Summer of Sixty

From shortly after World War Two till 1975 Fort Ord was the main basic training center for the US Army in the western United Sates.  In 1990 it was closed and morphed into a state university, several housing developments and a strip mall with an REI.  Its easternmost acres became Laguna Seca Raceway.  It was the largest army post to suffer the indignity.

Basic Training was a rite of passage for thousands of young men including this feckless fellow.  The Army or at least the Army Reserve version of same was a reprieve from a rocky first year of college in which my budding career as a folk singer and established career as a beer drinker kept my eye far from the academic ball.  And that puts it mildly.

Anyway Basic is a mythic hurdle for the callow and immature.  Just entering the presumed depths of hell makes a boy’s knees quiver.  In reality, it was pretty easy if you played the game of playing soldier and basic was a lot like play.  I was pumped in those manly forced marches, acing tests and the wearing tailored fatigues that had other trainees saluting me until they got close enough to see there were no bars on my lapels. 

Ted Newman, another folkie from Phoenix, was also at Fort Ord.  Ted, who was a couple of years older, had enjoyed a minor hit in 1959 called “Plaything.”  Nick Todd, Pat Boone’s younger brother, also covered the tune on Dot Records.   “Plaything that’s all I was to you.  Some tricks.  Your little game is through.  Right now, stop knockin' at my door?  I'm not your plaything anymore.”  Pure poetry.

Ted and his Martin held court on Carmel's Main Beach every Sunday and I followed suit; a Beach Blanket movie without Annette and Frankie.  I don’t know if Ted was authorized to leave the post.   I know I wasn't but, hey, the south gate was unmanned.

Ted became an Army helicopter pilot and an elementary school teacher in Gilbert, Arizona and Nick became a social worker.   I opened forty restaurants over forty years.  That's forty opening nights.  I win.

On the flip side the vacant hulks of the old barracks take a mournful turn.  They proffer an aching postmortem for the fort and for the youthful energy that filled these spaces half a century ago.  The murals from that era and the graffiti from this one compete for our attention.  Abandoned and empty the derelict halls echo with the voices of raucous young soldiers and billows of smoke that accompanied them.  The words "Smoke 'em if you've got 'em." punctuated every idle moment in this man's Army in the summer of 1960.  

Moss Landing

The Salinas River enters the Pacific just below Moss Landing.  I have the faintest recollection of being there in the mid-forties and recall that its icy waters were a mecca for sport fishing.  Today its home to 300 humans and 500 boats, larger even than Monterey itself.   A former whaling port, the harbor now docks vessels fishing for King Salmon, Halibut, Albacore, Black Cod and Red Snapper. Got a mind like a steel trap, I do.

In the seventies Moss Landing had descended into an abyss of pollution fueled by failed septic systems, a paucity of infrastructure and nasty effluent from the natural gas powered electric generator that dominates the skyline.   Several lawsuits and many millions of dollars of public dollars later the tiny village has recaptured some of its earlier glory.  A marine research facility operated by Cal State University and Monterey’s famed aquarium debuted the weekend after my visit.  One hopes that the new laboratory signals a return of the pristine shore and waters of my childhood.

Empty beaches offer serenity with a dollop of melancholy especially in fog or overcast skies as it was this day.  I shared Salinas Beach State Park with a solitary walker and driftwood sculpture from Mother Nature’s damp studio.

As the face of the moon

When I hear Zabriskie Point two thoughts spring to mind.  One, of course, is the famed Death Valley landmark and the other is Michelangelo Antonioni’s failed 1970 film of the same name.  The photogenic locale endures as a photographic magnet and Antonioni’s panned 1970 paean to sixties counter culture endures as a cult classic replete with dialogue by Sam Shepard and music by Jerry Garcia, the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd.  In it Harrison Ford had an uncredited role as a jailed student protester.   The movie ending five minute slow motion explosion fantasy with Pink Floyd’s Careful with the Ax beneath the bombast is worth the trip.  Pun intended.

Zabriskie Point is part of the Amargosa Range and of the Furnace Creek formation in eastern Death Valley.   It’s described as badlands which I take to mean dry, inhospitable and desperate.  In other words beautiful.  From the main vista point spreads a 360 degree view of otherworldly tucks, folds and creases of rock and of the desert floor stretching to the Black Mountains in the distance.  Zabriskie is often portrayed abstractly with the convolutions in the rock photographed without the context of the broader landscape.  And as with other iconic locales producing a transcendent image is a result of some skill and more luck.

Zabriskie Point is a Soviet code for a location on the moon and couldn't be a more apt for this barren moonscape.  But it was actually named for Christian Zabriskie the general manager of Pacific Coast Borax Company whose twenty-mule teams transported the borax from its Death Valley mines.  Anybody remember Death Valley Days from early television?  Who was its host? 

Kudos to Kelp

Three Stones and Surf

The Point Lobos was described by Tasmanian landscape painter Francis McComas as “the greatest meeting of land and water in the world.”  He left this earth in Pebble Beach so he certainly thought so. Still that’s some lofty lingo to describe a tiny, rocky headland.  There are legions of Mainers who would put Acadia and Monhegan into the ring with the Central Coast contender any old time.  Weston battles Wyeth in a steel cage death match.

Sea Foam

Part of the rocky part of the rocky headlands

Kelp in black and white

Kelp in Color

Unhappily for me I erased two memory cards from our recent California sojourn, erased that is before downloading the images.   So half of what I could have shown and told about Point Lobos has vanished into nothingness along with half my shots from the former Fort Ord where I majored in Army Basic Training and minored in AWOL on Carmel's Main Beach during the summer of 1960.  

California Dreaming

Point Lobos Morning

To say that California is a trove of topographic diversity puts it mildly.  With Mediterranean, Alpine, and three desert ecosystems to mention just a few the Golden State has about every kind of terrain you could want.  In the course of three trips there since November I’ve spent five weeks seeing just a fraction of its bounty and reckon I'll be back for more. So much state and so little time.

 

Within this wide array reside two iconic photographic locations, Point Lobos on the Central Coast and Zabriskie Point in Death Valley.  Both have lured generations of photographers most notably Edward Weston at Point Lobos just a football throw away from his house on Wildcat Hill.

Zabriskie Point

Here are three images from a week ago, one from Point Lobos, one from Zabriskie Point and one from the oak flecked hills above Carmel Valley.  The soft shouldered meadows of California’s Central Valley represent the Golden State like nothing else to me.   They may lack the drama of the shore and desert but they color my first childhood memories in Salinas and San Leandro.

Oaks and Meadow, Coastal Range

Remember to click on the images to see them full size.  The tall state needs a big screen.

Cactus Flower

After a week in California you’d think I’d post something from the Golden State but, alas, the computer gremlins have been in attack mode so I’m going with something from the archives.  The cactus hails from Ghost Ranch and, since we were just there, the image seems timely or at least excusable.  There’ll be precious little verbiage with this one since the gremlins have prevailed and I'm retreating to fight another day. 

Working Hands

From time to time I pull a golden oldie out my hip pocket.   Such is the case with this one of a codger and his pen knife making a whistle from a pea pod.   We found our fun anywhere we could back in the hardscrabble 1830s I can tell you that. 

The scene was Old Sturbridge Village in western Massachusetts in the early 1970s and may have been at Thanksgiving.   We enjoyed several Thanksgivings at Sturbridge when we westerners gloried in the colors, tastes and rich history of New England.  New England became our true home, the place where we spent thirty years, our children became adults and my restaurant career flourished and flagged till I rode off into the sunset 10 years ago.

Our gambrel colonial home in Ipswich was the Dennis Dodge house built in 1740.  Replete with seven fireplaces, a Jacobean staircase and a walk in fireplace with a beehive oven in the kitchen the house was magic to me.  My drive home from my office in Burlington was a 45 minutes of freeway travel and never did I regret the trip or stop relishing my return.  Garrett was baptized by Edward French at the Episcopal Church down the street.  French who had been John Updike’s Harvard roommate drove a 1968 Mercedes convertible, my favorite vehicle ever, and was married to a fiery redheaded Ballantine heiress.  Updike had also lived in Ipswich but had moved to Georgetown, Massachusetts with his former mistress and now wife.   I could write a book.  Oh wait, Updike did that.  It was a potboiler called Couples.

Old Sturbridge Village is a living museum in Sturbridge, Massachusetts which recreates life in rural New England from the 1790s through the 1830s. The Village includes 59 antique buildings, three mills and a working farm.  Customed interpreters like our old friend share the mysteries of early nineteenth century life with visitors from around the globe.

This image unlike the large format portrait posted on March 18 is from a scanned 35mm negative.