaluma Boulevard.
My grandparents came here from Berkeley in the early 1940s. My grandfather bought the existent store from a Mr. Agnew. My grandmother remembered Mrs. Agnew advising that she not wear bobby socks downtown. “You have to remember,” my mother says, “things were different back then.”
My mother used to visit the store when she was a little girl. She remembers a life-sized cardboard cutout of Buster Brown and his dog Tige, and the rows of shoeboxes, stacked floor to ceiling, white rough buck saddles and blue suede oxfords. She remembers the remodel–my grandfather gave away orchids to the first hundred women who came. Three months later was the big fire. My mother remembers all the light fixtures had melted; she says they hung from the ceiling like icicles. My grandfather had a fire sale after that, and started over.
My grandparents stayed in Petaluma almost twenty years. They liked it here. They raised their three children. They went to dances at the country club. They had a lot of friends. For a time, my grandfather was president of the chamber of commerce. He wasn’t much older than I am now.
What an odd and wondrous thing it seems, to be passing through this same place; who of my ancestors would have thought it?
I’m sure my grandfather made his way to Point Reyes. He was an outdoorsman at heart. Well into his sixties, he backpacked all alone into the Sierras. I’ve read his journal from that trip. He wrote about the clouds. Wild places ran deep in him, so deep that even after Alzheimer’s stole his mind, his body would still manage to load up his backpack and put on his boots and head for the door. My grandmother would have to restrain him. “Where are you going?” She’d ask, and he’d just point off to the horizon and say: “Out there.”
I wonder if my grandfather ever stopped in at Gail’s Central Club for a pint after work. Maybe he looked out the window there onto the street. Maybe he peered into the empty space his grandson would momentarily inhabit fifty years later. I wonder if he would’ve felt something then.
I’m in the country now, speeding west on Point Reyes-Petaluma Road, past sagging, sun worn barns and cows and sheep and half-wild dogs that bark at me as I fly by. The telephone wires have disappeared from overhead and the sky–here before unnoticed–reclaims its proper place. I greet my landmarks in the half-light like old friends.
There’s the lone oak on the left, the one with the huge boulder against its trunk. From this angle it looks as if the two are joined, as if the tree sprung right out of the rock itself.
And here is Volpi Ranch. One time I drove by here and all the goats were laid out in a perfect row along the front fence. They were motionless, shoulder to shoulder, their heads lolled out on the ground. I thought for sure they’d been killed, and it made me sad all day. But then, passing back by again that evening, I found the goats miraculously resurrected. It seems that what I’d seen that morning was just something that goats do sometimes.
I pass the row of giant cypress, the fire department and the cheese factory. I pass the rocky outcrop with the American flag that always reminds me of the marines on Iwo Jima.
It is here, near the Nicasio Reservoir, on the eastern side of Elephant Mountain, that the Point Reyes peninsula begins to assert itself. It is here where it makes itself felt. For so often, especially in the summer months, one will be driving along this road, through these sunlit fields, and then, in the most fearsome way, will encounter a barrier–a sheer wall of fog so dark and high that one’s first, unselfconscious response is to stop the car and turn around. It almost seems as if a concentration of the will is required to pass from one condition into the other, as if one must freely choose to plunge into an abyss. And the leap is breathtaking. In just a few yards, you go as if from day into night. Here, only seconds separate the earthly from well–something else entirely.
Not far from the village of Point Reyes Station, I cross a creek by way of a little purple bridge. There’s a scrawl of graffiti: ”GO HOME,” it says. I suppose the command is addressed to me, but still it makes me smile. Can’t you see? I am trying to go home.
I slowly coast down the final hill into town, as carefully as landing a plane. I hang a left at the Pine Cone Diner onto Main Street, pass the Palace Market and the taqueria, the kite shop and the Bovine Bakery. There’s Cheda’s garage, where once I had to go in and ask for help after locking my keys in the car. They fashioned a jimmy for me–no charge. I remember the walls in there were lined with elk heads. There must have been a dozen of them. I had to wonder if the mechanics ever found it unsettling, to work under all those dead animals. Here on the corner is the Old Western Saloon. Occasionally there’ll be a white horse tied up out front. One time I went in there and watched a baseball game. I pretended I was a local.
The most striking building in Point Reyes Station is undoubtedly the Grandi Building. Once a stately hotel, now abandoned for decades, the hulking mass of dark brick still dominates downtown. Some people call it the black hole. These days, the Grandi Building serves mainly as a giant community bulletin board, its walled-off sidewalk arcade perpetually covered with a patchwork of revolving notices. Galaxies of old staples shine in the void.
The wall of the Grandi just off Main is stenciled with signs. They read “NO PARKING,” until some wag went and meticulously transformed all the P’s into B’s. Point Reyes Station’s “NO BARKING” ordinance gets me every time. The best part of the joke is that, without fail, there are always cars parked along that wall.
One time I had a show of my Point Reyes photographs at a gallery back in Santa Rosa. Before the opening, I drove to Point Reyes Station and pinned up a bunch of my postcards on the Grandi Building. They hung there amidst the “Dog For Free” and “Fireman’s Pancake Breakfast” announcements, amidst the signups for “Fútbol Juvinal” and the calls to a political rally; “Bring our future home… and not in body bags. Stop the war in Iraq… end colonial occupation!” Point Reyes Station, out here at the edge of the continent, may well be this blue state’s indigo heart.
A heart at rest on this New Year’s morning; it seems all eight-hundred residents are lying long in their beds. On the weekends, on nice days, Point Reyes Station is overrun with motorcyclists and bicyclists and hikers and tourists of all stripes, trolling the art galleries and the cafes and spilling out all over the sidewalk in front of the bakery.
I try not to come here then. I’m no day tripper.
This place is in me.
And yet, I fear I am not in it. Sometimes it seems my destiny is to forever be off to the side–there and still not there.
I’ve found it is difficult to witness existence and wholly exist at the same time.
Still, putting those postcards up was my way of finally stepping forward, a way of introducing myself. And more, I wanted everyone to know that my intentions toward Point Reyes were pure. I wanted them to see my pictures so they’d know how much I love it here.
I’m not sure if anyone came.
I skirt around the southern end of Tomales Bay, and then head north, up narrow, sinuous, Sir Francis Drake highway, with the forested slopes of Inverness Ridge on my left, and the bay’s dark stillness on my right. There beneath the water runs the San Andreas Fault. It’s hard to believe–that under such tranquility could wait the most unfathomable violence.
At the hamlet of Inverness, I pull into the grocery store’s empty parking lot. I turn off my engine and sit for awhile. I always stop here. It’s my ritual. There’s an old fishing boat out back behind the store, stuck in the mud, disintegrating. I think I’ve photographed it a hundred times.
Across the street is Vladimir’s Czechoslovakian restaurant. Vladimir Nevl is something of a legend around here. Back in the old country he was a champion equestrian. That was before the Soviet coup d’etat in 1948. As the communist tanks rolled in, Vladimir escaped by skiing through the mountains into Germany. After that he traveled. He built roads in the Australian desert. He went to wine school in France. Then he came to Inverness and opened up his restaurant. It’s been here since 1960. Though well into his seventies now, Vladimir still gets up early each morning and drives down to town in his decrepit red Renault to begin preparing the day’s meals. He’s the cook, the bartender, and the waiter. Most memorably, he’s the storyteller of his own adventures. On occasion, dressed in traditional Czech garb and knee-high riding boots, Vladimir has even been known to demonstrate his skills with a bullwhip, right there amidst the tables of startled patrons. I hear his whip skills remain sharp.
My wife and I ate there once, a long time ago, before we were married. I remember asking Vladimir for a glass of wine and him returning with a bottle. He plunked it down on our table and said; “Good Czech wine. You keep track,” and then unceremoniously disappeared back into the kitchen.
Midway through our dinner of garlic rabbit, klobasa and Moravian cabbage rolls, we came to realize that Vladimir, out there on the far shore of Tomales Bay, does not accept credit cards.
Panicked whispering ensued. I certainly didn’t want to cross the old man. Who knew what he was capable of with that whip?
Then we noticed another couple across the way that seemed to be engaged in the same worried discussion. They were shuffling through a wallet. Our gaze found theirs, and in hushed tones we confessed to each other that none of us had close to enough cash to cover our meals, which with all the alcohol were quickly becoming extravagant.
We plotted a strategy. The other couple had come by motorcycle, and being that the night was cold, and that we were in the same predicament, it was decided that I and the other boyfriend would sneak off and take my car back into Point Reyes Station in search of cash. The women would stay behind to distract Vladimir, who had been flirting with them both all night.
And so, half-drunk on Czech wine, we two strangers set off to find an ATM machine while, it turns out, our girlfriends sat fireside, nibbling on hot apple strudel with cream.
Hours later, after coffees with plum brandy, the four of us poured into the empty street, under a night sky ablaze with stars, and we laughed there, and reveled in the world, exactly as it was.
I wonder where that couple is now.
I put on some Bill Evans, but the pianist, all alone, is just too damn melancholy, even for me. And so I opt for silence. It’s a New Year for God’s sake. As I pull away past Vladimir’s, I can see his wooden sign in the pre-dawn light. There’s a horseman with a golden crown and a purple cape and black riding boots. He’s surrounded by green vines and yellow flowers that curl around him like from some old illuminated manuscript. Vitame vas, it says beneath, Czechoslovakian for welcome. And then I see, strapped to one of the poles holding up the sign, a very old pair of skis.
I pass the waterfront inns, the Golden Hinde and Motel Inverness. There is the Russian style dacha, hovering above the bay on stilts. I can see the silhouettes of a dozen cupolas on its roof. I pass the kayak rental shops and the “LAUNCH FOR HIRE” sign and then, up near Teacher’s Beach, I leave Tomales Bay behind and head westward.
I’m racing now, trying to beat the sun.
The bishop pines on Inverness Ridge grow so close together that their crowns interlock. From a distance, the stand looks like a rainforest. Or else an Asian landscape painting, the kind with fog shrouded peaks and wind bent trees and perhaps, if you look very closely, a lone fisherman on his skiff. He is rendered minuscule to show his relationship with the world rightly.
The Miwok Indians who once lived here considered Point Reyes to be the abode of the dead. That seems about right to me. There is a feeling that overcomes those who wander here, as I have on innumerable days, that the peninsula stands somehow outside of everyday experience. It is otherworldly, this place, or rather, it seems neither here nor there, but someplace in-between. It is a difficult thing to define. I know only that nowhere else on earth have I so strongly sensed the immanence of the spirit. And I am not the only one.
Study a map of Point Reyes and the names of its features read as if from fiction, from myth, as if from some ancient allegory: Point Resistance, Mount Vision, Secret Beach…
There is a tangible air of mystery that permeates Point Reyes as surely as its summer fogs.
I often find that in attempting a description of the peninsula, ordinary adjectives fall short. And so I’ve come to say that Point Reyes is a terrible place; it is terrible in the awesome, forbidding, haunting, lonely, fearsome, and yes, beautiful way of the word terrible. Terrible with a capital T. Terrible, I imagine, in the Old Testament sense.
I’ve always wondered though–if the Miwok considered Point Reyes the abode of the dead, then how is it that they viewed their own existence here? Was Point Reyes their purgatory?
Is it mine?
I’m past the pines now, twisting through a thicket of manzanita. Under my headlights, the bare branches look like lightning, or a Jackson Pollack painting, all those lines flung up in a fever, representative of nothing but my own mind.
The road is flooded from last night’s rain. It always floods here, in this very same spot. The water’s not so deep though. I can skim right over it.
I see more familiar sites, flowing by like passages from a favorite book.
Here’s Schooner Bay, and the side-road that runs along the water out to Johnson’s Oyster Farm. The roadbed is made of crushed oyster shells; in the sun it’s so white you can hardly look at it.
And there, atop that hill, hidden away in the eucalyptus, is a cemetery. I’d have never found it if I hadn’t spent all those hours pouring over my maps. I remember the first time I went up, there were a bunch of cows roaming around. There was dung on the tombstones. Even the graves ringed with white picket fences weren’t spared; the cows had somehow squeezed through the gates. And I remember there were little American flags strewn about, the kind you see on motorcade cars. They looked like they’d been there a long time. To tell the truth, I didn’t stick around. I love cemeteries, but that one’s always left me a little unsettled.
Point Reyes is full of ghosts.
I pass a cluster of giant cypress trees. They’re half-dead now, white as bone, draped with thick, dark moss. They look like they belong on some old Southern plantation. Though you’d hardly know it, there used to be a ranch down there. It was called F ranch. You can still find a dirt road that leads from the site down to the bay. In the 1800’s, Drake’s Estero provided the ranchers on Point Reyes their outlet to the markets in San Francisco. A ship came twice a week. There was a pier on Schooner Bay, where men slaughtered lambs and calves before loading them on the boat. All that’s left of any of it now are a few worn pilings listing up out of the water like old tombstones.
There, on the seaward side of the highway, at G ranch, is a quarter-mile long colonnade of more old Monterey cypress. At the end of it sits the RCA building. Built in 1929, the Art Deco style structure once housed Marine Radio Station KPH, which received transmissions from ships at sea. It’s inactive now, rendered obsolete by the advent of global communications satellites. The station signed off the air on the 12th of July, 1999. The last commercial Morse code message, delivered by way of a chrome plated telegraph key, was the same as the first, sent 155 years earlier: “What hath God wrought…”
I’m above Creamery Bay now, another finger on the hand shaped estero that spreads through the heart of the peninsula. There’s the spot where once I spent a couple of hours trying to photograph cows. I’ve found cows to be generally uncooperative subjects, but on that day I promised them that if they would just come a little closer, I’d never again eat their brethren. To my astonishment, they did come closer then, and I made their portrait. I kept my word to them too, at least for a little while.
I’ve come to think we don’t give the bovines enough credit. One time near here I passed a cow standing over her dead calf, and when I came back by that afternoon, more than twelve hours later, she was still there. I’m quite sure she was mourning.
This part of Point Reyes is barren and sweeping, moor-like. The openness is broken only by the occasional ranch, the cows, and by the telephone poles and their wires leading out to the headlands.
The emptiness makes each thing seem significant
From the road two hundred feet up, I see the sun rise above Barries Bay. It is a New Year. The air is strikingly clear, a belated gift from last night’s storm. Even the most distant things look so close it seems I could reach out and touch them. The vision feels superhuman. It makes me think of the first time I ever put on glasses, of being shocked to learn that people actually saw like that, that this was the way I was supposed to see. I wonder–is this how the Miwok saw Point Reyes?
I come to the crossroads near Drake’s Beach. There’s the field where I stood before a storm making a photograph of starlings. The little black birds are everywhere in the autumn months, swirling madly over the fields like brush strokes in a Van Gogh sky.
I read that Van Gogh went to the middle of a field to shoot himself in the heart. He missed his mark though, and had to return home, fatally wounded. He died two days later with his beloved brother Theo at his side. Some say his last words were: “The sadness will last forever…”
On the day I photographed the birds, the field was so muddy that when I set my tripod in the furrows the legs sunk into the earth. And I sunk a little too. I was rooted to that field. I must have stood there an hour with my thumb on the shutter release, as still as a scarecrow, waiting for the birds to pass before me. The sky was low and dark and fearsome for the middle of a day. A hard rain was surely going to fall.
And then the starlings streaked over the horizon, as fast as arrows. Just before reaching my position, they jagged left and I tripped the shutter, reflexively, like lifting a shield. I felt as if I’d literally captured the scene, as if the starlings and the telephone poles and the wires and the field–all those straight lines–had been sucked into my magic box, that I’d caught a tornado by its tail. I thought my camera would break apart from the force of it.
How could it possibly hold it all?
My camera really did feel heavier on the way out.
I wonder–what does a furrowed field and six dozen starlings weigh?
I’m going so fast my tires are squealing a little in the corners.
This is the day–I can feel it!
Way down below to my starboard, the Pacific extends out beyond measure, as incomprehensible as space. On my port side is Drake’s Bay, and beyond that, more ocean. I’m on the tip of a spear.
At ‘A’ Ranch I reach the road’s last split. The right fork leads to the lighthouse, but I take the left–yes, the one seldom taken.
The road here is barely a car wide, cut into the side of steep hill. If I strayed over that left edge, even a little, I’d flip and roll all the way down into the bay. The lane is so narrow in fact, that if another vehicle should come from the opposite direction, one of us would have to defer, and back up all the way to the beginning. It doesn’t happen very often.
But today–
there’s a van in the parking lot! A van in the parking lot!
Unhinged, I drive to the point farthest from the intrusion. I need a moment to reset my expectations.
Through my windshield, I see a man get out of the van and initiate an elaborate series of stretches. He peers about as if he has never before seen his surroundings. He looks a little disheveled. I hazard that he slept here last night.
What a place to awaken to!
I climb out of my car–what else can I do?
The two strangers assess each other from across the distance.
“Happy New Year,” I offer.
“Oh, yes, Happy New Year,” he replies, in a way that informs me he didn’t know it was New Year’s Day until just now. He has a German accent. The man then spreads his arms and grins wildly, exultant at what is before us.
I smile back at him, despite myself.
“Yeah…” I say.
Sunbeams are pouring down onto Drake’s Bay through cracks in the lingering clouds, forming coliseums of shadow and light that shimmer and turn for a breath, or two, then vanish. Three white fishing boats bob in blue-violet waves. A rainbow lights over the distant green hills, flickers a little, fades, then shines forth again, twice as bright as before.
It’s all so beautiful I can hardly stand it.
The elephant seals are croaking away from some unseen place. Their deep, sonorous bellows sound almost subterranean, as if they were reverberating out of the earth itself.
“Elephant seals,” I offer, knowing that any comment beyond a simple fact would be absurd. I haven’t the slightest idea whether the German will understand me.
He turns and lifts an eyebrow.
I strap on my pack, sling my tripod over my shoulder, and motion toward the trailhead.
“I’m off to make a picture,” I say, hoping my new acquaintance won’t want to follow me. I work alone. It’s nothing personal.
I needn’t have worried. A woman reveals herself to have been in the German’s van; they’re a couple.
I wave at them and smile, then beat a hasty retreat.
Photography’s a lonely passion.
I’m worried about the wind. It’s the worst sort for making pictures, with moments of hopeful calm dashed by sudden, juddering gusts. Down on the bay, I can see swaths of water being chopped by odd downdrafts, like jungle under a rotor. The wind is not kind to view cameras, and if mine were blown over, it would surely be smashed to pieces. As unpleasant as such a prospect is though, it is not what concerns me most. I have been trying to make a picture of this place for so many years, a picture that might do justice to my feelings for it… to contemplate failure yet again (and on a day such as this) is what is truly unbearable.
I swear if I can just get my picture, the wind can have the damn camera.
I take to the muddy trail, almost jogging. The high grass on either side is bowing and rising and quivering in the wind. And I’ll admit it–I’m quivering a little too.
Soon I’m at the big white park service house. The commander of the lifeboat station used to live here, a long time ago. The station itself is still down there on the bay, though it hasn’t been used as such for years. Back when it was active, they’d launch the lifeboats with a marine railway. The tracks ran from inside the building right down into the water. The men stationed there saved a lot of ships. Some of them died trying. They’re up in the cemetery on the hill, with the eucalyptus and the cows.
How I love this house! Sometimes I daydream of coming to live here when the rest of the world ends. Awhile back, I left one of my photographs on the doorstep. It was on a night near Christmas. I wrapped it up and everything. I snuck up on the porch and propped it by the front door. It was the classic picture of Point Reyes, the narrow bridge of the headlands, with Drake’s Bay on one side and the Pacific on the other, and then, right there in middle, this very same house. It makes me happy to think of my photograph hanging up in there somewhere. Maybe it’s over the mantle.
I could walk this path blindfolded. First there’s the neck, and then the steep uphill stretch–the ground there raked with grooves from where the rain runs down–and then, finally, the plateau, where the wind always doubles.
When I reach the top, I turn around and look back the way I came, then go over to the cliff’s edge, right up to the brink. Two hundred feet beneath the toes of my boots, the Pacific roils on, hammering at the sea stacks, scouring the bluffs. Here at the edge of the continent, where you can so clearly see the earth’s unfolding, you can’t help but know in your bones the certainty of change. A hundred million years ago, Point Reyes was an island, and most of the rest of California had yet to rise from the sea. And like some colossal ship, the peninsula is even now moving northwards at two inches a year.
Geologically speaking, everything’ll be gone in just a moment.
Those Chinese landscape painters had it right; we are all the little fisherman on his skiff.
Gazing across Drake’s Bay, I follow the sweep of the shoreline. There is the mouth of the estero and Limantour Spit. There is Sculptured Beach and Secret Beach, and further on, Point Resistance. From here I can see clearly how the places are connected. I follow them from left to right like reading: Millers Point, Wildcat Beach, Double Point, Abalone Point, Bolinas Point… It strikes me now that all of my days on the peninsula–all of those diamond days–are connected too; all of them lie within me, and all of them have shaped me as surely as the sea has shaped this coast. All of them have led me to this exact moment.
I’m on the level crest that leads into the ocean. Head down, I sway in the wind like the grass. At times, it’s a struggle to stay upright. The winds here can exceed a hundred miles an hour. There’s nothing to stop them for three thousand miles of ocean.
I came here a few times as a boy, though I don’t remember much. My mother tells me we had to leave once because the wind gave me an earache. She says I cried all the way home.
I stagger on, perversely determined to seize my picture. And if the camera should shake? Well then, let it shake. The image will be then a reflection of its subject. But how much better if I was granted a moment of stillness… I ask only for a moment–for an eighth of a second–so that I might reveal this place in all its Terribleness.
No matter how many times I walk this trail, I am never prepared for the view of its end. There, at the bottom of a last, steep slope, a barren hump swells from the sea. It looks like a stage, like a pulpit, like a place for a last stand. It looks like it’s been waiting for you.
It’s been over ten years since that night and still, the sight of it causes me to shudder. Even now, gathering its recumbent syllables together in my mind makes the hair on my neck stand up. The sound of it itself has become a talisman.
Chimney Rock.
I have consecrated this place.
Chimney Rock, Point Reyes–the end of the earth.
I should begin here, at the beginning of everything.