1976 | Denver
70 | Common Cause - 2
1984 | La Mesa, California
“…We are different;
We are one.”
* A good time to look at Derrick Wang’s one-act comic opera Scalia/Ginsberg.
69 | Common Cause
1984 | La Mesa, California
Los Angeles hosted the 1984 Summer Olympics, having been the only viable bidder that year, and the centerpiece was again the same Memorial Coliseum used in the 1932 Games. I hardly remember that the Soviet Union boycotted the Games, along with all of the Eastern Bloc, less Romania, plus Iran and Libya for other reasons. (The U.S. had boycotted the 1980 Moscow Summer Games in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)
During the run-up for the Games, the Torch was brought from Greece by relay, arriving on our shores in New York, then was carried by hand through thirty-three states over 9,000 miles by over 3,600 relaying runners. Crowds really did come out to celebrate its passing through their communities on its generously serpentine route around the country. Here people gathered to celebrate a runner passing through La Mesa toward San Diego, to complete the route into Los Angeles from the south.
I do miss the days when we could join a big crowd with common enthusiasm, celebrate international sport, ignore boycotts, and cheer what we all shared.
68 | Harbor View
1977 | San Diego
The tuna boats comprised another big fleet in San Diego, and their owners and crews have been a significant part of the community. Their fortunes rose and fell with the catch, jostling national economies, international claims of fishing rights, oil prices, and everything else that floats.
Lesser known is the fact that fifty-two boats, more than half of the California fleet, were commandeered by the military in 1941 and 1942. Often manned by their own fishing crews, they ran picket duty to guard the Panama Canal, and delivered fuel to Pacific Island bases all the way across. Their superb refrigeration systems were valuable in ferrying perishables to our far-flung troops. Their shallow draft and long range got them in and out of distant, difficult, and dangerous places. They weren’t just boats; they were lifelines.
67 | Sailor's View
1985 | San Diego
By the 1920’s, San Diego already had seven Navy bases, and today the Navy remains the region’s largest employer, still defining its landscape.
In the early 1990’s, I drove onto one of those bases to lead a digital photography workshop for Navy personnel. My long wait at the sentry booth was soon explained, as the entire base fell silent at 0800, came to attention and faced our Flag flying from its mast as the national anthem echoed from a huge P.A. system.
Years later, I came to know a civilian employee of the Navy, whose 45-year career began as a computer technician when disk drives were the size of wagon wheels and data cables were as thick as elephants’ trunks. (In the lab, her team would assemble, program, de-bug, and run-in a new computer, verifying its capability. Then the whole system would be dismantled and stuffed and threaded into the spaces on a ship, to be debugged and verified again. Then there were sea-trials.)
Now, in her retirement, on still mornings, when she can hear the strains of the anthem, she still stands and faces the distant flagpole, far out of view. I asked her one day about her devotion to the Navy. She told me that it was not her own relationship that was so important, but that of her late father, and of his service at sea in two wars. (He had a ship shot out from under him in the Pacific.) It became her personal practice to feel near him on those clean mornings at 0800, when the anthem was in the air.
66 | Devils Hole
1996 | View South from Devils Hole
Behind me here is a small parcel in Nevada which was annexed in 1952 under President Harry Truman as an addition to Death Valley National Monument (National Park since 1994). It was long known to be a special place by Natives and more recently was set aside to protect the only known population of a distinct species of desert pupfish.
Devils Hole is a vertical cave, over 400 feet deep, fed by “fossil waters” which came into the aquifers 10,000 years ago as rain and snow. The Hole has intriguing geologic connections; seismic disturbances halfway around the world can cause its water level to rise and fall as much as six feet in a kind of sympathetic tsunami. The pupfish have evolved here at a selected depth under a rock shelf where the water is 94 degrees, the salinity is acceptable, and algae near the sunlit surface provide their food.
There is a viewing platform where a visitor might look for pupfish in the pool, but my picture up that way was over their heads to the fencing and desert beyond, and seemed a deficient one. Over the years, though, I have learned that when I find a spot but not a picture, there is often a picture right behind me, 180 degrees away; it turns out that I have been on exactly the right axis, but facing in the wrong direction.
So here is my view from Devils Hole, where for me, things were really happening that morning. I love the desert – there is always something going on.
▷ October 21 (update): Blog Handbook No. 1 is out…
65 | Royal Gorge
1978 | The Bridge over Royal Gorge
Near Cañon City, an old Colorado Gold Rush town, is a bridge to nowhere, built as a tourist attraction because the Royal Gorge was spectacularly there. It did lead to the record books as the highest bridge in the world, its deck 955 feet above the Arkansas River. By 2001, other bridges in the world overtook it, but this one still stands as the highest in the United States.
In 1878, the bottom of this tight gorge was only wide enough for a single track and a single railroad company. From opposite directions, the Santa Fe and the Denver & Rio Grande attacked the gorge, then each other in a serious physical confrontation. The D&RG won the legal battle in the Supreme Court, but the Santa Fe then muscled up and squeezed its own line through. A messy and fascinating history followed, and in 1880 things were somewhat smoothed by the so-called “Treaty of Boston.”
*Around this time, William Henry Jackson was making fine pictures along the line in the Royal Gorge, including views of the remarkable cantilevered railroad bridge at water level. You could look these up.
64 | ORU
1977 | Oral Roberts University
I was raised in a Gold Rush state, whose aggressive get-rich-quick beginnings plowed over Native, then Mexican claims. In 1846, a tiny band of immigrants captured the Mexican comandante Vallejo and raised the Bear Flag to establish a rough republic, leading to statehood in 1850. Somehow, culture bloomed along with everything else, and the University of California was founded in 1868 with hope for an educated populace under the motto Fiat Lux.* (In 1870, a UC policy was adopted for women to be admitted equally.)
So when I visited Tulsa, I found the campus of Oral Roberts University, some 100 years younger than my alma mater, visually engaging but seriously unsettling. I had not encountered another place called a university which was founded on assertion rather than inquiry. Aside from its academic posture, its primary history is a long and sordid story of how its students were mistreated and its funds were diverted.
* ”Let there be Light”
** The University of California system operates as separate public corporation, insulating its academic mission from much of the political distractions in the state. But this is not without irony – my diploma was signed by Ronald Reagan, actor-cum-governor, which at the time I thought was an anomaly, but a generation later, my son’s well-earned degree was certified with the signature of…Arnold Schwartzenegger.
63 | High Water
1981 | Travertine Point
I scrambled up this rough slope near Travertine Point, hoping for a good vantage to estimate the old water level of Pleistocene Lake Cahuilla, some 275 feet above the present Salton Sea, which itself lies 235 feet below the Pacific Ocean.
More than a view, I found a sense of the huge volume that had filled the broad basin, covering an area 130 miles long. As I rested with my head aligned to the old water level, I could feel the old waves lapping at my neck as I saw the rough shells of bivalves clearly marking the shore. All the cues were there; I felt buoyed in the old water and free to breathe with my head just above the surface.
This was a fine place to take in a great hydrological cycle of the West, which shifted dry and wet over 400-year periods, and this shoreline revealed its own memories to me. It was easy to go back in time here, after I learned how to be still, and to tread water in the old lake.
62 | Salton Bay Yacht Club
1993 | Salton Bay Yacht Club
When calm, the Salton Sea looks almost hard, truly glassy. Twice as salty as the oceans, its dense waters lie flat. This heavy water brings erosion and corrosion along the human shoreline that was boldly selected from a constantly ranging water level. All around the sea is evidence of short-term planning, played out over an accelerated longer term.
As I entered high school in 1961, forms were being staked and concrete poured for this pool deck at the Salton Bay Yacht Club. It was about to be abandoned to rising sea levels as I left grad school, and before the middle of my career, it was just another piece in the geometric puzzle of the seaside ghost town.
Now it’s high and dry.