Ansel Adams Read online

  At the time of my birth my father was building what was to be our family home on the dunes, out beyond the Golden Gate, the narrow passage from the bays of San Francisco and Oakland to the Pacific Ocean. This was thirty years before the famous bridge was built to connect San Francisco to Marin County, with its beautiful hills rising to the north. Our house was sturdily made; my Grandfather Adams, being a lumberman, gave my father the lumber in double the specification quality and quantity. A large brick chimney rose from the ground level and serviced the coal furnace and fireplaces in the living room and my parents’ room on the second floor. The chimney continued upward through the eaves of the shingled roof to a noble height. A second, smaller chimney vented the kitchen stove.

  My bedroom was on the second floor; it was about twelve feet square and situated in the northwest corner. I could see the Golden Gate from the north window and the cypress trees and rolling dunes around the old Chinese cemetery in what is now Lincoln Park to the west. I could also gaze well out to sea, beyond Point Bonita and the white glimmer of the Cabbage Patch, a dangerous shoal. I could watch ships of every description enter and leave the embrace of the Golden Gate.

  There was always the distant bustle of the city, a deep and throbbing space-filling rumble of ironclad wagon wheels on cobbled streets and the grind of streetcars. It was almost like the sound of the ocean or the wind in the forest, yet deep with the brutality that only a city can offer in fact and spirit, no matter how glamorous the environment or euphoric the social veneer. This was a resonance we cannot experience today; rubber tires on smooth paved streets have muted the old, rough sounds of iron on stone and the clopping of thousands of horses’ hooves, timing the slow progression of ponderous wagons and more sprightly buggies. It was a sound not to be forgotten: a pulse of life in vigorous physical contact with earth.

  Returning from his downtown office, my father took a daily carriage from the end of the cable car line at Presidio Avenue to our home. I could see him coming for a mile over the sand dunes to the east, since hardly a structure interrupted the view over the dunes, from the Presidio to Lone Mountain. At Lake Street and 24th Avenue he would climb out of the “two-seater” and come down the boardwalk over the sand to our redwood gate between the two native laurel trees, carrying my milk and other groceries.

  Though usually at home with us, April 17, 1906, found my father away on business in Washington, D.C. Mr. O’Connor, an old family friend, occupied the guest room. Our Chinese cook, Kong, slept in the basement. That evening all was quiet, except for the boom of the surf pounding on Baker Beach. I was tucked away in my child’s bed. Nelly, my nanny, an elderly woman of expansive heart and frame, slept next to me in her bed.

  At five-fifteen the next morning, we were awakened by a tremendous noise. Our beds were moving violently about. Nelly held frantically onto mine, as together we crashed back and forth against the walls. Our west window gave way in a shower of glass, and the handsome brick chimney passed by the north window, slicing through the greenhouse my father had just completed. The roaring, swaying, moving, and grinding continued for what seemed like a long time; it actually took less than a minute. Then, there was an eerie silence with only the surf sounds coming through the shattered window and an occasional crash of plaster and tinkle of glass from downstairs.

  Nelly pulled me out of bed and quickly dressed me. My mother hastened into my room; I recall her as rather pale and dazed; the entire fireplace in her room had gone with the fallen chimney and she had awakened to a broad view of the Golden Gate and the cold morning breeze. She hugged me tightly and then we hesitantly went downstairs to assay the damage. Mr. O’Connor was already about in his dressing gown, warning us not to step on the many shards of glass and china. The pantry, with its bountiful shelves of homemade preserves, was a shambles; everything movable seemed to be broken on the floor. The living room fireplace had fallen in; a treasured cut-glass vase from the mantel was buried in the bricks but was later miraculously retrieved in perfect condition. Plaster was cracked and detached everywhere, but fortunately the ceilings and walls solidly remained.

  Mr. O’Connor had taken a quick look outside the house and knew that both chimneys had collapsed. I next heard the sounds of an altercation from the kitchen. Mr. O’Connor had forcibly to restrain Kong from building a fire in the stove; it would have been an added disaster. Kong appeared stunned. I later learned that he had suffered a concussion from being thrown against the wall by the quake.

  Mr. O’Connor and Kong moved the stove outside, and by ten o’clock a breakfast was ready, although it took much foraging to find edible food in the appalling mess. I am sure my father, if present, would have recorded it all with his Brownie Bullseye box camera.

  I was a little over four years of age and was very curious, wanting to be everywhere at once. There were many minor aftershocks, and I could hear them coming. It was fun for me, but not for anyone else. I was exploring in the garden when my mother called me to breakfast and I came trotting. At that moment a severe aftershock hit and threw me off balance. I tumbled against a low brick garden wall, my nose making violent contact with quite a bloody effect. The nosebleed stopped after an hour, but my beauty was marred forever—the septum was thoroughly broken. When the family doctor could be reached, he advised that my nose be left alone until I matured; it could then be repaired with greater aesthetic quality. Apparently I never matured, as I have yet to see a surgeon about it.

  The impressions of confusion during the following days and, above all, the differences in daily life, are still very much with me. I recall a great to-do about cleaning up the house and a large and growing mound of broken glassware, crockery, bricks, and assorted rubble, piled in a far corner of the garden. Mr. O’Connor walked into town and secured food. Soldiers from the Presidio came by and gave us fresh water.

  Kong returned to Chinatown to be with his family and friends. He came back a day later, looking grim, and stated that he had found no one and that fire was everywhere. He never discovered what happened to his family. It is probable that they were lost with the many others in the fiery holocaust that consumed most of San Francisco east of Van Ness Avenue following the earthquake. Since the principal waterways and cisterns of the city were destroyed in the quake, there was no water with which to contest the fast-spreading flames. I have heard an estimate of four hundred lives lost; it was also said that the real total was closer to four thousand, as it is probable that the Chinese had never been counted. All personal and legal records in the city hall were lost: property records, birth certificates, recorded documents, all gone. The army moved in to maintain law and order. A meeting with the hangman or the firing squad was the assured fate of looters and other criminals; the word spread, and there was little crime.

  From our house I saw vast curtains of smoke by day and walls of flame by night filling a good part of the eastern horizon. I remember the distant booms of dynamite as the program of blasting buildings to arrest the fire’s progress continued. Refugees poured into our district, setting up their pitiful camps in the dunes with what they had carried from their burning or fire-threatened homes. We had several friends who had been burnt out of their dwellings sleeping on our floors.

  I can understand now the intense anxiety my father must have felt, thousands of miles away, buffeted by outrageous telegraphed rumors of total disaster. It had been variously reported that all the city had burned, that San Francisco was slowly sinking into the sea, or that a huge tidal wave had wrecked the entire Bay area. My father left Washington as soon as he could find space on a train and arrived about six days later. Finally reaching the ferry docks, he was unable to get a horse and buggy, so he ran and walked five miles around the periphery of the fire to our home. Happily, he found all was well, with his family healthy and the house he had built largely intact.

  An important family heirloom from New England, an 1812 grandfather clock with wooden works, had stood by the door in a corner of the living room. The shock transported it to a
prone position, about twenty-five feet away in the opposite corner. The wooden gears and shafts were scattered about, and I am told that I exclaimed with glee, “Now I can play with the clockworks!” The parts were gathered up and within a year a clockmaker had put them all together. The old clock, serene in its antiquity, ticks on in our Carmel home today, still keeping astonishingly good time.

  After the quake, field mice and sand fleas invaded the house. Our cat, Tommy, who had disappeared for two days after the quake, returned for a copious diet of mice, while fleas feasted on him and on us. Tommy did not get all the mice; some expired in the woodwork and with that came the usual week of wrinkled noses and resigned expressions.

  My closest experience with profound human suffering was that earthquake and fire. But we were not burned out, ruined, or bereft of family and friends. I never went to war, too young for the First and too old for the Second. The great events of the world have been tragic pageants, not personal involvements. My world has been a world too few people are lucky enough to live in—one of peace and beauty. I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.

  2.

  Childhood

  DESPITE A WIRY FRAME AND CONSIDERABLE STAMINA, as a child I was prone to frequent illness, with far too many colds and flu. I also had extremely poor teeth that plagued me later with diabolic toothaches, especially on cold mountain nights. I now realize that my diet as a child was atrocious: too many sweets and starches and not enough foods with the protein, mineral, and vitamin content I needed. I do not blame my parents for this; there was little knowledge of proper diet in the early 1900s.

  My mental state was also precarious. At the age of ten I remember experiencing unsettled periods of weepiness. The doctor ordered me to bed in a darkened room every afternoon for two hours to calm me, but the effect was just the opposite. I remained alert, resistant and hostile to this routine. The sound of the surf from Baker Beach, of the gardener working outside my window, and of occasional children playing near the house created a yearning tension to get up and go that left me in much worse condition. I wanted to run down to the beach in sun, rain, or fog and expend the pent-up physical energy that simply fermented within me. Today I would be labeled hyperactive.

  With a resolute whisper, Lobos Creek flowed past our home on its mile-long journey to the ocean. It was bordered, at times covered, with watercress and alive with minnows, tadpoles, and a variety of larvae. Water bugs skimmed the open surfaces and dragonflies darted above the stream bed. In spring, flowers were rampant and fragrant. In heavy fog the creek was eerie, rippling out of nowhere and vanishing into nothingness. I explored every foot, tunneling through the thick brush and following the last small canyons in the clay strata before it met the Pacific. The ocean was too cold for swimming, so I would skirt the wave-foamed edge and follow the rocky shore to Fort Scott to the east or climb along the rugged cliffs to China Beach to the west. These cliffs were dangerous, but I was light and strong and could pull myself by my fingertips over minor chasms.

  A beautiful stand of live oaks arched over the creek. In about 1910, the Army Corps of Engineers, for unimaginable reasons, decided to clear out the oaks and brush. My father was out of town when the crime was committed. One of his favorite walks was through these glades to Mountain Lake in the nearby San Francisco Presidio; on his return, he became physically ill when he witnessed the ruthless damage.

  I must have been a juvenile problem of consequence, but I was limited by my very proper human surroundings. While my father was liberal in his politics, he was also shy and socially conventional. In the presence of all but close friends he addressed my mother as Mrs. Adams. I never saw him without a collar except on Sunday mornings. Attaching the collar to the shirt by front and back buttons was a major effort. He sometimes yanked the collar off the shirt while making a few pointed remarks about the fate of mankind that such gestures of convention should be so nasty. All his shirts were designed for stiff collars; collarless, he looked quite forlorn, showing a brass button and a long neck.

  Certain matters of life were completely avoided or most daringly spoken of in whispers. That did not stop me from asking, “Does God go to the toilet?” Grandfather Bray would clearly enunciate, sometimes between clenched teeth, “Plague be gone, young’un!”

  Inevitably, I pondered the beginnings: where from and how had I entered life? I asked these questions of my mother; she merely shook her head. I enjoyed a prepuberty erection in the bathtub and asked, “What is that?” Again my mother shook her head. I had heard or read mysterious words and would innocently ask neighbors questions such as “What does masturbate mean?” I never had an explanation, only queer looks and obvious evasions. One of the main city sewers drained about a thousand feet or so offshore at Baker Beach, and an array of objects would come ashore. Sanitation was a foreign word in those days and one had to walk carefully on Baker Beach! There also were interesting rubber objects that I first thought were jellyfish, or some other form of sealife. Bringing one home for questioning did not sit well with my mother, and I am confident now that Aunt Mary could not identify it.

  I posed my questions to my father and he painfully explained—after being sure we were alone and out of the house. I later learned that he did not have an accurate idea of the essential organs and their relationship. My friends and I, equally uninformed, conjectured the possibilities: never were there greater fantasies in all the paradises of fact or legend!

  My favorite hobby was collecting insects. Various bugs filled the bottom drawer of the large bureau with phalanx after phalanx of tiny corpses displayed on pins. When my great-aunt, Mrs. Aurelia Hills Collamore, came from Thomaston, Maine, to visit us, she was given my room. She must have been eighty-five years old and was dressed like a Grant Wood woman on Sundays. I told her the bottom drawer of the bureau was full of bugs. Being slightly deaf she misunderstood me, thinking I had said, “Bed bugs!” There was a screech and a period of feminine demonstration. Even after my explanation, her visit was clouded with the faint possibility that the insects would crawl down from the pins and attack her. I had one huge African black beetle nearly three inches long with a horn like a rhinoceros. It always looked ready for takeoff, and she asked me to please put it somewhere else. I covered it with a little box and put a weight on it. That seemed to mollify her.

  To continue my catalog of childhood leisuretime activities: I was quite a roller skater for a time until a number of hard falls and close calls with automobiles and horses convinced me I should stop that activity. Another sport I enjoyed for a while was golf. Once, at the old Lincoln Park Golf Links, I lofted a ball over a bunker in the general direction of the hidden green. My companion and I searched for the ball for half an hour (we had a very limited budget for golf balls) and then found it in the cup, an unanticipated hole in one! I played cribbage with my father and pinochle with my friend Billy Prince, and usually lost to both. I tried playing chess, without success, and bridge and poker were anathema. I just could not rouse the patience required to accomplish these games. I also had no interest in spectator sports.

  When roaming our neighborhood and the city, I found there was only one rewarding way to get from place to place and that was to run! I was impatient at the tempo of walking and the slow sidewalk flow of pedestrians and I simply ran, doubtless an object of curiosity. Jogging was unheard of in those days, but a few athletes in training might be seen running in their white shoes, shorts, and sweaters. Darting about as I did in a conventional child’s suit was out of order and conspicuous.

  In the late afternoons I usually returned to Baker Beach to walk along the surf-edge across the dark, flamelike tongues of sand. I was never able to find the source of the considerable amount of iron particles that caused this interesting effect. I would take cans of the sand home, dry it out and experiment, sprinkling the sand on a sheet of paper and moving magnets of different shapes underneath, producing wonderful patterns with the black iron parti
cles against the white background.

  Driftwood would come ashore in all shapes and sizes—large timbers, poles, wood fragments, and deeply worn parts of furniture. Some were very beautiful in their configurations. All had firewood potential. I carried as much as I could home each day to add to our supply.

  The great sand dunes began stirring with developments. Contractors spawned houses on twenty-five-foot lots. Just east of our house, two blocks of sand and scrub were graded by scrapers powered by mules and sweating, yelling men. Baronial limestone gates were set up at 22nd and 24th Avenues. Twenty-third Avenue was cut off and a new street, paralleling Lake Street, was graded in, paved, with a strip of lawn and a sidewalk on each side and given the glamorous name of West Clay Street. The basic Clay Street ended more than a mile away to the east. The imagination is boggled by the lack of it at times.

  Mr. S. A. Born was one of the more dependable and prosperous contractors and the one who developed the lands surrounding our home. His houses were contractor designed, put together without compromise, and have lasted with a stern dowager quality for many decades. He was very kind to me, allowing me to visit his field office and observe his draftsmen. His patience passeth understanding. From him I learned how to draw a straight line and a ninety-degree angle. I drew up some plans for houses, forgetting to provide for stairs and closets.

  Words fail to convey my total experience in that office: the smell of pinewood, ink, and sweat, the all-pervading sand on tables, chairs, paper, and between teeth, the hot afternoon light coming through small, dusty, spider-hazed windows, and the sound of wind and surf invading the room every time the door was opened. There were rolls and rolls of plans, pale blue and frayed at the edges, stacked on frames and on the floor, bearing incomprehensible hieroglyphics of plumbing, wiring, and framing details. The master carpenter would come in, loudly arguing with gusty profanity some point, then exit in slam-the-door wrath only to reappear, sanguine, an hour later.