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1985 | Coronado, California
The Hotel del Coronado has been the centerpiece of the San Diego shoreline since its construction in 1888, old enough to have been photographed by William Henry Jackson. In its time, it was the world’s largest resort hotel, and today it holds the title of the second-largest wooden building in the United States.
But for this picture, l turned my back on all that; there’s always a place in my heart for vernacular architecture.
1994 | Borrego Springs
I used to stop here to hit a few balls, but the ones in the two-dollar buckets were crippled and near-dead. So I began to collect the ones lost in the chaparral along the Balboa Park course near my home, then bring them here and hit them out into the owner’s inventory.
I met Jack one day as he pedaled out from town on an old bicycle. I was forty-six years old at the time, but he asked me if I was thinking about retirement, that I should look around for some property in the desert.
I thanked him for the encouragement, but did not mention two things which came to mind. The first, that the Borrego Valley relies on pumped groundwater from an aquifer with unknown voume and unmapped sources; at the time, hydrologists were noting that the water coming out of the wells was about 5000 years old, and replenishment of the groundwater was till a mystery. The other thing was that in my limited golfing experience, the Borrego Valley was not the place to play regularly. One course, Ram’s Hill, was atrociously gentrified, an another one, Club Circle, was an engaging nine-hole course, a donut-ring around a modest development east of town. All I remember about Club Circle is that it was windy — as I circumnavigated the course, I used a driver into the wind on a 100-yard hole, and downwind, a pitching wedge for a 200-yard tee shot.
1997 | Curry County, Oregon
We think of Oregon as pristine, but you can drive on the beaches. Incoming tides, however, can rise to discourage this and impound some vehicles.
This view was made just beyond a forest where a splendid blue-slate canyon opened out. The hill in the background has been clear-cut — the owner sold the trees one year, to raise money for his property taxes.
1991 | Salton City, California
Salton City came on-line in 1958, to great fanfare with hundreds of miles of paved roads and significant anticipatory infrastructure. Many investors speculated in the 25,000 lots in the plan, a few built. Not long after, the water level in the Salton Sea rose due to unusual precipitation and agricultural runoff, and the promise of seashore living was compromised and inundated. More recently, the sea level dropped considerably due to drought and better management of the human-generated runoff, and the shoreline is drier than ever in modern times.
Every time I have visited this place, I’ve seen far too much or far too little water to fulfill the dreamers’ dreams.
▷ The soil in the Imperial Valley is salty in a shallow basin, so irrigation and plant transpiration leach debilitating salts up to the level of the crop’s roots. Tile drains have been set four feet deep in the soil, extra water is laid on the crops, and the salts are flushed into the drains and routed down into the Salton Sea.
1989 | My Mother’s Workroom, Marin County
For me, this one has become an example of photographic history; now, only the walls, door, and window are the same. My father built this space out of thin air — the little hillside shed-roofed cabin was originally cantilevered on twelve four-inch steel-pipe columns and four steel H-beams like a Case Study House. So Dad set a real foundation and then built a nice basement-with-view workroom to finish out a more livable house.
My father was intrigued by maps early in life, and later on, he pored over aerial and satellite views. He arranged almost all of his trips to experience the “ground truth” of special places. My parents were able to make a voyage to Scammon’s Lagoon during the gray whale breeding season, enjoying marine life from sea level along that part of the Baja California peninsula.
The spreading bay laurel seen through the window was blown over in a big storm a few years after this picture was made.
The watercolor at right was made by my grandfather Rene Weaver in the red-rock country near Sedona, while grandmother Claire sunbathed rather immodestly for her era. My mother learned to weave from her mother, and this picture shows a smaller model from Grandmother’s many looms; my mother had this four-harness rig warped up for an “easy” project.
I remember that Claire had three bedrooms full of yarn upstairs in the old house in Oakland, and that Rene regularly threatened to put a large sign out on the front lawn the moment she passed away — "GIANT YARN SALE!” But she outlived him by a few years, so that task fell to my mother and sister, who supplied lovely vintage yarns to serious weavers and knitters all up and down the coast.
While Rene was engaged in his fine watercolor work, Claire wove stair-tread runners for the house, upholstery for the living-room chairs, yardage for clothing, and hanging works for exhibition. I recently found a color photo of her from the ‘70s showing her wearing a remarkable full-length wool coat — the same material as my favorite reading chair near their old library nook!
Both of these grandparents were generous with their skills, as were the other two, and my own parents. Rene patiently taught many watercolor classes, and Claire was a special resource — when San Francisco-born Kay Sekimachi was released after her childhood incarceration as a Japanese American, she asked Claire to teach her how to weave.
▷ You could look Kay up; her name and her works are everywhere.
1993 | Abbotts Lagoon, Point Reyes
This picture is fairly “old,” but it’s recent to me because I am just taking a second look at it this year. It was made at a time when I used the view camera for everything. On this day I walked out toward Ten Mile Beach and was arrested by this scene instead.
This is a fine place to view geology in action — as I write, I am sitting a few miles away from this lagoon, at a kitchen table on the Pacific Plate, looking across water in the San Andreas Fault, toward hills on the North Pacific Plate.
1998 | Mesquite Flat, Death Valley
In psychology, apprehension (Lat. ad, "to"; prehendere, "to seize") is a term applied to a model of consciousness in which nothing is affirmed or denied of the object in question, but the mind is merely aware of ("seizes") it.
▷ As noted in Wikipedia, based on an article in the out-of-copyright Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh Edition, 1911).
1995 | California-190, View East-Northeast
I know that I made another fine picture right here, near this time. (It’s the closing photograph in One Eye on the Road.)
But after the light “deteriorated,” I stayed alert, paid soft attention, moved my camera a little, and exposed this sheet. I’m glad I did, and I am grateful for the subtle power of the camera to make good sense of my most delicate and fleeting intuitions. Seventeen and a half years later, I am that much older, and now I feel ready to give these kinds of pictures a different kind of attention.
Some time ago, a sharp therapist told me that there are two kinds of light — starlight, and fog light. I still don’t know exactly what he meant by those, but I have been more sensitive to them ever since.
1994 | Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
It’s possible to see a long way from here, but that’s not always the point.
1989 | Old Site of Deer Park Elementary School, Fairfax, California
For me, Deer Park Elementary School was the crystallization of the good old days; I could walk the mile to first grade, and on the way home I could stop at the “Little Store” and use my pennies to choose from the candy box the proprietor kept behind the counter. If I walked to school with my big brother, we could cut across on our secret back route, jump the creek, and make it to class early.
I remember one day, on the way home with my pal Al Mellow (he was!), we stopped at the tiny triangle park with its grove of redwoods. We discovered that though tall, they were easy for us to scale to a significant height, as this species grew with fine child-hand-sized side branching. Arriving home, my mother noted we were later than usual, and asked what we had done on the way home.
“Oh, nothin’.”
Demographics have changed, rising property values have priced out young families, and Deer Park has been re-purposed as a community center. This is what I saw when I took my kindergarten-age son for a visit to the dear old place.