A New Kind
of Book Club

FALL LINEUP
OCTOBER 20

A Place
at the Nayarit

By NATALIA MOLINA
In her third book, Molina explores issues of
community, identity, and placemaking by
focusing on the restaurant her grandmother
opened in 1951 in Los Angeles.

NOVEMBER 17

The Gold Coast

By KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

You

The second volume in the Three
Californias trilogy, Robinson’s 1988
novel imagines Orange County in 2027:
overdeveloped, dystopic, and saturated
with freeways and malls.

DECEMBER 15

Maybe you grew up here. Maybe you visited and fell in love with the
place. Maybe you just want to learn more about it. Introducing the
California Book Club, brought to you by Alta Journal. Each month, we
gather virtually to discuss a prominent work about the region—fiction,
history, poetry, memoir—in conversation with the author. Sign up
for free today at CaliforniaBookClub.com and you’ll receive four
custom-designed bookplates. A new wave of writers deserves a new
kind of book club. Please join us.

Gordo

By JAIME CORTEZ
Cortez’s collection of linked short stories
revolves around a young boy growing up
during the 1970s in a Central Coast migrant
workers camp.

TO JOIN AND ORDER BOOKS, GO TO CALIFORNIABOOKCLUB.COM

2 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

CONTENTS
5
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
CRAFTERS AND CREATORS
OF THE AMERICAN WEST
By WILL HEARST
6
CHOOSING THE RIGHT TIME
TO BECOME A MOTHER
By PIA HINCKLE
10
DODGER STADIUM IS
THE BELLE OF THE BALL
By MATT JAFFE
14
A COMMUNITY VINEYARD
GROWS INTO A MOVEMENT
By SYDNEY LOVE
18
THE HIDDEN HISTORY
OF SAN FRANCISCO’S
GRAVEYARDS
By BETH WINEGARNER
24
BRINGING
A GROUNDBREAKING
PAINTER BACK INTO VIEW
By EMILY WILSON
27
WHY THIS ART
By COURT LURIE
28
A DANGEROUS RESCUE
IN THE TRINITY ALPS
By JULIAN SMITH

MADE IN
CALIFORNIA
50
INTRODUCTION
52
HEATH’S HEAVENLY
CERAMICS
54
MOCHI ICE CREAM IS
THE BIG CHILL
56
SENSATIONAL SEEDS

64
WET-YOUR-WHISTLE
WHISKEYS
66
FANCY FURNISHINGS
68
FOUR INVENTIONS THAT
STILL HIT THE MARK
70
THIS SKATEBOARD IS
ALWAYS ON DECK
72
JAMS SPREAD THE LOVE

58
KEEPING GUITARS
HIGH-STRUNG

74
GOLDEN STATE GRAINS

60
JOURNALS THAT WILL
GET YOU WRITING

76
WATCHES THAT ARE
WORTH THE WAIT

62
LADY GAGA’S FAVORITE
HATMAKER
36
THE WOMAN WHO TURNED
ORANGE COUNTY BLUE
By GUSTAVO ARELLANO
39
POETRY: “QUALIFYING
ANIMACY” AND “GRIEF
LOGIC #6”
By CRYSTAL AC SALAS
40
AN ALTA EXPEDITION:
RETRACING A LANDMARK
CROSSING OF THE SIERRA
By ROBERT ROPER

PHOTO BY MATTHEW SMITH; COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL SCHWAB

78
SCULPTURES TO LIGHT
UP YOUR LIFE
80
INTRODUCING THE
CALIFORNIA BOOK CLUB’S
FALL WRITERS
By NATALIA MOLINA,
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON,
and JAIME CORTEZ
86
THE MAGNIFICENCE
OF M.F.K. FISHER
By JIM LEWIS

ISSUE 21

94
THE CONTINUED
RELEVANCY OF
JOHN GREGORY DUNNE’S
VEGAS MEMOIR
By DAVID L. ULIN
100
CELEBRATING THE OEUVRE
OF COLLAGE ARTIST
ALEXIS SMITH
By HUNTER DROHOJOWSKAPHILP
105
POETRY: “A BRIEF HISTORY
OF POMONA HOUSE
PARTIES”
By MICHAEL TORRES
106
ALTA PICKS: OUR
STREAMING GUIDE
TO THE BEST OF THE WEST
108
WILL U.S. CITIES RISE
TO THE VERTICAL
CHALLENGE?
By JOSEPH GIOVANNINI
114
FICTION: “MY
CHICANO HEART”
By DANIEL A. OLIVAS
120
TRAILBLAZER:
NICOLE MARTIN
By JESSICA KLEIN

90
A NEW BIOGRAPHY
SHEDS LIGHT ON MY
GRANDFATHER’S MISTRESS
By WILL HEARST

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 1

CONTRIBUTORS

GUSTAVO ARELLANO

ROBERT ROPER

TOD SEELIE

“Sí Se Puede,”
page 36

“Five Men, Six Days, and 34 Miles Across the
Sierra Nevada,” page 40

“Five Men, Six Days, and 34 Miles Across the
Sierra Nevada” photography, page 40

Alta usually doesn’t publish stories about
politicians. What makes Ada Briceño different?
I’ve covered Ada now for over a decade
but never did a full profile until now. Her
remarkable story is that of a changing
California—the rise of unions and
progressive politics and Latinos in Orange
County, an area that was long a conservative
bastion but is now as purple as an eggplant.
If such a revolution is possible here, it can
happen anywhere. Alta is always on the
vanguard of what’s next—and Ada is it!

How did you write and organize your notes while
crossing the Sierra Nevada on foot?
Usually when I write on an outdoor subject,
there’s a motel at the end of the day. But this
time it was a tent on snow, and I was exhausted and fell asleep before I could write
anything. Then I’d wake up at dawn, scribble
down the main stuff. We saw a red bear—red
like an Irish setter—with three cubs. I was
determined to get that into the story but
couldn’t.

On an assignment that lasted days and required
moving constantly, how did you decide which
moments were worth slowing down to photograph?
Knowing what to photograph is an instinct
you hone over time. On a trek like this, it’s
more complicated due to the terrain. You need
to envision the route and anticipate things
with enough time to get ahead of the group,
all while carrying your full pack and wearing
snowshoes. It’s a bit exhausting to be “on” constantly for a week, but the results are worth it.

LYNELL GEORGE

HUNTER
DROHOJOWSKA-PHILP

VICTOR JUHASZ

“Paper Pusher,”
page 60

Do you keep a notebook or journal outside of work?
I’m not a classic journaler, per se, though
I really have tried during different periods
in my life. Instead, I keep a sort of casual
daybook/commonplace book where I jot
down observations, story ideas, or quotes
from texts I’m reading. I also clip segments
from newspaper or magazine stories, photos
or illustrations, and paste in and date them.
Maybe write about them. Those notebook
pages become a way to look back and view a
period of time via different modes.

“The Real Worlds of Alexis Smith,”
page 100
When you’re creating a story from what an artist
said in the past, where do you begin?
Alexis Smith has been a close friend for 35
years. In a way, that made it harder to write
about her, so I decided to let her tell the
story herself by using many of the quotes
I’d gathered from her in the past along with
quotes given to others. The challenge was the
intertwined simplicity and complexity of her
art and finding a balance.

“My Chicano Heart” illustrations,
page 114
Has your approach to or process of illustrating
fiction stories for Alta changed since you began
doing so two years ago?
Until Alta, I rarely if ever illustrated fiction,
so every story I work on is a journey into
uncharted territory, and the process is very
improvisational. I have my technical skills
and strengths but allow for intuition—the
muse—to choose the medium and style most
appropriate to the copy. Feeling the story
comes first.

THIS ISSUE’S OTHER WRITERS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, AND ARTISTS
STEVE CARROLL • STANLEY CHOW • JAIME CORTEZ • ANDREA D’AGOSTO • ANDREW DICUS • ERIC DRAPER • THOMAS EHRETSMANN • CAROLYN
FONG • KATHARINE GAMMON • CHRISTINA GANDOLFO • JOSEPH GIOVANNINI • PENNI GLADSTONE • SPENCER HARDING • CHRIS HARDY •
MONICA CORCORAN HAREL • JASON HENRY • PIA HINCKLE • LARRY HIRSHOWITZ • ROBERT ITO • MATT JAFFE • LARS KENSETH • JESSICA
KLEIN • CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK • JOY LANZENDORFER • LYDIA LEE • MARISSA LESHNOV • JIM LEWIS • SYDNEY LOVE • COURT LURIE • NAVIED
MAHDAVIAN • NATALIA MOLINA • STEFFIE NELSON • DANIEL A. OLIVAS • KIM STANLEY ROBINSON • ELLIS ROSEN • CRYSTAL AC SALAS •
CROWDEN SATZ • MICHAEL SCHWAB • JULIAN SMITH • MARK SMITH • MATTHEW SMITH • DUSTIN SNIPES • ALI SOLOMON • MICHAEL TORRES •
MATT TWOMBLY • PETER WESTWICK • EMILY WILSON • BETH WINEGARNER • JESSICA ZACK

2 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

ILLUSTRATIONS BY STANLEY CHOW

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Alta

JOURNAL OF ALTA CALIFORNIA
Editor & Publisher
William R. Hearst III

Join Alta
and Show
Your Love
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Alta members share a passion for
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Join today and receive an exclusive
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can wear your heart on your head!

Managing Editor: Blaise Zerega
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Editor at Large: Mary Melton
Books Editor: David L. Ulin
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4 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

By WILL HEARST

Living Treasures
of the American West
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is
not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we
must do.
—LEONARDO DA VINCI

L

eonardo is widely and deservedly regarded as
one of the greatest artists of the Western world.
But a huge volume of his artistry was devoted to
practical inventions, from a machine gun concept
for the reigning military authorities to designs for
a parachute, a helicopter, and a glider that, if it had
been built today with an engine, would surely have
been capable of flight.
He sketched the organs and muscles of the human
body. Understood the possibility of optics and lenses for
magnification. Played musical instruments and wrote
treatises on a variety of subjects, from the formation of
mountains to aging to philosophy.
As a painter, he was responsible for the Mona Lisa and The
Last Supper—two masterpieces of the Renaissance. If they
were all he had done, his reputation would still be immortal.
Leonardo was living proof that there is a fine line between
high Art with a capital A—like that in museums—and the
most beautiful and useful works of master crafters. In this
issue, we intentionally blur that line.
We’ve sought to discover and applaud the artisans whose
skills and creations rise to the level of Art, even though
they may not be formally categorized as artists. Their work
is spectacularly beautiful. And it requires study, practice,
devotion, and talent—prerequisites that we normally
associate with artists.
In Japan, there is a tradition of naming and venerating
Living National Treasures. These are creators whose
artisanal skills are so extraordinary that the whole country
is encouraged to honor and celebrate them. The designation
divides crafts into eight categories: pottery, textiles,
lacquerware, metalworking, doll making, woodworking,
papermaking, and other.
We don’t have quite the same tradition here in the West.
But perhaps we should. And in this issue, we spotlight those
creators and crafters who might be nominees, whose skill and
devotion create objects and experiences worthy of celebration
and collecting.
This issue is a voyage of discovery during which readers
will encounter the amazing work of Claudio Mariani, who
restores furniture using traditional European techniques. His
handiwork is almost invisible in restoration, and the pieces
he reproduces are almost more perfect than
the originals.
Our issue also features the amazing
pottery of Tung Chiang and the

ILLUSTRATION BY STANLEY CHOW

exquisite mochi of Frances Hashimoto. We profile the best
purveyors of heirloom seeds, the guitar-string wizardry
of Gabriel Tenorio, a printer of artisanal stationery, and a
designer of original millinery—as well as makers of rare jams,
various distillers of fine spirits, and other craft specialists.
Alta Journal was launched to discover and document arts
and culture, invention and exploration, with an emphasis on
the sensibility of the North American West—a geography
that spans the coast, the mountains, and the high deserts,
from Texas in the east to Hawaii in the west and from
northern Mexico to southern Canada. More important than
latitude and longitude are attitude and sensibility. We had a
hunch that boundaries are more fluid out here. That

PENNI GLADSTONE

Artisan Claudio Mariani (left) and his colleague Jose Umansor restore
a chair at C. Mariani Antiques in San Francisco.
science and technology count as creative pursuits. That
exploration and discovery are ongoing activities of our
readers, writers, and editors. That surfing, poetry, and
software all attract creative minds.
The one thing we might have missed, at our founding, is
the astounding number of makers who care deeply about
craft, who build objects and experiences of beauty and
functionality, and whose work inspires us and makes our lives
better. This issue of Alta is our course correction.
Leonardo also wrote that “there are three classes of people:
those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who
do not see.”
While we may not always make Leonardo’s first class, we
are determined to operate within the second class. And as is
often the case, it’s our readers and writers who lead us to see
more. Q

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 5

CHOICES

By PIA HINCKLE • Photos by MARISSA LESHNOV

‘I’d Like a Catholic
Diaphragm, Please’
Raised with all the freedom of a man, at 19 I faced my
first decision as a woman.

A

fter the birth of her third child, my grandmother Angela,
a devout Irish Catholic, went to her gynecologist and said
she wanted to be fitted with a diaphragm.
“But Mrs. Hinckle, you’re a Catholic,” he said sternly.
“Yes,” she smiled. “I’d like a Catholic diaphragm, please.”
Angela always told me she didn’t believe that God was a
bean counter. And diaphragms—birth control—were beans.
Millie, my other grandmother, was also Catholic. A first-generation
Italian American who married a Frenchman who almost broke off their
engagement to become a priest. She had soured on the church after the
nuns at a Catholic nursing school in San Francisco in the 1930s had turned her away for being
“too dark.” She happily attended the Episcopalian
nursing school instead. She became a surgical
nurse on one of Santa Rosa’s first open-heart-surgery teams but gave up that career after the first of
her four children was born.
When her daughter, my mother, was in college,
she helped my mother’s friends in need find qualified doctors in Washington State to perform safe
abortions before the procedure became widely
accessible in California with the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Pia, my Italian great-grandmother,
a faithful Catholic from the old country, told my
mother that in regard to birth control, “God helps
those who help themselves.”
“The vagina has to breathe,” Millie, a lifelong
and passionate Republican, would famously say
to me and my girl cousins if she noticed anyone wearing underwear beneath their nightgown
during sleepovers. When we got older, she educated us all about the
importance of birth control and sexual health, ideally within marriage
because “Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?”
My parents were Christmas and Easter Catholics who believed in
birth control, or family planning, as it was also known. Abortion in my
family was considered a sad last resort, medically, socially, and financially necessary at times. Something that should be legal and a matter
left to a woman’s own conscience.
I had been using a diaphragm since I was 14, when I first had sex.
I had gone to the free city health clinic closest to our house on Castro
Street to get one, intent on losing my virginity that summer of 1979 to
keep up with my older BFFs, without getting pregnant.
Four years later, I was a college sophomore in New York and having
the best sex of my young life with my grad student boyfriend. I remember he complained he could sometimes feel my diaphragm, so, not
wanting to displease him, I went on the pill. My mother had been en-

couraging me to do so anyway, saying she’d never trusted diaphragms.
I gained weight, developed PMS, and felt generally weird, so I stopped
the pill after a few cycles and went back to my trusty diaphragm.
With perfect use, the fail rate on diaphragms was considered to
be around 2 percent. When my perfect 27-day cycle ran long in early
December 1983, I wrote in my journal, “A week late. It’s stress. It’s hormones.… I think I’m knocked up, but I can’t believe it yet.… Help. I’m
even saying my prayers.”
Home pregnancy tests were new, hard to find, and expensive. I had
to go to the college infirmary. When the nurse showed me the positive
result a few days later, I froze while time stopped moving forward and
then turned into a countdown. A countdown of the days I had left to
choose an abortion. I walked back to my dorm room through the snow
with a buzzing in my ears, feeling stunned. I was faced with the first real
decision in my life. This was not choosing PBR or
Bud, feathered hair or straight, Levi’s or Jordache.
This was about life. My life. I was 18.
An unplanned pregnancy was pretty much the
worst thing that could happen to you as far as my
mother and aunts were concerned. They had been
in favor of legal abortion for decades. Of course I
was going to have one. That’s what middle-class
women did.
I knew that abortion was considered a sin in
the church. So was birth control. And sex before
marriage. And living together without being
married. No one in my Catholic family paid much
attention to any of those beans. I wasn’t worried
about going to hell—if I did, most of my family
would be there.
For all my airs of maturity, I was still a kid. I
didn’t want to give up my body, college, and my
freedom by becoming a teenage parent. I had
never even babysat! My boyfriend told me he had
been through an abortion with a previous girlfriend. He said it was my
decision and he would support whatever I chose, but we both understood that I wouldn’t keep it.
I was the first in my circle of girlfriends to get pregnant. Most of
them would in the next few years, and all of them would have abortions.
I didn’t know where to go for one, but I didn’t call my mom or my dad
or my little sister. I did what every 1980s pregnant New York college
student did—looked at the back page of the Village Voice. “Pregnant?
We can help.”

I did what every
1980s pregnant
college student
did—looked at the
back of the Village
Voice. “Pregnant?
We can help.”

6 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

•
Roe was barely a decade old, and abortion clinics were being picketed
and bombed; doctors who performed abortions were being outed and
attacked. But not in New York City. My boyfriend offered to pay most of
the $300 fee, which was much more than I made in a month at my parttime campus job in the biology lab.

Author Pia Hinckle near her
home in San Francisco.

I was going to classes, working, and trying to write papers before the
winter break, but I was out of my body. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. I decided I wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. I called a
clinic from the slimline phone in my boyfriend’s apartment off 61st and
Lexington. Crazy Eddie was going crazy on the TV in the other room. I
felt sick to my stomach after I hung up. I was to show up early on Friday
morning, having had nothing to eat or drink since the night before. I
would skip classes that day.
•
The doors were heavily barred, and there was bulletproof glass separating the reception area from the dank, off-off-white waiting room. No
one was smiling. I considered the forms that I and the other women of
various ages and races were filling out. Date of last menstrual period.
Age. Emergency contact. Religious preference. Any previous reaction to
anesthesia? Hell, I had never had any anesthesia. I had never had any
kind of medical procedure other than my wisdom teeth being pulled the
summer before.
I remember being cold, shivering naked under the thin cloth gown
while I kept my socks on. The doctor explained the procedure in a tired
voice. The nurse held my hand warmly after I got positioned in the stirrups, feeling exposed. “Look at me, Pia. It will be over soon.” I winced at
the IV being placed and the sudden whoosh of cold rushing through my
veins. I started to count backward from 10 as instructed and then came
to in what seemed like just a few minutes as I was wheeled into recovery. Nurses carefully supported me and the other women as we dizzily
limped to lounge chairs where we rested further. We each got a bag with
extra pads and pain meds and were cautioned
about excessive bleeding, cramping, and signs
of infection. I almost threw up as my boyfriend
walked me to catch a cab.
I spent the weekend recovering at his apartment. The bleeding and cramps subsided, and
then I only felt relief. Disaster averted. I picked
up my college life where I had left off—partying,
finishing finals—and then flew home for winter
break.
I had scheduled a follow-up exam with my San
Francisco gynecologist as recommended. When I
mentioned I had an appointment to my mother, she
wanted to know why. She slammed on the brakes at
the intersection of Masonic and Oak when I told
her that I had had an abortion in New York.
“What?” She looked at me wide-eyed, scared
and shocked. It was a week after my 19th birthday.
The physician’s assistant got a puzzled look
on her face as she checked me and the size of my
uterus. “Hmm. That’s weird. Let me get the doctor,” she said.
“What?” My mind ran around in circles being chased by a bad feeling. My gynecologist came in and felt too. “Hmm. It does feel enlarged.
There could be a complication of some kind. Let’s get you an ultrasound,” he said. “Sometimes if tissue is left behind, the uterus doesn’t
fully close. No cramping? No bleeding?” No. I felt great. I had just gotten
back from a skiing trip in Tahoe with my friends.
The ultrasound tech at the Catholic hospital was cheerful. I was
intrigued by this amazing technology. I lay there on the table with my
flat belly covered in cold goo and watched, fascinated, as she started her
survey and a ghost image appeared on the black screen. “OK. Oh, here
we are. I see you’re about 11 weeks gestation. Look, you can see the little
fingers here.” The sonar-blip heartbeat sound shattered me. I stopped
looking and retreated deep inside myself. I didn’t hear anything else
until “You can get dressed now.”
I fell to the ground in the tiny dressing room, sobbing on the cold
linoleum with my jeans around my ankles. All this time, I was still
pregnant? How? I’d had an abortion! I was shaking with shock. A nurse
handed me a box of Kleenex under the door. When I came out, she
looked confused and sad that this wasn’t happy news.
I don’t remember the ride home with my mom, but I do remember
her face, grim. I lay on my single bed in the converted-closet bedroom I
had in my mother’s apartment that she shared with her new boyfriend.
I felt like a vessel, not like a person anymore. All this time, it had been
feeding off me. My mind was in disbelief. I whiplashed between numbness and weeping. I considered what seemed impossible: having a baby.

I asked my mom, “Was this meant to be? Is that why this fetus is still
here? Still growing?”
“I guess you could keep it if you wanted,” my mom said, fingering the
baby carriage on her old silver charm bracelet that I was wearing. “Millie and I could raise it, and you could finish school.” The “it” said it all. I
hadn’t given any thought until that moment about what kind of parent
I wanted to be or how I wanted to raise a child. I felt that I was in this
pregnancy alone, as if there had been a not-so-immaculate conception.
I assumed I would be a single parent. I wanted to be with a partner—
married. And then baby, if baby. I thought that if I went through with
the pregnancy and gave birth, I would be too attached to give the baby
up for adoption.
•
Having a child at 19 seemed an impossibility. Who did that? Not me,
presumably destined for greatness, unsure of even wanting a family. I
had been living like a man—I was aggressive in my views and desires, I
went after the men I wanted to want me; I kept up with the boys, held
my own or bested them at their own games of strength, chicken, drinking, pool, and one-upmanship. I was sharp of wit and tongue. I thought
I was fearless.
Now I found myself a woman.
A pregnant woman.
The most vulnerable state of all.
All my short life I had said Yes to everything:
Yes to cigarettes, plucked from the gutter at age 9;
Yes to marijuana Holly stole from Mountain Girl’s stash at her dad’s
house and rolled into joints that we sold on Castro
Street for $1 at age 11;
Yes to losing my virginity with the summer
yard boy at my grandparents’ house—whose
name I can’t even remember now—couldn’t wait
to be rid of it and get in the Game;
Yes to drinking, early and always;
Yes to LSD for Rocky Horror at the Strand;
Yes to cocaine whenever offered;
Yes to mushrooms in Golden Gate Park—yes,
I’d like to sell them for you, can you pay me in
trade?;
Yes to jumping off the cliff at Cherry Creek at
Camp Mather to show how brave I was (I was
really scared);
Yes to working at the California Academy of
Sciences and scuba cleaning the Fish Roundabout
and feeding speared live shrimp to the chambered
nautili, depressed in their tiny tanks;
Yes to all this that had come my way, and
much, much more.

If becoming
a mother changes
your life forever,
then surely
the decision not
to become one
changes you
as well.

8 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

•
I decided to say no.
No, I don’t want this fetus to keep growing inside me.
No, I don’t want to become a mother now. This young. This way.
No, I don’t want to make this choice.
•
It was much harder to find a place willing to do an abortion after 12
weeks, even if it was legal. I was right on the edge. If I was going to terminate this pregnancy, I had to do it immediately. I called my boyfriend
and told him the unbelievable news. He was offering to fly out to be with
me when my mother grabbed the phone out of my hand and screamed
that this was all his fault. I’d never heard her yell like that at anyone—
not even my dad. I told him not to come. Later I heard my mom call my
dad and tell him what was going on. I slept.
My gynecologist arranged for an abortion at the not-Catholic hospital where my three future children would be born. The procedure
happened not at a depressing clinic but in a real operating room, just
a floor below the maternity ward and nursery. The doctor was kind to
me, smiled and put his hand on my forehead and told me not to worry
as I counted back from 10. After recovery, he assured me that there was
no question that my pregnancy was no more. He said that it may have
been that because I’d had the abortion so early, around six weeks, they’d
simply missed the fetus.
I was relieved, but I wanted to see the report. The words “Fetal hind-

No matter what I did, I felt nothing.
A couple of months later, I wrote in my journal:
ABORTION. I got rid of something that would have been a baby if
I had kept it. A baby that was made out of making love with someone I love who loves me. I got rid of the biological product of love
(and lust).
Lust Love
Kill Baby
Did I kill a baby? Did I kill my body?
I killed part of myself that will never be again.
An abortion is not a good time. I know there are women who say it
meant less to them than getting their teeth cleaned, but that was not the
case for me. Maybe it would have been different if the first abortion had
been effective. Instead I was forced to make this terrible choice twice. It
marks you, as I suppose it should. If becoming a mother changes your
life and you forever, then surely the decision not to become one changes
you as well.
But back in the early ’80s, in my circle, abortion was looked upon
mostly as a rite of passage. Once word about mine was out, friends,
aunts, other female relatives, and acquaintances of all faiths, backgrounds, and finances fessed up. Millie talked about the women she had
helped find a trusted doctor in Mexico before abortion became legal,
even one of her son’s girlfriends. My mom revealed the abortion she’d
had when I was about seven. Her pregnancy with my sister had been
complicated and required surgery at five months to remove a massive
tumor. Her postpartum depression had been so serious that she’d
needed help from a cousin to take care of me and my sister for a time.
She couldn’t bear the stress of another child with my unreliable and
unfaithful dad.
•

Hinckle at her San Francisco home with Toby, the last surviving basset hound of
her late father, Warren Hinckle.
quarters” pierced me with the knowledge that a future baby had been
growing and was no more. I was cocooned in still, black deadness.
•
Dad invited me to lunch. Alone. This had never happened before. He
always had an entourage or someone to meet wherever we went. We met
at Jack’s, an old-school San Francisco restaurant and bar on Sacramento
Street that opened soon after the gold rush. He was on time. Also something that had never happened before. I ate frog legs for the first time.
He had rabbit. We shared a bottle of red wine.
He wanted to know how I was doing. Another first. “You gotta take
care of yourself, Box.” He looked me in the eye, clearly worried. “Do you
want to stay home longer? I’ll cover it if you want to change your ticket.
You can be a little late going back to New York.”
He spoke of women and their burden, of men and their helplessness
in the face of pregnancy; free will; the church; and choice. The church
had only come out against birth control a couple of decades ago. Abortion was as old as time.
It was the first time I was alone with my father. He was supportive—he wanted me to keep on with my passions, the marine sciences,
whatever I wanted. And he was sad—not a happy decision for anyone
involved, he said.
•
Fetal hindquarters followed me everywhere. I tried to drown them in
vodka, smother them in coke, smoke them up in a little taste of heroin,
lose them in impulse sex with my girlfriends and my boyfriends’ friends.

Postpartum depression was just being recognized at the time; postabortion depression wasn’t even mentioned. People were just beginning
to talk openly about anxiety and depression. There was still a lot of
shame and scorn involved in seeking treatment for mental health conditions. Psychotherapy was barely mainstream. After an abortion, you
were expected to be relieved and maybe a little sad, and then to get over
it. After my second abortion, I could barely get out of bed. I didn’t care
about anything. I lay in my darkened room listening to the Psychedelic
Furs. There were no tears. I felt nothing, no matter what I did. The anxiety and panic attacks came later and lasted for years. I didn’t know what
was wrong with me, and it didn’t occur to me to ask anyone. It wasn’t
until I gave birth to my first child 13 years later and experienced postpartum depression that I understood what had happened: how sensitive I was to pregnancy hormones and what they did to my mental state.
When I became pregnant with my first child, the timing couldn’t
have been worse. I had been married less than a year and had just started a job as the business editor at my city’s afternoon daily. My health
insurance hadn’t even kicked in. My husband was working as a temp
and wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. I was the main wage
earner. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. We hadn’t even said out
loud that we were trying to become pregnant, but we were not being
very careful, and we were having the most delicious baby-possible sex.
When we held the home pregnancy test in our hands, we both cried,
joyful and terrified. I wanted this baby, and so did he. Nothing else
mattered. We would figure out all the rest and somehow make it work.
To be pregnant and have it be welcome and not a dreadful and terrible
discovery was such a healing relief. This felt like the most creative thing
I had ever done—growing a person. It didn’t even compare to writing.
I often think of my sacrifice of that first unborn child spirit—I’ve always imagined a her—and all that she allowed me. I think of her in gratitude. Her spirit was not ready to come into this world. She forgave me.
And ultimately I forgave me. I believe she shepherded my three children
to me later, when I was ready enough to become a parent.
I had said no because I was young and wanted to be free and didn’t
think another road was possible. And I’m grateful that I could. Q
Pia Hinckle is a San Francisco writer and editor. She is a coauthor
of The Court That Tamed the West: From the Gold Rush to the Tech
Boom. This essay is adapted from Pia & the Elephant, her memoir in
progress about growing up in the limelight of her father, Warren Hinckle, a buccaneer editor and epic drinker.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 9

Built into the slopes of a
mountain, with sweeping views
of Los Angeles from Downtown
to the Hollywood sign and
beyond, Dodger Stadium offers a
definitive perspective on the city.
10 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

An ode
to L.A.’s legendary
Dodger Stadium
on its 60th birthday.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 11

BELLE OF THE BALL

By MATT JAFFE • Photos by MATTHEW SMITH

D

ay baseball, a midweek rarity. The marine layer lingers
over Dodger Stadium an
hour before the Arizona Diamondbacks’ leadoff batter
steps to the plate on Mexican Heritage Day, my first
game during the stadium’s
60th-anniversary season.
Traffic is light, also a rarity on the almost-ceremonial
route I follow down Sunset Boulevard and into
Echo Park before reaching forested Elysian
Park and driving through Gate B to enter the
sprawling 16,000-vehicle parking lot. (If you
wonder why Dodger fans arrive late and leave
early, that’s why.) Once inside the ballpark, I
climb, via a series of escalators and stairwells
tucked underneath the stands behind home
plate, from field level to the stadium’s top deck,
to take in the panorama.
From the time of William Mulholland and
the Los Angeles Aqueduct, L.A. has been
a city unafraid of engineering on a grand
scale, no matter the environmental or social
costs. When owner Walter O’Malley moved
the Dodgers from Brooklyn following the 1957
season, he turned to architect-engineer Emil
Praeger, an expert on concrete construction, to
design a stadium at Chavez Ravine, a 350-acre
site creased by arroyos in the Stone Quarry
Hills, near Downtown. As late as the 1950s,
around 1,800 families lived here in three
secluded, predominantly Mexican American
villages: La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde.
The term Chavez Ravine is used interchangeably with Dodger Stadium and, largely
thanks to the recently passed announcer Vin
Scully, has become the most romantic placename in sports. Even if it’s a misnomer: some
of the eight million cubic yards of rock and dirt
gnawed from the ground during construction
came out of the adjacent Cemetery, Reservoir,
and Sulphur Ravines. Names that even Scully
couldn’t transform into poetry.
Dodger Stadium was built into the slopes
of 726-foot-high Mount Lookout, and the
venue’s terraced seating descends into the ravine like the rows of an ancient amphitheater.
Construction also leveled the top of Mount
Lookout. Now, the artificial summit of Dodger
Stadium takes in the San Gabriel Mountains,
rail yards and freeways, City Hall and Downtown skyscrapers, Griffith Observatory and
the Hollywood sign. This is L.A.’s definitive
perspective—the wild and gritty city from the
most Los Angeles place in all of L.A.

L

os Angeles was a baseball town long
before the Dodgers relocated from
Brooklyn. The first baseball games
here were played in 1860, a century
prior to the team’s arrival and the same
year the town of 4,385 banned bullfighting. Through the first half of the
20th century, the Hollywood Stars and the Los

12 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

Angeles Angels were two of the Pacific Coast
League’s flagship teams, and by the 1950s,
the region had produced such Dodger stars as
Compton’s Duke Snider, Don Drysdale of Van
Nuys, and Pasadena’s Jackie Robinson.
If the Dodgers’ move to Chavez Ravine
marked L.A.’s coming-of-age, the monumental
stadium symbolized L.A.’s emergence as the
United States’ city of the future. Dodger Stadium is unmistakably of its time, yet even as
the ballpark has become the third oldest in the
majors, it still feels new. “The trick is growing
up without growing old,” said baseball legend
Casey Stengel, who played outfield for and later managed the Dodgers, and several hundred
million dollars in renovations and face-lifts
have certainly helped.
When the stadium opened, it joined the
Rose Bowl and the Los Angeles Memorial
Coliseum among the ranks of the world’s most
venerable sports venues. The ballpark set a
standard for innovative sports architecture,
and with the debut in recent years of soccer’s
acclaimed Banc of California Stadium and the
National Football League’s lauded SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles has the finest collection of
outdoor venues of any U.S. city.
Constructed of 23,000 steel-and-reinforcedconcrete sections cast on-site, Dodger Stadium
incorporated modern materials and architectural details instead of the iron and brick
of more traditional ballparks. From the top
deck, I look out at Googie-style hexagonal
scoreboards, while the folded corrugated-steel
canopy over the outfield pavilion wouldn’t be
out of place in Palm Springs.
The pastel seats evoke the hues of a beach
sunset, changing section by section from ocean
blue to sandy yellow and orange and finally
to sky blue. And the parabolic concrete roofs
that crown the stadium cantilever low over the
upper-deck concourse, casting shadows that
create a play of light and dark straight out of a
Julius Shulman photo.
In a hidden stairwell, I work my way down
21 flights so short they’re like switchbacks on
a steep trail, reaching the field level in time to
hear mariachi Julian Torres sing the U.S. and
Mexican national anthems. The marine layer
has burned off, leaving behind what ballplayers call a high sky, a glaring blue that closely
matches the color of the outfield fence. What
little remains visible of the fence, that is.
Gazing toward left field, I’m confronted by
a brand slam of logos: Golden Road Brewing,
State Farm, Bank of America, California Pizza
Kitchen, Yaamava’ Resort & Casino. Plus a scroll
for Jinro (“Official Soju of the Dodgers”) and a
Postmates ad wrapped around my cup holder.
There are also five circular, orange Union
76 logos in my field of vision, although at least
they qualify as traditional at Dodger Stadium.
In early pictures, the only stadium advertising
is the orange Union 76 ball atop the scoreboard. Union Oil helped bankroll O’Malley in
exchange for exclusive sponsorship, and, befit-

ting an autopian city that once led the world
in oil production, a 76 gas station operated for
four decades in Lot 37 and still stands today.
The ballpark has an almost minimalist appearance in those photos, especially the classic
shots by Sports Illustrated’s Neil Leifer. The
pavilion canopy’s silhouette zigzags above the
outfield wall, brightly lit by the California sun
and unadorned, except for painted numbers
denoting the field’s dimensions.

T

his is the ballpark I remember from
my first Dodger game. In August
1964, we were staying with my
grandparents on Hope Street, a few
blocks from the Coliseum (where the
Dodgers had played before their own
stadium opened). We sat in the top
deck, and I can still see the blues and reds and
white of the uniforms against the green grass,
palm trees and mountains in the distance, as
the crowd yelled “Go, go, go!” when Maury
Wills stole second base. A few days after that
game, I’d board the Santa Fe Super Chief to
return to Chicago for my first day of kindergarten. I came back to L.A. for good 25 years later
and soon fell into a share of prime field-level
season tickets that I’m still using.
The fans’ chant that day could have served
as a civic mantra for the booming Los Angeles
of the 1960s. The Dodgers were the city’s glamour team, the original Showtime, and an early

An expert on concrete construction, architect-engineer Emil Praeger designed Dodger Stadium. Its 23,000
steel-and-reinforced-concrete sections were cast on-site—a big departure from the usual iron-and-brick
ballparks that came before it. Above: Landscaped gardens, including succulents and mature palms, surround
the stadium. Below: Stacked seating decks have an almost minimalist appearance.

example of the nexus of entertainment and
sports. Celebs like Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant,
and Doris Day were regulars, and Mister Ed
hoofed out an inside-the-park home run off
Sandy Koufax. The transistor radio was the
smartphone of its time. When I spoke with
Scully a few years ago, he said, “As far as my
career was concerned, the biggest break we got
was the transistor radio. It helped us to actually talk to the people in the ballpark.”
Dodger Stadium is often called baseball’s
Disneyland, which isn’t a surprise considering
that O’Malley found inspiration in the theme
park and shared Walt Disney’s penchant for directing the visitor experience. Disney had even
eyed Chavez Ravine for Disneyland. But from
Mulholland to O’Malley, Los Angeles likes its
origin stories with a frisson of morality play.
And Dodger Stadium is where Tomorrowland
met Chinatown.
The stadium’s construction saga encompassed familiar L.A. themes: land deals, backroom intrigue, housing shortages, property
rights, displacement (my grandparents’ apartment is now a Harbor Freeway off-ramp),
court battles, and celebrity: stars were enlisted
to rally support during a pro-Dodger telethon.
The saga began in 1949, when the city approved 10,000 public housing units, including
more than 3,000 in the modernist, Richard
Neutra and Robert Alexander–designed Elysian Park Heights, which was slated to replace the supposedly blighted neighborhoods
of Chavez Ravine.
It wasn’t the Dodgers that bought out most
ravine residents; it was Los Angeles’s housing
authority. In 1953, however, the project was
scrubbed, thanks largely to an ongoing campaign that branded public housing a socialist
threat. So the popular legend that the Dodgers
destroyed the ravine communities isn’t true,
although the team won big when it acquired
the land in a deal with the city. That deal happened despite the property’s designation for
public, not private, use.
After the Dodgers narrowly won approval in
a voter referendum on the deal, the final ravine
holdouts were forcefully evicted—complete
with footage on the 10 o’clock news. The team
found itself in a public relations nightmare as
la gente and the Folks—the city’s conservative
political class—briefly came together in defense of the little guy in the battle against big
government and big business, though soon
sentiment turned in the Dodgers’ favor.
Six decades is a long, long time in Los
Angeles, but not everyone has forgotten. Last
season, three protesters ran across the outfield carrying banners bearing the names Palo
Verde, Bishop, and La Loma to remind fans of
los desterrados. The uprooted.
With the Dodgers leading in the ninth, I
walk from the field level to the outfield pavilion and take in the end of the game. An elderly
Latina woman, wearing a Heritage Day jersey
in the colors of the Mexican flag and with a
faint Aztec-calendar background, is telling
stories to a pair of young men drinking micheladas. Dodger Stadium has lots of stories.
Baseball stories and ghost stories. Q
Matt Jaffe last wrote about the nonprofit music
program Lead Guitar for Alta Journal, Summer 2022.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 13

Christopher Renfro
examines vines at
Alemany Farm in San
Francisco. In 2019, he
revived the abandoned
vineyard and started
the 280 Project.

ALLYSHIP

By SYDNEY LOVE • Photos by PENNI GLADSTONE

A Vineyard
in San Francisco’s
Black Belt
Christopher Renfro’s 280 Project
gives a community reason
to go back to the farm.

I

n 2015, Christopher Renfro landed a job
waiting tables in downtown San Francisco at a newly opened eatery called Oro.
The name, meaning “gold” in Spanish,
was a tribute of sorts to the restaurant’s
location in a plaza shared by the former
San Francisco Mint.
Renfro was 32 years old, and Oro was his
first gig at a high-profile restaurant. An artisan with an environmental bent, he had done
many things over the previous decade, from
refurbishing storefronts for American Apparel to working the register at a co-op grocery
store to gardening at the city’s Conservatory
of Flowers. Before Oro, he had worked at a
ceramics company, where his innovative thinking sparked the creation of a tile-recycling
program. “The work was backbreaking,” says
Renfro. He calculated that he was lifting the
equivalent of two elephants, or about nine
tons, in tile a day. Earning generous restaurant
tips seemed a better way to provide for his
young daughter at home.
At Oro, he says, he wore a nice blue shirt that
covered the tattoos on his espresso-brown skin,
and he kept his black, woolly Afro cut short and
combed out. The cuisine was served family-style
and highlighted local California produce, fresh
meats, and charcuterie cured in-house—reminiscent of the pâté, liverwurst, and other foods
Renfro had eaten as a boy in Germany. (He’d
spent 10 years of his childhood there while his
mother worked on a U.S. Army base.) But what
intrigued him most was the menu of 140-plus
mainly Italian, French, and Californian vintages. The wine director, Kelly Evans, had been the
head sommelier at Saison.
Renfro’s early experiences with wine had
been subpar. While he was growing up, his
mother drank wine coolers and amaretto sours.
As a teenager, he had a friend who worked for a
gallery, and they would hang out at art openings
for free booze. The first time Renfro drank red
wine, it made him sick. It wasn’t until working

at Oro that he came to understand how fine
wine could elevate the dining experience. He
asked Evans if he could assist him in the cellar
(actually a dusty backroom office). Renfro started off taking inventory and would study the
bottle labels to remember them, but what he
learned about wine’s history was disheartening.
“I saw all these bottles [with] châteaux

The 280 Project’s first release: 2021 L’Amalgame
San Francisco Bay Rosé.
and domaines on them and was reading white
people’s stories about their sons taking their
land,” he says. “There’s not one story like this
in Black history, at least that I know of.” While
those châteaux and domaines established generational wealth, Black Americans were entrapped in 12 generations of slavery. President
Thomas Jefferson cultivated grapevines at his
plantation, Monticello, where enslaved Black
people had a hand in nearly every aspect of
food production, except winegrowing (Jefferson hired Italian workers for that).

Renfro found himself having an internal
dialogue with the wine world’s whitewashed
history: You guys are selling juice that tells
racist stories, and people buy it for tons of money. He saw the potential for a career in wine,
though he felt it was time for another kind of
winemaking story, told on different terroir, by
Black and brown voices.

O

ro shuttered within nine months
of opening. Renfro pivoted to
a nearby restaurant, Liholiho
Yacht Club, where he took his first
strides as a sommelier. He grew
more interested in learning about
how wine was made, but his ambitions went beyond that. “Nobody was doing
anything positive for Black people in wine,” he
recalls. What he really wanted was to stake a
claim in the hegemonic world of viticulture for
people who’d been shut out of it for centuries.
Wine country was just a stone’s throw outside
the city, but “I didn’t think Napa was the best
way to get there,” says Renfro, “and I didn’t
know anyone in Napa.” He lived in South San
Francisco, and it turned out that there was an
alternative nearly in his backyard—Alemany
Farm, on the south side of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights.
Renfro discovered that a nonprofit, Neighborhood Vineyards, had planted pinot noir
there in 2013. The community-run project
taught its volunteers about viticulture, aiming
to sustain its work through sales of its wine
production. Renfro reached out to the nonprofit’s founder several times but says she never replied to him. In December 2019, he went
to Alemany Farm to harvest a cutting, only to
discover that Neighborhood Vineyards had
abandoned the site, leaving behind about 65
vines that looked to be dying. Here was Renfro’s opportunity to pursue his vision of a new
wine story. He introduced himself to the farm’s
manager and offered to care for the vines. He
didn’t have any grape-growing experience, but
he was willing to learn. Within a week, Renfro
had his vineyard.
Alemany Farm was once just an empty hillside overlooking the 280 freeway. In the early
1990s, it was a local dump site for cars, refrigerators, and other junk. The land was converted into an organic urban farm by the San
Francisco League of Urban Gardeners in 1995.
Among other initiatives, SLUG offered paid
internships to youth; the majority lived in the
neighboring housing project, Alemany Apartments, and others came from the nearby Bayview area. Black and brown hands tended the
land for almost 10 years, until the city accused
SLUG of pressuring employees to do campaign work for local elections and slashed its
funding. The farm’s ensuing shutdown took a
toll on the surrounding Black community, and
the land lay nearly abandoned until Friends
of Alemany Farm arrived in 2005. Today, Alemany’s 3.5-acre farm is the largest agricultural
site in San Francisco, yielding about 12 tons

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 15

Renfro walks through the 280 Project vineyard with 19-year-old Marvin Rivas, one of his mentees in the Alemany community.
of produce a year, most of which is donated to
local food pantries, including one at Alemany
Apartments. Anyone in the city can come to
the farm and harvest fresh produce for free.
In Renfro’s mind, the local community had
“a free, organically farmed mecca of food and
peace where you can walk around, pray, do
whatever you want.” As with the invisible lines
drawn elsewhere in San Francisco, though, he
didn’t see any Black residents from the housing
project coming to reap those benefits. Before the
pandemic and the reignition of the Black Lives
Matter movement, the wine industry at large
wasn’t yet talking about its race issue. Renfro envisioned creating a safe space “for the community right here that’s been impacted by agricultural
injustice, food injustice, and land injustice.” He
wanted to teach marginalized youth about a sector of agriculture they otherwise might not know
about and, in the process, give them new skills
they could monetize. The 280 Project, as Renfro
named it, would give the Black community a
reason to return to the farm.

G

ermany has a lot to do with who
I am,” says Renfro. His fourthgrade teacher, Frau Naser, inspired his love for nature. She
was an older German woman
with fashion sense, wearing her
blond hair in a pixie cut, a white

16 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

suit with aviator sunglasses and jewelry, “but
then, she was all about the earth.” Naser took
her class to the countryside to learn about
animals, fossils, and ecosystems. Renfro had
a curious, sharp, and rebellious spirit that
sometimes got him in trouble. “I remember
that lady gave me the permission to be able to
be who I already was. She saw it and nurtured
it,” he says. “I could speak the language, and
I played with the kids, and I was able to run
through forests, and I never had anyone aiming guns at me.”
His mother made sure he read books on
Black history and culture. Renfro was drawn
to George Washington Carver’s story. Though
Carver was born enslaved, his pioneering discoveries in agricultural science at what is now
Tuskegee University played a crucial role in
saving impoverished southern farmers during
the Dust Bowl. “I would think about that,”
Renfro says, “and I’d be like, Damn, this guy is
like a superhero.”
Visits to relatives in Louisiana could cause
culture shock. Instead of pâté and liverwurst,
there were family crab boils. Renfro gazed at
the giant oak trees in New Orleans’s Ninth
Ward and the region’s beautiful Victorian
houses, but he also began to comprehend the
pangs of being a Black man in America. When
his family moved back to the States—bouncing
around Kentucky, Texas, and Colorado—he

witnessed racial inequities across the Black,
Indigenous, and immigrant communities he
lived among.
Renfro made his way to San Francisco in
2006, but, he says, “when I moved to the city,
it was a real problem to be Black.” Poverty, police brutality, and gang violence waited in the
streets. Renfro lived in the Western Addition,
a historically Black neighborhood at the heart
of the city that had been nearly decimated by a
roughly 55-year-long municipal campaign to
clear the “blight.” The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency had shuttered 883 businesses,
torn down roughly 2,500 Victorian homes,
and displaced 4,729 households in the area,
SFGate reported in 2008.
Like many other Black San Franciscans,
Renfro eventually migrated to South San Francisco. His own path was proving just as rocky,
as that job at American Apparel had ended in a
racial discrimination lawsuit. He won the case
but says he lost the majority of his compensation to lawyer fees. “I lost my mind for a bit after that,” says Renfro, which compelled him to
get back to what had always been constant joys
in his life—plants and the outdoors. He took
courses in environmental horticulture at City
College of San Francisco. Still, Renfro sensed
microaggressions in almost every workplace.
While at Oro, he quickly learned that restaurants had their own set of issues.

W

hen he landed at Alemany,
Renfro needed to learn how
to prune the vines, and fast,
as the growing season was
about to begin. He had recently attended a trade event
spotlighting U.S. viticulturists
Steve Matthiasson and Mimi Casteel, and he
contacted them. Matthiasson, based in Napa
Valley, was widely respected for his decades of
work in organic farming; Casteel, for her work
popularizing regenerative farming in Oregon’s
Willamette Valley. They both agreed to give
Renfro pruning lessons over video chat.
“I’ll talk to anyone about pruning,” says
Matthiasson. He was blown away when he
learned what Renfro was up to. “I had no
idea there were grapevines in San Francisco.
I would have thought it’d be way too foggy.” Matthiasson Winery is based in Napa’s
Oak Knoll District, where winegrowers once
thought it was too foggy to ripen cabernet
sauvignon. Matthiasson proved them wrong.
Like Renfro’s, his path to winegrowing had
started in San Francisco, though almost 30
years ago and at a community garden on Potrero Avenue. It was through urban gardening
that Matthiasson became a farmer. Now he is
one of Napa’s most trusted sources on organic
winegrowing. “I was really mentored along the
way, and viticulture—there’s no way you can
learn this on your own or from books,” he says.
Passing along that information was a part of
the tradition. After the virtual pruning lesson,
Matthiasson and his wife, Jill Klein Matthiasson, visited Renfro in San Francisco to see the
vines up close.
Just as Renfro began restoring the vineyard,
the pandemic hit, and he was furloughed from
Liholiho Yacht Club. “Everything changed in
life, but for me, it was for the better,” he says.
During quarantine, the farm was a place for
Renfro to reconnect with nature. He worked
the vineyard almost every day, and his partner,
Jannea Tschirch, and their daughters came
along. Ahmarie was a toddler and grew up as
the vines did, and Sula, who was 10 years old,
learned how to plant, prune, and graft vines
alongside her dad. In the summer of 2020,
Renfro and chef Haley Garabato launched Feed
the People Collective, preparing a free monthly lunch at the farm. The Renfro-Tschirch
family even had a winemaking operation in
their kitchen that harvest. However, winemaking is only a fragment of Renfro’s end goal.
“Wine is just the vehicle to talk about all of
these other things,” he says.

I

n 2021, Renfro read about a Japanesenative grape variety called koshu in a British lifestyle magazine and wanted some of
his own. Matthiasson connected him to
plant biologist Elisabeth Forrestel at UC
Davis. “People often come to me to ask
where they can find certain grape cultivars
or varieties or species now,” she says. Forrestel
spent a postdoctoral at Harvard and UC Davis
studying climate change and its impacts on
living collections of grapes across the globe.
She has worked with cultivars in France, which
has the largest collection, and with all of North
America’s wild vitis species. Sure enough, she
knew where to find koshu: Wolfskill Experimental Orchard in Winters, California, run in

partnership by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and UC Davis. The 280 Project was invited
to visit and propagate some of the vines.
Wine as a luxury product was inherently
exclusionary, but Renfro felt that winegrowing
was especially inaccessible. During that initial
interaction with Forrestel, he shared an idea
for a new initiative: a paid apprenticeship
that taught BIPOC and LGBTQ youth about
viticulture. His new allies joined in the effort.
“He just has this vision, and somehow it is
infectious,” says Matthiasson. He offered direct access to Napa’s biggest, most successful
winemakers and winegrowers, and Forrestel
opened the doors to academia.
It was still the peak of COVID-19, and
without the infrastructure to transport youth
to wine country, the project’s focus shifted
to working adults. Renfro promoted the apprenticeship on Instagram, and many people
expressed interest. “I guess you’re a part of it,”
Renfro told them. “Whoever wants to come.”
For the first meeting, the apprentices gathered
at Matthiasson’s estate in Napa, where they
were joined by his vineyard crew, and everyone
shared their backgrounds and career goals.

altercation with a winegrower on the subject of
paying vineyard workers fair wages. The winegrower’s opinion was outnumbered by the opposing BIPOC perspectives in the room. “It was
just interesting seeing the depth of privilege in
the wine industry,” says Renfro. “It felt special
to be in that space and community together.”
Multiple apprentices noted that the confrontation was an integral moment of the program.
The apprenticeship is now in its second
year. For the 2022 growing season, the Gérard
Basset Foundation provided funding for five
apprentices of color. This year’s selected participants include an army veteran and mechanic,
a former real estate agent, and a cheesemonger, all wanting to break into the wine industry.
Financing continues to be a major obstacle,
however. There is a team behind the scenes
volunteering its time and skills to keep the 280
Project afloat.
Renfro is now working full-time as the wine
buyer at Canyon Market in San Francisco’s Glen
Park neighborhood but remains hopeful that
one day he’ll be able to fully focus on the 280
Project—and Alemany Farm, of course. In between the pinot noir vines, he has interplanted

Beehives in the garden at Alemany Farm.
Looking around the room, Renfro couldn’t believe they had made it to this point, that “we all
[wanted] to be in wine, and this is what it took
for us all to be here.”
Almost every Friday, Renfro; his 280 Project manager, Rita Manzana; and the apprentices went to a different winery or vineyard,
including Andy Beckstoffer’s famed To Kalon
Vineyard, one of the most sought-after sites
for cabernet sauvignon in the world. They did
hands-on learning in vineyards and attended organic seminars taught by Matthiasson.
“There’s nothing like that even in formal education,” says Forrestel. At UC Davis, grape geneticist Andrew Walker gave the apprentices a
lesson in grapevine identification, and Forrestel
taught them how to propagate vines. They also
produced a collaborative wine made entirely
from wild vitis species native to North America.
These excursions were often a clashing of
worlds. Program participants faced microaggressions, like when one apprentice got into an

other varieties he has collected along the way:
a U.S. hybrid called marquette from Vermont,
sémillon from Sonoma’s Monte Rosso Vineyard
(the second-oldest such planting in the world),
and the koshu from Wolfskill Experimental Orchard. There are four additional terraces of vines
planted up the hillside, thanks to the apprentices. After two years of care, the vines are ready to
produce grapes—and likely wine.
He has everything mapped out: the apprenticeship program growing to be bicoastal
or maybe international; the land he’ll own in
Oakland, Half Moon Bay, or Daly City; the cooperative winery; the farm and seed bank that
will grow and preserve the Black community’s
foodways. “It’s all coming, man. I know it,” says
Renfro. “I feel closer to this power than I’ve
ever felt in my life.” Q
Sydney Love last wrote about the women who
spurred Los Angeles’s thriving natural wine
scene for Alta Journal, Fall 2021.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 17

One of the graves
uncovered by a backhoe
during the renovation
of the Legion of Honor
museum in the early 1990s.

LAST RITES

By BETH WINEGARNER

BURIED
HISTORIES
San Francisco’s
Legion of Honor
museum and
Lincoln Park
Golf Course
sit atop the
grave sites of
thousands of
immigrants and
indigent people.
Their stories—
and some of
their remains—
are coming to
the surface.

PHOTO BY RICHARD BARNES

I

n the summer of 2019, construction crews working near
the northeastern corner of San Francisco’s Lincoln Park
dug up something they weren’t expecting: a coffin.
The workers were creating new bioswales along El
Camino Del Mar, designed to divert stormwater during
heavy rains and keep the tony Sea Cliff neighborhood
from flooding. In the process, and under the watchful eye
of an archaeologist hired by the city, they would end up
uncovering the graves of at least 20 people, dating back
to the end of the 19th century.
A secret lies beneath the manicured lawns of Lincoln
Park Golf Course. These gentle slopes were once the home
of one of San Francisco’s largest graveyards. Between 1870
and about 1900, 29,000 people were buried in Golden Gate
Cemetery, named for its proximity to the entrance to San
Francisco Bay, though most people called it City Cemetery.
The majority were new burials, although a few hundred had
been relocated from the city’s earlier cemeteries. And many
of City Cemetery’s graves stayed where they were when other cemeteries in San Francisco eventually were moved out
of town. Somewhere between 10,000 and 22,000 are still
there, including the ones the bioswale workers found. Those thousands
of graves hold the stories of San Francisco’s builders, of immigrants and
low-income laborers, many of whom died destitute and alone. They tell
a tale of how San Francisco has, again and again, favored its wealthy and
privileged residents over its poor and marginalized ones.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 19

At first, there was no way of knowing
whom the graves on El Camino Del Mar
belonged to. City Cemetery’s grave markers
were removed more than a century ago,
when the burial ground closed. The city
didn’t have a detailed map of the 200-acre
cemetery, which contained over two dozen
plots that belonged to different community
organizations—often nonprofits that helped
take financial care of members and their families. Many of them were Chinese and were
overseen by the Chinese Six Companies, a
group of benevolent associations formed in
the 19th century. As archaeologists studied
the remains, they reached out to historians
Alex Ryder and John Martini, who were
working on reconstructing a City Cemetery
map—partly for situations just like this.
As it turned out, the area where workers found the bones had once belonged to
the French Mutual Benevolent Society of
San Francisco. A number of the skeletons
showed signs of autopsies and other postmortem medical studies, which were illegal
in the 19th century. And one of the skulls
had apparently been pierced by a gunshot. A
.44-caliber bullet from a Winchester pistol
was rattling around inside it.
Ryder says the research team is close
to identifying whose skull it was. But local
newspaper archives may hold important
clues: On January 15, 1896, the San Francisco Call told the story of a French doctor,
E.L. Molass, who had sailed to New York
on a steamer called S.S. La Bretagne, then
traveled overland to San Francisco, where he
arrived in late December. Molass was suffering from tuberculosis and hoped the California climate would cure him; apparently he
didn’t know about the city’s brutal fog and
wind. He wound up in the French Hospital,
but “sickness and despondency” overtook
him, the newspaper reported. On January
14, 1896, he “sent a bullet into his right ear.”
The ground beneath Lincoln Park Golf
Course contains thousands of such stories,
often involving San Franciscans who died
penniless, buried at the city’s expense.
Just two massive cemetery markers still
stand among the golf course tees. One, erected by the Ladies’ Seamen’s Friend Society of
the Port of San Francisco, is a large obelisk
visible from the parking lot of the Legion of
Honor museum. The other, the gateway-like
Kong Chow funerary monument, was once
a central part of a Chinese plot in City Cemetery.
Woody LaBounty, a longtime San Francisco historian, knew that City Cemetery had
a singular story to tell about San Francisco’s
complex past. When Connie Chan was elected supervisor of District 1, which includes
Lincoln Park, in 2020, LaBounty told her
about the presence of the historic cemetery
and encouraged her to start the process of
making it a city landmark. Before that conversation, “I have to be honest: I never knew
that’s what it was,” Chan says. She agreed it
was worth commemorating and got to work.
LaBounty says that City Cemetery’s silent
residents are the people “who built San Francisco, who represent the diversity—socially and
ethnically—of San Francisco in the 19th century. They’re the forebears of the place we all call
home, and they’ve mostly been forgotten.”
20 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

How and why they were forgotten says a
lot about San Francisco’s history too.

THE FORSAKEN DEAD
Thomas W. Wood, born in Fairfax, Virginia, was 22 when he enlisted in the U.S.
military on June 3, 1847, to fight in the
Mexican-American War. He reenlisted numerous times, until he couldn’t anymore.
He received his final honorable discharge on
November 27, 1881, when a medical board
deemed him too worn-out to continue serving. Wood decided to head to San Francisco,
even though he didn’t have a home, a job, or
any friends lined up. When his $25 ran out,
he poisoned himself, the San Francisco Call
reported on February 18, 1882. He was 57.
When Wood’s body was found, his pockets
contained a “bundle of honorable discharges,
nicely tied with red tape, and a number of
affectionate letters from a married daughter
living near the old home, back in old Virginia.”
Wood’s body remained at the city morgue
as folks with the San Francisco coroner’s office
attempted to arrange an honorable burial, but
many cemeteries would not take him, likely
because he had died by suicide. Ultimately, he

MORE THAN 10,000
CHINESE RESIDENTS
WERE BURIED
IN CITY CEMETERY
OVER ITS YEARS
OF OPERATION.
was interred in City Cemetery “with no one by
to say even the poor words ‘dust to dust, ashes
to ashes!’ ” Wood’s grave, just off the shores of
the Golden Gate, was marked with a white
plank bearing only a number—1,116—partially
covered in drifting sand.
City Cemetery was the last public burial
ground established in San Francisco, which
famously shut down and evicted many of
its graveyards in the early 20th century. Not
counting Indigenous burial grounds, San
Francisco saw roughly 30 cemeteries, large
and small, official and unofficial, come and
go between Spanish colonizers’ arrival in the
1760s and the cemeteries’ ouster to Colma, a
dozen miles away, throughout the first half
of the 20th century. At first, the city’s burial
grounds were compact, spanning a single
block at most, but then the gold rush happened. In 1846, two years before San Francisco officially came under U.S. control, about
200 people lived in the small town. But by
1852, its population had exploded to 36,000.
More residents meant more death, including
from waves of disease like smallpox and typhoid fever, and the city’s existing cemeteries
quickly filled up.
But with each new cemetery, poor planning

prevailed. Over and over again, city officials
found new places to bury the dead, thinking
they’d identified a spot so far out in the sticks
that nobody would ever want to live next
door. Over and over again, they were wrong.
It happened with Yerba Buena Cemetery, a
13-acre public burial ground located where
San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza, Asian
Art Museum, and Main Library stand today. It
happened with the massive Masonic, Odd Fellows, and Calvary cemeteries on and around
Lone Mountain, which were surrounded by
Richmond district NIMBYs within decades.
And it happened with City Cemetery.
City Cemetery was meant to be San
Francisco’s solution to the problem of Yerba
Buena. That old municipal burial ground,
which opened in 1850, was full by the mid1850s, with 7,000 to 9,000 graves, mostly
of working-class and Chinese residents. By
1870, the graveyard was falling apart—and
located right in the heart of the city, where
leaders wanted to build a new city hall. In
theory, most of Yerba Buena’s burials would
be disinterred and moved to City Cemetery.
But in practice, only 267 unidentified graves
were documented as being relocated to City
Cemetery. Untold thousands likely rest in
the old Yerba Buena Cemetery soil, and
workers continued to find them anytime they
excavated, whether they were building City
Hall at Larkin and McAllister Streets in the
1880s or renovating the old Main Library to
become the new Asian Art Museum in 2003.
For the new City Cemetery, San Francisco
leaders looked for a far-flung spot to bury the
dead. When they began considering a plot in
the desolate northwestern corner of the city,
near Lands End, the property was barren,
treeless, and buffeted by strong winds off the
Pacific Ocean. Still, the San Francisco Board
of Supervisors’ Outside Lands Committee
acknowledged that “a public burial place is a
necessity, and…the tract designated was the
best for the purpose, and least objectionable
of any at our disposal. It is sheltered from the
wind to some extent; has a beautiful view;
is susceptible of cultivation, and has a firm
clayey soil, which is much better in a sanitary
point of view than a light or sandy soil.”
As a public burial ground, City Cemetery
included significant space to bury San Francisco’s indigent dead. The large Potter’s Field,
now beneath and surrounding the Legion of
Honor building, took in an estimated 11,000
burials, which the city paid for. These graves
were distinguished with no more than a
plank painted white, like Thomas W. Wood’s,
each marked with a number that indicated
the deceased’s place in the burial register.
But those records weren’t perfect. When
a San Francisco Call reporter visited the
cemetery in February 1882, he asked a
gravedigger how many graves there were.
The gravedigger replied, “I numbered up to
three thousand, and then began with ‘one’
again.” By that time, 4,118 burials had been
recorded, but it could have been more; cemetery workers said they sometimes buried two
people in one hole.
Not long after City Cemetery opened, local
benevolent associations began claiming plots.
Among them were the Knights of Pythias, the
Grand Army of the Republic, and the Ladies’
Seamen’s Friend Society, a female-run chari-

JASON HENRY

The Kong Chow funerary monument, once a central part of a Chinese plot where perhaps 3,700 graves remain in the earth, is one of two former Golden Gate
Cemetery markers on the Lincoln Park Golf Course.
table organization that looked after destitute
sailors. By 1887, there were 45 sub-cemeteries
linked to local societies and associations, including 26 connected to Chinese community
groups. More than 10,000 Chinese residents
were buried in City Cemetery over its years
of operation, making it the largest and most
significant burial ground for San Francisco’s
Chinese communities, say historians LaBounty and Ryder.
During the mid- to late 1800s, many
Chinese residents in San Francisco didn’t

regard local cemeteries as permanent resting
places. Most who came to the city planned to
stay only long enough to make some money
before returning home. Chinese community
associations took on the responsibility of
burying their brethren in San Francisco if
they died there and also handled the task
of returning their bones to China. If a body
was “buried in a strange land, untended by
his family, [the] soul would never stop wandering in the darkness of the other world,”
Shih-shan Henry Tsai wrote in The Chinese

Experience in America.
Shantang (benevolent society) representatives kept track of graves and arranged for
permits to disinter the bodies four years or
more after burial. They paid the city $10 per
disinterment, $2.50 of which went to the
cemetery. Bones were cleaned, if necessary,
and sealed in a tin box marked with the
name of the deceased. They were stored in
Chinatown before sailing to the deceased’s
hometown in China. About 6,300 Chinese
burials were disinterred and sent home; the
ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 21

RICHARD BARNES

Graves were found nestled amid the plumbing at the Legion of Honor in 1994. The museum turned over about 900 remains to the San Francisco medical examiner.
rest remain in the earth near the Kong Chow
monument, Ryder says.
San Francisco’s Chinese immigrants began arriving in much higher numbers during
the gold rush and immediately faced horrific
racism. They were wrongly blamed for many
disease epidemics, and their cemeteries became targets too. White San Franciscans
complained to the city about Chinese burial
and exhumation practices and often used the
euphemism “abatement of nuisance” as an
argument for closing San Francisco’s cemeteries or limiting the activities of Chinese
residents. Other times, they didn’t bother
with euphemisms; their bigotry was stated
openly. The Richmond District Improvement Club was thrilled when the city agreed
to close City Cemetery in the late 1890s. In
a resolution, the club celebrated “getting
rid of this pest-breeding spot and forever
remov[ing] from the sight of visitors to the
district the pagan rites of scraping the flesh
from the bones of deceased Chinese who had
been buried there, which to our people was a
sickening and dreaded sight, once seen not
soon to be forgotten.”
22 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

Racism wasn’t the only reason many San
Franciscans wanted the cemeteries gone.
At the time, it was commonly believed that
graveyards spread disease through the air
and groundwater, and many of the city’s older burial grounds, which lacked the money
for upkeep, had become derelict. More than
anything, though, prospectors wanted to
cash in on surging property values.

A DUTY TO THE LIVING
The fight to end San Francisco’s cemeteries was as long as it was messy—and it
started before the first graves in City Cemetery were dug. Richmond district residents
had begun agitating for the removal of their
sepulchral neighbors on Lone Mountain
by the end of the 1860s, and by 1901 they’d
persuaded municipal leaders to ban further
burials anywhere in the city.
“No feeling is more honorable or creditable than respect for the dead,” James
“Sunny Jim” Rolph Jr., San Francisco’s mayor
from 1911 to 1932, proclaimed in 1914. However, “the duty of government is more to the

living than to the dead. We must provide for
the expansion of our city.” Eventually, a majority of voters agreed with him. In 1937, they
overwhelmingly approved a measure forcing
the Lone Mountain cemeteries to relocate
their dead elsewhere. An estimated 150,000
graves were moved south, transforming the
tiny town of Colma into San Francisco’s personal necropolis.
City Cemetery was different. While Richmond residents were eager to remove the
graves and turn the property into a public
park, few burials were ultimately moved.
Long before voters went to the polls, the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors sent notices
to every organization with members buried
in City Cemetery and set a removal deadline
of July 1, 1909. But almost none of these associations had the necessary funds. Likewise,
San Francisco didn’t want to pay to dig up the
massive Potter’s Field. Aside from the earlier
Chinese disinterments, only about 2,300
graves went elsewhere, Ryder estimates. On
top of that, brush fires in 1891 and 1903 destroyed a number of the wooden grave markers, making it easier to forget who was buried

there. As soon as the deadline passed, the city
ordered that the remaining graves be “leveled
over and the tombs destroyed.”
Almost immediately, local golfers began
agitating for the city to open a public course,
so players didn’t have to belong to a stuffy
country club, says Richard Harris, cofounder
and president of the San Francisco Public
Golf Alliance. In August 1909, just a month
after the deadline to remove the graves from
City Cemetery, the S.F. Board of Park Commissioners voted to install a golf course atop
the graveyard. Golfers had already built a
3-hole course on the site in 1902, which had
expanded to 9 holes by 1909 and 18 holes by
1918. The site was renamed Lincoln Park, to
denote the fact that it was at the western end
of the cross-country Lincoln Highway. The
golf course was the first public one in San
Francisco and one of the first in the western
United States, Harris says.
Harris began playing golf at Lincoln Park
decades ago, at the age of 12. Even then,
he was well aware that he was golfing in a
graveyard. “When you’re playing golf there,
you can’t not know that. At the first hole, you
walk past the Chinese burial site. You know a
cemetery marker when you see it.”
Lincoln Park visitors may have always
recognized these graveyard monuments, but
it’s not clear they knew how many thousands
of graves remained in the ground. The dead
started to make themselves known again in
February 1921, as crews broke ground on the
California Palace of the Legion of Honor, as
it was originally called. The museum, funded
by Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and her husband, Adolph, who made his money through
sugar plantations and breeding racehorses,
was built as a memorial to California soldiers
killed in World War I. As workers dug into
the earth, they tore open 1,500 graves.
“The site of the $250,000 memorial to the
dead was once a cemetery. It still is, but the
bones are now scattered. In the excavation
work for the memorial workmen have uncovered about 1500 skeleton-filled coffins,”
reporter Vid Larsen wrote for the Daily
News in 1921. Larsen and a colleague visited
the site during construction and reported
“piles of bones not completely covered by the
dirt,” many coffins cut in half by the teeth of
excavating machines, and more coffins poking out from the soil. Local college students
bought some of the skulls. The foreman told
the reporters that his crews refused to touch
the bones. “The only thing we can do,” he
said, “is to scrape them over and cover them
up again.”
The Legion of Honor opened on Armistice
Day, November 11, 1924, atop thousands of
graves. The burials remained relatively undisturbed until 1993, when a new round of
excavations at the museum uncovered what
archaeologist Miley Holman described as a
“charnel heap,” a mass grave likely left over
from the 1921 construction. The remains,
archaeologists found, belonged mostly to elderly white people buried in redwood coffins.
Their bones showed signs of age and heavy
labor: fractures, skeletal trauma, arthritis.
Museum officials and builders didn’t want
to deal with the work of processing the remains; Harry Parker, the director of the Fine
Arts Museums of San Francisco, complained

to the San Francisco Chronicle that the delays associated with the discovery would cost
$50,000 a month. Ultimately, the Legion
of Honor turned the remains of about 900
early San Franciscans over to the medical
examiner’s office, and they were reinterred
in Skylawn Memorial Park in Colma. The
rest, however, are still there. Of the remaining graves, a spokesperson for the Legion
of Honor says, “We are monitoring the city
process and will determine how the designation of Lincoln Park will impact the museum
operations as we learn more.”
City Cemetery’s history speaks to San
Francisco’s profound disrespect for the dead,
LaBounty says, adding, “It points toward how
we treat different socioeconomic levels. That’s
the reason it was so easily transformed into a
park, and there wasn’t more outcry about not
disinterring the dead. It mostly consisted of
groups outside the power structure.”
Now that S.F. leaders may make City
Cemetery a local landmark, some of those
groups are beginning to reclaim it.

UNDERGROUND TALES
In October 2021, dozens of Chinese
American San Franciscans gathered at City
Cemetery’s Kong Chow monument for
Chung Yeung, an autumn festival that often
includes paying homage to the dead. Golfers’
games were paused as locals brought in alcohol and food, including a whole roast pig,
as well as paper money and incense to burn
as offerings, says Supervisor Chan. “Many
of our Chinese elders were there, and some
got teary-eyed. It was a moment to think
about their parents, and grandparents, and
great-grandparents.” It was the first such
ceremony in decades, possibly since the 1907
memorial for Hew Kong, president of the
Yung Wo Association, who died suddenly
on November 27, 1901, after a fight with the
Chinese consul, Sun Sze Yee.
As soon as Chan proposed making City
Cemetery a landmark, in April 2021, golfers
began to worry. The course’s lawns and tees
had grown shabby, and the clubhouse was in
poor shape, Harris says. Many were concerned
that landmarking the cemetery would make it
more difficult, or perhaps impossible, for the
city to keep the golf course in playable condition. Chan says there’s no reason that making
the cemetery a landmark should interfere with
maintaining the golf course: “We’re all trying
to find ways to share the space and be inclusive
and respectful to each other.”
In a letter on behalf of the public golf association, Harris urged the city to consider
landmarking the whole, multilayered history
of the site, including the golf course, the Legion of Honor, and the Holocaust Memorial
near the museum, designed by artist George
Segal and installed in 1984.
But only City Cemetery is being considered for landmark status under Article 10 of
San Francisco’s planning code, says Allison
Vanderslice, principal environmental planner for the city. The site “is significant for its
ability to add to our understanding of history
and also its cultural associations and its funerary structures.” It captures the cultural
diversity of early San Francisco, too, she says.
If the S.F. Board of Supervisors approves

landmark status for City Cemetery, the designation will not entail new signage for
the site. But, separately, the San Francisco
Public Utilities Commission plans to install
an informational panel that briefly discusses
the history of City Cemetery and the remains
found along El Camino Del Mar, says Kari
Hervey-Lentz, an archaeologist in the city’s
planning department. Hervey-Lentz and
Ryder are reluctant to reveal specific places
where remains could be found; they don’t
want to make it easy for relic hunters to dig
up bones or other grave goods. It’s rare, but it
happens: in the 1960s, local kids digging for
fun in the park near Clement Street and 39th
Avenue unearthed a Jewish headstone that
dates back to 1858. It may have been moved
from an earlier Jewish cemetery at Gough
and Green Streets, Ryder says.
The poet Kenneth Rexroth once argued
that there is “nothing underground about”
San Francisco. On the contrary, it is a city
with history as layered and rich as the Franciscan Complex stone that underlies it. The
original home of the Ohlone people is famed
for the Spanish colonizers, the gold rush, the
Beats and the Summer of Love, queer and
trans rights movements, and the tech boom.
It’s also famed for having no cemeteries within city limits, even though it still has a few:
the historic graveyard at Mission Dolores de
Asís, the National Cemetery in the Presidio,
the Columbarium with its thousands of niches for cremated remains. And City Cemetery;
most of its dead are still there too.
And yet, because San Francisco outsourced its burials in the 20th century,
it’s a city where local victims of the 1906
earthquake and fire (3,000), the AIDS crisis
(20,000), the Jonestown massacre (909),
and the COVID-19 pandemic (946 and
counting) couldn’t be buried in the place
they called home. In San Francisco, do the
dead matter? Time and time again, through
a combination of poor planning, lack of foresight, and human greed, city officials have
demonstrated that the dead don’t matter.
Landmarking City Cemetery may begin
to change that. Since the Chung Yeung
ceremony last October, there are already
signs of it happening, particularly at the
Kong Chow monument. Someone has been
keeping fresh flowers, incense, and a broom
at the site to pay respect to the dead buried
there, says Hervey-Lentz. “It’s rewarding to
see this work contributing to the heritage of
these groups” and the importance of this site
recognized.
Chan hopes that local Chinese American
elders and community organizations will return to the monument each year to celebrate
Chung Yeung and similar ceremonies. And
she hopes that landmarking the cemetery
will create more respect for San Francisco’s
historic dead overall. “Not just for [residents] who are here now but for generations
to come and for immigrants.… It will remind
people that San Francisco has always been a
city of immigrants, a refuge for people who
want to come here and thrive here.” Q
Beth Winegarner is a longtime Bay Area
journalist and the author of several books.
She loves researching the hidden histories
and human stories behind everyday places.
ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 23

A PAINTER’S PAINTER

By EMILY WILSON • Photo by CAROLYN FONG

Bernice Bing
Steps into View
San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum
celebrates the work of a queer
Chinese American artist
with a long-overdue retrospective.

I

magine an artist: Chinese American, lesbian, and a Californian, her work overlooked in the mostly male and East
Coast–dominated field of abstract expressionism. And now imagine that this artist
had been orphaned as a little girl and
shuttled back and forth between 17 white
foster homes, an orphanage, and occasionally
her grandma, before earning a scholarship to
what is now California College of the Arts.
“Bernice Bing, in so many ways, she represents a miracle,” says Abby Chen, a contemporary art curator at the Asian Art Museum
in San Francisco. “Orphaned at such a young
age and with [such] undeniable talent that she
was able to get into California College of the
Arts. It’s so rare to find an Asian in a prestigious art school [at that time].”
Chen has put together Into View: Bernice
Bing, on display at the Asian Art Museum
through May 1, 2023. This lively exhibition is the
first in a series that features the work of underrecognized modern and contemporary artists.
“I think for Bernice, who some knew as Bingo, her story was obscured,” says artist Lenore
Chinn, a friend of Bing’s who considered her
a mentor. “And women in general, I think, in
that time frame were passed over in favor of
the spotlighting of male artists.”
Into View seeks to correct this. The show,
which contains 20 paintings and drawings,
aims to trace Bing’s journey from the abstract
expressionism of the 1950s and ’60s to her
blending of Zen calligraphy and abstraction in
the 1980s and ’90s.

cult circumstances of her life.
At California College of the Arts, she studied with abstract painter Saburo Hasegawa, who introduced her to Zen calligraphy
and Buddhist philosophy, and with Richard
Diebenkorn, an abstract expressionist who
became a leader in Bay Area figurative painting. Bing transferred to what’s now known
as the San Francisco Art Institute, where
she completed her undergraduate degree and
studied with other expressionists, including
Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff. She received
a master’s degree in fine art from SFAI in 1961
and became one of the few women in the Beat
scene in San Francisco.

in 1963 that features landscape imagery and
focuses on the beauty of nature. In a rare artist
statement from 1990, she writes, “For me, all
nature is pure, and purely abstracted; the spiritual union links both the seen and the unseen
forms of nature. Freedom, for example, is seeing trees as pure energy, light, and mass made
up of linear particles.” The show also presents
artworks exploring her Asian heritage and Buddhism, including one that references a revered
Buddhist scripture, the Lotus Sutra. Bing died
in 1998 from cancer, and her last major work,
Epilogue (1990–95), a triptych of abstract and
figurative forms, also hangs in the show.
Bing’s bold colors and dynamic strokes be-

CHARLES SNYDER; © BERNICE BING ESTATE

Bernice Bing (1936–1998) at her studio in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood around 1961.

AN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM OF HER OWN
Bing was born in 1936 in San Francisco’s
Chinatown, a community still affected at the
time by the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,
which banned Chinese people from immigrating and prevented those of Chinese ancestry
from becoming citizens. Through drawing, she
could escape and try to make sense of the diffi-

24 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

Into View includes some of Bing’s early
pieces that combine elements from abstract expressionism and the Bay Area figurative movement, like A Lady and a Road Map (1962); ink
drawings that have never been exhibited before;
and work produced while she was employed
as a caretaker at Napa’s Mayacamas Vineyards

long to abstract expressionism, but her study
of calligraphy and Zen Buddhism, encouraged
by her mentor Hasegawa, also shows up in her
work, says Mark Dean Johnson, previously an
associate dean at SFAI, a former professor of art
at San Francisco State University, and the author
of Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970.

Curatorial fellow Naz
Cuguoglu (left) and
contemporary art curator
Abby Chen, at the Asian Art
Museum in San Francisco.

He relates a conversation that he had with Bing and community arts programs.
Cuguoğlu nominated videos for that project
about Hasegawa’s influence: “She [told me],
Chinn, Bing’s friend and fellow artist, also and organized a reading group for it with art‘You can imagine this Asian woman, who’s ba- recalls Bing’s commitment to others. After ists and researchers from the Asian diaspora.
sically looking for their place in the art world, returning from China, Bing moved to the Men- She calls this a good way to support one anothto have someone talking to them about Asian docino County town of Philo but remained a er and come up with alternative institutional
philosophy, Asian art history, and suggesting vital figure in the Bay Area. “She would drive structures to “break the hierarchies of learning
that it was an opportunity for her to define or to out all the way from Philo, which is up north and knowledge.”
help guide her artistic search.’ ”
Bing’s work, Cuguoğlu explains, gives her
several hours away, and attend our [AAWAA]
In 1984, Bing traveled to what is now the meetings or show up for our various events,” a fresh lens with which to view the collection.
China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou, to study Chinn says. “And when we put shows together, “She’s this Chinese American lesbian artist inwith Wang Dongling, whom Johnson calls she was there, helping out and lending her volved in the San Francisco Bay Area commuone of the world’s preeminent abstract callig- hand, so to speak.”
nity and arts, but so generous and building all
raphers. The sojourn led Bing to incorporate
Chinn says that it means a lot to see her these allyships and collaboration,” she says. “I’m
calligraphic markings into her paintings, in a friend’s work at major institutions like the thinking, How can she give us inspiration?”
unique and personal way.
Asian Art Museum. And Into View is just the
“She had a distinctly Bingo voice that was beginning of what curator Chen, with assis- A NEW CANON
both Western and Eastern because she had tance from curatorial fellow Naz Cuguoğlu,
Johnson remembers that when he started
a number of Asian American influences, not has planned. Cuguoğlu has been a researcher working at SFAI in 1989, he had a conversation
just Hasegawa, who I think introduced to her at San Francisco museums and has curated with Villa and some others about how U.S. art
the concept of calligraphy as abstract ges- exhibitions in San Francisco, Baltimore, and history books were almost exclusively devoted
ture,” says Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, the board her hometown of Istanbul.
to white men—with maybe Georgia O’Keeffe
president of SOMArts Cultural Center, a Bay
“I’m specially focusing on women artists, thrown in. The discussion led to a conference
Area arts organization. “Her experience as a queer artists, other underrepresented artists, three years later on ways to make art history
Chinese American and growing up
more inclusive. Thirty years later,
in Chinatown and being part of that
Johnson finds the Asian Art Musecommunity also has a part in storyum’s expansion of its mission deeply
telling in her practice.”
satisfying.
Johnson and Lagaso Goldberg re“Carlos and Bernice were friends
cently cocurated a show on Filipino
and classmates, and the fact that
American artist Carlos Villa, Bing’s
their exhibitions are overlapping
contemporary and fellow SFAI alum,
for a few weeks is evidence again of
at the Asian Art Museum (on view
this recent commitment of the muthrough October 24, 2022). Lagaseum,” Johnson says. “It’s evidence
so Goldberg recounts going through
of Abby’s vision to highlight local
Villa’s archives and being delighted
artists, to make it clear that San
to discover the many exhibitions he
Francisco’s own backyard is ground
and Bing had together, notably a
zero.”
1960 show, Gangbang, at the Bat“It is vital to acknowledge how
man Gallery in San Francisco, that
economic, racist, and heteronoralso included Joan Brown and Manmative structures contributed to
uel Neri.
the historical erasure of her work,”
Lagaso Goldberg, like Villa and
filmmaker Yoshida says of Bing.
Bing, went to SFAI, and she says
“During the years around abstract
she has a soft spot for the artists
expressionism, especially, romantic
who came out of the school. “I have
partnerships determined a woman’s
a real bias for painters who are real
success and visibility as an artist.
painters’ painters and who really
Bernice Bing, as a lesbian and a
know how to make a canvas sing
woman of color, did not have access
through abstract brushstrokes
to the same privileges as her counthat are really super brushy or
terparts, Joan Brown [married to
©
BERNICE
BING
ESTATE;
PHOTO
©
ASIAN
ART
MUSEUM
OF
SAN
FRANCISCO
minimal,” Lagaso Goldberg says.
Manuel Neri] and Jay DeFeo [mar“When I look at Bingo’s work, it’s A Lady and a Road Map (1962), by Bernice Bing.
ried to Wally Hedrick].”
very legible to me that she’s part
With Into View, Chen has set out
of a history of painting in the Bay Area and and immigrant artists,” Cuguoğlu says. “And my to help Bing and others claim their rightful
particularly SFAI.”
role is to think about what kind of collecting ap- place in the art world. “I think with both the
Bernice Bing exhibition and the research that
proach or exhibition approach we can develop.”
A BROADER VIEW
Buoyed by the Bing show, Cuguoğlu is comes with it, what Naz is doing, I think we are
As a prelude to the Into View exhibit, combing the collection, looking for the founda- reinforcing that this is indeed the canon,” Chen
two summers ago the Asian Art Museum tions of upcoming exhibitions. “She’s coming says. “Ideally that through all of these different
screened the short documentary The Worlds in with a fresh eye and an understanding of practices, we can find new models and new
of Bernice Bing, which explores the artist’s what Bernice Bing has done, and using that practices that innovate the institution.”
And in doing so, the Asian Art Museum and
activism and her prominent contributions to as sort of a northern star to look into what we
its upcoming shows honor the work—and the
Bay Area arts organizations. “Bing champi- have,” Chen says.
oned the disenfranchised and underserved,”
When it comes to programming, Chen spirit—of Bing. “It’s long overdue to celebrate
says Jen Banta Yoshida, a coproducer of the sees clear value in bringing in new ideas and and sing praises and show our respect and
film, via email. “Bing made sure that arts pro- perspectives from outside the museum. Invit- to really shine a light on these San Francisco
grams and funding were accessible to artists ing Johnson and Lagaso Goldberg to curate Asian American creative giants,” Lagaso Goldthe Villa show, for instance. Or hiring Padma berg says. “That’s it. To me, that’s the headline.
in the community.”
Bing served as the executive director of Maitland, an architecture professor at Califor- We’re long overdue.” Q
SOMArts, worked for the Neighborhood Arts nia Polytechnic State University and a former
Program in Chinatown, was a founding mem- curator of Asian art at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Emily Wilson is a San Francisco freelance
ber of the Asian American Women Artists Center, who worked with Chen on a 2021 ex- writer who covers arts and culture. She wrote
Association (AAWAA), and cofounded SCRAP, hibition of short videos, After Hope: Videos of about the opera El Último Sueño de Frida y
Diego for Alta Journal, Summer 2022.
which provides discarded supplies to schools Resistance, at the museum.

26 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

WHY THIS ART

By COURT LURIE

Utopian Elation
in Julie Mehretu’s
HOWL, eon (I, II)

W

hen I engage with HOWL,
eon (I, II), by Julie Mehretu, I am filled with gratitude. I’ve cried when I’ve
encountered paintings like
this, and this one makes my
heart ache. It is a love song
that moves me. It is a steeple for pupils of light
who arrive at its doorstep seeking questions,
searching its face for truth. After deep examination, architecture is revealed, meticulous brushstrokes that spark a story that speaks loudly.
Hold still and listen. The painting breathes with
gray thunder. Hold still—watch the world unfold
through its lines and holes. A world filled with
the wails and whimpers of mothers. Yet the
palette runs through like a glimmer of hope in
the face of rage, injustice, and the greater laws
of the land. It exudes connection, deliberate,
specific, brilliant.
Here, Mehretu handles transitions with
wit and grace as color palette meets line
meets shadow meets pinks meets blues meets
whites. Through lime and peach and pear and
pine, through drumbeats, and bass players,
and horns blowing, and people glowing. Inside
these crevices, mysteries of reconciliation and
forgiveness are found.
My feet dance in the streets. Mehretu
moves my hands to write and my body to paint
and draw. To howl in the face of unfound freedom. To scream in the streets for holy redemption! Can mountains be moved with art? I am
feeling optimistic (and still a little sarcastic)
and have begun to dream again. This painting
calls to my people, “Go to one another. Come
together, and build together.”
The gesture of HOWL is a map of worlds colliding in prose and poetry to shape a language,
bridging one reality to another. Crafted like a
cerebral poem, HOWL enlivens a conversation
about utopian elation. Listen to it and you may
hear the whispers of tomorrow. Q
Court Lurie’s work hangs in public and private
collections around the country, including at
Austin City Hall and the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. She has spearheaded many
collaborations with other artists, community
organizations, and government projects that
advocate for and support the arts, including
Art Alliance Austin and Big Medium’s Creative
Standard. She lives and works in Austin.

© JULIE MEHRETU; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY; PHOTOS BY TOM POWEL IMAGING

Julie Mehretu’s HOWL, eon (I, II) is a diptych created in 2016–17 that was commissioned by the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a gift from Helen and Charles Schwab.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 27

SEMPER PARATUS

By JULIAN SMITH • Illustrations by MARK SMITH

Miracle

on the
Mountain
Deep in California’s Trinity Alps,
two firefighters battling a fast-moving
blaze were gravely injured by a falling
boulder. Their best option for survival:
a four-person Coast Guard team adept
at sea rescues.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 29

he call came in a little after 9 p.m. on September 5: a medevac was needed
for two badly injured wildland firefighters in Northern California’s Trinity
Alps, in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
It wasn’t unexpected. Fighting fires in the backcountry was a dangerous job, and the 2019 fire season was well underway. Lightning had
already ignited 124 blazes across the region in September, including 18 in
Shasta-Trinity alone.
What was surprising was who picked up the call: the U.S. Coast Guard
Sector Humboldt Bay in McKinleyville, about 58 miles west of the firefighters.
The helicopter rescue team on duty—aircraft commander Derek
Schramel, 36; copilot Adam Ownbey, 32; rescue swimmer Graham McGinnis, 34; and flight mechanic Tyler Cook, 23—were just settling in for
the night when they were summoned to the command center.
They went over what little information they had. Two wildland firefighters, part of a 20-person crew employed by a
private company under contract to the U.S. Forest Service, had been hit by a rolling boulder: one in the head and neck,
who had been knocked unconscious for approximately 30 seconds, and the other in the leg, whose femur was shattered.
The pair were stuck on a steep slope at about 5,000 feet, close to the fire line and miles from the nearest major
road. Carrying them out would be next to impossible—the ground was covered with rocks and downed trees—and
could put everyone’s lives at risk. The crew’s leader—whom the Coast Guard would call the incident commander
throughout this ordeal—said on the radio that both men were in bad shape. He was worried that the one with the
broken leg might not survive the night.
Two agencies, including the California Highway Patrol, were contacted to perform a search and rescue mission;
the CHP was deterred by the risk involved. The incident commander was desperate.
Coast Guard helicopter rescue teams train endlessly to do things like pull sailors off floundering ships in stormy
seas. In fact, Schramel and the others had spent the afternoon practicing hoists off a 47-foot Coast Guard motor lifeboat. Teams like theirs are encouraged to think outside the box and improvise in new situations.
But lifting severely injured firefighters off a burning mountain? “That was vastly outside our realm of experience,”
Schramel says. Cook was the newest flight mechanic in the unit, and neither he nor Ownbey had ever flown a search
and rescue mission before.
Their twin-engine Dolphin MH-65 helicopter was sleek and agile. But the red-and-white craft had limited power
and fuel reserves, its performance started to suffer above about 3,000 feet, and fire-heated air is thinner and offers
less lift. In any case, landing in a forest of 200-foot trees was out of the question. The firefighting crew had cut down
enough trees to make a small clearing, which meant the rescue team would have to perform a cable hoist from a high
hover, at night, a challenging operation under the best of conditions.
McGinnis had been with the unit for only a few months, but his EMT training compelled him to speak up. A broken
femur can be life-threatening, he said. If a femoral artery is cut, you can bleed out internally and never see a drop of blood.
That very thing had happened in the same forest in 2008. A firefighter with Olympic National Park, his femur
shattered by a falling tree, had bled to death in the back of a Coast Guard helicopter after waiting for hours to be
rescued. That wasn’t the only disaster that season: two weeks later, an overloaded helicopter crashed during takeoff
from a remote helispot, killing seven firefighters and two pilots.
Coast Guard teams evaluate every potential mission in terms of risk versus gain. Everyone has to be in agreement,
and anyone can decide to turn around at any time. McGinnis and the others decided that the severity of the injuries
and the fact that they were likely the only remaining medevac option within range tilted the equation enough to at
least try. They would fly to the scene and see whether a rescue was even possible.
They started gearing up and prepping the Dolphin for flight. At 11 p.m., with Ownbey at the controls, they took off
from the fog-covered airfield and flew east into the alps.

T

uring the half-hour flight, the team went over checklists and did their best to game-plan potential scenarios. A quarter moon was setting, leaving the mountains in darkness almost too
deep for their night vision goggles. They then cleared a ridge, and a huge glow lit the horizon.
“That was a gut check for all of us—what exactly are we getting ourselves into?” Schramel said.
A half dozen firefighters were stuck in a north-south canyon about three miles wide and
surrounded by sheer ridgelines on three sides, like a bowl. The top half of the east ridge was
on fire. Smoke filled the canyon, rising into an anvil-like thunderhead.
Schramel took the controls from Ownbey and started circling. They spotted a trail of headlamps on the east ridge
about half a mile below the fire line and radioed the incident commander to say they were headed his way.
“No, that’s not us,” he said. “That’s our relief team coming up. You need to look higher up toward the fire.”
It took one more pass to find the faint glint of more headlamps about 20 yards from the fire line.
“You could feel it in the aircraft,” McGinnis says. “Everybody was like—whoa.”
Schramel started working to get into a hover over the clearing the firefighters had cut. Every workable approach
route seemed to carry them over the flames. The air, already thinned by the heat and elevation, churned with updrafts
of up to 100 miles per hour, forcing him to adjust power to keep a steady altitude.
Whenever they reached the clearing, the updrafts would abruptly stop, and the Dolphin would start to fall toward
the trees. Each time, Schramel had to peel away down the canyon just to stay in the air.
He had no depth perception through his night vision goggles, and whenever he looked near the fire, the flames’
light turned his field of vision into blinding static. With no flat horizon for reference, he fought the vertigo that can
make helicopter pilots misjudge their orientation and tilt in the wrong direction.
Schramel had 11 years of flying experience and was an instructor at the Coast Guard’s Advanced Helicopter Rescue
School. But this was the toughest flying he had ever done.
“There’s no words to describe how hard it was,” he says. “My sole preoccupation was trying not to kill everybody.”

D

They
were
likely
the only
remaining
option.
They
would
fly to the
scene
and see
whether
a rescue
was even
possible.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 31

He kept trying. In the copilot seat, Ownbey served as a second pair of eyes, monitoring the instruments and watching the fuel level creep closer to “bingo,” the cutoff point where there was just enough left to fly back. McGinnis could
hear the doubt in their voices as they tried to maneuver into position again and again.
After about 10 tries, Schramel found an approach that avoided the flames: he skimmed a high ridge at treetop level
and made a fast descent toward the clearing. It was almost midnight when he settled into a hover. The mountainside
was so steep that redwoods rose above them on two sides.
McGinnis sprang into action. He hooked his harness to the end of the hoist cable and looked out the open door on
the Dolphin’s right side. The only light came from the fire and the helicopter’s spotlights knifing through the smoky air.
He looked down at the tiny clearing lit by flaming trees. The Dolphin was at least 200 feet above it, and the cable
was only 240 feet long. If Schramel lost power or veered just slightly too far in any direction, McGinnis could be
dragged through the trees, or the cable could snap, or both. He sized up the situation and told Schramel that if things
got out of control once he was on the ground, the aircraft commander should leave him behind, even overnight. Absolutely not, Schramel replied.
McGinnis had made it through the Coast Guard’s grueling training program, his branch’s equivalent of the Navy’s
SEAL training. During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, he had waded through flooded Houston neighborhoods, searching
for people trapped on roofs, and watched as a hoist cable was sheared by a power line. Still, the view over the burning
ridge left him momentarily speechless.
“What the fuck am I doing?” he said.
He knew that flight mechanics like Cook had hundreds of hours of experience in hoisting swimmers to safety. Still,
as he prepared to step out the door, he gestured and yelled at Cook to watch out for the “candy cane,” the red-andwhite warning stripes that marked the last 10 feet of cable.
“I kind of gave him the googly eyes,” McGinnis says. “ ‘Hey, man, just watch.’ ”
It took so long to get to the ground that the roar of the rotors eventually began to fade overhead. Then McGinnis
started to spin. “I just remember seeing black, fire, tree, black, fire, tree, over and over,” he says.
Cook watched the glow of the flashlight on McGinnis’s helmet grow dimmer. Along with manning the winch, his job
was to give Schramel directions to keep them over the clearing: “Tree just off your nose. You’re drifting right. Hold position.”
McGinnis was still at least 25 feet off the ground when the candy cane appeared. Cook carefully guided Schramel
to bring the helicopter to the side until McGinnis could grab a tree, unhook from the cable, and shimmy down awkwardly. It wasn’t pretty, but it got him to the ground.
He scrambled uphill over a mass of felled trees to reach the firefighters. Half a dozen men in yellow shirts and hard
hats stood backlit by fire and covered in dust. The two injured firefighters were already strapped onto backboards and
covered with Mylar blankets. Within seconds, the rotor wash whipped the blankets away, and McGinnis could see
one man’s right foot pointed almost backward.
He radioed up for Cook to lower the litter. But on the way down, it started to pendulum in bigger and bigger arcs.
Cook had no choice but to bring the litter back up to attach a trail line to it. Before he could do this, they were at bingo.
They had only enough fuel left to bring McGinnis up.
McGinnis told the incident commander they had to go. They would head to Redding, about 50 miles southeast, to
refuel and reassess the situation. He knew there was a chance they wouldn’t be allowed to come back, if the higher-ups
decided the mission was too risky. “I didn’t want to give any promises,” he says. “He was obviously disappointed.”
Cook had to guide the helicopter even lower so McGinnis could hook back onto the cable. The ride up was just
as frightening as the descent. “I had to consciously force myself to stop white-knuckling the hoist hook so I didn’t
unintentionally unlock it,” he says.
he atmosphere in the cabin was grim on the way to Redding. “Everyone was palpably dismayed—the doubt was definitely creeping in hard,” McGinnis says.
They landed at the Redding airport at about 2 a.m. and started talking as the helicopter was
being refueled.
“I saw the patients, and they’re in bad shape,” McGinnis told his teammates. “And they’re
not going to be able to hike these guys out on backboards—it’s just too rugged.”
Remember how hard it was just to find the right approach angle, he added. Any other helicopter team that went out would be starting over from scratch. They weren’t just the best hope of rescue—they were
very likely the only one.
The team started running the numbers on fuel, weight, distance, and time. They did this on every mission, but the
margins here were especially slim. Every extra pound of fuel, gear, or people limited their flight time and affected the
aircraft’s performance. It was a complex calculation with lives on the line.
McGinnis had two ideas that might give them more of a safety margin. Instead of lowering him and the rescue litter separately, they could send them both down at once; then they could bring him and a patient back up at the same
time. This would cut hoist time in half and could mean the difference between rescuing one or both men.
The maneuver wasn’t part of standard Coast Guard training, and none of them had ever tried it before. But other
agencies and private companies apparently did it, and it didn’t seem that complicated.
And if they fieldstripped the aircraft of everything they didn’t absolutely need, as another team had done during
Hurricane Harvey, they could eke out more time in the air and leave more room for the patients.
They checked in with their commander, who approved the plan. They would retrieve both patients, if possible,
and bring them to a small airfield in Weaverville, only a five-minute flight from the rescue scene. There, they would
transfer the patients to a private emergency air medical service called REACH. That airfield didn’t have refueling
services, so there would be no return trip for McGinnis and his companions.
The team started dumping out everything that wasn’t nailed down: rafts, searchlights, extra seats, anything related to water rescues. When they were done, over 200 pounds of gear lay piled on the floor of the hangar.
By 3 a.m., the Dolphin was aloft and en route. When they updated the incident commander on their position, he
said that his crew had tried to carry the femur patient down the mountain. In an hour, they had gone only 40 feet.

T

The fuel
level
crept
closer to
“bingo,”
the cutoff
point
where
there
was just
enough
left to fly
back.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 33

he Coast Guard team arrived to find that the fire had crawled downhill, closer to the clearing,
which was now surrounded by burning trees on three sides. There was only one approach route
that wasn’t on fire: flying straight toward the mountainside. That meant that if they lost power,
a crash was almost inevitable.
Schramel could barely see through the smoke and flying embers. Aiming one of the landing
lights horizontally at the trees gave him a makeshift reference point, and somehow he managed
to get into a hover again.
McGinnis struggled to connect himself and the litter to the hoist hook and wrestle the whole setup into position. The rotors sucked smoke into the cabin like a black tornado as he hooked up and Cook helped him shuffle toward the open door.
McGinnis could feel the heat of the fire on the way down. The air was full of dust and ash, and flames were climbing the trees right under the tail of the helicopter. (“That got my attention,” he says.) He landed and lugged the litter
up the hill to where the fire crew were waiting, now only a few dozen feet from the fire line.
He jammed the litter into the hillside below the first patient, wedging his knees underneath to keep it horizontal.
McGinnis estimated that the man weighed about 280 pounds. He screamed as his crewmates lifted him onto the
litter. “I could see his thigh jiggling like jello,” McGinnis says.
In just minutes, McGinnis and the patient were ready for Cook to begin lifting them to the helicopter. Their combined weight made the Dolphin dip to the right, but Schramel reacted quickly and steadied the aircraft.
As McGinnis clambered aboard, Cook helped maneuver the litter inside. The men tried to lift the patient, still attached
to the backboard, out of the litter and onto a low shelf inside the low-ceilinged, cramped space. McGinnis squatted and
lifted as Cook pushed from below. But no matter how hard they strained, the backboard just wouldn’t budge.
“At this point, my brain is going, ‘You’re running out of time, you’re running out of time,’ ” McGinnis says. Every
extra second they spent hovering was burning fuel and flight time.
McGinnis gave one huge heave and howled as pain from a pulled muscle shot through his back. The backboard
popped free—a buckle had been caught on the litter—and he and Cook managed to heave the patient onto the shelf.
They immediately started readying themselves to fetch the next man. There was no way they could leave him behind.
Beginning his descent, McGinnis could see that just a few minutes of hovering had fanned the flames even higher.
Blowing ash and dust were working through the balaclava over his mouth, and he could feel grit on his teeth. But he
was humming on adrenaline, and now he knew the new hoist method worked.
The second patient was shirtless, with a cervical collar as well as bandages around his head and one shoulder. His
fellow firefighters were clearly relieved that their crewmates were likely going to be safe. Just before the cable went
taut, one of them, blackened from head to toe in dirt and ash, leaned over McGinnis and said thanks.
The final hoist seemed to take forever. McGinnis looked down at the red glow of the fire just feet from where he
had been standing. He could feel himself grinning in disbelief. “I can’t believe we just pulled this off,” he thought.
With the litter on the floor, there was just enough room to close the cabin door. Schramel had to push the engines
to maximum power to make up for all the weight. The altitude slowly ticked up foot by foot. “Thank god that was the
last hoist,” he says. “There was no way we could have hovered another 30 seconds.”
When they were clear of the burning treetops, he passed the controls to Ownbey and took a deep breath.
“I swear on my life, I looked forward and watched his shoulders drop from up near his ears,” McGinnis says.

T

wnbey landed at the small, unlit airfield in the forest outside Weaverville just shy of 4 a.m. Before
he was even out of his seat, the patients were unloaded and whisked to a pair of waiting REACH
helicopters.
The night was suddenly quiet. The team members looked at one another, exhaustion crashing in, wondering what had just happened. “It was an adrenaline dump, for sure,” Ownbey says.
None of them had ever been through anything remotely like the past six hours.
Their most immediate concern was where they were going to sleep. They were tired enough to
consider spending the night in the Dolphin. Luckily for them, they were able to catch a ride with a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection crew to a fire station a few minutes away. “We ended up straggling along with
them like lost puppies,” Schramel says. A couch and a couple of recliners had never looked so inviting.
McGinnis couldn’t sleep because of the pain in his back. He finally gave up and went outside. The rising sun was
just starting to burn off the early-morning chill. He found a trail around the building and followed it, trying to stretch
out the muscles in his back, going over and over in his head what had just happened and how everything, incredibly,
had seemed to fall into place.
The two patients survived, and the rest of the fire crew made it out safely on foot. The morning after the rescue, a
spokesperson for the firefighting company, GFP Enterprises, told local news site Redheaded Blackbelt that both men
were in “really good spirits [and] one wanted to go back to work today.”
Schramel later reached out to the company to check on the patients, but nobody ever called him back. “It’s a bummer, but that’s the nature of our work sometimes,” he says. “You rarely get to talk to that person after you drop them
off.” (GFP Enterprises didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
In the months to come, McGinnis and Schramel would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the U.S. military’s highest aviation award for heroism in flight. Ownbey and Cook would receive Air Medals, recognition for their
own heroism. Together, the team would receive the Captain Frank A. Erickson Award for exceptional performance
while engaged in search and rescue operations.
“You want to chalk it up to your skill as professional military aviators,” McGinnis says. “But honestly, we also got
really lucky. If just one thing had gone wrong, it would have been a disaster.… I think we were all in shock that we
pulled off a miracle.” Q

O

“My brain
is going,
‘You’re
running
out of
time,
you’re
running
out of
time.’ ”
—Graham
McGinnis

Julian Smith’s latest book, Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World’s Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of
the American West, won the 2020 Oregon Book Award. He is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and most recently wrote
about a love affair between a British travel writer and a mountain man in 19th-century Colorado for altaonline.com.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 35

GO VOTE

By GUSTAVO ARELLANO • Photos by LARRY HIRSHOWITZ

Sí Se
Puede
Orange County political leader
Ada Briceño harnessed
the power of protest to help
the conservative bastion flip
from red to blue. Her next test:
the 2022 midterm elections.

A

summer meeting of the Democratic Club of West Orange County
has just kicked off at Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Fountain
Valley when Ada Briceño walks
in, unnoticed. It is quite the feat.
She wears a neon-pink T-shirt,
stands nearly six feet tall, and is possibly the
only Latina in an audience of about 40.
Not exactly a reception befitting the chair
of the Democratic Party of Orange County. But
this is how Briceño wants it. She has come to
give a speech, but she wants to read the room
first, from the back. It’s a few days after a shooter killed seven people during a Fourth of July
parade in Highland Park, Illinois—and the
West O.C. Dems are angry and motivated.
After about 20 minutes of letting the
crowd vent, Briceño approaches the synagogue’s podium.
“I have too many mixed emotions after this
holiday,” she says, reading from a cell phone.
“Independence Day 2022 will always represent
a dark time in our history for me.”
She lists some of the calamities that the United States has weathered: A radicalized Supreme
Court. Mass shootings. Joe Biden’s declining
popularity. But as she sees the pained faces of
the Dems before her, Briceño ditches the script.
“As an organizer, I’ve been taught ‘Don’t
mourn, but organize,’ ” the Nicaraguan immigrant says as people nod their heads.
Her hands begin to move, her smile becomes
wider, her delivery becomes more rhythmic.
Her points—a defense of progressive principles,
attacks on the GOP, a call to action—become
sharper. The audience applause becomes louder.

36 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

The room is hers.
Briceño is a multipronged force in Southern
California politics. The 49-year-old mother sits
on the board of the Community Action Fund
of Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties and serves as a Democratic
National Committee member. She’s copresident
of UNITE HERE Local 11, which represents
hospitality and food workers in Southern California and Arizona and has earned worldwide
attention for protests that have called out everyone from Jay-Z and Beyoncé, for crossing the
picket line at Chateau Marmont, to Disney, for
allegedly overworking maids.
But it’s as chair of the Democratic Party of
Orange County, a position she has now held for
nearly four years, that Briceño wants to make
history. My native O.C. made national headlines in 2016 and 2018 when the place Ronald
Reagan once described as where “all the good
Republicans go to die” voted for Hillary Clinton
and then went on to elect an all-Democratic
congressional delegation.
Under Briceño, Orange County once again
went blue in the 2020 presidential election.
Registered Democrats in O.C. now outnumber
Republicans by more than 75,000. Gains by
Briceño’s slate of candidates in the 2022 elections, when Democrats are expected to lose
the House of Representatives and possibly the
Senate, would represent a powerful blow to the
GOP in one of its traditional strongholds and
provide hope for Democrats nationwide.
“She’s the right leader at the right time,” says
Rusty Hicks, the California Democratic Party
chair. “She can bring the work that has to be
done in a place like O.C. to get the wins not just
in front of you, but to secure the wins in the
years and hopefully decades to come.”
“Ada has not been afraid of taking on a different narrative,” says Norberto Santana Jr.,
publisher of the Voice of OC, a nonprofit news
agency that has covered Briceño for nearly a
decade. “Whether you like her or don’t like her,
she’s fearless.”
In a sign of the political climate, Briceño’s
biggest critics today aren’t conservatives;
they’re former colleagues. “Ada used to be a
progressive whose ambitions to become the
most powerful woman Democrat in Orange
County made her throw people around her
under the bus while aligning herself with people she used to despise,” says a former ally who
requested anonymity.
There are no haters at the Democratic Club
of West Orange County meeting. The people
there want to hear from a leader, and they
do—mostly. Near the end of her remarks, she
throws a challenge back at the faithful: “We’re
always waiting for someone to do something,”

Briceño concludes. “You’re the ones to do it.”

FAITH, HOPE, AND HARD WORK
About a week before her speech, I visit
Briceño at the Democratic Party of Orange
County headquarters in Anaheim. It’s in a
nondescript office park, its only signpost a
small orange sticker on the outside window,
and maybe the padlock on the front door that
requires a code to access the key that lets people in.
Briceño and I sit in her barren office—a
room with just a couple of posters and a standup desk. Subdued volunteers huddle in a nearby conference room. It is the week after Roe v.
Wade was overturned. The GOP is bragging
that a million voters have joined its party nationally. I ask Briceño how she’s feeling.
She uses terms like “heart-wrenching” and
“big cloud” at first, but then ceases her selfpity. “I never lose hope or faith,” Briceño says.
“And while it does impact me to hear others
feel so down, my ‘Sí se puede’ attitude that I
learned from housekeepers and dishwashers
remains at the soul of my leadership.”
The philosophy has governed her life, one
marked by good times frequently followed by
crashes.
She was born in Nicaragua to a family whose
patriarch worked as a banker under the Somoza regime. Briceño remembers “lavish” birthday parties at a well-kept home staffed with a
cook, a nanny, and a chauffeur who’d take her
to private school. Vacations were mostly in
Costa Rica, with occasional trips to Disneyland.
“My father would just give me whatever I
wanted,” she says. “But that came to a halt” after her family fled Nicaragua’s civil war in 1980
for Miami, when she was six.
Briceño’s family eventually settled in San
Pedro, California. She began to work at 13 as
a dishwasher and cashier and dropped out of
high school her senior year. Eventually, she
landed a job at the front desk of a hotel within
walking distance of her apartment. One day, a
manager asked Briceño to clean a guest room.
“I was drenched in sweat and did it halfassed,” she says. “It shook my foundation.”
She soon got a job with the hotel’s union,
then known as Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees. One promotion led to another, until Briceño, just 26 years old, found
herself president of the organization. It was
the early 2000s, and Southern California labor
was at a crossroads. Membership was changing from multicultural to mostly Latino. In Los
Angeles, a new generation of leaders leveraged
this change via street marches to win better
contracts and more political power.
Briceño sought to replicate that protest strat-

Ada Briceño,
Democratic Party of
Orange County chair.

people; photos of demonstrators cuffed while
dressed as Mickey Mouse, Tinker Bell, and
other Disney characters went worldwide.
Among the arrested? Briceño, who says
she’s been detained by police at least six times
while participating in such rallies. “It was one
small proof that we weren’t leading [workers]
in the wrong direction,” she says of that day.
“So it’s validation.”
By then, Briceño was also on the board of
Orange County Communities Organized for
Responsible Development. The nonprofit is
modeled on similar efforts in Los Angeles
and elsewhere that marry union power and
grassroots activism to change local politics.
Anaheim was OCCORD’s
case study: a Republicanmajority council kept granting hundreds of millions
of dollars in subsidies to
developers as the city became more Latino and less
affordable.
In 2016, OCCORD helped
push Anaheim to switch
from at-large elections to
a by-district system, which
gives voice to smaller groups
of voters. The organization
became a training ground
for young progressives who
remain involved in politics
to this day.
But critics whispered
that Briceño was pushing
UNITE HERE issues onto
OCCORD. It came to a
head in fall 2019, when she
found herself chairing the
nonprofit while her union
was fighting Anaheim over
the sale of the city’s Angel Stadium to a company owned by Los Angeles
Angels owner Arte Moreno. Briceño and local labor
sought community benefits
that would guarantee affordable housing and union
jobs to guard against what
government watchdogs said
was a grossly unfair deal;
OCCORD began to hold
town halls on the subject to
educate the public.
“We felt that that was a
perfect convening for what
OCCORD was born to do,”
Briceño takes a question at a Democratic Club of West Orange County
Briceño says. “And they
meeting this summer. Registered Democrats today outnumber Republirefused.”
cans in Orange County, once a GOP stronghold, by more than 75,000.
The town halls were
colleagues trying to organize just for basic ne- sparsely attended. Briceño claims that staff
cessities and getting killed in front of her eyes,” and other board members ignored the stadishe says of the Guatemalan Indigenous rights um issue. Frustrated, she left OCCORD in the
activist. “And I thought to myself, What the summer of 2020. In a statement, the nonprofit said feedback from community members
fuck am I crying about?”
demonstrated “that Ada’s focus, then and now,
is on what Local 11 wanted from OCCORD, not
MICKEY MOUSE IN HANDCUFFS
In 2008, approximately 1,000 people flood- on the needs of the broader community or the
ed the intersection of Katella Avenue and progressive movement as a whole.”
But her position was vindicated last year,
Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim—just down the
street from Disneyland—to protest the lack when the FBI announced a massive investigaof a contract between the theme park and its tion into a “cabal” that ruled Anaheim and had
hotel workers. Police eventually arrested 28 orchestrated a stadium deal heavily in favor of
egy in Orange County. But about two years into
her tenure, her reputation was nearly destroyed.
In 2003, four former HERE employees
sued the union for discrimination, alleging
that they’d lost their jobs in part because they
were older white women. One claimed that
Briceño “was intent on finding a way to get rid
of her because [Briceño] wanted to bring in
younger Hispanic employees.”
A jury awarded them more than $750,000
in damages. The trial “was just crushing,”
Briceño says, and she was ready to resign when
she went to hear Nobel laureate Rigoberta
Menchú at an event to get her mind off things.
“I just remember her talking about her

38 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

Moreno. The city canceled the deal in May.
“The rank and file of OCCORD didn’t understand” the severity of the situation, says
Voice of OC publisher Santana. “Ultimately, by
standing up to the thuggish approach to the
stadium deal, Ada was correct.”
“OCCORD was 15 years of my life,” Briceño
says. “I think that my work in OCCORD speaks
for itself, and so I don’t need validation, you
know? But I wonder what could have happened and what would have happened.”
Before Briceño, community activists
clashed with Democratic leaders over how strident liberal politics could become in moderate
O.C. Yet by the time she left OCCORD, Briceño
was already the chair of the Democratic Party
of Orange County. She explains that she had
never felt “much of a connection” with local
politics, but Trump’s election inspired her to
get further involved.
Her biggest headaches as chair have been intraparty battles. In 2020, just before the national election, DPOC vice chair Jeff LeTourneau
praised Ho Chi Minh—political kryptonite in
Orange County, which has the largest Vietnamese population in the world outside of
Vietnam. Briceño quickly held a press conference along with other elected officials to
denounce LeTourneau, which angered progressive Democrats who had long supported
him. Meanwhile, the moderate wing grew
angry at Briceño for endorsing a progressive
candidate, Buena Park mayor Sunny Park, to
take on Orange County Board of Supervisors
chair Doug Chafee, another Democrat.
“I don’t know if it’s my values changing [or]
my experience,” Briceño replies when I ask
about her critics. She brings up a progressive
candidate who sought the party’s endorsement during this year’s primaries in his run
against Representative Lou Correa, a moderate. “When I talked to him, he said, ‘I’m an
immigrant rights activist. I’m a labor activist.’
What? I never have seen him in my life.”
He didn’t get the party’s endorsement.

O.C. THE BELLWETHER
My two hours with Briceño are almost up.
The DPOC offices hum with more volunteers.
Briceño’s phone keeps buzzing. There are elections to win, canvassing to do, lawn signs to
distribute. I’m reminded that while all politics is
local—so local, in my case, that some of Briceño’s
opponents are my friends who’ll text me their
disappointment after reading this profile—what
happens here can influence the national conversation, this fall’s midterm elections, and even the
2024 presidential race. For Briceño and O.C.,
the stakes are both small and large.
I ask her a final question, one that is more
like the challenge Briceño offered her fellow
Democrats at the Fountain Valley synagogue.
¿Se puede? Can it be done?
I expect her to respond with a pro forma “Sí
se puede,” but she doesn’t.
Instead, Briceño answers without hesitation. “Claro que sí.” Q
Gustavo Arellano is an Alta Journal contributing editor and a Los Angeles Times columnist. His article “Finding Killer Texas BBQ
in Orange County,” for Alta, Fall 2021, was a
finalist in the 2022 Southern California Journalism Awards.

POETRY

By CRYSTAL AC SALAS

Crystal AC Salas’s Grief Logic is a cowinner of the inaugural Alta California Chapbook Prize
and is available in a bilingual edition from Gunpowder Press. Salas is a recipient of a 2021–22
California Arts Council Established Individual Artist Fellowship and lives in Los Angeles.

After seeing my community’s grief in the summer of 2020 as a result of structural and systemic violence, I noticed that
storytelling for the bereaved often involves trying to rationalize the injustice and pain of loss. “Qualifying Animacy” shows
how language not only fails but also betrays us when trying to convey what someone meant to us. “grief logic #6” is also
about loss, the passing of Tío, my second father. He fell gravely ill from a non-COVID sickness during the initial months of
the pandemic. Hospital safety protocols meant that physical contact, a basic human need in the face of death, was not only
forbidden but dangerous. I wasn’t able to bestow this tenderness upon my uncle until after he was already gone. Q

Qualifying Animacy
after reading reporting on the murder of Andres Guardado
They killed another young man yesterday
this time at his job.
When asked for comment, the police said:
no uniform

no one saw it

When asked for comment, his tío promised:

grief logic #6
for Mike (2020)

I never saw him sad or angry.
Tío
there is no holding
here if you are trying
to stay

When I saw the news, my first
rage and spit:
He was a teen. He was a student.

so this
our last closeness at the door of history
does not matter your breath
already thinned from the air

and look at how I qualified
his breath with a résumé.
I thought of you
and what mothers
must collect as proof
of the light that once warmed
the body outside of their own:
birth times

I kissed your brow after you left it
though I could not
endanger anyone else with my touch
could not hold Tía T’s hand
as your chest slowed to stop

brown eyes

el mundo detras de pestañas largas

and I birthed your death for all others
retching into the phone

dodgers hats faded blue

we don’t know

hair slicked

in tres flores and mother’s spit

second grade

pictures tucked along the edges of the bedroom mirror
that you used to fall asleep on the sofa
a near-grown man dreaming in soft mijo peace

what’s inside of us

but somehow are trying to stay here
together
I see you everywhere
I called your name in emergency
how is it
the first time I kissed your forehead
was the last?

and someone still awake in the house draped you
in tigre cobija as you drifted
that it crowned dandelion
when you laughed.
PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 39

40 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

The Sierra Nevada near
Grover Hot Springs State
Park, where the Alta Journal
Expedition picked up the
trail of the Walker party.
ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 41

THE PATHFINDERS

By ROBERT ROPER • Photos by TOD SEELIE

IN WHICH ALTA JOURNAL COMMISSIONS
AN EXPEDITION TO RETRACE
THE FIRST EAST-TO-WEST CROSSING
OF THE SIERRA NEVADA BY NON-NATIVE
PEOPLE. IN 1833, THE JOURNEY WAS MARKED
BY BLIZZARDS, FROSTBITE, AND
NEAR STARVATION; 189 YEARS LATER,
THE WINTRY CONDITIONS ARE
NOT TERRIBLY DIFFERENT.
icture the young man, after a hard day’s travel
by foot and horse, jotting down a few words
in his journal by the stub of a candle. It’s October of 1833, a searingly cold, snowy season
in the Sierra Nevada. California, along with
the rest of the world, is in the grip of what will
later be known as the Little Ice Age, a period of
punishing temperatures that lasted from 1500 till 1880. The Spanish sea captains who first explored California’s southern coast—
Juan Cabrillo in 1542–43, Sebastián Vizcaíno
in 1602–03—noted how wintry everything was,
and Sir Francis Drake, who may or may not have
landed at Northern California’s Point Reyes, reported that the ropes froze on the Golden Hind,
while his chaplain marveled that the coastal hills
were snow-covered even in June.
The young man, Zenas Leonard, recorded that

P

the ground was covered with a deep snow.…
These peaks are…incapable of vegetation; except on the South side, where grows a kind of
Juniper or Gin shrub, bearing a berry.… Here
we passed the night without anything to eat except these gin berries, and some of the insects…
our men had got from the Indians.
Leonard is a clerk and a trapper, one of 58
men on an expedition led by Joseph R. Walker of
Missouri. Walker was famous in his day, a contemporary of Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and other
prominent beaver skinners. He had led sizable
expeditions before and would lead others, but this
was the one that would make his reputation, the
one that came closest to catastrophe.
Walker, in Leonard’s description, was

Recruited by Benjamin de Bonneville, of later Salt Flats fame,
Walker undertook to lead a party across the Intermountain West,
trapping and mapping along the way. Then, should conditions prove
favorable, he would cross the California mountains, something that
Euro-Americans had never done in a westerly direction.
A little short of 200 years later, five of us set out to duplicate that
crossing. We would be traveling not on horses but on snowshoes and
skis, and we would start out not in future Wyoming but at Grover Hot
Springs, scene of many a steamy California frolic.
What I remember from our first day is the ungodly backpack. I was convinced that the others
were carrying less than I was, although when I
looked their packs over, I realized it was probably
the other way around. The amazing fact about the
Walker party is that they did it on horses. Leonard
recorded that each man had four of them, one to
ride and three to carry; by my calculation, that’s
200 horses clambering up granite benches, wallowing through snowdrifts, in places needing to be
lowered on ropes.
Mid-October in the Little Ice Age was bleak.
We, in contrast, were heading up in April, but conditions were not all that different: The previous
December had been the snowiest in Sierra history, and we found snow everywhere above 7,000
feet. Most of the high lakes were frozen. I had
an old down bag that I’d borrowed and a flimsy
backpacker tent; the guide who came with us, SP
MATHEW BRADY
Parker, had told us to acquire four-season tents, to
Joseph R. Walker (circa 1860) found a route
protect against bitter nights and possible storms,
to the Sierra Nevada that was later widely
but I figured I could fake my way through, and
used by those traveling west to California
wasn’t our goal to experience something of what
during the gold rush.
the Walker party had? To tough things out a bit?

a man well calculated to undertake a business of this kind…well
hardened to the hardships of the wilderness—understood the character of the Indians very well—was kind and affable to his men, but
at the same time at liberty to command without giving offense,—
and to explore unknown regions was his chief delight.

42 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

IN WHICH THE WALKER PARTY,
FOR A TIME, AVOIDS VIOLENCE
AND CLUELESSNESS
Leonard is sleeping rough: no fancy Hilleberg tent for him, just a
buffalo robe or some blankets for warmth. He’s wearing moccasins

GRAPHIC BY MATT TWOMBLY

in the deep snow. Shoes made of leather, from a factory, are a sign of
greenhornism; once those shoes wear out, a trapper has to make his
own footgear or trade for it. Leonard is no greenhorn. At age 21, he set
out from Pennsylvania, making it to St. Louis in 10 months; there, he
signed on with a fur company and headed for the Rockies. When the
company went under, he became a free trapper, living by his own wits,
and here we can perhaps allow ourselves a brief time-lapse montage
as the young fellow sprouts a first scraggly beard, grows his hair down
to his shoulders, gets rid of his wool trousers and store-bought jacket
and becomes a figure in stained buckskin, like everybody else on the
expedition.
From their beginning in the Rockies, the group headed south and
west, entering “the most extensive & barren plains I ever seen,” Leonard wrote. A few others had been here before them. Peter Skene Ogden
of the Hudson’s Bay Company had trapped along Nevada’s Humboldt
River, and the first U.S. expedition leader to pass through was Jedediah Smith, on his return from an 1826 trip to California, which he
entered not via the Sierra but through the Mojave Desert.
Smith was a bold explorer with an unfortunate propensity for losing
the lives of people who accompanied him. While crossing the Colorado
River in 1827, his party came under attack from Native people, losing
10 men. The year before, Smith had been greeted with kindness and
generosity in the same region, where a group of Paiutes had sent forth
an emissary with a rabbit as an offering; when the emissary was not
harmed, the Paiutes sent out a dozen more people, each bearing an ear
of corn, unmistakable tokens of welcome.
What had happened in just a year? Smith had no clue. (What had
happened was that another party of trappers had roared through,
taking many beaver; when a chief of the Mohave demanded a horse in
return, he was refused, leading to a dustup in which the chief was shot
dead, leading to an attack from the Mohave camp, leading to a counterattack by the trappers in which the camp was wiped out, after which
“we suspended those that we had killed upon the trees…to dangle in
terror to the rest,” as one participant wrote.)
Cluelessness was widespread—white cluelessness, mostly. Walker, who was known for not losing people, for bringing back all who
traveled under his protection, blundered badly along the Humboldt
River. Here was not another beaver wonderland, as in the Rockies,
but a mostly trapped-out region where the buffalo did not roam. Yet it
supported many, many people. Most were hunter-gatherers, small and
naked and without much body fat; they had no firearms and were as
likely to eat a horse as to ride it.
Communicating by sign, they advised the Walker group to lay in a
supply of meat: 60 pounds of buffalo jerky per man. Of a band of Natives encountered west of the Great Salt Lake, Leonard wrote, “They
have paths beat from one spring or hole of water to another, and by
observing these paths, they told us, we would be enabled to find water
without much trouble.”
This advice proved invaluable. The leader of this second group—probably Western Shoshone—described in detail the route the party would
need to take to get safely across the Great Basin. Though he himself had
never climbed the Sierra, he was able to specify landforms that marked
the way there, and these features rolled out for the Walker party as if on
a GPS screen. The leader warned, though, that near the end of the basin
“we would come across a tribe of poor Indians, whom he supposed would
not be friendly,” and this forecast proved highly accurate.

IN WHICH THE WALKER EXPEDITION
FOLLOWS THE HUMBOLDT RIVER
ACROSS PRESENT-DAY NEVADA
AND ARRIVES AT THE BATTLE LAKES
Before they began their climb, the Walker party killed some people.
Leonard’s journal says that their traps were getting stolen, which so
angered the men that they killed “two or three” Native people at random and the next day killed a few more. But this was not the “disposition of Captain Walker,” to kill randomly, and he promised to punish
any further unauthorized reprisals.
The number of people living on the Humboldt was astonishing. After the killings, “the trails of the Indians began to look as if their numbers were increasing,” and it was easy to imagine they were massing
for a revenge attack. The empty wilderness west of the Great Salt Lake
was proving to be not empty at all; indeed, it was a populous nexus, a

44 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

teeming homeland of several related tribes, collectively known as the
Numa. They had been in the region for a thousand years at least, ancestral groups evolving into denominations of Paiute, Shoshone, Bannock, and Ute. Walker and Leonard would give the name “Shoshoco”
to most of them, thus burying distinctions that might have saved the
party much trouble later.
Flash forward a few days. The trappers are now at “some lakes,
formed by this river…which we supposed to be those mentioned by
the Indian chief ” with the GPS-like mind. They make camp at an area
known forever after as the Battle Lakes. Then, “a little before sun-set,
on taking a view of the surrounding waste with a spy-glass, we discovered smoke issuing from the high grass in every direction. This was
sufficient to convince us that we were in the midst of a large body of
Indians…in arms to revenge the death of those…killed up the river.”
Walker’s men prepare to be attacked. But, Leonard wrote, “before we
had got everything completed…the Indians issued from their hiding places in the grass, to the number, as near as I could guess, of 8 or 900 and
marched straight towards us, dancing and singing in the greatest glee.”
Invitation to a party? Performance of songs of friendship? Even
today, the meaning of this dancing and singing is debated among historians, some convinced of the entirely peaceful intent of the Native
people—now believed to have been Paiutes. Walker’s different opinion
can perhaps be understood, though. There was no attack by the 800
or 900 that night, but the next morning the trappers were followed for
hours, “Shoshocoes” with bows and arrows repeatedly trying to surround them, and eventually “a party of 80 or 100 came forward, who
appeared more saucy and bold than any others. This greatly excited
Capt. Walker, who was naturally of a very cool temperament, and he
gave orders for the charge.”
The result: 39 Paiutes dead. Leonard wrote that “the remainder
were overwhelmed with dismay—running into the high grass in every
direction, howling in the most lamentable manner.”
Thereafter, the trappers ran into other people, who fled from them.
They caught a mare and a colt that these people abandoned; the next
morning, the trappers ate the colt for breakfast.

IN WHICH OUR PROTAGONISTS FIND
AN “INDIAN PATH” TO THE CREST
OF THE SIERRA NEVADA,
WHICH THEY EXPECT TO BE NARROW
Historians have long disagreed about where, exactly, the party
crossed the Sierra. The debate started with an obituary written in
November of 1876, in which it was said about the recently deceased
Walker that “His was the first white man’s eyes that ever looked upon
the Yosemite.” This claim was carved into Walker’s tombstone in the
Alhambra Pioneer Cemetery in Martinez, California, which reads, in
part: “Camped at Yosemite, Nov. 13, 1833.”
Walker had died during the U.S. centennial. It made sense to many
that someone of his stature would be the discoverer of Yosemite; by
1876, the area was an acknowledged national treasure, the subject of
President Abraham Lincoln’s Yosemite Valley Grant Act of 1864 and of
John Muir’s ardent campaign for its preservation.
Walker himself never claimed to have found Yosemite. He never laid
eyes on it in 1833, he reportedly told one writer, yet the idea that he had
became embedded in popular belief. It was repeated in newspapers and
in serious-minded books, such as H.H. Bancroft’s History of California
(1884–90) and more recently Francis Farquhar’s History of the Sierra
Nevada (1965) and the standard reference guide Geology of the Sierra
Nevada (2006), published by the University of California Press.
If Walker didn’t cross at Yosemite, then where did he? We know that
once his party left the Great Basin, they were on their own; they had no
maps or written descriptions to go on, and the Native people shunned
them. While scouting for a break in the mountain wall, one of the Walker trappers shot and killed two more Native people; afterward, he said
he was sorry, but the impulse to kill-before-maybe-they-kill-you was
hard to overcome.
Now came a lucky break. Another scout looking for a way up “found
an Indian path,” which he “thought led over the mountain—whereupon
it was resolved that in the morning we would take this path, as it
seemed to be our only prospect of preservation.” Walker’s great skills as
a western pathfinder—and they were truly great, experts acknowledge,
unsurpassed by those of other mountain men—came down to this:

Author Robert Roper (center), guide SP Parker (right), and photographer Spencer Harding (left) set out from Grover Hot Springs on the first day.
following another Indian path. As it happened, this one did lead up,
to a kind of way through. But it was far from the easiest route over the
mountains, and following it nearly killed them. In later years, Native
people in the area directed other groups of white people to routes that
were simpler, less about danger and suffering, and they did it out of, as
far as I can tell, a desire to help the stranger.

IN WHICH ALTA JOURNAL’S WRITER
FINDS OUT ABOUT WALKER’S
TRUE TRANS-SIERRA ROUTE
We had maps, many maps. Long before we started out, I sent them
to Parker, our guide, who ran them through the CalTopo trip-planning
software he likes, producing something that looked like it belonged
on a cell phone: four nights out, five days on the trail, 9,000 feet of
elevation gain, starting point here and end point there, for a total of
34 miles (see map on page 43; further study produced a plan for five
nights out, six days on the trail). Our route relied heavily on Leonard’s
journal, so to understand it better, I turned to Scott Stine, a former
professor of geography who had spent decades thinking about and
exploring Walker’s crossing.
Stine’s excellent book, A Way Across the Mountain (2015), is sharpeyed but not iconoclastic. Yes, “the Walker brigade would have benefited greatly from a more peaceful encounter” at the Battle Lakes, he
writes, but Ogden of Hudson’s Bay had had the same sort of trouble
along the Humboldt in 1829, hundreds of warriors swarming his men;
maybe the swarming was a kind of playacting, a formalized showingoff, but what was Walker to have done? Waited for the first arrow to
catch someone in the neck?
The question of what white men were doing there—whether they
had a right to explore the West and trample Native lands, to take up
space in the New World, any space—is not Stine’s concern. He reads
Leonard’s journal ingeniously, finding that the descriptions considered
geographically incorrect by earlier commentators are in fact accurate

and prove that the trappers missed Yosemite. The real entry point into
the mountains was much closer to Lake Tahoe than to Yosemite—just
south of Tahoe, the Carson River runs out of the Sierra, and this was
the entry point for the Walker party, up the Carson River drainage.
They followed the Carson till the going got too rocky. The route
from there, passing close to modern-day Markleeville, resembles a
proposed Walker party route that a U.S. Forest Service supervisor, William Maule, first wrote about in 1938. Maule’s route, because it ruled
out Yosemite, never gained much popular traction. But Stine took it
seriously, investigated it, investigated others, and came up with a route
that agrees with virtually every detail and date in Leonard’s journal.
Hoping that the crest of the range, when they got to it, would
prove narrow, Walker planned to just push on through. After that, the
streams would all flow west, and the trappers would pick one and simply follow it out of the mountains. But the Sierra crest is not narrow
where they climbed. It is miles wide, with long interior valleys, deep
canyons, and streams that flow north, south, and southeast as well as
southwest. With only berries and insects to eat, some of the men became “unmanageable” and “desirous of turning back,” Leonard wrote;
Walker announced that anyone who wanted to was free to turn back,
but could take no ammunition or horses with him. Nervous about
facing the Natives again unarmed, no one took him up on this offer.

IN WHICH ALTA JOURNAL’S INTREPID
WRITER CONSIDERS THE CHALLENGES
OF NATURE AND THE WINTRY
SIERRA NEVADA
Snowshoeing is not the same as walking: this was my great discovery, after five days of slogging with the heavy backpack. Yes, you put
one foot in front of the other, but sometimes one snowshoe clips the
other, and you end up with your face in the snow. Your companions
try not to laugh as you struggle to your feet. At the end of a long day
of this, your toes are numb and wet inside your supposedly waterproof

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 45

The Alta group descends
from Wheeler Peak on the
final day of their journey.

46 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 47

boots. You force down some dried food and then rush into your sleeping bag, inside the limp tent that you pitched on snow.
Walker’s route meanders, but as we followed it day by day, it always
made sense. One curious proof of this was all the bear signs that we
kept seeing. As the bears came out of hibernation and roamed for food,
they often headed in the same direction that we took, using the same
breaks in the landscape that allowed us to get from point A to point B
efficiently. Our challenge—Walker’s challenge, too—was to gain a high
point from which an escape route could be spied out. This led his party
up and up, almost to the summit of Deadwood Peak (9,846 feet), Stine
argues; from there, no magical way through appeared, but a giant
ridge descends from the peak, and Walker followed it down.
The ridge leads into the very deep canyon of the North Fork of the
Mokelumne River. This is a famous stretch of whitewater, I learned in
the late stages of my research, a dream destination for kayakers able
to handle Class V+ rapids. In late April and early May, it is often in full
spate, roaring with snowmelt.
OK. Hadn’t thought about that. When I shared my new concern
with Parker, he joked that we would just have to bring wetsuits and
swim the damned thing.
We did bring not wetsuits but a packraft, a small inflatable boat. It
was not much, but it was something—might prove useful in a pinch.
As our takeoff day approached, I began waking up each morning at
dawn, remembering shots from some extreme kayaker porn I’d stumbled on; our section of the North Fork really did look crazy, and what if
one of our young photographers fell into the whitewater and drowned,
or the magazine writer himself? And if the river proved impassable,
how would we get out of there? At that moment, we would be ninetenths of the way to our exit point, and turning back would be physically and psychologically difficult, if not impossible.

IN WHICH THE LEGACY OF WALKER’S
JOURNEY IS SCRUTINIZED AND
HIS ROLE AS “HERO” RECONSIDERED
On balance, Walker was not considered an Indian killer, not one of the
more egregious ones. His reputation, rather, was that of a humane, foresighted man who achieved remarkable things through sheer competence
and who treasured above all his freedom to travel at will with a few trusted companions. In 1836, he married a Shoshone woman whose name is
lost to history. Thereafter, he “always took along with him on these lonely
trips” his wife, according to Thomas Breckenridge, a fellow trapper.
He likely spoke Shoshone with her. Sometime around 1841, he
returned to Missouri, where he had many relatives, bringing his wife
along. They attended the Six Mile Baptist Church in Fort Osage Township, and Walker introduced her to his extended family, who appear to
have embraced her. The couple had several children together, but after
1846, Walker was again seen alone; some sources say that his wife and
children had died of cholera.
He had other terrible losses, too. The worst one, in the eyes of historians, was the loss of his journal in a fall into a river. In it, he had kept
an “exact accounting” of everywhere he had ever been and everything
he’d done, he later told his grandnieces and grandnephews.
None of this makes him a hero, or not a hero, or less implicated in
the human losses that attended his expedition to California, the bloodiest of his career. But as we snowshoed on, day after day, finding ourselves in glorious parts of the Sierra that I had never seen, I began to
appreciate his energy and trail sense. For fleeting moments, I felt that
I could share at least a particle of the anxiety he must have felt as he
committed 57 other men to an arduous, half-cracked exploration, the
horses they herded “dying daily,” Leonard reported, the men increasingly mutinous, hurrying to butcher the “black, tough, lean” horseflesh
as soon as an animal faltered, then gorging on it.

IN WHICH OUR FAITHFUL ALTA
JOURNAL SCRIBE AND HIS FELLOW
TRAVELERS CONFRONT THE
INEVITABLE QUESTION: WHAT WOULD
WALKER DO?
At the end of day four, we stood atop a steep mountain wall, look-

48 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

ing half a mile down to the Mokelumne. Somehow we had to descend
with our ungainly packs, climbing through granite cliff bands and
manzanita thickets, along game trails slippery with pine needles. I had
a glimpse of a thin stretch of river below. At this distance, it looked
mirage-like, fantastical; it was frothy white, no calm sections showing
darker and smoother, nothing that looked raftable, that was for sure.
We down-climbed, camping not on snow this night but in a damp
forest a hundred yards from the river. I found some of the gin berries
that Leonard mentioned. It was spring where we were camped, below
the snow, with new leaves but no flowers yet on the currant bushes.
The Walker expedition had passed close by—it was possible they had
grazed their horses in the same grassy forest. In late October of 1833,
the river would have been fordable, the spring flood long over. The
problem for Walker was to cross at a place where the opposite bank
was not a sheer granite wall but rather a side canyon wide enough for
the horses to pass up it. Our maps showed just such a place, these days
known as Jackson Canyon, a few hundred yards east of us.
The next morning, heading up that way, we found two kayaks
stashed in a crevice in a rock face. One had a busted hull, but the other
was in good shape, still equipped with a $900 paddle. We discussed
various scenarios in which two boats could have ended up so placed.
Then we kept ascending—ascending, because the Mokelumne has a
steep gradient along its course, and to follow it in an eastward direction is to go uphill. Parker, as guide, was surely thinking in more useful
ways than I was about what was now likely to happen. Some possibilities: We come to the river and find it roaring and thrashing, decide
to give up, not getting in that water no matter what, not in a raft, not
even in a submarine. Or, we come to it and find a calm section, decide
to take our chances, and the first guy paddles over to the other side,
trailing a rope; we pull the raft back and then cross one by one, but
someone’s pack falls in, and he loses his balance and… Or, a logjam
has made a bridge over the river, which Parker’s assistant, an athletic
young guy, crosses easily; now it’s somebody else’s turn, the writer’s
turn, and those logs are slippery and…
Parker did not seem anxious. Surely he understood better than
anybody the trap we had potentially made for ourselves, coming this
far with no escape but to turn around, but he was cheery, eager to
kick this little problem in the behind. Two days before, he had posed
the general question “What would Walker do?,” and I wondered if he
wasn’t channeling the Old Pathfinder a bit, just for fun. Walker was
“well hardened,” in Leonard’s description, “kind and affable” yet able
to “command without giving offense,” and this pretty much described
Parker. We followed his instructions because he knew more than we
did, had been in countless situations and come out OK, along with
his clients. He and Omri Navon, his assistant, were wizard-like with
the GPS feeds on their phones, and while Navon was at the start of
the long educational process that makes someone a guide, Parker had
been on the board of directors of the American Mountain Guides Association, had been a certified alpine and rock guide for more than 30
years, and had been a teacher and examiner for the AMGA.
You could read this on his website’s buried pages, but he never talked about it. Walker hadn’t liked to talk about himself, either. To say
that Parker was modest would not be quite right—he seemed to have a
pretty good opinion of himself. What it boiled down to was that when
we finally headed toward the river, he seemed up for the encounter,
and his mood was a reassuring thing to be around. I imagined that
Walker, too, had led in this spirit; it just suited his temperament to go
first, and his companions would have appreciated that.

IN WHICH THE ALTA JOURNAL
GROUP RECEIVES A MIRACLE,
A 14-KARAT MIRACLE
Imagine that the river, 26 miles of froth and maelstroms, does have
one slightly calmer section without a sheer rock wall on the opposite
bank. Imagine, further, that Walker intuited that, somehow sniffed
it out, and headed upstream instead of down, against the dictates of
common sense. Jackson Canyon is not a narrow granite chute gushing
into the freezing Mokelumne but, at its mouth, more like a delta, a
wetland, with a few small streams debouching close to one another,
draining the snow slope above.
Both banks here were broad and flat, and the river itself wasn’t
especially turbulent. Yes, it was moving fast, but you could imagine

SPENCER HARDING

Parker crosses a calm section of the North Fork of the Mokelumne River near the end of the Alta group’s journey.
crossing it in a raft if that was your only way of getting out of the woods.
disgust. We would soon be feasting too, on veggie burgers in the town
We were all, I think, astonished to find this calmer spot. But here was
of Jackson, in Amador County.
something even more astonishing: “Someone’s been going to church,”
For the Walker expedition, everything from here on would be difParker commented, shaking his head. “Someone’s been praying, I think.”
ferent; everything would be an experience of a worldly paradise. It
“Yeah, I have,” I said. “I’ve been praying nonstop. Just not in a church.”
included wonders such as gigantic reddish trees “from 16 to 18 fathoms
There was a tree—a miraculous tree. It had fallen across the river,
round the trunk,” “deer, elk, grizzly bear and antelopes…remarkably
making a pretty footbridge. Not an iffy bridge: it didn’t totter when you
plenty,” many streams and rivers flowing down out of the mountains,
stepped on it, and it was well above the water, so it wasn’t even wet.
soil that was fantastically fertile, and timber standing “as thick as it
It looked alive, this tree, despite having fallen. The canopy was still
could grow” on the margins of the gigantic central plain. “It is quite
green, the needles still bushy. Walking across was like walking on a
romantic,” Leonard concluded, and we were dazzled along with him,
paved road. It took about 30 seconds for each of us.
thinking of that world of not so long ago, fewer than 200 years, a mere
Later, we debated what kind of tree it was. I thought
split second on time’s big chronometer.
it was a sugar pine, the tallest western pine; Parker
It was some days before they encountered any peothought it was a ponderosa. Why it had fallen right
ple. When they did—and for the rest of their California
there, exactly where we’d hoped to get across and where
sojourn—the Walker party did not threaten, did not
the Walker group had crossed, I leave for the metaphyWant to learn more
plunder, did not injure; on the contrary, they sought
about this Alta Journal
to get “in company with” any Native people they could,
sicians to figure out. Parker took it in stride: he had
Expedition? Visit
and when at last they came upon a Native village, they
been confident and merry before, and he was confident
altaonline.com/serials
hurried to calm the fear felt at “the approach of beings
and merry now, as we joked a bit and then headed up
to read “Surviving the
so mysterious as we were to them.” It was as if they had
Jackson Canyon.
Sierra,” Robert Roper’s
learned something in the Great Basin. Walker quickly
Twenty-four hours later, we stood atop Walker’s high
multimedia version of this
offered to smoke—at the Battle Lakes, the Paiutes had
lookout, the perspective he kept seeking but only found
story, told in five parts,
advanced with pipes as well as bows in hand, but Walker
when the trouble was mostly over. Leonard called it “the
that retraces (in detailed
had refused to engage, taking it as a deadly ploy.
brink of the mountain,” the far side of the mountain range;
prose with video and
Now things went better. The Native people had horsStine refers to it by an old local name, Sleeping Indian
photography) Joseph R.
Ridge. Below was a yellowish plain, which Leonard rees to trade, and they were generous with information
Walker’s 1833 expedition.
corded as “one of the most singular prospects in nature.”
to the extent that they could understand Walker’s sign
Walker took out his trusty spyglass and soon declared that
language. These were different people, entirely unfathe Pacific Ocean could not be far beyond the horizon,
miliar with English. They had traded with the Spanish,
because the yellow plain itself had the appearance of a beach. Might as
however, and their horses had a Spanish brand. Trade is always a good
well start calling it the Golden State right then! And start carving the first
way to start.
surfboards! The view was of a hundred-mile stretch of what we now call
The Walker party moved on, with “five of the best of their horses,”
the Central Valley, with the future city of Turlock to the southwest.
on their way to camp beside a lovely beach, a real Pacific beach with
For us retracers, the view was, unfortunately, obscured by clouds
pounding surf, at “the extreme end of the great west,” Leonard wrote,
and valley dust. Still, it was good to have made it here, to see this. Only
“near a spring of delightful water.” Q
hours after they reached the brink, the Walker party feasted on a small
deer and then on “two large black tailed deer and a black bear,” the first
Robert Roper writes novels and biographies and is the author recently of
fresh game they had had in many weeks. This marked the end to their
The Savage Professor and Nabokov in America. He wrote about huntliving on “stale and forbidden horse flesh,” Leonard wrote with frank
ing and gathering in prehistoric California for Alta Journal, Fall 2021.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 49

50 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

SPECIAL SECTION

hiskey and watches! Grains
and guitar strings! Stationery
and sandals! They’re beautiful,
functional, sometimes even edible, and all
were made right here in the Golden State.
Join us as we celebrate creators and
crafters and tell the stories behind their
work. If you’re looking for some gift ideas
that support artists and local businesses,
we’ve got you covered.

W

STIRRING THE POT

Interview by ROBERT ITO

52

THE MOCHI MIRACLE

By ROBERT ITO

54

BUMPER CROPS

By JOY LANZENDORFER

56

GUITAR STRING HERO

By GUSTAVO ARELLANO

58

PAPER PUSHER

By LYNELL GEORGE

60

HEADS UP

Interview by STEFFIE NELSON

62

GOLDEN DRAMS

By JOY LANZENDORFER

64

OLD-WORLD SAGE

By JESSICA ZACK

66

WHEELS OF FORTUNE

Interview by ROBERT ITO

70

JAM SESSION

By LYDIA LEE

72

FLOUR CHILD

Interview by LYDIA LEE

74

A TIME TO BUY

By AJAY ORONA

76

SEEING THE LIGHT

By MONICA CORCORAN HAREL

78

© 2022 MICHAEL SCHWAB STUDIO

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 51

CLAYWARE

Interview by ROBERT ITO •
Photos by CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK

E

dith Heath transformed the art of ceramic
dinnerware, eschewing the “Sunday best”
formality of white china in favor of versatile pieces crafted in rich, earthy textures
and tones. A sometime art teacher and
largely self-taught potter, she founded her studio in
Sausalito in 1948, using clay from north of Sacramento and proprietary glazes she created herself. Seven
decades later, Heath Ceramics is still going strong. In
2012, the company opened its Clay Studio, a creative
testing ground for prototypes and small collections,
in San Francisco and hired Tung Chiang, an industrial designer turned master potter, as its director. We
talked to Chiang about his love of clay and about the
hallmark of the studio, his Design Series—an annual
offering of themed pieces, from candlesticks and planters to figurines of three-legged dogs.

A Q&A with
Tung Chiang,
who keeps things
spinning as
studio director
at the legendary
Heath Ceramics.

Let’s kick off with news: the next edition of the Design
Series, objects with lids, will be the 10th and last of the
series. How does that feel?
Lidded objects open and close. So this is the closure of the Design Series but the opening of the next
chapter for me as Heath’s Clay Studio director.
How did you get into working with clay to begin with?
Sort of by accident. I was working as an industrial
engineer in [San Francisco’s] Noe Valley, sitting in
front of a computer all day. I really wanted to make
something, but I didn’t know what. I stumbled upon
a clay studio and took my first class. As soon as I
started learning, I found it really satisfying.

STIRRING
THE POT
What was it about clay that touched you?
It’s natural. As an industrial engineer, I was
working with a lot of synthetic, plastic materials.
Clay is a natural material that people have been using for thousands of years. The material itself could
be millions of years old. And you could spend a long
time learning how to make something on a wheel,
but if you’re a kid, you could also make a little animal
in no time.
Ceramics have traditionally been functional. Do you
mind if people just put your ceramics up on the mantel as
decoration and never use them?
I am also a collector, so that’s a perfect question
for me. Last year, the Design Series was planters. If

52 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

Japanese American fiber artist Kay Sekimachi wrapped a
vase designed by ceramicist Tung Chiang in real leaves for
this collaborative piece.
someone tells me, “I pulled out all the plants and
locked the planter in a glass shelf,” I’ll probably be
less happy than if someone says, “You know what,
I’ll be careful, but I’m putting a plant inside.” I don’t
want to judge. But as a maker, I’m happier if they’re
used the way I designed them.
Do you have a favorite Design Series line?
The animal series is one of my favorites. Heath
Ceramics is famous for their functional ware: dining
plates, saucers, mugs. I thought, “What if I brought
a story-oriented approach, with animals?” I always
loved tripod dogs, dogs that are missing a limb.
When humans are injured, it brings them so much
emotional stress. But in animals, they don’t see a lot
of difference. If they have three legs, they still run and
play and chase. So I loved the spirit of it. In the end, I
cared less about whether it looks like a dog or doesn’t
look like a dog. I was more interested in making a
sculpture about the story of a three-legged dog.
What would you do if you couldn’t be a potter?
The funny thing is, I’ve been thinking about that
every day. If you ask most potters, we have back pain,
shoulder pain, tendinitis. You can see my wheel is on
this very tall platform, because I have scoliosis. Have
you seen My Left Foot? I always thought that if I was
missing my hands, I would use my foot to throw. If I
can connect my brain to a 3-D printer, I’ll just start
printing objects. Q

Tung Chiang, the director
of Heath Ceramics’ Clay
Studio in San Francisco,
in front of the company’s
signature bud vases.

CONFECTIONS

By ROBERT ITO •
Photos by ANDREA D’AGOSTO

Y

ears ago, I had my first manju, a
traditional Japanese confection, at
Benkyodo, a shop in San Francisco’s
Japantown. It was a mochi manju—
sweet glutinous rice (that’s the mochi
part) around an even sweeter red bean filling. I
thought it was delicious, but the combination of the
gumminess of the mochi rice and the graininess of
the mashed beans is not for everyone. In the 1987
indie film Living on Tokyo Time, directed by the
Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki, the hero,
Ken, an over-assimilated, third-generation Japanese
American like myself, goes into a sweet shop just like
Benkyodo looking for a jelly doughnut and is offered
a manju instead. “Looks weird,” Ken says. “I’d rather
have a doughnut.”
Although one can find Japanese food items like
sushi and ramen nearly everywhere, manju is still
something of a culinary outlier, even among many
Japanese Americans. For plenty of dessert lovers
in the United States, its primary significance is as
the inspiration for the nationwide sensation that
is mochi ice cream. In the early 1990s, Frances
Hashimoto, the head of Mikawaya, a Los Angeles–
based manju confectionery, began tweaking the
traditional recipe to make a more accessible dessert.
She replaced traditional red bean paste with balls of
ice cream, and mochi ice cream was born.
The original Mikawaya store in Little Tokyo had
been in Hashimoto’s family since William Howard
Taft was president. The confectionery served traditional handmade desserts whose lineages could be
traced to the 14th century. Hashimoto was born in
1943 in the Japanese American internment camp at
Poston, Arizona, and grew up in L.A.’s Boyle Heights,
then a Japanese American enclave. A University of
Southern California grad and former grade-school
teacher, she probably had plenty of Kens in mind
when she created mochi ice cream.
It was a pretty radical idea at the time. Few non–
Japanese American folks had even heard of mochi.
And why would you want to muss up a perfectly
good scoop of French vanilla by packing it inside
a thick skin of sticky sweetened rice? Beyond the
weirdness of the combo, there were the logistics
to consider: How do you fill mochi before the ice
cream melts without all that glutinous rice getting
stuck to your fingers? (Answer: Move quickly, and
cornstarch.)
Hashimoto devised the frozen concoction with
the help of her husband, Joel Friedman, who got the
idea while on a trip to Japan. In the mid-’90s, they
began selling the treat at Mikawaya’s flagship shop,
where it became the top seller.
Mochi ice cream transformed Mikawaya into
a dessert destination in Little Tokyo, a generation
before boba shops, Taiwanese patisseries, and Hawaiian shave ice purveyors put down stakes in bigcity neighborhoods and the malls of suburbia. Not
long after I moved to Los Angeles, when one was
jonesing for a sweet treat in Japanese Village Plaza,

there was imagawayaki—red bean cakes served hot
off the griddle—at Mitsuru Café, Mikawaya’s mochi
ice cream, and not much else. If it was hot outside,
the choice was clear.
At first, Mikawaya’s mochi ice cream offerings
were limited to your U.S. standards (chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry) and Japanese favorites (green
tea and, perhaps in a nod to manju’s roots, red bean).
Before long, though, the company added more flavors to the mix, including plum wine, black sesame,
and matcha.
So lucrative was Hashimoto’s creation that, three
years after her death in 2012, a private-equity firm
bought the company. Originally sold in Mikawaya
stores in U.S. cities with large Asian populations—
like Torrance and Gardena in Southern California
and Honolulu—Mikawaya mochi ice cream can now
be found in the freezer sections of Japanese grocery
chains like Nijiya and Marukai as well as Whole
Foods, Target, and Trader Joe’s. Alas, the original

THE
MOCHI
MIRACLE
flagship store in Little Tokyo closed in 2021, after 111
years in business. (Sadly, after 115 years in San Francisco, Benkyodo also closed, in March of this year.)
In the late-’80s setting of Living on Tokyo Time,
Ken has two options in that sweet shop: jelly doughnut or manju. And the one he picks has cultural
implications, particularly to the manju-shop guy
(played by Lane Nishikawa, a fellow third-generation
Japanese American who was also the artistic director of San Francisco’s groundbreaking Asian American Theater Company). What sort of Japanese
person would eat a jelly doughnut when they could
choose a manju? In the end, Ken is cajoled into picking the manju and is none too happy about it. Today,
of course, he could have mochi ice cream and live in
the best of both worlds. Q

Combining ice
cream with gummy
rice for a dessert
treat had its risks.
But the payoff has
been sweet.

Robert Ito wrote about the Planetary Society for Alta
Journal, Summer 2022.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 55

PLANTS

By JOY LANZENDORFER •
Photos by ANDREA D’AGOSTO

W

hen it comes to home gardens,
Californians are spoiled. Not
only does the pleasant climate
afford long growing seasons,
but our rich agricultural history
means we have access to a huge variety of plants
that we can try out in our own yards. Whether
you’re looking for organic or native or just delicious, here are seven standout seed companies to
turn to as you’re planning your 2023 garden.

1. WILD BOAR FARMS
There’s just no comparison between a homegrown tomato and the ones from the supermarket.
Bradley Gates at Wild Boar Farms in Napa Valley
understands this, which is why the farm is devoted to providing the ultimate tomato-growing
experience. For 20 years, it’s been breeding tomato
varieties from heirloom strains, and it’s created
more than 70 in a kaleidoscope of shapes and
colors, including pink, purple, orange, brown, and
blue. Take, for example, Black Beauty, which is coal
black on the outside and bright red on the inside.
Or Berkeley Tie-Dye, whose green, yellow, and red
stripes have different flavors. It’s no wonder Wild
Boar’s tomato seeds are prized by chefs and home
gardeners alike. wildboarfarms.com

2. THE PLANT GOOD SEED
COMPANY
If you want to take ecological gardening to the next
level, the Plant Good Seed Company in Ojai is a
place to start. The seeds are certified organic—you
can view the certificate online—and chosen because they’re adapted to the Southern California
climate. Many are sourced directly from owner
Quin Shakra’s farm, Ivan’s Meadow, named after
his cat. Aside from vegetables, flowers, and herbs,
Plant Good Seed sells an unusual selection of
grains, fiber and dye plants, and cover crops. This
is the place to find culinary dandelion, ornamental
tobacco, or oat plants for your own organic milk.
plantgoodseed.com

3. RENEE’S GARDEN
Thirty years ago, Renee Shepherd started her
business with one goal in mind: to provide flavorful culinary vegetables to home gardeners.
Today, her company sources seeds from all over the
world and tests them in its trial garden in Felton.
Her edible collection ranges from purple basil
to yard-long beans, while
the ornamental-flower roster includes cathedral bells
and the black hollyhocks
once grown at Monticello. “Our thoughts
are, Is it wonderful to
cook with?” says
Shepherd. “That’s
our shtick.” Once
she and her team
choose a plant,

56 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

botanical illustrator Mimi Osborne paints a watercolor portrait of it to grace the front of Renee’s
distinctive seed packets. reneesgarden.com

4. TRADE WINDS FRUIT
If you’re a more experimental gardener, why not
try growing some rare fruit? Trade Winds in
Santa Rosa features a wide assortment of seeds,
from tropical plants to “super hot extreme heat”
peppers to carnivorous species to “ultra-rare” varieties. Consider the ground cherry, a marble-size
tomato relative with a lacy cover that looks like a
paper lantern. Or the 60-foot-tall cardon cactus,
which produces fruit for jams and jellies. I might
try the musk strawberry, prized in Europe for its
flavor but hard to find in the United States. Or the
tepin pepper, believed to be “the wild parent of all
domesticated chiles,” according to Trade Winds.
And frankly, it just makes me happy to know
that something called an ice cream bean exists.
tradewindsfruit.com

5. SWALLOWTAIL GARDEN SEEDS
While many seed companies focus on vegetables,
Swallowtail Garden Seeds in Santa Rosa puts
flowers first. Since 1998, owners Don and Lynn
McCulley have offered a large number of annual and perennial flowers as well as vines, herbs,
and, yes, vegetables. They have the biggest retail
selection of zinnias online—121 and counting—and
40 varieties each of coleus, cosmos, petunias, and
sunflowers. There are also some truly arresting options mixed in, like the xeranthemum, which feels
like paper, and the Armenian basket flower, which
looks like a pineapple. swallowtailgardenseeds.com

6. PEACEFUL VALLEY FARM
When it comes to organic seeds, Peaceful Valley
Farm in Grass Valley has one of the largest and
most reputable selections. Since 1976, the company has striven to be a one-stop shop for those who
want to invest in healthy and sustainable gardening practices. The farm sells certified-organic,
non-GMO vegetable, herb, and flower seeds as
well as other products that can be shipped to your
door: beneficial insects, drip-irrigation equipment, potato and onion starts, bare-root trees,
and mushroom kits. groworganic.com

7. LARNER SEEDS
Gone are the days when people regarded native
plants as mere weeds. Now we know that they’re
an important addition to the garden, for us and
the environment. Not only do natives thrive in
local soil, but they also tend to use less water and
are a haven for birds, beneficial insects, and other
wildlife. Larner Seeds in Bolinas specializes in California natives, including wildflowers, grasses, trees,
shrubs, and even edibles. Owner Judith Larner
Lowry forages seeds from all over California and
propagates them in her 1.5-acre demonstration garden and on property in Mendocino County. More
than 200 species are available. larnerseeds.com Q

BUMPER
CROPS
Watch your fall garden grow with a little help
from these seed purveyors.

1

4

3

2
7

6

5

Gabriel Tenorio at
his studio in Boyle
Heights.

INSTRUMENTS

By GUSTAVO ARELLANO •
Photos by CHRISTINA GANDOLFO

G

et within a half-block radius of Gabriel Tenorio’s studio in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights,
and you won’t just hear him hard at
work—you will feel it.
Most mornings, there’s a vibration from the tensile
testing Tenorio performs in his cramped garage as he
cuts, spools, and stretches metal and plastic wires to
fashion strings for all sorts of strummed instruments.
Thick, bumpy cords to withstand the resonant plunks
of an acoustic bass. A taut combo of nickel and steel
capable of sustaining a Fender Telecaster’s wah-wah
squeals. The nylon threads that make a ukulele ring
loud and bright. Slinky-like strings for the trademark
shimmy of a Django-style jazz guitar.
“Down the street is a plumber—he’s who everyone goes to when there’s a leak,” says Tenorio, his
round-frame glasses rising up and down as he gets
more animated. “Over there is the gardener. Me? I’m
the neighborhood string maker.”
Skinny but with muscly forearms, the 49-yearold Tenorio stretches out a thin steel wire on his
workbench. He twists each end with a foot-controlled metal winch and plucks a perfect high E
note. He then tries to make a thicker A string with a
phosphor bronze overlay.
“This is the core,” he explains. “You loop others
around it. You know what they call a core wire in
Spanish? El alma.”
The soul.
Tenorio rubs the string with beeswax, hits it with
a heat pen, and feels the finished product. He frowns.
“This is not a happy string,” he declares, inviting
me to run the entire length between my thumb
and index finger. Seems fine to me until I catch an
almost imperceptible bump about three-quarters of
the way through.
“See?” Tenorio declares triumphantly. “I can’t use
it. I feel and hear, like, ghost notes that almost no
one else can!”
He’s one of the last manual guitar-string makers
left in California, in a profession that never had
many members to begin with and counts even fewer today, when big companies can bust out 1,000
strings in an hour. A good day for Tenorio is 150.
His handiwork goes for four to five times more
than mass-produced strings—a full set of six can
run more than $100—but for Tenorio and his customers, this is no luxury item. “I’m making a tool,”
he says. “When you’re not thinking about breaking
a string, you’re thinking about playing and creating.
Most guitarists have to change strings every night.
Mine last for fucking ever.”
Born in El Paso, Tenorio has spent most of his life
in Boyle Heights in the world of Chicano cultural
activism, moonlighting as a teacher, a filmmaker, a
composer, and even a nonprofit director. A skilled
guitarist, he was a músico for hire during the 1990s
and 2000s for multiple iconic Chicano bands, from
the refried Elvis tribute El Vez to jarocho rock luminaries Quetzal. Tenorio’s own neo-traditional band,
Domingo Siete, toured the world.
Early in his career, he made a pilgrimage to Santa

Barbara to meet Francisco González, a Los Lobos
founder who left the band before they became big
to focus on string making. Under González, Tenorio
learned to search for material wherever he could
find it, from industrial fibers in L.A.’s Fashion District to fishing line at bait-and-tackle shops.
“Francisco always said he wanted musicians to
have a job,” Tenorio says of his mentor. “Old methods
aren’t worth keeping just because they’re old. He’d
keep vintage strings for us to see not as a reminder
of the good old days, but how shitty musicians from
the past had it!”
González ended up selling his business, Guadalupe
Custom Strings, to Tenorio and a friend, who continues to run it in East Los Angeles. In 2016, Tenorio created his own namesake company to focus on electric
guitars, although he does the occasional custom job
on traditional instruments ranging from the balalaika

GUITAR
STRING
HERO
to the tololoche, a Mexican-style upright bass.
As much as Tenorio loves his craft, he knows he
has only a couple of years left. His hands constantly
ache—a mason jar of marijuana-laced ointment sits
above his workbench—and he’s developing tendinitis. He does have an assistant, but frets about whether anyone will want to take over the business.
As for mass-producing his strings to make more
money and keep doing the work once his hands
give out—for Tenorio, that’s out of the question. He
recites some advice that legendary guitar maker Bob
Taylor gave him: “ ‘You can do like me and make
millions and never touch a guitar, or you can be the
most expensive guy, but then be able to help people
who really need it.’ ”
Tenorio starts on another string. “It’s all about the
latter, man.” Q

Using metal wires,
nylon threads,
and everything in
between, Gabriel
Tenorio keeps axes
taut—and in tune.

Gustavo Arellano wrote about the book and film
American Me for Alta Journal, Summer 2022.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 59

STATIONERY

By LYNELL GEORGE •
Photos by CHRISTINA GANDOLFO

E

arly on, I made note: most kids don’t
look forward to much of anything that
follows the words “Back-to-School.” It
often seemed I was the one student who
enthusiastically embraced the prospect
of back-to-school supplies: three-ring binder, looseleaf paper, marbled composition books, pocket folders, fresh pens and pencils, and, of course, the pouch
to store them in.
Back then, nothing signaled a new beginning
quite like the full sweep through the stationery aisle
and choosing my statement for the year: Op art?
Earnest ecology? Basic blue canvas binder?
Those once-a-year browsing trips are the bedrock
of my pen-and-paper obsession, an infatuation that
continues to this day.
I spend a large amount of time at keyboards,
filling up virtual pages; it’s the format in which, as a
journalist, I file my finished pieces. But my old habit
of writing longhand, which has always been a way to
tap into how I feel—and sound—is still very much
part of my process. It even survived the reproach
of a long-ago editor who blanched when he saw me
scratching out a lede on a yellow legal pad in pencil.
On deadline. “No time for that!” I never repeated the
outrage—in his presence.
Nowadays, free of a newsroom setting, I find
that if the topic is complex and my thoughts are
fast-moving, my impulse is still to step away from
the blinking cursor and reach for my tools of
choice—a favorite pen and notebook.
A few years back, I was searching for a special
notebook on the shelves of my neighborhood
bookstore’s stationery section—something more
grown-up, elegant but sturdy, different from my
default college-ruled, wire-bound workhorses. I
was beginning an important project, and those new,
crisp pages would be its designated workspace.
The simplicity of what I found called to me, made
me almost wistful: a notebook with a plain brownbag-looking cover, brass-tone wire rings, off-white
paper. Its lightweight yet firm back promised durability, everyday-carry potential. Centered low on
the back cover, the embossed logo announced, “Iron
Curtain Press/Los Angeles.” If I had been wavering,
this hometown declaration would have decided it.
Some months later, I learned that Iron Curtain
Press, the printshop and maker of that eye-catching
notebook, had opened a brick-and-mortar store in
L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood and had named it
after the press’s stationery line, Shorthand. The news
arrived via a friend’s brief text: “OMG, I thought of
you immediately!!!!” She followed up with snapshots
of a sweet storefront—its hand-painted window sign
and a sidewalk sandwich board announcing Shorthand’s grand opening. I was there in days.
Inside, I found an eclectic range of unique, madein-house letterpress cards, notebooks, and task pads
alongside all manner of stationery-store staples
from the world over—erasers, scissors, calendars,
pouches, binder clips, all in a rainbow of colorways—
catering to a clientele ranging from intrigued be-

ginner to veteran professional. It was a blast of nostalgia. I lingered over the options, then purchased
a pack of Blackwing pencils; a delicate wooden micro-tipped, Japan-made ballpoint pen; memo pads;
and squat reporter’s notebooks, for writer friends
who also puzzle out their first thoughts on paper.
That first love, Shorthand’s Standard Notebook,
still provides a perfect launchpad. There is no rigid spine, allowing it to lie flat. The paper’s surface
is smooth yet sturdy enough to handle a range of
writing instruments and media: pencil, fine-point
felt-tip, gel roller, fountain pen—all of which can be
found at the shop. And if you time your visit right,
you can catch a glimpse of the staff in the back,
working through orders and inventory on their
beautiful letterpress.
Those old-fashioned stationery stores, once plentiful, now rapidly vanishing, have always symbolized
possibility to me: a brand-new season, a brand-new
page, a brand-new chance. With the right tools, you
can create something with the flourish of your style,
in your own hand.

That tactile connection was important for me,
especially during the earliest weeks of the pandemic,
when, like so many others, I felt marooned on an
unfamiliar island. I needed to take a break from the
various screens upon which I’d begun to train—and
strain—my eyes. I wanted to connect with loved
ones, but without the interruption of adrenaline
spikes of breaking news and deadline demands.
Instead of texting or emailing, I crafted handwritten
notes, attempting to untangle the enormity of what I
was feeling. Shorthand had acquired a limited batch
of handmade stationery that perfectly fit my needs—
envelopes made from old Thomas Guide street maps
of Southern California, the navigational bible of my
childhood. Sentence by sentence, I was able to get
my bearings. As I reminded loved ones of their place
in my heart, pen to paper, I reminded myself of the
deep source it all comes from. Q

The clean,
crisp pages of a
handmade journal
help a writer puzzle
out her thoughts.

Lynell George last wrote about L.A.-based, New
Orleans–born DJ Chuck Taggart for Alta Journal,
Summer 2021.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 61

ACCESSORIES

Interview by STEFFIE NELSON •
Photos by CHRISTINA GANDOLFO

W
A Q&A with Gladys
Tamez, whose
handmade hats
top the noggins
of everyone from
Lady Gaga to
LeBron.

hen Lady Gaga appeared on the
cover of her 2016 album, Joanne,
unadorned except for a gently tapered pink felt hat, the Mexican
American designer Gladys Tamez
officially stepped center stage. She launched her line,
Gladys Tamez Millinery, in Los Angeles in 2014 and
would become one of the first Latina hat designers in
the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Clients
like Beyoncé, Kendall Jenner, and LeBron James
(who bought the felt Optimo cap in every color) also
sport her chic creations. We chatted with Tamez at
her Arts District showroom and atelier, where antique hat blocks are displayed alongside contemporary art, to discuss her roots, her inspirations, and
what true luxury means.
You’ve described yourself as Tex-Mex. How has your
heritage influenced your work?
I’m Mexican, but I was born in Texas. I grew up in
Reynosa, Mexico, and McAllen, Texas, on the border,

HEADS
UP
and when you live on the border, you
go back and forth all day. We used to
go to a ranch on the weekends, and
the rancheros wear cowboy hats,
and of course they do in Texas, too.
Hats were always around me.
Yet millinery is a specialized field. How do
you go from wearing hats to making them?
I’m from the Taurina family of bullfighters.
My husband, Oliver, and I were doing a road trip in
Spain, and we passed through this little town called
Vitoria. There was a hatmaker who had been there
for four generations, making hats for policemen, clero—the priests. I was having a bolero hat made, and
right then and there I saw it, the spark: I love this. I
want to do this! I had a clothing line, and I closed it,
and I started looking for a teacher. Millinery is called
a secret art—I guess there are schools in Paris, but
it’s hard to find them—and organically I found this

62 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

amazing lady, Lois King, and I took a class with her.
She’s retired now.
Your signature is the unique shapes of the crowns of
your hats, which look traditional but are quite sculptural.
I studied art in Florence, and then I came to L.A.,
and I was really passionate about the architecture
here—[John] Lautner is one of my favorites—and
I started expressing that in the construction of the
hats. Some designers use a lot of decoration, but my
hats are more minimal.
Were you always creative?
I was always interested in fashion. My parents
had a bookstore called Tivoli, and at 10, I was reading Vogue.
Where does your design process start?
My inspiration comes from everywhere: a photo,
a trip, a book. Lately I’ve been playing golf, and we
launched a golf capsule collection for summer ’22.
My spring/summer ’23 collection is inspired by the
Mexican movie star Dolores del Río, who lived for
many years in Hollywood. She wore a lot of red, and
classic fedoras.
Speaking of inspirations, the hat you made for Lady
Gaga was instantly iconic.
Gaga and I collaborated on the pink hat for the
Joanne album cover, which was a tribute to her
aunt. And that turned into the tour, and all her presentations, and New York Fashion Week. I think we
made two hundred and something hats for her, but
I lost count.
You’ve said that Gladys Tamez Millinery is a true luxury,
heritage product, as opposed to a luxury brand. What is the
distinction?
We make everything by hand in Los Angeles, and
that, to me, defines luxurious more than the way
something is marketed. I could produce the hats in
Italy, but it’s important to me to keep production
in-house. I do freestyle shaping, and we create everything with the finest materials: straw from Ecuador,
grosgrain ribbon from France and Japan. A good hat
can be passed to the next generation.
How should someone feel when they wear a Gladys Tamez design?
I want to give confidence to people. People tell
me, “I can’t wear hats, I don’t look good in hats.” I
say, “Come to see me. Let’s try.” I always say, the hat
doesn’t wear you; you wear the hat.
What can we look for this fall?
Our fall/winter collection, Tivoli, is an homage to
my mother, Elizabeth, who recently passed. She was
my personal style icon and my muse. Her support
and encouragement and her grace and poise have
most informed who I am and how I design. Q

Gladys Tamez in her
showroom and atelier in
L.A.’s Arts District. She
launched her line, Gladys
Tamez Millinery, in 2014.

GOLDEN
DRAMS

4

Tap the barrels of the state’s
finest whiskey purveyors.
1

3

5

2

SPIRITS

By JOY LANZENDORFER •
Photos by ANDREA D’AGOSTO
6

C

alifornia has opened so many craft
distilleries in recent years that some
say the state is developing its own
style of whiskey, much as it did with
wine some decades ago. The jury’s
still out on that, but in the meantime, here are six
contenders—ranging from around $30 to $80 a
bottle—to consider.

1. MOYLAN’S AMERICAN WHISKY
Given the similarities between whiskey and beer
making, it’s not surprising that many brewers are
moving into distilling. This is true of Brendan
Moylan, owner of Moylan’s Brewery in Novato. In
2004, he teamed with Stillwater Spirits in Petaluma, and he’s been making award-winning whiskey
ever since. The American Single-Malt Whisky is
made from 100 percent barley malt, aged in American white oak, and then finished in orange brandy
barrels. It’s full of bright citrus, nutmeg, and maple
flavors, with a spicy finish. Another tasty option is
finished in a port barrel. moylansdistilling.com

2. ALLEY 6’S WHISKEY
If artisanal distilleries are your jam, small-batch
operation Alley 6 in Healdsburg has a product line
worth savoring. Head distiller Jason Jorgensen
and his wife, Krystle Jorgensen, run a tasting room
and distillery in a warehouse near the downtown
wine hub, where they produce gin, brandy, and
whiskey. Every part of the process, from milling to
mashing to bottling, is done on-site. You can’t go
wrong with Alley 6’s single malt or its rye whiskey,
which is aged for a minimum of 18 months in oak
barrels, resulting in a peppery, oaky flavor, hints of
vanilla, and a fiery kick. alley6.com

of corn-mash bourbon and spicy rye is “relaxed,
but sophisticated, with a rugged edge,” according
to Wine Enthusiast. It’s smooth and slightly sweet,
with hints of vanilla and cinnamon. At 42.5 percent alcohol and around $30 a bottle, it’s made for
a casual night with friends or chilling on the couch.
calidistillery.com

5. OLD POTRERO’S STRAIGHT
RYE WHISKEY
In 1993, following the success of Anchor Brewing, owner Fritz Maytag turned his attention to
pot-distilled whiskeys, which weren’t made in
the United States at the time—at least legally.
Maytag wanted to re-create the original U.S.
methods using historically accurate small copper
pot stills. The result was Old Potrero, named after
the hillside neighborhood in San Francisco where
the whiskey is distilled. It’s made from rye mash
and has a balanced texture, with a touch of spice.
oldpotrero.com

6. ST. GEORGE SPIRITS’ BALLER
SINGLE MALT WHISKEY
St. George Spirits in Alameda seems to do little
wrong when it comes to distilling, whether it’s gin
or fruit brandy or Japanese-style whiskey. Made
with 100 percent malted barley, Baller is aged in
a series of wood casks, including one that used
to hold umeshu, a Japanese plum liqueur. The
result is crisp, with sharp plum and mineral notes
and a lingering smokiness. It’s a surprising take
on Japanese whiskey, similar to scotch and yet,
like so many California whiskeys, uniquely itself.
stgeorgespirits.com Q

3. REDWOOD EMPIRE’S
LOST MONARCH WHISKEY
Redwood Empire in Sonoma County is
committed to protecting the environment as well as making good-quality
liquor. Its Lost Monarch whiskey
is named after a 320-foot-tall redwood, one of the biggest trees in the
world. The blend of aged bourbon and
rye has notes of maple, vanilla, and
cloves and a peppery finish. And the
company plants a tree for every bottle
sold (617,554 at the time of writing).
shop.redwoodempirewhiskey.com

4. CALI DISTILLERY’S
CALI WHISKEY
Howard and Marni Witkin, the husband-andwife team behind Cali Distillery in Los Angeles
County, are reimagining U.S. sipping whiskey to
reflect the Southern California lifestyle. This mix

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 65

DECOR

By JESSICA ZACK •
Photos by PENNI GLADSTONE

For four decades,
Claudio Mariani
has been
restoring—or
re-creating—
furniture with
design techniques
that reach back
centuries.

A

s a young boy, living in the southern
Italian town of Taranto on the Ionian
Sea, Claudio Mariani trained with his
artisan father and grandfather in the
art of furniture making. In the five
decades since, he’s established himself as a preeminent antiques restorer and a gifted craftsman of fine,
museum-quality furniture in another town-on-thesea, more than 6,500 miles away: San Francisco.
Thirty-six years after opening his 33,000-squarefoot gallery and workshop, C. Mariani Antiques,
which has been dubbed the “Louvre with price tags,”
Mariani uses the same centuries-old methods to
painstakingly repair and bring back to their original
condition furnishings and domestic treasures that
once resided in Europe’s finest homes and estates—
or to re-create the furniture himself.

OLDWORLD
SAGE
When it comes to restoration, Mariani shuns
modern advances, using products and formulas that
have been favored by craftspeople since the 18th
century: unadulterated European beeswax; flaked
French polish derived from pine resin; fish glue
Mariani makes from boiled sturgeon bones and skin
(“a family tradition passed on to me,” he says), for
veneer work; and leather-embossing wheels made
from 24-karat Italian gold leaf and brass, which he
collects on trips abroad.
He knows his fastidious attention to historical
fidelity can seem out of step with trends in design,
especially in a tech-enthralled city that’s endlessly
fascinated with the new. But Mariani would say
that’s the point. Clients go to him because he honors
tradition with uncommon devotion.
“If you want museum quality, you have to stick

66 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

with the originality of the finish,” Mariani said on a
recent afternoon visit. He would no more use a new
chemical formula (something plenty of vendors have
tried to sell him) to polish wood than he would carve
or build a desk with a robotic arm or a 3-D printer.
“Using chemicals and materials I don’t suggest using
on antiques, to try to simplify the process, it really
ruins the piece,” he says. “We do things the same way
they’ve always been done. That’s why people come
back to us over and over again.”
Mariani has built a clientele of high-end designers and collectors, including Oprah Winfrey (he
worked on pieces for her Montecito home), Golden
State Warriors owner Joe Lacob, and Joe Montana
(“one of my favorite clients,” Mariani offers).
As you step through C. Mariani’s unassuming
Harrison Street entrance in the South of Market
district, impeccable taste and restoration skills are
on display in every corner of the first floor: gleaming
gilded chandeliers, massive neoclassical statuary,
hand-painted chinoiserie cabinets, Dutch marquetry desks, dozens of ornate colonial tea caddies, even
an ancient Egyptian burial mask.
Mariani, who is almost 70, is tall and fit and
looks younger than his age. Wearing his well-worn
monogrammed work apron, he steers me toward
an English Regency mahogany partners desk and a
George III walnut games table, running his fingers
over each as he explains the delicate process of handembossing them “with gold leaf I get in Florence.” It’s
a skill he acquired, along with marquetry, parquetry,
stonework, and metalwork, at Florence’s Accademia
di Belle Arti, where he began his studies at 18.
“Let’s sit and talk at the 17th-century table,”
Mariani says when he sees my eyes wander to an
enormous ash refectory table, perfectly restored and
oiled. We pull up chairs. Well, to be clear, these are no
ordinary seats. They’re “19th-century Brescia carvedand-inlaid walnut meuble de style chairs from Lombardy,” according to their tag (“price upon request”).
I tuck my iPhone away after being distracted by
its brash newness on the 400-year-old tabletop; the
device is so out of place in an environment where
nothing has been mass-produced. “Knowing this
piece has been here for hundreds of years, and wondering what stories and history it’s seen, is what still
intrigues me,” Mariani says of his lifelong fascination
with antiques.

O

ne need only hear Mariani describe the
differences between the graining in the
bottom boards of wood drawers constructed in the 18th century (vertical
graining) and in the 19th (horizontal)
to appreciate the satisfaction he derives from knowing the precise details that have defined well-made,
elegant furniture for hundreds of years—and make
it worth preserving. (The oldest pieces Mariani has
sold date to 1690.)
“Everybody in my family was involved in antiques,” he says. His late brother, Antonio, moved to

Claudio Mariani, owner
of C. Mariani Antiques in
San Francisco. Trained in
Italy, Mariani opened his
workshop and gallery 36
years ago.

WHO
KNEW?
The story behind some surprising
products born in the Golden State.
WD-40:
THE TRUE KING
OF CALIFORNIA’S
OIL INDUSTRY
WD-40 is the handiest of lubricating goos. Since its formulation
in 1953, the multipurpose oil
has been used by customers
around the globe to keep doggy
doors swinging, break in new
baseball mitts, shine stainless steel, and unstick gum.
During the Vietnam War, soldiers applied it to their M-16s
to prevent rust damage; on one
occasion, according to company
lore, police officers slathered the
stuff inside an air-conditioning
duct to extract a naked burglar.
The original makers of WD-40
could hardly have foreseen such
utility. The three employees of the
San Diego–based Rocket Chemical Company were just trying to
create a rust-prevention solvent
for the aerospace industry. Forty
attempts later, they got their “water displacement”
formula just
right (hence,
WD-40). At
one point, a
can of WD-40
could be found
in four out of
five U.S. homes.
Today, the company, now named
after its signature
product, manufactures millions
of cans a year in
its San Diego factory. A handwritten copy of the
secret formula—
nearly seven decades
old—rests in a Bank of America
vault not far from the company’s
Scripps Ranch headquarters.

SUPER SOAKER:
THE WATER GUN
THAT SATURATED
THE TOY MARKET
California’s aerospace engineers
have long helped Californians
have fun, designing such devices
as the modern surfboard, windsurfer, and boogie board. Add to
that list another invention that
keeps us cool in summertime:
the Super Soaker. The idea came
from Lonnie Johnson, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer with
a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University.
In 1982, he was experimenting at
home on a heat pump that used
water instead of Freon. When
he attached a nozzle to
his bathroom sink
and shot

RAINBOW
SANDALS: THE
ORIGINAL SURF
AND TURF
About 20 pairs of tattered sandals are
encased in glass displays throughout
the Rainbow Sandals factory and retail
outlet in San Clemente. It may sound
odd, but customers get it: wearing down
Rainbows takes effort. Owners often
mail in their retired
flip-flops with
letters about

a high-pressure jet of water across
the room, inspiration struck.
After several more years of developing a prototype, he applied for
a patent and licensed the design
to Larami (later acquired by Hasbro) in 1989. The Super Soaker
was soon the most popular toy in
the United States. It has racked
up more than $1 billion in sales,
and its success allowed Johnson
to invent full-time; he also holds a
patent for the Nerf gun as well as
less fun but more practical ideas
like a wet-diaper detector.
—PETER WESTWICK

how they wore them across continents,
on the sand, on dates, and even in winter
rains. Jay “Sparky” Longley sparked
Rainbow mania when he made the first
pair in 1972 using scissors, a belt sander,
and a sewing machine. Today, Sparky
still visits his shop, where two million
pairs of Rainbows are handcrafted each
year with nubuck leather and closedcell rubber midsoles that form to your
feet—thanks to a technique that Sparky
invented. Interested in a pair? Get them
only if you’re ready for commitment.
—AJAY ORONA

—ROBERT ITO
68 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

PHOTOS BY CHRIS HARDY

SRIRACHA:
THE BELOVED
SAUCE THAT
BRINGS THE HEAT
When David Tran first mixed up a
potent brew of red jalapeño chile
peppers, vinegar, garlic, salt, and
sugar, he didn’t imagine that his
concoction would become the
United States’ most popular hot
sauce and would hold pride of
place on restaurant tables around
the world. A Vietnamese immigrant who arrived in the United
States in 1979, Tran wanted to
create a perfect spicy addition
to slurp with his pho. He started
a company called Huy Fong
Foods—after the freighter, the
Huey Fong, that had carried
him into a new life. Now his
company produces 20 million
bottles of sriracha sauce annually (look for the rooster label)
in a massive factory just off the
10 freeway in the San Gabriel
Valley city of Irwindale. A lawsuit
initiated by the city over the
spicy gases emitted by the factory
almost caused a shutdown, but
then-governor Jerry Brown’s
office stepped in and brokered a
deal that included modifications
to rooftop vents to better absorb
the chile and garlic smells. This
year, the spring chile harvest was
weak, and by summer, restaurants
were scrambling to grab up the
red stuff. So were we. Q
—KATHARINE GAMMON

Mariani working on a reproduction of a coffee table using raffia, which requires the pieces to be glued one at a time.
California in the 1960s. When Mariani followed
him to San Francisco in the 1970s, “there were very
few people here that knew or liked antiques,” he recalls. Mid-century modernism reigned. But as the
Mariani brothers’ reputations as dealers, restorers,
and craftspeople grew, antique lovers started to
look to them for one-of-a-kind pieces to anchor
their home collections.
Mariani now employs 20 artists and master
craftspeople, most of whom he’s trained himself,
in his sprawling second-floor workshop. He’s a
calm presence in the atelier, slowly checking on
and complimenting his artisans in a space that’s
buzzing with activity, sawdust in the air. Workers
are reupholstering velvet chairs from Queen Victoria’s reign in one corner. In another, a carver is
replicating a floral detail on an antique child’s bed.
Thick slabs of recently delivered Italian burled
walnut are stacked on the floor. It’s like Santa’s
workshop—if the world’s children asked for handcarved pearwood tables ($45,000 for the set) and
filigreed boulle-work mirrors.
Since 1983, Mariani has also run a thriving apprenticeship program based on the 15th-century
Renaissance model, keeping these hands-on traditions alive for the next generation.
“He is right there looking over the shoulder of his
carvers, gilders, and painters, which is the best sort
of quality control one can have,” says Amanda Ahlgren, a design principal at San Francisco–based interior design firm Tucker & Marks, who has known
and sourced furniture from Mariani for 24 years.
She’s expecting a 17-by-5-foot dining table from
Mariani for clients in the Santa Ynez Valley; it’s
based on a carved detail of the property’s oak
leaves. “We were able to go into Claudio’s gallery,
see a similar table with a different type of leaf pattern there, and say, ‘This is what we want,’ ” Ahlgren
says. “Then we drew it up, and now he’s doing a

sample of the carving. Knowing Claudio, I know it
will be amazing.”
Mariani says that 60 percent of his work is these
custom projects, which range in price from a few
thousand to upwards of $20,000. Customers come
to him with a photo or sketch of something—a bed,
a table, a gilded sconce, for example. Maybe it’s
something the client saw in a castle, or museum, or
magazine spread. Mariani prides himself on replicating anything, not as a faux reproduction, but with
the expectation that the quality of the new piece will
stand the test of time, just as the original has.
“There are very few people born in this country
who can do this work,” he says, introducing me
to carvers from the Philippines employed by the
company, including master carver Jesus Bong,
who has been with C. Mariani for 30 years. “Mostly, this is a lost art, and it’s very difficult. They call
me the ‘last of the Mohicans,’ ” Mariani says with
a laugh.
High-end antiques have plummeted in popularity in the 21st century (though the pandemic
sparked a craze for all things vintage), and many
top-tier dealers in New York have shuttered. But
C. Mariani’s enduring appeal, and whopping price
tags, prove that living with furnishings that predate modernism (and tell stories of their own) has
never lost its draw among a certain U.S. elite who
can afford them.
When asked whether he himself is still handson in the workshop, and is not just the boss giving
his stamp of approval, Mariani lights up. “Oh, yes,”
he says. “It still brings as much joy. I love doing
this.” Q
Jessica Zack is a Bay Area journalist who wrote
about High Desert artist-philosopher Andrea Zittel
and aerial photographer Michael Light for Alta
Journal, Summer 2021.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 69

George Powell holds a
Powell-Peralta Dragon
Formula wheel and a Bones
Brigade skateboard deck at
the company’s factory in
Ventura, California.

TRANSIT

Interview by ROBERT ITO •
Photos by CHRISTINA GANDOLFO

P

owell-Peralta, maker of some of the most
iconic and recognizable skateboards
anywhere, is the unlikely love child of
two Southern California entrepreneurs.
George Powell was a Stanford-educated
engineer with a gift for creating high-performance
skate decks and wheels. Stacy Peralta, a member
of Venice’s legendary Z-Boys skate team, was the
highest-ranked skater in the world. When the two
launched Powell-Peralta in 1978, they revolutionized the way skateboards were made and marketed;
they also assembled the greatest skateboarding
team of all time, the Bones Brigade. The company’s
signature boards from the ’70s and ’80s fetch thousands of dollars on the collectibles market. Earlier
this year, the 13th reissue of Bones Brigade decks,
constructed at the company’s Ventura factory, sold
out within a week. We chatted with Powell about
the company’s beginnings—and why its boards still
rule the ramps.
How does an engineer working in aerospace end up
building skateboards?
When my son was eight, I gave him my wife’s
skateboard, and we would skate around Pacific
Palisades on clay wheels. One day, he came home
and said, “Dad, my friends have yellow wheels, and
they’re really good.” And I said, “Oh, come on, yellow
wheels don’t make any difference.” So we trundled
over to Palisades Hobby, and I looked at the counter,
and lo and behold, there were clear yellow urethane
wheels. A light bulb went off in my head. Every time
we hit a pebble or a seed pod, our wheels stop and
fly off. This was going to make skateboards a viable
product. I bought two sets and started developing
skateboards in my garage.
A few years after that, in the mid-’70s, Stacy Peralta
was the top-ranked skateboarder in the world. Did you
know him?
Stacy lived near LAX, and I lived in the Palisades.
He had grown up skating at Paul Revere [Middle
School] and Palisades High, and I occasionally went
to those spots to test new equipment, so I met him a
couple of times.

[The award] was possibly the industry wishing
we would retire.
Vernon Courtlandt Johnson’s Skull and Sword deck art
for you is instantly recognizable. Why do his decks strike
such a chord?
There are certain images that are sort of transcendental in the collective subconscious of mankind. Skulls are one of them, and dragons are right
up there. We have more fun with skeletons because
you can do so many things with them. Images like
the Ripper, Skull and Sword—those original graphics are very special in the industry.
Did you have any idea Powell-Peralta would become so big?
You know, I did. It was that aha moment when I

A Q&A with
George Powell,
whose engineering
mojo led to a
revolution in
skateboard design.

WHEELS
OF
FORTUNE
saw urethane wheels. I remember going home after
I rode them and thinking, “Damn, every kid in the
world is going to love skating.” Because it’s really fun
when you’re not falling down every time you turn. Q

How did the two of you team up professionally? Stacy
was working for G&S, a San Diego–based surf and skate
company, back then.
I was happily working in a vacuum, not connected to the existing industry at all, and Stacy was one
of the most famous skaters of his time. We finally got
together when he decided to leave G&S. He wanted
to form his own team and bring kids up and help
them develop, as opposed to hiring skaters away
from other companies, which was the common
practice. Still is, actually.
Speaking of teams, you formed the Bones Brigade, which
included Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, and Tony Hawk. All of
those guys are in the Skateboarding Hall of Fame. In 2016,
even Powell-Peralta itself was inducted. Aren’t you supposed to retire before you get that sort of honor?

Powell-Peralta decks and transfers (the graphics that
appear on the undersides of skateboards) are designed and
made in Southern California.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 71

CONDIMENTS

By LYDIA LEE •
Photo by ANDREA D’AGOSTO

JAM
SESSION
Enjoy a little California sunshine—
right out of the jar.

A

good preserve expresses the beauty of the fruit,” says June
Taylor, the Bay Area–based grande dame of artisanal jam.
Taylor has scaled back her business considerably in recent
years, but her fruit-forward approach (using a light hand
with sugar) continues to inspire others. We’ve rounded up
six wonderful ways to celebrate the state’s lavish fruit basket.

1

2

1. LADERA PATISSERIE’S
APRICOT & VANILLA CONFITURE
With the addition of whole vanilla beans, luscious Blenheim apricots
become even more decadent. The dessert-like combination is
made by chef Fateha Id boubrik, who drives down to Hollister for
the apricots and makes the jam in a commissary kitchen in San
Francisco. Trained in the culinary arts in France, Id boubrik took top
honors in 2021 at Confituriades, a prestigious competition that is
also known as the World Jam Championships. laderapatisserie.com

2. FROG HOLLOW FARM’S
ORGANIC PEACH CONSERVE
Frog Hollow Farm’s renowned peaches retain their core identity as
fragrant preserves, thanks to a finely tuned process followed by farm
co-owner Rebecca Courchesne. She leaves the skins on for better
72 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

flavor and cooks a shallow layer of peaches down quickly in a tilting
brazier, commonly used by restaurants to make stock. It also helps
that Courchesne has complete quality control over the fruit—grown
organically just east of Mount Diablo, it’s picked at peak ripeness and
frozen, so regardless of when a jar is purchased throughout the year,
it’s always from a fresh batch. froghollow.com

3. INNA’S FLAVOR KING PLUOT JAM
The pluot, a plum-apricot hybrid bred in Modesto, took the
fruit world by storm in the 1980s. Its depth of flavor, balanced
by plum tang, results in preserves with exceptional richness and
complexity. Dafna Kory, the founder of Emeryville-based Inna,
produces single-varietal jams to showcase the subtle qualities of
each variety—in this case, organic Flavor King pluots from Fresno
County. innajam.com

4

6
3
5

4. E. WALDO WARD & SON’S
ORANGE PAPAYA MARMALADE
Established in 1891, E. Waldo Ward & Son is the oldest jam company in
California—even older than Knott’s original berry stand. Jeff Ward, part
of the fourth generation to run the family business, continues to make
marmalade on a parcel of the original orchard in the foothills city of
Sierra Madre, about 20 minutes from Downtown Los Angeles. Among
his innovations is an inspired pairing of Valencia oranges and Maradol
papayas from Mexico; the sumptuous papaya pulp pushes the bitterness
of the peel into the background and lets the sweetness of the orange take
center stage. waldoward.com

5. EMANDAL’S GOOD OL’ RED STUFF
Besides baking bread and cooking farm-to-table meals for guests
at Emandal, owner Tamara Adams puts up around 80 kinds of preserves a year, inspired by the bounty around her. The vintage summer

resort on the edge of the Mendocino National Forest has a one-acre
organic garden and orchard. It provides strawberries, raspberries,
wild plums, rhubarb, and tart red cherries, combinations of which
are then supplemented by purchased peaches and apricots to make
Good Ol’ Red Stuff, a perennial favorite for its tart-sweet character.
emandalgeneralstore.com

6. FOURTEEN MAGPIES’ CITRUS
PRESERVE ORANGE SPICE
This marmalade is an ode to fall: navel oranges are accented with cinnamon, star anise, and cardamom, which will pique your taste buds.
Jam maker Tanya Seibold uses only organic fruit from the trees on
her 5.5-acre farm in Santa Rosa and what she gleans from residential
orchards in Sonoma County, saving perfectly good fruit from going to
waste. And yes, she also makes marmalade from an abundance of Meyer lemons, the unofficial state fruit. fourteenmagpies.com Q
ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 73

Rachel Britten, the owner of
the Mendocino Grain Project,
in one of her wheat fields
in Northern California. The
company offers milled flour
through a subscription box.

GRAINS

Interview by LYDIA LEE •
Photos by PENNI GLADSTONE

I

n the unlikely setting of central Mendocino
County, where vineyards and cannabis farms
claim the vast majority of the agricultural real
estate, Rachel Britten is cultivating 35 acres
of amber waves of grain. As the owner of the
Mendocino Grain Project in Ukiah, Britten has partnered with other farmers to launch a unique monthly
subscription box. The contents? Locally grown organic dry goods. In addition to the flour milled from
Britten’s wheat, the customizable box includes quinoa
and heirloom beans. We caught up with Britten in
late June, at the start of her third harvest season.
Wheat farming conjures up the plains of the Midwest.
Why grow grain in California?
Grain lets you grow plenty of calories to sustain
yourself, and it can be easily stored, which is why it
is so relevant to food security—as we’re finding out
from Ukraine. So much of the world’s wheat comes
from there, but there are risks as well as efficiencies
to consolidation. In March 2020, the big-box supermarkets couldn’t keep flour on the shelves. For a time,
we were the only flour at the local co-op, which was a
pretty interesting experience. Even though our sales
grew twentyfold in a month, we had relationships with
other farmers who filled in our supply gaps. It underscored how local food systems create resilience.
Just like you can get a cucumber from anywhere
or you can choose to buy it from the farmers market,
there are advantages to getting your dry goods locally. For one thing, it tastes better! You wouldn’t think
that freshly dried beans would make a difference,
but oh man, it does. Especially with quinoa—you
can taste the difference, no question.
What are you growing?
I’m focusing on heirloom varieties known specifically for their flavor. There’s a romantic buzz around
heirloom crops, but the practical aspect is that they
were bred for conditions that are more like the conditions that I’m putting the plants in. I dry-farm,
which means that I’m not using any irrigation—I’m
farming with the rain and the pervasive drought.
Sonora is a white wheat that has been cultivated
in California for a long time. It’s the gateway drug
for whole wheat baking. White wheat is used to
make pastries and cakes—it’s a little more delicate.
So if you’re interested in switching from white flour
to whole wheat flour, this is the variety I recommend. We also grow Red Fife. Bakers rave about its
flavor, but it has lower protein content, so it’s harder
to get big, fluffy breads out of it.
What’s it like to farm grain in California?
In produce farming, if you can get up at 5 a.m.
and hustle, you can beat the heat and be out of there
by 2 p.m. Grain farming is not like that. In the morning, the grain is too wet to harvest. You specifically
have to wait until it’s miserable, and then you start
harvesting. With the increased fire danger, we take
a break in the heat of the day and go back again in
the evening.
We’re right on the Russian River, and we don’t

The Mendocino Grain Project sells milled flours along with
pantry staples like beans and quinoa.
use any fertilizer other than compost and cover
crops. We use a low-tillage system, which means
minimizing the disturbance to the soil. It’s part of
my farming values, but it also feels like a responsibility to my community. Local farming creates a really
beautiful loop of accountability and understanding.
What are your plans for the future?
When I took over the business from Doug Mosel, who started it in 2009, largely what I inherited
was the equipment. It’s a pretty equipment-intensive
game, and that’s one of the reasons I think we’re not
seeing other young farmers raising staple crops. If you
have a half-acre parcel, there is no way it makes sense

FLOUR
CHILD
for you to own a combine, and it definitely doesn’t
make sense for you to own the equipment to clean
the grain. So we are creating an opportunity for small
farmers who want to produce small batches of grain.
I have a friend in Humboldt who grows quinoa,
and we do the processing of the quinoa for him. I
have a network of small farmers that I’m often doing
grain processing for, so when something cool comes
through, I can say, “Hey, can I buy a couple thousand pounds?” My vision is to diversify our products
from collaborations with other farmers and provide
exposure to a lot of interesting and extremely tasty
dry goods. Q

A Q&A with
Rachel Britten,
who’s growing
wheat in Northern
California—not
North Dakota.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 75

WATCHES

By AJAY ORONA •
Photo by ANDREA D’AGOSTO

I

never had an interest in fashion growing up.
I skipped the prevailing hipster aesthetic of
my college years—skinny jeans, button-ups,
beanies—for baseball caps and baggy cargo
shorts, looking like the classic frat bro I wasn’t
and never would be. If nicer garb couldn’t help me
better do the things I loved, like boogie boarding or
judo, what was the point?
But I did find inspiration in three numbers: 007.
I wasn’t too taken by the Tom Ford suits that Daniel
Craig wore as James Bond in Skyfall—my favorite
of the Bond films—or by his sky-blue swim trunks
by the British outfitter Orlebar Brown. What mesmerized me was Bond’s Omega Seamaster Planet
Ocean 600M. With its stainless steel bracelet, bulky
winding stem, and crenels on the bezel, the diver
watch looked like just another Bond tool, yet its
orange-tipped second hand, silver zero mark, and
white trimmings indicated it was a work of subtle
precision. The Seamaster gave Bond a rugged elegance that I flatly coveted.
As the name indicates, a diver is a timepiece
designed for scuba diving, capable of withstanding
pressure at depths of 90 meters or more. It’s also
meant to look good paired with a suit or a T-shirt
and jeans. The only problem for me was another
set of numbers: I was a broke student, and the
Seamaster cost upwards of $5,000. “This is fine,” I
thought. “In a couple of years, I will get something
just as nice.”
Ten years later, I’d amassed a modest collection
of also-rans: a couple of Casio G-Shocks, a Nixon, a
vintage Seiko Mickey Mouse, and a Hamilton field
piece. Several times, I could have broken the bank
for a Seamaster, but it never made sense while saving
for a wedding, a car, or, more recently, a baby crib. I
could have bought a more affordable diver, but hitting up Quora forums and visiting countless watch
kiosks revealed that pieces at my $600-or-under
price point looked like something you’d find inside
a Happy Meal.
Then I discovered the Vaer D5 Arctic. With its sleek
black dial, bold markers, and peach-dipped second
hand, it certainly looked like a secret-agent accessory.
I was shocked to discover that it was not designed on
a Swiss mountaintop but in my hometown of Los Angeles. Vaer was founded by a surfer and a designer in
Venice who met at a tech company. They poured their
personal savings into a timepiece that looks and functions like a Seamaster but is, at $549, around a tenth
of its price. I figured the D5 Arctic was quartz powered
but then flipped it over: it’s actually an automatic. The

apparatus behind automatic movement is intricate,
but the basic idea is that energy from the wearer’s
wrist actions is transferred from a weighted rotor
mechanism to springs, literally making the watch tick.
To showcase this process, the sapphire caseback on
the D5 Arctic, etched with “Designed in Los Angeles,”
is partially see-through. As for the diver function, the
watch can plunge to depths of 20 ATM (660 feet).
Its attractive face is encased within a double-domed
sapphire crystal, increasing scratch resistance and
enhancing visibility.
The company assembles its timepieces in California and Arizona, helping bring the craft of watchmaking back to the United States. That’s already an
admirable undertaking, but in the process, Vaer has
also helped make owning a designer watch attainable for many.

An obsession
with James Bond
leads to another
obsession: divers.

A TIME
TO BUY
I’ve decided I have one last mission to complete
before rewarding myself with a diver: scuba certification. The good news is that I won’t have to wait
10 years; I am on track to complete my training
hours this fall. I could be diving off Catalina with the
D5 Arctic as early as November, although it will be
at a depth of only 35 feet or so, where the water is
warmer and the little orange garibaldi are easier
to see. Of course, this pales in comparison with the
scene near the end of Skyfall in which Bond battles
a henchman underneath a frozen lake without the
help of a mask or a tank.
But hey, it’s a start. Q
Alta Journal associate editor Ajay Orona wrote
about NFTs for Alta, Spring 2022.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 77

ART

By MONICA CORCORAN HAREL •
Photo by CHRISTINA GANDOLFO

I

won’t forget the first time I saw Ray Howlett’s
art. It was over a year into the pandemic, and
my 11-year-old daughter, Tess, had become a
nautilus. Like the cephalopod mollusk in its
hypnotizing spiral shell, she had withdrawn to
a deep, dark crevice. I had not seen her sly smile in
months. I couldn’t even recall the echo of her laugh.
Watching her slowly disappear was like looking at a
solar eclipse. My eyes burned. My heart skidded.
I didn’t admire Howlett’s piece in a pristine setting like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I
had walked into a beach house in Malibu that late
afternoon planning to drink some tequila with good
friends and watch the sun sink into the sea.
But as soon as I stepped inside and kicked off
my shoes, life changed. There, perched on a table
in the entryway, was one of Howlett’s two-foot-high

SEEING
THE
LIGHT
During dark times,
Ray Howlett’s
sculptures offered
a mother
some hope.

78 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

infinity light sculptures. At first, I just circled the
vibrant pyramid of coated glass and mirrors and
electric light. Neon pink and blue and green ladders
of illumination—as intricate and graceful as DNA—
beckoned me closer. Howlett’s sculptures are known
for inducing the dizzying illusion of eternity. The
reflection is never-ending. Call it a human-made mirage. But instead of seeing the crushing continuum
of the pandemic and my daughter’s depression in
that moment, I felt a flicker of hope.
“When you see something you can’t process, the
mind shuts down and your emotions open up. You
get enlightened. You get to feel stuff,” says Howlett,
who is 82 and lives in a cabin about two hours north
of Los Angeles in Pine Mountain Club. I tracked the
artist down online a few days after I saw his light
sculpture. Howlett’s work wasn’t easy to surface on
Google, since I didn’t know his name and could only
describe his art. He’s not nearly as well-known as

James Turrell, Larry Bell, Helen Pashgian, and other visual artists who came up during the Light and
Space movement of the late 1960s in L.A. “I was a
nobody,” he tells me. “Too shy. When I did go to one
of those parties where artists socialized, I left after
15 minutes. I was so uncomfortable.”
Howlett had moved from his native Nebraska to
Silver Lake in 1965 and was hired as an interior designer for the Downtown department store Bullock’s.
Once he committed to being a full-time artist, he
worked out of studios in beach towns from Venice to
Malibu. He left California for two decades to take care
of his widowed mom and shared his art with curators
in a self-funded traveling exhibition. Now he spends
about 12 hours a day in his mountain studio, fulfilling
a long waiting list of commissions for his light sculptures. “I don’t want to socialize. I don’t want to go to a
party. I just want to make art,” he tells me.
Before COVID, Tess would initiate games of tag
just by yelling “I’m it!” and chasing anyone nearby.
She went on sleepovers every weekend. But the social isolation, coupled with the bewildering onset of
puberty, stole her confidence. It probably didn’t help
that she grew almost eight inches in a few months.
“I don’t know what to say to anyone,” my only child
whispered to me and my husband when we tried to
arrange “safe” masked playdates. We got Tess a therapist, who recommended a pet. We got Tess a rabbit,
who didn’t like to socialize either.
Images of Howlett’s art became my beacons. I
gazed at them on my laptop over coffee every morning. Somehow, these flat versions of his complex,
multisensory work summoned the same sense of
buoyancy I’d felt in Malibu. The scientific study of
how art affects the brain is known as neuroaesthetics. When I am moved by the stimulus of Howlett’s
sculpture, apparently, my mind is able to muse more
freely on the past and the future. The memory of
Tess’s smile had been fading, like a photo left in the
sun—but I could start to see the lift of her lips and
the light in her ocean-blue eyes. In navigating Howlett’s illusion of infinity, I could visualize a future in
which she looked up at me and laughed again.
When I ask Howlett what inspired him to flirt
with endless time and space in his art, he talks about
staring at the ocean in Malibu for the first time.
“Being at the beach and the openness of Los Angeles
gave me the ability to come up with something outside of what I learned in art school,” he says. “I’m a
California artist.”
A few months ago, Tess started to resurface. She
talked to a psychiatrist about her sadness and social
anxiety; medication helped too. She smiles a lot now.
When I look at my daughter, who will be 12 in a few
months, I see an aura around her. Sometimes, it’s
a soft blush. Other times, she gives off a bold blue.
She’s my own light sculpture. Q
Monica Corcoran Harel wrote about space fashion
for Alta Journal, Summer 2022. She runs Pretty
Ripe, a media platform for women over 40.

Ray Howlett with a work-inprogress light sculpture in his
studio north of Los Angeles.

OCTOBER 20
A PLACE
AT THE NAYARIT
BY
NATALIA
MOLINA
Join us for a Zoom event featuring Natalia Molina
in conversation with John Freeman. Learn more at
californiabookclub.com.

FALL 2022 SELECTIONS
WHY I WRITE

By NATALIA MOLINA

Keeping Place, Memory,
and History Alive

I

write for many of the same reasons people feel compelled to take a photo and
post it on social media: to present or
engage with people, events, and places
that feel unique yet speak to a universal human experience. Such moments
illuminate the resilience of people, their
bravery and ability to triumph under difficult conditions. These impulses compelled
me to write about my grandmother and her
restaurant in my most recent book, A Place
at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant
Nourished a Community. There I tell the
story of immigrant workers—including my
grandmother, Doña Natalia—as placemakers, who nurtured and fed the community
through the restaurants they established,
which served as urban anchors. I never met
my grandmother, but I grew up surrounded
by people who had worked at the Nayarit or
had been regular customers, and I listened,
fascinated, to their stories.
And yet, when it came time to write my
version of the story, I encountered many difficulties because the Nayarit is a prime piece
of what I call underdocumented Los Angeles.
These overlooked places, people, and events
nonetheless make the city what it is. The lives
of Doña Natalia and her fellow placemakers in
Echo Park were also comparatively underdocumented, meaning that their individual stories
are not well served by printed records, which
usually inform the historian’s efforts to paint a
picture of a community. Understanding their
daily lives means studying them alongside, not
exclusively within, official archives.
While I was able to re-create a lot about
my grandmother’s life through research—using oral interviews as well as business permits, census records, genealogical searches,
photographs, and restaurant reviews—getting at her interior life was more difficult.
One approach that helped was to look at her
possessions. While she didn’t leave a diary
or letters, I do have her dishes, given to me
by my mother. They’re from the Franciscan
Ceramics plant in Atwater, hand-painted
with apples and leaves around the edges.
In the book, I write, “Those dishes say a lot
about my reserved grandmother. She wanted
elegant tableware, and she got it for herself,
piece by piece. I like to imagine her setting
her place and enjoying the sheen and the col-

PHOTO BY DUSTIN SNIPES

or of those dishes, not just as a sign of aspiration, but also as a way of embracing the place
where she lived and asserting her belonging.”
I read this section over the summer when
I did a book event at Boyle Heights Bar. The
audience was composed of community members who don’t usually attend readings but
were curious about this history. Many were
in their 60s and 70s, Latinx, retired teachers, water and power employees, restaurant
workers. Before we got started, they shared
with me that they didn’t know a lot about
Latinx history. And why should they have?
They certainly were not taught it in their
textbooks. So I read to encourage them to tell
their stories. You don’t have to write a book
to do that. I asked them, Do your partners,
children, grandchildren, neighbors, coworkers, and fellow churchgoers know your story?
Hands started to shoot up around the room.
One woman remembered learning to sew at
the age of seven on her grandmother’s Singer
sewing machine with the push pedal. She
made a dress for her mother that she has now
inherited and still wears. Another woman
recalled that both her mother and her husband’s mother collected Blue Chip Stamps,
and each could buy one piece of dishware every week, which they viewed as a sign of their
fortitude, a way of making a place in their
new homeland. A third woman, Shirley, from
Burma (Myanmar), sat proudly with her chin
in the air as Dan, her husband of 50 years, described the dishes from her homeland, such
as curries, that she still made for her extended family and friends. That was yet another
way to keep place, memory, and history alive.
I know it’s important to record these histories, but it’s even more essential that people see
themselves in the larger history of the United
States and that, if they don’t, they stand up and
tell their story. This is why I write. Q
Natalia Molina is a distinguished professor
of American studies and ethnicity at the
University of Southern California. A 2020
MacArthur Fellow, she is the author of How
Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial
Scripts; Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and
Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939; and A Place
at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant
Nourished a Community.

WHY YOU SHOULD
READ THIS

N

atalia Molina understands that history is
a living thing. “Placemaking,” she writes
in A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican
Restaurant Nourished a Community, “has
worked in distinct ways for racialized
groups.… The ethnic Mexican immigrants
who congregated at the Nayarit were
attempting to carve out a niche for themselves in their
new homeland. Their story is not simply about struggling
to gain access to urban space by grabbing a slice of the
existing pie, but an expression of challenge that, in its
own way, works to remake the existing city altogether.”
A Place at the Nayarit is a groundbreaking work, a
book that blurs the line between vernacular history
and scholarship—and in the process creates a territory
all its own. Using the restaurant that her grandmother
Doña Natalia Barraza
opened in 1951 in the Los
Angeles neighborhood
of Echo Park, Molina
writes about place and
family, but equally about
community. Those “who
worked and ate at the
Nayarit,” she explains,
“were not just putting
food onto the table or
into their mouths. They
were creating meaning,
establishing links with
one another, and tending to roots both old and new.”
This idea of place, or placemaking, has been part
of Molina’s project all along. Her first book, Fit to
Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles,
1879–1939 (2006), examines the way cultural and ethnic stereotypes became weaponized around health to
justify discrimination in Southern California. Her 2014
follow-up, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration,
Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts,
addresses the use of discriminatory narratives to
marginalize “racialized” groups. For this work as well
as her teaching (she is a distinguished professor at the
University of Southern California), Molina received a
MacArthur Fellowship in 2020. A Place at the Nayarit
both extends and expands her vision by evoking the
history of her grandmother’s restaurant, which was not
only a successful business but also a kind of cultural
and social center—placemaking at its most profound.
This is important because it reaches beyond the
family. “Between 1959 and 1973,” Molina writes, “the
spirit of placemaking and place-taking that Doña
Natalia had nurtured helped at least six former Nayarit
employees open businesses of their own, all of which
went on to become urban anchors.” But it is also
important because Molina never loses sight of her
grandmother’s role.
Doña Natalia was more than a placemaker; she
was a social catalyst, creating an example and a set of
opportunities. Molina traces this by way of a necessary
double vision, as both historian and granddaughter,
sharing the family stories and excavating what they
mean in regard to the city at large. Q
—DAVID L. ULIN

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 81

NOVEMBER 17
THE GOLD COAST
BY KIM STANLEY
ROBINSON
Join us for a Zoom event featuring Kim Stanley
Robinson in conversation with John Freeman. Learn
more at californiabookclub.com.

WHY I WRITE

By KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

An Acceptable Degree
of Coherent Narrative

T

he covering-law model of historical explanation states that an
event is explained if it can be logically deduced from a set of initial
conditions and a set of general
historical laws. These sets are the
explanans, and the event is the explanandum. The general laws are applied to
the initial conditions, and the explanandum
is shown to be the inevitable result. An explanation, in this model, has the same structure
as a prediction.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets and his crew flew the Enola
Gay from Tinian Island to Hiroshima and
dropped an atomic bomb on the city. Approximately 100,000 people died. Three days
later, another crew dropped a bomb on the
outskirts of Nagasaki. Approximately 70,000
people died. The Japanese surrendered.
President Harry Truman, in consultation
with his advisers, decided to drop the bombs.
Why did he make these decisions? Because
the Japanese had fiercely defended many
islands in the South Pacific, and the cost of
conquering them had been high. Kamikaze
attacks had sunk many U.S. ships, and it was
said that the Japanese would stage a gigantic kamikaze defense of the home islands.
Estimated U.S. casualties resulting from an
invasion of the home islands ranged as high
as a million men.
These were the conditions. General laws?
Leaders want to end wars as quickly as possible, with a minimum of bloodshed. They also
like to frighten potential postwar enemies.
With the war in Europe ended, the Soviet
Army stood ready to go wherever Stalin ordered it. No one could be sure where Stalin
might want to go. An end to the Japanese war
that frightened him would not be a bad thing.
But there were more conditions. The Japanese were defenseless in the air and at sea.
U.S. planes could bomb the home islands at
will, and a total naval blockade of Japan was
entirely possible. The Japanese civilian population was already starving; a blockade, combined with bombing of military sites, could
very well have forced the Japanese leaders to
surrender without an invasion.
But Truman and his advisers decided to
drop the bombs. A complete explanation of
the decision, omitted here owing to considerations of length, would have to include an
examination of the biographies of Truman,
his advisers, the builders of the bomb, and

PHOTO BY CAROLYN FONG

the leaders of Japan and the Soviet Union, as
well as a detailed analysis of the situation in
Japan in 1945 and of U.S. intelligence concerning that situation.
President Truman was elected in 1948, in
an upset victory over Thomas Dewey. Two
years later the United States went to war in
Korea to keep that country from being overrun by Communists supported by the Soviet
Union and China. It was only one of many
major wars in the second half of the 20th
century; there were over 60, and although
none of them were nuclear, approximately 50
million people were killed.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says
that we cannot simultaneously determine
both the velocity and the position of a particle. This is not a function of human perception but a basic property of the universe.
Thus it will never be possible to achieve a deterministic prediction of the movement of all
particles throughout space-time. Quantum
mechanics, which replaced classical mechanics as the best description of these events, can
only predict the probabilities among a number of possible outcomes.
The covering-law model of historical explanation asserts that there is no logical difference between historical explanation and
scientific explanation. But the model’s understanding of scientific explanation is based on
classical mechanics. In quantum reality, the
covering-law model breaks down.
The sufficient-conditions model of historical explanation is a modification of the
covering-law model; it states that if one can
describe a set of initial conditions that are
sufficient (but not necessary) for the event
to occur, then the event can be said to be
explained. Deduction from general law is not
part of this model, which is descriptive rather
than prescriptive and “seeks only to achieve
an acceptable degree of coherent narrative.” Q
This piece is adapted from “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions,” originally
published in 1991.
Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of more
than 20 books, including the Mars trilogy—
Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars—and
more recently Red Moon, New York 2140,
and 2312. In 2016, he received the Robert
A. Heinlein Award for lifetime achievement
in science fiction, and asteroid 72432 was
named Kimrobinson. His most recent book is
The High Sierra: A Love Story.

WHY YOU SHOULD
READ THIS

I

t’s astonishing to revisit Kim Stanley Robinson’s
The Gold Coast in 2022. Published in 1988, the
novel, which is the second volume in the author’s
Three Californias trilogy, is set in a future that
then seemed suitably distant, taking place in
Orange County in 2027. Nearly three and a half
decades later, the potential future Robinson
imagined is coming up fast in front of us, less a
harbinger or a warning than a slice of life. This is the
challenge of all science fiction that unfolds in the near
future—I think of Blade Runner (1982), which crossed its
point of singularity three years ago, or Harry Harrison’s
Make Room! Make Room!, written during the 1960s and
set in an overpopulated New York City in 1999.
The Gold Coast fares better, temporally speaking,
than either of those precursors; the future it posits
remains recognizable
through the lens of the
present we occupy.
That’s because, even
early in his career (The
Gold Coast was his
fourth book), Robinson
was a visionary writer, if
not prescient exactly—
prescience, it turns out,
only appears to emerge
in hindsight—then highly
attuned to the world
both as it was and as
it could become. The
story of a disaffected
young man named
Jim McPherson, the novel unfolds in a landscape that
has been overdeveloped, traversed by freeways and
blanketed with condos and malls. Cars rely on computerized navigation systems, while defense contractors
bid to supply the Pentagon with drones. Jim’s father,
Dennis, works for one such company, which adds a
layer of generational conflict to the narrative. It’s
not hard to imagine, from where I live in Los Angeles,
everything Robinson describes in the book occurring at
this moment, just a few miles down the road.
Such a tension, of course, is necessary, the backand-forth on which science fiction relies. The best
of the genre is not about the future but, rather, is a
response to, or an extrapolation of, the world in which
we find ourselves. This can lead to hope or to despair;
in Three Californias, Robinson engages in both. The trilogy’s first book, The Wild Shore, imagines an agrarian
culture that has emerged after a nuclear holocaust.
The third, Pacific Edge, presents a full-on ecotopia, in
the vein of Ursula K. Le Guin or Ernest Callenbach.
The Gold Coast represents a counterpoint. It is a
novel about what goes wrong when (in some odd way)
nothing goes wrong. Without some sort of external
disruption, it observes, we will continue to amuse
ourselves, even if it leads us to the grave. “A map,”
Robinson writes here, “is the representation of a
landscape, after all, and many landscapes, like Orange
County’s, are principally psychic.” A map, and a work
of fiction, too. What Robinson is doing in this novel,
then, as he does throughout Three Californias, is framing his own map of the future through the conundrums
of the present—not to resolve them, necessarily, but
to confront them and, in so doing, to raise necessary
questions about who we are and how we want to live. Q
—DAVID L. ULIN

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 83

DECEMBER 15
GORDO
BY
JAIME
CORTEZ
Join us for a Zoom event featuring Jaime Cortez
in conversation with John Freeman. Learn more at
californiabookclub.com.

WHY I WRITE

By JAIME CORTEZ

Because Every Quixote
Needs to Pick a Damn
Windmill and Charge

I

write because writing is the best way to
explore the delicious, perplexing, maddening frictions that surround me on all
sides. Which is to say that writing helps
me think like an adult. Which is to say
that I can, for minutes at a time, rub
together two opposing ideas until they
heat up and begin to smoke:
QPeople can be savage one moment and
tender the next.
QEvents can be both horrible and funny.
QTranscendence and trauma are entwined
like snakes in mid-fuck.
No, wait—I write because I’m too fat to
breakdance, but I crave attention.
No, wait—I write in tribute to the captivating, hilarious storytellers I grew up listening
to around the dinner table.
No, wait—I write because every Quixote
needs to pick a damn windmill and charge.
No, wait—I write to give love to immigrants and Latino/a people, who get way too
much of the stuff that is not love launched in
their direction.
No, wait—I write because I am a middleaged gay man who survived that other pandemic and knows that every day, every hour,
every exhale is a gift. To write is to say thank
you for those extravagant gifts.
No, wait—I write to send a Molotov valentine to the loving and monstrous tribe I was
born into.
No, wait—I write in the hope that my writing might have a longer life than me, so that I
can forestall that future day when my name is
uttered for the last time and I evaporate into
lumpen obscurity like 99.9999999 percent of
humanity.
No, wait—I write because I never feel optimistic, but writing and imagining that the
writing might go somewhere allows me to
take optimistic action.
No, wait—I write because making people
laugh is one of my two writerly superpowers, and a good laugh is one of only five
things that most everyone wants and wel-

PHOTO BY CHRIS HARDY

comes most all the time (the others being
gold, orgasms, chocolate, praise, and a little
more chocolate).
No, wait—I write because reading fine
writing never saved my life (nor did music,
dance, or any other art), but it made me measurably better, smarter, and more human/e.
I’m grateful for that and hope that one day I
can do that for some reader somewhere.
No, wait—I write because writing is the forensic tool par excellence for picking through
the smoking rubble of what I think happened
and unearthing what really happened.
No, wait—I write because it gives me a reason to claim and defend my solitude, which I
love as much as I love people. Maybe more.
No, wait—I write because while growing
up, I almost never encountered someone
like me in books, people like my peeps in
books. I hope that someone reads my book
and finally sees something shaped like
them in those stories. When that happens,
I hope they feel less alone and take a small
comfort in being visible.
No, wait—I write to undercut my respectability and fag out in public.
No, wait—I write to conjure my demons,
gaze upon them, and hopefully conclude that
outside the darkened dungeon in my mind,
them bitches ain’t all that impressive.
No, wait—I write because when I’m writing, I’m like the ancients who stared up into
the random pinpricks of light in the night sky
and began to connect the dots, to trace meaning and pattern into it.
Here is a jaguar.
Here is a scimitar.
Here is a plumed serpent.
Here is the tiny boat that cuts through the
night, slices clean through all obstacles, and
takes you wherever you dare to go. Q
Jaime Cortez is the author of Gordo, a collection of short stories, and the graphic novel
Sexile, created for AIDS Project Los Angeles.
His work has appeared in Kindergarde, No
Straight Lines, Street Art San Francisco, and
the San Francisco atlas Infinite City.

WHY YOU SHOULD
READ THIS

P

erhaps the most astonishing aspect of
Jaime Cortez’s first collection of short
fiction, Gordo, is how funny it is. Bringing
together 11 linked narratives, the book
opens at a migrant worker camp on the
Central Coast, then shifts to a small house
in Watsonville. Revolving around a boy
nicknamed Gordo, it is, in part, a coming-of-age story,
or a set of coming-of-age stories. At the same time,
Cortez also tells us about family and belonging and
the small and intimate gestures of community, which
renders the world of the pickers and their children
through a nuanced and recognizable lens of grace.
What I mean is that Cortez has a light touch. Or,
perhaps, it’s that he’s interested in the humanity of
his characters, who are struggling in a world where
opportunity is often
at arm’s length. Gordo
doesn’t shy away from
that, but it also seeks to
peel back the surface,
to find consolation and
camaraderie in the
spaces between. “This
is the way Jesus should
taste,” the main character imagines, chewing a
bite of doughnut, in the
appropriately titled story “The Jesus Donut,”
which opens the book.
Cortez is not being
satirical or trying to make a social statement; he is
writing about bliss. This, too, sets Gordo apart—
Cortez’s willingness to look for, and to find, transcendence in the least expected places. In the story “Alex,”
the protagonist finds himself compelled, and confused,
by his family’s neighbor, who reads as a man but whose
gender identity remains unclear. This fascination may
or may not be reflective of Gordo’s questions of identity, which remain a bit below the surface, although he
tells us, “Sometimes I feel different, too.”
The territory is one Cortez has worked throughout
his career, from the anthology, Virgins, Guerrillas &
Locas: Gay Latinos Writing About Love, that he edited in
1999 to the graphic novel, Sexile, written and illustrated for AIDS Project Los Angeles in 2004. That book told
the story of Adela Vázquez, a transgender activist, and
suggests the range of Cortez’s work. In Gordo, he is
operating in a different register: writing from the point
of view of a character too young yet to have the language to articulate who he is. On the one hand, Gordo
is a child, growing up in the 1970s, being introduced to
pop music and pornography and the inchoate longing
of being alive. On the other, he is a seed, or a kernel,
not yet blossomed but containing all that he will one
day become.
The sensibility, then, is one of emerging, which
gives the stories in Gordo a kind of fluid movement,
between who the characters are on the inside and
who they are out in the world. “Some people have to
walk around with so many sad stories,” Cortez tells
us. “They have to get up, brush their teeth, wash their
face, go to work like everybody else, but they’re not
like everyone else.” The power of the collection is
that this applies to everyone, not least the narrator
himself. Q
—DAVID L. ULIN

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 85

BON APPÉTIT

O

By JIM LEWIS • Illustration by THOMAS EHRETSMANN

She
Was Not
a Food
Writer

f course, many of the
great American prose writers of the 20th century were women, especially when it came
to essays and criticism: Elizabeth Hardwick,
Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion,
Pauline Kael, M.F.K. Fisher. What strikes me
as more surprising, or at least more notable, is
that the last four all came from California, far
removed from the magazine culture where
they made their names.
Why this should be the case I can’t say, not least
because the figures I mention vary widely in substance and style, method and consequence. I could
make some kind of argument about independent
and self-reliant pioneer spirits, about the death and
rebirth of the New World on the beaches of the Pacific coast, about first-rate public universities (Kael,
Sontag, and Didion went to UC Berkeley, though
only Didion finished there). But perhaps none of
that’s true; perhaps it’s an accident. Nevertheless,
the broader point is worth mentioning: cultures
are continually renewed by outsiders, who leverage
their estrangement into influence—and then become insiders, in a universe of their own devising.
It’s Fisher who interests me here, because she’s
the least known and celebrated of the lot, the only
one who, even to date, hasn’t found her proper
place. She should have a Library of America volume, if not two or three, but she has none. Her
fans, and I’m certainly one, are a devoted lot, but
86 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

we’re surprisingly small in number. Many others
have read a thing or two or heard her name. Many
more have not. The subhead in her New York Times
obituary (she died in 1992) read “Ignored for Years.”
And why? No doubt much of the reason has to do
with her subject matter.
She’s widely known as a food writer, perhaps
the first American to elevate that genre into an art
form. But that’s banal, a bit tame, like calling Bruce
Chatwin a travel writer or Anne Carson a literary
critic, and Fisher threw it back. “I do not consider
myself a food writer,” she once said, testily, wearily,
accurately. It’s harder to say what, instead, she was.
The fact that it’s so difficult is part of her charm:
like most originals, she’s elusive, the prerogative of
our betters. With the exception of How to Cook a
Wolf, from 1942, a guide to getting by on wartime
rations, she didn’t write cookbooks, not really,
and while there are instructions for specific dishes
scattered throughout her books, they seem like

The words
of M.F.K.
Fisher—one of
2oth-century
America’s best,
if overlooked,
voices—describe
a magnificent
feast of ritual,
meaning,
and life.

AN M.F.K. FISHER
PRIMER

THE ART OF EATING
Fisher published dozens of books
in her lifetime, and more were
published posthumously. Fortunately,
the five canonical books most
directly about food—Serve It Forth
(1937), Consider the Oyster (1941),
How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The
Gastronomical Me (1943), and An
Alphabet for Gourmets (1949)—have
been published in a single volume
called The Art of Eating.

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE
By Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Brillat-Savarin was a 19th-century
French lawyer, eccentric, witty, and
proud. This quasi-scientific treatise
was translated by Fisher in 1949 and
includes notes so copious that they
amount to a conversation with her
hero. She considered the book her
finest achievement.

A LIFE IN LETTERS:
CORRESPONDENCE 1929–1991
Another side of Fisher, more
relaxed and open, this 1997 volume,
published five years after her death,
is a counterpoint to the measured
prose of her essays.
—J.L.

88 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

afterthoughts. A recipe for North Country Tart in
An Alphabet for Gourmets calls for four ingredients,
in no specified quantity or proportion. Another, for
a sort of poorhouse stew, includes the line “Cover
the thing with what seems like too much water.”
Advice wasn’t really her field. She often said that
The Joy of Cooking was the only resource most people needed. Her own best-known work, a collection
of five short volumes she wrote on food, is called
The Art of Eating, a curious phrase if you think
about it: it’s not the one who makes the meal who’s
the hero of this tale. It’s the one who partakes, and
anyone can step into that role, even you and me.
She is neither a historian nor an anthropologist,
not a purveyor of exotica, not a critic. She offers no
restaurant reviews, though she often writes about
eating out. If she ever visits a kitchen to chat with
the chef about technique, I don’t remember it. But
she loves waiters, especially those in France’s rural
provinces, kind, eccentric, ingratiating, and proud,
with their dramas and sorrows and the tenderness
with which they serve.
In fact, she’s a writer who uses food as an excuse; her essays usually start with a dish, a meal,
an ingredient, and then drift this way and that, return home for a moment, and then maunder away
again, tossing off rich little apothegms. (“A group of
deliberately assembled relatives can be one of the
dullest, if not the most dangerous, gatherings in the
world.” “No vegetable should be cooked for as long
as you think.”) She cites Lucretius, Talleyrand, Pope,
weaving in memories and observations, opinions
and exhortations. Hunger and satiety are simply
experiences, hardly distinguishable from their surroundings: travel, romance, grief. “It seems to me,”
she wrote, “that our three basic needs, for food and
security and love, are so mixed and mingled and
entwined that we cannot straightly think of one
without the others.”
Though she admits to having once eaten a pound
of caviar over the course of a single day, she was
neither a gourmet nor a glutton. Instead, she was a
connoisseur, of food, yes, but also of the rituals that
surround it. A democratic connoisseur, if you can
imagine such a thing, with a taste for simplicity:
fresh vegetables, local sourcing, clean compositions,
nothing too fancy, no heavy sauces, exotic spices, or
elaborate stews. A newly harvested snail; oysters
(she wrote an entire book about them); cauliflower;
fresh, ripe tomatoes.
Another paradox: the first line of An Alphabet for
Gourmets is “A is for dining alone…and so am I, if a
choice must be made between most people I know
and myself.” And yet she had enormous influence
on American cooking, in large part because of her
extraordinary capacity for friendship. They came to
her door: James Beard and Julia Child, Ruth Reichl
and Alice Waters, not out of deference, exactly,
since they were formidable figures themselves, but
because they loved her.

I

t seems it never occurred to Mary Frances Kennedy to be anything other than a
writer. She was born in Albion, Michigan,
in 1908: her father was a newsman. She
liked to say that he wrote 2,000 words a
day, every day of his working life—if true,
an astounding rate, roughly equivalent
to three Moby-Dick-length manuscripts a year. By
1912, he had moved the family down to Whittier,
California, a small town of about 4,500 in southeast Los Angeles County, where he bought and
edited the local paper. At the time, it was a Quaker
community focused on citrus crops (today, it’s best
known as the town that gave us Richard Nixon).

The Kennedys were Episcopalian, Mary Frances a
somewhat obdurate child, who wrote poetry and
later worked as a stringer for her father. She did a
semester at one college, a year at another. At the
age of 21, she married Al Fisher, a grad student and
would-be poet. Within a few weeks of their wedding in 1929, they moved to Dijon, where they lived
for three years.
In France, she discovered the true depth and
entanglement of her appetites: for food, for travel, for love. Of their first night’s meal, she writes,
“Everything that was brought to the table was so
new, so wonderfully cooked, that what might have
been with sated palates a gluttonous orgy was, for
our fresh ignorance, a constant refreshment.” Upon
their return to California, she began writing, and
her first book, called Serve It Forth, was published
in 1937. Soon after came another, many magazine
articles, another book, a move to Switzerland, and
her life came to a boil.
She started an affair with a man named Dillwyn
Parrish, a close friend and next-door neighbor:
he was the true love of her life, and each left their
spouse to marry the other, but their time together
was short. Parrish had a rare neurological disease,
which left him in excruciating pain. There was no
treatment: a leg was amputated, the disease progressed, more amputations were on the horizon,
and Parrish took his own life with a pistol. Mary
Frances heard the shot and was neither surprised
nor appalled. It was what he had to do.
A few years later, she had a daughter, whose
father she never identified, even to the girl herself,
who desperately wanted to know. In 1945, she married her third husband and had another daughter;
in 1950 came her second divorce. She came back
to California, eventually settling in Glen Ellen in
Sonoma County. At this point she was halfway
through her life.

I

mention all this because her life was of
a piece with her work: both voluptuous
and touched by a certain melancholy,
the need for pleasure tempered with a
toughness of mind, a capacity for delight
alternating with a hard-won worldliness.
She was intemperate and impatient, in a
mild sort of way. She disliked rewriting and rarely
did it, except under duress (she often complained
that the editorial process at the New Yorker was
too finicky and intrusive). She endured events—a
series of marriages interrupted by infidelities, a love
child, the perpetual scramble to make a living—that
might have left another woman cowed by scandal or
smothered in resentment. She had no time for that:
there was always another story to be told.
The boundaries of her production are hard to
establish: no one seemed to bother to keep track
of it all, least of all Fisher herself. According to the
Times obit, she published 15 books. “More than 20,”
says one of her publishers; 31, says her great admirer Reichl; 33, says Wikipedia. Fisher’s own website
says 35. Her biographer says 37, as does her official
bibliography, with a few score more appearing as
special limited editions, repackagings, and the like.
Along with them, there were God knows how many
essays—hundreds, for everyone from Ladies’ Home
Journal to Westways, a magazine published by the
Automobile Club of Southern California. And there
were travelogues, a study of folk medicine, a children’s book, many short stories, one novel (which,
despite its brilliant title, Not Now, But Now, is, by
her own admission, not very good). When asked
if she would consider publishing her journals, she
said, “No, they’re very personal.” After her death,

three volumes’ worth of entries were published:
together, they ran to more than 800 pages. A separate volume of letters added 500 more. On top of
that, there was the miserable year she spent writing
gags for Hollywood movies and a spirited and lasting translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s
19th-century classic, The Physiology of Taste, which
she considered her greatest achievement, though it
is not. Blurbs, reviews, anthologies, an M.F.K. Fisher
reader. Not just a cottage industry: an entire sector.
This is not a bibliography of unprecedented
length—John Updike, for example, published at
least twice as much—nor does it come across as
graphomania, though Fisher herself describes it as
“compulsive.” She was, on and off, a single mother,
who claimed that she never in her lifetime received
a royalty check for more than $500 and once received one for $10. She wrote for love and she wrote
for money; she wrote because she had to, because
she enjoyed it, and because, well, it was easy.
I say this carefully, and with a certain disbelief. I
don’t think I’ve ever looked deeply into an author’s
life and found so little struggle—with writing itself, I
mean. Rarely, if ever, does she
express doubt, despondency, blockage. Henry James
once wrote of Flaubert, “He
felt of his vocation almost
nothing but the difficulty.”
Fisher was quite the opposite: not joyous, perhaps, but
not the slightest bit balky
either. She seems to have
been blessed with a mixture
of confidence and modesty:
tart with those who underestimated her, and dismissive
of those who fawned. Most
essays about her include the
fact that W.H. Auden helped
elevate her status a notch or
two. “I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose,”
he said in the introduction to
a British edition of her work.
When she was reminded of
this some years later—a vivifying touch from a distant
god—she shrugged and replied, “I don’t remember. Did
he really say that? How nice.”
And yet she wrote in her
own high style, with a fully formed voice even at 29,
already regal, tough in her way, carnal, every word in
its place, every assertion steady. You can tell this was
a choice by reading her letters, which are very different: chatty, full of ellipses and exclamation points,
occasionally scatterbrained, often mischievous, and
sometimes wicked. “Please write some juicy gossip,
if any…and believe EVERYTHING YOU HEAR about
unicorns and other mythical beasts!!!!!” she wrote
to James Beard and his family. You don’t hear that
tone in her books.
“It is difficult to write about physical pleasures
without being either coarse or over-delicate, vaguely sentimental or dry and scientific,” she once wrote.
This extends to sex, which she covered the way she
covered everything else: frankly but elegantly. The
Gastronomical Me, an autobiographical volume
published in 1943, begins with an account of a
pass made by a fellow student at the girls’ boarding
school she attended as a teenager, an event that
coincided, almost too perfectly, with the first time

she tasted an oyster. It ends with the story of a
mariachi singer with a silvery voice named Juanito,
who developed a crush on Fisher’s brother during a
vacation in Mexico, gradually revealed himself to be
a Juanita and then, heartbroken, went back to male
drag. In neither case does Fisher indulge in the
usual clichés of stories like these: sensationalism,
titillation, misplaced pity, pronouncements on the
human heart. She simply tells what happened, in
calm, rhythmic, flawless prose, and then moves on.
In this she reminds me of no one so much as
Colette: she’s sensual but not decadent—and, in
fact, Colette was one of her favorites (she once
considered translating the latter’s complete works
into English). And like Colette, she’s easy to
underestimate: because it’s trivial, isn’t it, these
stories of meals and friendships and love affairs?
But they’re the objects of our deepest appetites
and greatest enjoyment. She wrote about taste,
not to scold but to celebrate. If that’s trivial, then
we’re all trivial, because our choice among pleasures is fundamental to our humanity—more so, I

PAUL FUSCO/MAGNUM PHOTOS

think, than our ethical standards or our capacity
for reason.
It may be an accident that the taste we sense with
our tongues and the taste we apprehend with our
minds have the same name, or it may be one of those
strokes of genius that are embedded in the language.
Because taste in food, taste in clothes, taste in paintings, these are all aspects of a single faculty, and so is
taste in people, in behavior, in landscapes, in belief.
The exercise of that faculty is life itself: where we
go, and with whom, what we do, and above all what
we enjoy. And this is why Fisher is more than a food
writer. What she’s after, and it shows on every page,
is not just a better meal, but a better way of being—a
eudaemonia, as the Greek philosophers called it: a
Good Life. I do believe she found it. Q

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher in the
kitchen of her home in Glen Ellen,
California, in 1982.

Jim Lewis’s latest novel is Ghosts of New York. His
interview with the late art critic Dave Hickey for
Alta Journal, Fall 2021, was a finalist in the 2022
Southern California Journalism Awards.
ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 89

FAMILY AFFAIR

By WILL HEARST

Marion Davies
on Her
Own Terms
A new biography of the famous
actress reveals her to be
far more than the mistress
of William Randolph Hearst.

I

t isn’t every day you are asked to review the
biography of your grandfather’s mistress.
Time tends to soften the intensity of
family wounds. A dutiful grandson, I’ve
always had the greatest regard for my
grandfather. As a little boy, I spent summer vacations at San Simeon, his castle in
Central California. It seemed like a marvelous
Disneyland, with sun-filled gardens, a compound on the scale of a hilltop Spanish village,
an amazing art collection, and grand architecture—which meant nothing to me then, except
that it was something impressive, extraordinary, rare; and the garden smelled very good.
I knew that my dad, one of five sons (W.R.
Jr., widely known as Bill Hearst), had reservations about Marion Davies. I came to believe,
as a young adult, that three of my uncles who
were younger than Bill had even more disdain
for her. Once you reach a certain age, if your
parents’ marriage breaks up, you are a little
more able to understand the complexities of
human relationships.
But if you are a younger child of the family,
it may feel like a terrible betrayal: of your parents by each other and, perhaps, by your parents of you. I didn’t grow up with any personal
impression of the Hearst-Davies affair; it was
an unspoken subject, until I went to see the
film Citizen Kane as a college student in the
late 1960s. The movie seemed very glamorous.
And of course, it’s a riveting, legendary motion
picture, though I thought some of the portrayals seemed overly dramatic. And Xanadu, the
movie’s castle, seemed completely wrong from
my own personal experience of San Simeon.
By my mid-20s, I had become a newspaper
reporter, and a few years later I was a magazine editor working for Jann Wenner, the
founder of Rolling Stone. I came across the
Davies memoir from 1975, The Times We Had:
Life with William Randolph Hearst. Long in
paperback, this testimony of Davies’s was sold
for many years at the Hearst Castle gift shop.

90 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

It’s not a real autobiography, more a lengthy
interview—but it was the first time I heard her
voice. Or began to understand that she, too,
was a historical person with emotions, ambitions, and, of course, frustrations, along with a
celebrated film career.
Now, finally, there is a deeply researched and
fair-minded biography of Davies’s life and movie
work: Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion
Davies, by Lara Gabrielle. In this book, Davies is
not simply the consort of a famous man—she’s a
working actress, someone with her own personality, judgments, and perspective.
Gabrielle’s work offers a look at my own
family’s mythology through the opposite end
of the telescope: from
the viewpoint of a
woman who was part
of my grandfather’s
life—but who saw
the world in different terms. Davies was
a remarkable person who should be
known for her philanthropic generosity
as much as for her
movies. But her life
story has been overshadowed until now
CAPTAIN OF HER
SOUL: THE LIFE
by the great men who
OF MARION DAVIES
ruled the earth in her
generation, industry,
• By Lara Gabrielle
and epoch.
• University of California
The author dePress, 344 pages, $34.95
serves special credit
since this was a difficult subject that she took
on with intense scholarly devotion. This biography is not merely a summer beach read but
a careful examination, a precisely drawn work,
so it’s an enormous adjunct to our understanding of Hearst and Davies’s era and the movie
business back then.
Leaving aside the opinions of the Hearst
family, Davies’s life story has been in the shadow of so much mythology.
One major overhang is the Orson Welles
penumbra—i.e., the character of Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane is a shallow
and grasping woman who has no talent as an

opera singer but has a boyfriend who can use
his newspapers to promote her career. Welles
wrote on more than one occasion that this was
one of the few regrets he had about the film.
Sadly, the Susan Alexander character has
become a substitute for the real Marion Davies. Welles felt he owed her an apology and
wrote the foreword to Davies’s memoir, which
was published posthumously. Seven years later, in 1982, he tried again to make amends for
the conflation of Alexander with Davies: “It
seemed to me to be something of a dirty trick
and still strikes me as something of a dirty
trick, what we did to her.”
As a film viewer, I always thought this was just
one of the things that happen when you’re making a movie as opposed to writing history—so
I admired Gabrielle’s effort to excavate the real
Davies. It was a project facing a stiff headwind.
Another difficulty is the Hearst Castle tour
guide problem—for almost 60 years, the standard spiel has tended to present some hybrid
People magazine version of Susan Alexander.
The tired tourist is fed a hackneyed but lurid tale of extramarital adventures and lavish
costume parties by the Neptune Pool. This
version of Davies as a kind of party girl with no
actual career of her own is another obstacle of
mythology—a simpler, faster, easier snapshot
to remember—and it corresponds to the dated
pop culture view of actresses behaving badly
with wealthy men.
Finally, the W.A. Swanberg biography Citizen Hearst—still sold at the castle gift shop—
has become the de facto official version of my
grandfather’s story, and it is also a scholarly
work. Yet its treatment of Davies as yet another
shiny object in Hearst’s life distracts from her
real nature. So bravo to Gabrielle.
However you read the life of Hearst and the
movie career of Davies, you’d be challenged
to not notice that this was a great love affair. On numerous occasions, my grandfather
sought a divorce, but in that era, a wife could
obstruct the dissolution of a marriage. My
grandmother, Millicent, wanted no part of it. I
believe my grandfather was reluctant to either
make false accusations or engage in a lengthy,
hurtful, and public legal battle.
His view was that his life with Davies was
happier than his life with my grandmother,
which had become unhappy and filled with
quarrels. It wasn’t the first time an unfaithful
husband found himself at odds with his wife.
As Gabrielle writes, my grandfather thought it
was better to avoid an acrimonious divorce; he
could simply spend his time with the woman
he truly loved.
One could launch a thousand objections to
their set of choices. One might wonder why
Davies accepted the arrangement. She did not
inherit a great fortune from my grandfather or
seek control of his assets. So one should eliminate financial gain as the reason she persisted
in a three-decades-long relationship with a
man who was unable to remarry.
But that’s what happened. So we must ask:
Why did the relationship work; what was in it

PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES

Marion Davies and William
Randolph Hearst in Bad
Nauheim, Germany. Davies’s
pet dachshund peeks his
nose out from her coat.

for both of them? How did they end up feeling
at the end of their time together? Those are
more difficult and dark questions than anything in Citizen Kane, and Gabrielle has done
a wonderful job of presenting the raw facts. It’s
a story told from Davies’s point of view, one
that ends with my grandfather passing from
this earth in 1951 (he was 34 years older than
her) and Davies having yet another life with
another man soon after.
As well as being a detailed biography of Davies’s film career, this is a profile that does not
lend itself to easy, moral, or psychoanalytic answers. But if the various possibilities of human
relationship interest you, this book will take
you to a rare corner of love—and life in an era
not so distant from our own.
Marion and W.R. (as they are called in the
book) were deeply in love. They were not perfect
people, but they stayed together longer than
many married couples, without any legal sanction. I fear that the end of my grandfather’s life
was filled with sadness for him and for Marion,
but I would not presume that they had many
regrets about the years they’d spent together.
Readers who expect juicy tidbits about the
fabled 32-year romance of Marion and W.R.
may be disappointed. Captain of Her Soul
is a university-press publication, with pages
of footnotes and an extensive bibliography. I
can see why Gabrielle’s book didn’t attract a
traditional New York publisher; it reveals the
real story of Marion. The photos chosen for the
book follow the narrative and bring vivid documentary imagery to the story. One arresting
photograph shows an elderly Marion on the
presidential inaugural platform, a few chairs
back from John F. Kennedy as he takes the
oath of office in 1961.
In a sense, Gabrielle’s book is two stories interwoven seamlessly. One thread is a detailed
narrative, told chronologically, of a genuine
romance. Much as with Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage
of the Century, the reader follows the couple’s
movements, and experiences, almost day by
day. But Marion and W.R. had a less tumultuous affair than Liz and Dick, bordering on the
domestic.
The other thread is an equally detailed
narrative of the motion picture industry, in the
same time frame: from the silents of the 1910s
through the talkies of the ’20s and on up to the
1960s. Historians of U.S. film will find this side
of the story—as seen through the eyes of Marion, W.R., and a vast array of friends, writers,
celebrities, press agents, and actors—to be a
kind of oral history of the era, including how
films were cast, produced, and financed. Gabrielle’s appendix lists 49 movies in which Davies appeared as a billed actress. So one can’t
discount her career as a working actress and
as a professional woman with her own income.
Gabrielle steers away from salacious detail,
but if you are a fan of three-dot names, your
reading will be richly rewarded. The text is
filled with celebrities and other talents of the
era: Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Louis B.
Mayer, George Bernard Shaw, Frances Marion,
Hedda Hopper, to name just a handful who
appear regularly at lavish parties at the pair’s
Santa Monica and San Simeon residences.
Many of them are both friends and colleagues
of their hosts. There is even a cameo by Adolph

92 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

CLARENCE SINCLAIR BULL

COURTESY OF THE ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES

Clockwise from top left:
Davies’s last public appearance, at the inauguration of
John F. Kennedy in January
1961. She is circled, top left;
Davies eyes the microphone
before her radio debut with
Gary Cooper and Ted Healy in
a production of Operator 13
(1934); after Hearst’s death,
Davies married Horace Brown;
Davies in a scene from Zander
the Great (1925); Davies with
her beloved dachshund at San
Simeon.

Hitler. Marion had become aware of the treatment of Jews in his emerging regime. She
and others urged W.R. to meet Hitler and to
express alarm about what they were hearing.
On the couple’s next European trip, he met
with the German leader, who denied any such
behavior. W.R. left with suspicions about the
Führer’s honesty and character. “W.R. was not
impressed by him,” Marion recalled.
Despite the enormous fun, travels, and energy of their years together, Gabrielle portrays
them as living under a shadow of sadness. W.R.
would fret over Marion’s “flirtatious nature.” Yet
Marion had no temptation to wander, saying,
“I had no intentions of ever getting married to
anybody, because he knew I was in love with
him.” Nevertheless, she clearly would have preferred marriage, and very quickly after W.R.’s
death, she accepted a proposal from Horace
Brown, a close friend of theirs.
During their time together, W.R. experienced disappointments of his own. Gabrielle
writes that he very much aspired to be a toptier movie producer but fell considerably short
of that ambition. With their age difference, it
was likely that he would die years before his
lover, so some of the satisfactions of a long,
happy marriage were denied them both.
Gabrielle’s book left me admiring just how
deep their love must have been, so I asked the
author whether she felt their romance was truly heartfelt. She wrote me back:
Over the years, I’ve come to see the genuineness of their relationship as axiomatic.…
Marion was never bound to him in any
way. She had nothing forcing her to stay,
she had her own money, her own livelihood,
there was nothing keeping her but the love
she had for him. She could have left at any
time, but never did. She said on her autobiographical tapes “I had plenty of opportunities to get married. But how can you marry
when you’re in love with someone else?”
At the end of W.R.’s life, Marion cared for
him and comforted him. She commissioned a
portrait of him as an infant with his mother for
his final birthday. On his end, there were the
little notes that he wrote her and slipped under
her bedroom door every night. Of these tender
instances, Gabrielle wrote me, “If we couldn’t
tell it was genuine before, that seals the deal,
I think.”
After W.R. passed, Marion was not invited
to the funeral, which was held in San Francisco.
She gathered with friends in Los Angeles, and
as the memorial service got underway, Marion
sat on a shag rug and recited the Lord’s Prayer.
In the final analysis, Gabrielle, like a detective or an archaeologist, has reconstructed
a life history and made a convincing case,
contrary to the prevailing cliché, that Marion
was a complex, happy, and talented actress—
and that whatever sorrow darkened her days,
her love affair with W.R. Hearst was genuine,
long-lasting, and intensely satisfying.
If either had wanted to escape, it would
have been much easier than a divorce. Their
loyalty, and candid expressions of affection, are
enduring proof of an intense romance. Q

LOS ANGELES EXAMINER, DOHENY MEMORIAL LIBRARY

COURTESY OF MARION LAKE CANESSA

Will Hearst is Alta Journal’s editor and publisher.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 93

BY THE BOOK

By DAVID L. ULIN • Illustrations by STEVE CARROLL

The Dark
Season
John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas
is an epic of displacement.

I

n the middle of a dark season, I flew to
Las Vegas to participate in a book festival.
It was a Saturday in late October, and I
was on the 7 a.m. flight out of LAX. The
plane was full of Philadelphia Eagles fans,
en route to see their team play the Raiders at the arena a Las Vegas writer of my
acquaintance has taken to calling the Boondoggle Dome. The actual name is Allegiant
Stadium: I saw it, looking like an enormous
Kodak Instamatic Flashcube after all the bulbs
had burned out, as my taxi pressed north on
I-15. Across the freeway stood the Mandalay
Bay, where four years earlier, in the autumn
of 2017, the deadliest mass shooting in United
States history had occurred. At the beginning
of 2017, I’d spent four months in Las Vegas on
a fellowship, and this was the freeway exit I
had used. Tropicana east to Maryland, then a
few blocks north to the subdivision where I’d
rented a small unit in a triplex on Elizabeth
Avenue, around the corner from the Crown &
Anchor British Pub. I remembered watching
coverage of the shooting from my home in
Los Angeles and feeling something not unlike
proximity. How many times had I been right
there? All the same, I understood that this was
just a story I was telling, that I was no closer
to the tragedy than anyone else. I hadn’t been
present, and if I knew the ground, the territory,
so did every tourist who had ever visited the
Strip. The Mandalay was gold with smoked
glass; it had a saltwater aquarium and a pool
with a wave machine. Were I looking for a metaphor, this might add up to one, although if
Las Vegas had taught me anything, it was that
metaphor could never be enough.
When I use the phrase “dark season,” I’m
borrowing from John Gregory Dunne, who
employed it in the subtitle of his 1974 book,
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which has
long been out of print. Prior to Vegas, Dunne
had been a journalist at Time and a freelance
columnist and screenwriter. He had published

two books: Delano (1967), an account of Cesar
Chavez and the California grape strike, and
The Studio (1969), for which 20th Century Fox
had given him a year of unrestricted access, to
its eventual chagrin. Each involved its own sort
of immersion, which was also the case with Vegas, albeit on somewhat different terms.
For Delano, Dunne, assisted by his wife,
Joan Didion, did extensive on-the-ground reporting. (The book grew out of a piece he had
written for the Saturday Evening Post.) With
The Studio, he functioned as with a heightened
fly-on-the-wall point of view. It’s a strategy we
associate with New Journalism, although that’s
something of a misnomer for what Dunne
was doing. Perhaps more so than Didion, who
distrusted narrative as much as she recognized
its necessity, Dunne was a storyteller; just look
at his novels True Confessions
(1977), Dutch Shea, Jr. (1982),
and The Red White and Blue
(1987). Vegas, however, refuses to be so straightforward.
Here more than in any of his
other books—including Harp
(1989), which comes billed as
a set of “autobiographical examinations”—Dunne turns the
lens inward, not on the facts of
his existence so much as on the
feeling, his sense of distance
and disentanglement.
“My wife says I am clinically
detached,” he writes early in
the book.
My wife would not say the
same, but in a lot of other ways
the experiences—the displacement—Dunne evokes in Vegas remained resonant for me. “In the summer of my nervous
breakdown,” he begins, “I went to live in Las
Vegas, Clark County, Nevada. It had been a bad
spring, it had been a bad winter, it had been a
bad year.” I read those lines a few weeks before
leaving for the book festival, in an Airbnb just
north of Hamilton High School in Los Angeles,
around the corner from a house my wife and I
had once tried to buy. We were there because

we’d been forced out of our home by a burst
pipe and a flooded bathroom. It had been a
bad year for me as well: Not only the bathroom
but also issues with my parents, who were aging and needed more help than I knew how to
give. My daughter had graduated from college
and moved across the country. The coronavirus kept mutating, and we had returned to
some strange state of semi-lockdown, riding
out the Delta surge. We left our house so quickly, my wife and I—just for a few days, we believed…until the bathroom was stripped to the
studs—that we did not recognize the severity
of what was happening. Then the days turned
into weeks, and the weeks turned into months.
The opening lines of Vegas echo something
Didion had written a couple of years earlier,
in her essay “In the Islands”: “We are here on
this island in the middle of
the Pacific,” she reports from
the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in
Honolulu, “in lieu of filing
for divorce.” The resonance, I
imagine, is not unintentional. Vegas, after all, tells the
story of another marital disruption, during which Dunne
decamped to a dumpy apartment complex called the Royal Polynesian, on Desert Inn
Road. Royal Hawaiian, Royal
Polynesian…it’s a nifty bit of
doubling, although there the
similarities end. I’ve been to
the Royal Hawaiian, wandered
its long and stately corridors,
watched the sun set over the
ocean at the beachfront bar
while drinking Kona Longboard Island Lagers. I have also been if not to the Royal
Polynesian then to many places like it—“in
each unit,” Dunne reports, “there was a blackand-white television set, a hot plate, a plastic
dinner service for two and two peanut butter
jars reincarnated as water glasses.” The uniformity, and the transience, remind me of the
now-shuttered Red Roof Inn about a mile from
the Strip where I once spent the night, or even

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 95

my old place on Elizabeth Avenue. They’re all
similarly rootless, similarly anonymous.
That, of course, is the idea; Dunne was in
Las Vegas not to be found but to get lost. “The
question,” he observes, “was where to go to find
that perfect place where one could look for salvation without commitment. And then one day
I was driving on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood
and saw a new billboard high atop the office
of a credit dentist. On a brown field there was
a picture of an enormous roulette wheel and
a gold-lettered legend that said simply, with a
Delphic absence of apostrophe: VISIT LAS VEGAS
BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP.”
Dunne is trafficking in cliché here: Las
Vegas as illusion, or escape. What happens
in Vegas stays in Vegas, a slogan I have long
resisted, both for how it reduces the city to a
catchphrase and because nothing ever remains
so contained. “That was the year,” Didion
suggests in “Goodbye to All That,” her 1967
essay about leaving New York, “…when I was
discovering that not all of the promises would
be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable
and that it had counted after all, every evasion
and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” This is one of the essential
tensions of Vegas also, despite—or possibly
because of—the fact that the book is, or may
be, broadly fictionalized. “What you have read,”
Dunne acknowledges on the final page, “is a
myelogram of six months of my life. I can offer
no guarantee that everything you read actually
happened, only that insofar as it was perceived
by my fractured sensors it was true.”
What is Vegas, then, if not an autofiction?
What is it if not a self-constructed myth? What
is it if not (to frame it in more contemporaneous terms) a fictional memoir in the vein
of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, an impressionistic narrative unbound by the journalistic
strictures, new or otherwise, of Delano or The
Studio? The same could be said of all art or
literature, which we create out of the questions
we can’t settle, the conflicts we can’t resolve.
I was interested in Vegas for all these reasons.
I was interested because it was a lost book. To
get a copy, I’d had to order from a used bookseller in England. It had cost me 90 bucks. The
volume, paperback with a dust jacket, smelled
like ancient wood pulp. The edges of its pages
were stained and brown. The cover featured an
image of a slot machine, bars aligned to reveal
a woman, nude. It was an artifact from another time. During the flight, I kept the book flat
in my lap, to hide that picture. I hid my face
behind an N95. I kept thinking about those
elements—the cover, the mask—as emblematic, two very different sides of a coin. Once,
the louche aspect of the photo might have
played as daring, transgressive even, a swipe
at puritan pieties. Now, it was the opposite:
a tawdry reminder of retrogressive attitudes.
Someday, the mask I wore might appear similarly outmoded, although I couldn’t imagine
ever flying unmasked again. Together, they
were points on a line from past to present, with
the future, as always, a question mark. That
was what this fall, this dark season, had reaffirmed, beginning with our displacement, the
necessity of leaving home for first one Airbnb
and then another, no end to our expulsion in
sight. There was nothing you could count on,
nothing that couldn’t dissipate in some unan-

96 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

ticipated way. Seventeen years, my wife and I
had lived in our place. We’d raised our children
there. Now, time and location had unraveled.
We couldn’t say when we’d return.
Flying to Las Vegas felt similarly fraught,
surrounded, at seven in the morning, by football fans already half in the bag. Behind my
mask, I kept my distance. I kept my distance
in the airport, too. As I moved through the terminal to the cab line, I could hear the bells and
chirrups of the slot machines. I recalled another flight, during the months of my fellowship,
from this airport to Austin, getting up at four
in the morning in the high desert darkness for
a six o’clock departure. That morning, too, the
slots had kept ringing. People were drinking
as they played. Had they been up all night?
Anything to keep the party going. Anything to
keep the fantasy intact. What happens in Vegas
stays in Vegas. Airport as casino, difficult to
find a clock or a window, a microcosm of the
city’s most prevailing clichés.
The book festival, it should go without
saying, was not a prevailing cliché of the city.
For me, that was part of the appeal. It took
place at the Historic Fifth Street School, a
Depression-era mission revival compound that
had been redeveloped as an arts complex. I’d

“In the summer of my
nervous breakdown,
I went to live in Las
Vegas, Clark County,
Nevada. It had been a
bad spring, it had been
a bad winter, it had
been a bad year.”
attended in 2019, driving in from Los Angeles.
That had been my plan this time as well, until
my disenchantment led me to rethink. I didn’t
want to spend four hours in the car each way. I
didn’t want to have to stay overnight. I wanted
to get in and out, nice and clean, like a scalpel
or a thief in the night. This would be my first
in-person event in a year and a half, and I
wasn’t sure I wanted to be here, although I was
trying to prove something to myself. Amid the
disruption and the instability, I felt…what?…
the need to find a way back to routine. Our
home was a construction site. Either my wife
or I drove over every morning, to let in workers
and pick up mail. The bathroom remained undone. The landlord had taken the opportunity
to do other upgrades to the building: bolting
the structure to the foundation, revamping the
heat and the electrical. Three weeks earlier,
while tented for termites, our house had been
burglarized. The perpetrators had stolen a set
of silver flatware bequeathed to my wife by her
grandmother and a watch that had belonged to
my father-in-law; they’d left a pair of sneakers
and two partially consumed cans of Diet Coke.
In her 1990 story “Health,” Joy Williams imag-

ines a family coming home after a fumigation
to discover a burglar lying dead in their living
room. It is no exaggeration when I tell you that
I regret we didn’t come upon the same.
What’s that I was saying about a thief in the
night?
Three weeks later, my anger still felt like
whiplash. It kept me awake. I was angry at
the burglars and the extermination company.
I was angry because no one had known to pay
extra for security. “It’s probably an inside job,”
the investigating officer told me, writing his
report at the dining room table, mask below
his nose. A lot of tented houses, he went on,
were burgled; it was something of a cottage
industry. I handed him the sneakers and the
soda cans as evidence, but we never heard from
the police again.
At the festival, I sat at a table in the outdoor author reception area, sipping a cup of
coffee. A dozen or so feet away, a family of
musicians rehearsed. Two men who looked
like brothers played jarana and requinto; a
drummer kept the beat. The singer and one
of the siblings were partners, I soon realized.
An abuela looked after their two daughters, a
toddler and a slightly older girl in a pink dress
and a flowered headpiece. As I watched, the
band worked through a number, while the kids
darted back and forth. At one point, the singer
picked up her younger child and danced with
her as she sang. The players repeated a figure,
and then again, practicing a rhythmic break.
I preferred this to the polish of performance,
music starting and stopping, shifting tempo,
the missed notes, the collaboration on the fly.
The singer had on green pants, and after a bit,
she spoke up: “Showtime. We gotta go.” She
lifted the toddler again, and the group moved
out into the plaza, leaving me alone. Their seriousness, their spirit on a Saturday morning
in Las Vegas, stood in contrast to the airport.
Together, the scenes added up to something
more defining than either one alone. It was
Dave Hickey’s democratic demotic: “As Americans,” he had written nearly 30 years earlier
in The Invisible Dragon, “we are citizens of a
large, secular, commercial democracy; we are
relentlessly borne forth on the flux of historical
change, routinely flung laterally by the exigencies of dreams and commerce.… As such, we
are social creatures charged with inventing
the conditions of our own sociability out of the
fragile resource of our private pleasures and secret desires.” A collage culture, in other words,
which was what Las Vegas represented. A city
barely a century old, built on the residue of a
collective dreamscape. I had often wondered,
during the four months I had spent here, what
an archaeologist or an extraterrestrial visitor
10,000 years in the future would make of the
postmodern mash-up of the city, the scaleddown Tour Eiffel and Empire State Building,
the gondolas in the ersatz Venetian canals.
Hickey was a signature voice of Las Vegas;
I was at this festival to discuss his work. But
Dunne had observed a similar dynamic. “The
side of the road out there,” he writes, describing
an excursion to the end of West Sahara Boulevard, “…resembled the trail of an army in full
retreat. Carcasses of cars, refrigerators, propane heaters, furniture with the stuffing ripped
out.… Tires, old radios, television sets with
no picture tubes, stoves, washing machines,

bicycles, ironing boards, supermarket carts,
air-conditioning units. Why here?… I could
not find an answer, but today, years later, that
stretch of highway out on the edge of the desert seems a more vivid image of Vegas than
the lights of the Strip that even then were
struggling against the summer twilight.” Do I
need to say I felt the same about the glitz and
glitter? Do I need to say I felt the same about
the Strip? Over the course of my fellowship, I
had visited it only twice—both times for dinner
with friends from out of town.
For Dunne, what he discovers along the
fringes of the city represents the detritus of
a disposable society. The gleaming surfaces
obscure more than they reveal. To his credit,
the author understands that; he builds much
of Vegas around a trio of characters: a stand-up
named Jackie Kasey, who once went on tour
with Elvis; Artha, a prostitute taking classes at
a local beauty college; and the private investigator Buster Mano, who runs surveillance on
missing husbands, an irony of which the author is not unaware. The intention is to portray
these individuals as representative. And yet,
this gets complicated because none of the three
existed in real life. What does it mean, then? I
think again of Dunne’s assessment of his book
as a myelogram, literature as Rorschach test, in
which the facts may or may not have anything
to do with the truth.
What is truth anyway, especially in a city
such as Las Vegas? It’s a question that occupies
the center of the book.
In places, Dunne’s explorations can veer
into male posturing, licentiousness as liberation or something like that. He spends too
much time on the dynamics of sex, or at least
its possibilities; he introduces Artha with a
paragraph-long list of statistics: “She had
turned 1,203 tricks with 1,076 johns,” it begins.
The specificity of the numbers (and, later, of
the acts) reveals their artifice. Contrast that
with what I think of as the book’s “truest” sequence, even though it emerges from similarly
conditional terrain. Late in the narrative, Jackie tries to set Dunne up with a younger woman.
The narrator remains, as he has throughout,
ambivalent. Seeking clarity—or perhaps permission—he calls his wife in Los Angeles.
“It’s research,” she reassures him. “It’s a type,
the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t
meet her.”
When Dunne responds that he doesn’t want
to meet her, “there was a long silence at the
other end of the telephone. ‘Well, that can be
part of the story, too,’ she said.”
His wife is right, although this is part of
her persona: cool, dispassionate. At the same
time, the passage functions as a kind of parody.
Dunne makes that explicit in the way he sets
it up. “She said that she was lonely and depressed,” he tells us. “The septic tank had overflowed. There was a crash pad next door and
one of the couples had taken to boffing on the
grass in clear view of our daughter’s bedroom
window. The wind was blowing and there were
fires at Point Dume. The maid had quit, the
fire insurance had been canceled and the engine in the Corvette had seized on the Ventura
Freeway.” The Corvette, of course, is the one
from those Julian Wasser photos of Didion.
The rest of the passage reads like a pastiche of

her essays, not least “Los Angeles Notebook”:
“The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a
waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over
to whatever it is in the air.” There’s an intimacy
to Dunne’s portrayal, or at least I want to think
that’s what it is.
There’s also a lot of rage.
Considering it now, I have to wonder: Is
this why Vegas has been out of print for nearly
50 years?
“Time took on a kind of pattern,” Dunne
writes of Las Vegas. “For days on end I did not
leave the apartment.” I know exactly what he
means. The months I’d spent in the city were
another season of displacement, during which
I often felt nothing so much as lost. I drove
back and forth from Nevada to Los Angeles.
When I was in one place, it was as if the other had ceased to exist. I wrote and read and
walked for miles along empty sidewalks dusted
white with alkali. I explored, as Dunne had, the
edges where the boulevards blurred into the
surrounding desert, where Las Vegas dissolved
into where it was going, what it was. One
weekend, I went to Red Rock Canyon. Another, I hiked Sloan Canyon, where hundreds of
petroglyphs dot rock faces, messages inscribed
in a language no one can any longer under-

What is truth anyway,
especially in a city such
as Las Vegas? It’s a
question that occupies
the center of the book.
stand. That this will happen to us is inevitable;
languages, like people, die. One day, these
words will be petroglyphs, if they survive that
long; the archaeologist or the extraterrestrial
may gaze at this sentence without realizing it’s
addressed to them.
One day, in other words, everything I’m
writing—not unlike Dunne’s book—will effectively disappear.
And yet, if that is the weight, perhaps it is
the counterweight as well. At Red Rock Canyon, I climbed a rising trail before a cliff face,
marveling at the color of the stone. The name
Las Vegas means “the meadows”; it describes
the oasis that first drew travelers to stop here,
on the way from California to Salt Lake. These
canyons are the only landscapes here from
which the Strip is invisible. Then you leave or
turn a corner, and it reappears. Both weekends,
after I had finished hiking, I found myself at
one of Las Vegas’s ubiquitous shopping centers,
eating lunch in a chain restaurant: sandwich
and a cup of coffee, maybe a beer. Afterward, I
went back to my little apartment near the university, made plans for the evening: sushi at a
place in Chinatown where I went so frequently
that the chef had come to know me. But that
had been another decade, another lifetime. He
wouldn’t know me anymore.
After my festival panel was over, I set

off on another kind of walk, first from the
Fifth Street School north to Fremont Street,
then east to Maryland, past the Container
Park, with its enormous mechanical praying
mantis, and Atomic Liquors, where I had
once liked to drink. In part, I was tracking
landmarks. In part, I was killing time. My
flight back to Los Angeles wasn’t until late afternoon, and there was nowhere I had to be.
From Fremont, I doubled back to Las Vegas
Boulevard and undertook a long and meandering arc south. This was the Strip, although
not yet; here, north of the Stratosphere and
the unfinished Fontainebleau—a 68-story casino that had still not opened nearly 15 years
after breaking ground—I saw gun shops
and wedding chapels and sex stores and
cannabis dispensaries. In the distance, the
surreal projections of the Bellagio, the Aria,
the Cosmopolitan, and Caesars Palace shone
weakly beneath the raw brightness of the sky.
“The summer heat burned into the cortex of
the brain,” Dunne writes. “It was something
tangible, hallucinogenic, dipping under a
hundred degrees only after midnight, so hot
outside that a heat headache seemed a permanent, terminal condition.” Summer had
long since ended, but the effect was much the
same. It felt like I was walking my way out of
Las Vegas. Or walking Las Vegas out of me.
On the Strip, the sidewalks filled with revelers and street hawkers and tourists, women
dressed as showgirls posing for photographs,
and always, always, Eagles fans in town for
the game. No one was masked, but that was
not my issue. I felt invisible behind my N95.
Even in the middle of the action, I was on
the outside. Like Dunne, I understood, as I
always had, that this was not my place.
Eventually, I made it to the taxi line at the
MGM Grand, not far from my old neighborhood. I could see the planes take off in the
near distance, next to the Luxor pyramid. At
the airport, I waited for my flight to be called,
reading Vegas. On the terminal sound system,
Sheryl Crow’s “Leaving Las Vegas” played on
what felt like repeat. It had been the last song
I’d heard driving out of the city after my fellowship. Dunne, too, had left Las Vegas. He had
lived and written and remained in his marriage
for three decades before he died, in 2003, at 71,
sitting at the dinner table with his wife.
I suppose that’s as good a way to go as any
other, although I don’t think like that. Between
death and life, it’s not a question. Or maybe
survival is a better word. “I can only say it
was a bad season and then it was over,” Dunne
writes. And: “It has been two years now since
I last was in Las Vegas, and the things I remember about it have nothing to do with why
I went, and less with why I left.”
My own bad season continued through November, December, and into January. My son’s
best friend was killed in a hit-and-run in Texas.
My wife broke her elbow and needed surgery.
For a time, it felt as if the universe were aligned
against us, but that, too, I understood, was
mere projection, another failed metaphor. The
universe is not capricious; it is indifferent.
It does not care about our fate. All we could
do was wait it out, live through this, until, as
Dunne had, we found a passage home. Q
David L. Ulin is Alta Journal’s books editor.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 99

REINVENTION

By HUNTER DROHOJOWSKA-PHILP

The

REAL WORLDS
of
H
T
I
M
S
S
ALEXI

H

ollywood is a city of reinvention, and it’s not just actors
who change their names and origin stories. Artist Alexis
Smith, née Patricia Anne Smith of Norwalk, California,
assumed the spangly pseudonym of the 1940s movie star
when she was 17.
It was an innocent, even humorous, choice but one
that foregrounded the direction of both her life and
her art. “I think when you change your name…it’s a big statement to
yourself that you want to be somebody else,” Smith once told me. “Ultimately, I think that’s what mine was.”
Certainly, the act of changing her name freed Smith to invent visual
stories, mining fresh meaning from old movies, books, and oddments
of pop culture. Throughout her 50-year career of making collages, she
has borrowed broadly from swap meet–sourced tableaux, texts, and
theatrical installations. “My artwork is about the real world rather than
the world of art,” she previously said to me. “It’s about tracing familiar
underlying memories, stories and myths that make up our culture.”
In many ways, Smith relies on the slippery nature of memory, a
theme so widespread in literature, to seduce her audience. She has often used the writings of Thomas Mann, Jack Kerouac, and Raymond
Chandler, but in a context of her own making. And now, over the
past decade, her brain has been ravaged by Alzheimer’s. Living in a
Craftsman-style cottage in Venice, with her husband of 34 years, artist Scott Grieger, she can no longer form sentences when speaking.
Against this backdrop, the arrival of Alexis Smith: The American Way at the recently reopened La Jolla site of the Museum of
Contemporary Art San Diego is fortuitous, if not poignant. Smith’s
conceptually oriented art has been shown widely, but not since
her 1991 retrospective at the Whitney has there been an opportunity to see a complete overview of her work. MCASD owns 11
pieces by the artist, some of which are among the 50 brought
together for the occasion. There are also two large public works in
the Stuart Collection on the nearby UC San Diego campus. The show
went up on September 15—three weeks after Smith’s 73rd birthday—
and runs through February 5, 2023.

INVENTING A MEDIUM

A retrospective at the Museum
of Contemporary Art
San Diego provides the first
chance in 30 years to see
an overview of this seminal
California artist’s collages.

JOSHUA WHITE

Alexis Smith’s conceptually oriented art often subverts themes of popular
culture and literature. Opposite page: Smith’s wall painting Men Seldom Make
Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses (1985).

Smith and I became friends and neighbors in the close-knit art
scene of early-1980s Venice. I wrote reviews, essays, and articles
© ALEXIS SMITH; COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 101

Smith’s mural Same Old Paradise (1987) is on display on the UC San Diego
campus. Below: Your Name Here (1975).

102 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

about her work, particularly attracted to the ways she drew on collective memory, before I sensed the early signs of her dementia. Her
comments in this story are of necessity in the past, things she told
me, often for other publications, around the time when the works in
question were created. In that way, this story itself is something of a
collage—her preferred medium.
Smith’s art evolved from an unconventional upbringing in a postwar Southern California still redolent of orange groves. Her father
was both a psychiatrist and a superintendent at Metropolitan State
Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Norwalk, and the family lived on
the manicured grounds. Her father was 43 when she was born and
ill-equipped to be a single parent when her mother died of
cancer 11 years later. “I think that it was a huge accidental
boon that I was raised by my father, because he didn’t
know how to raise me as a girl,” she said. “I think it made
me more brave and ambitious.”
Having moved to nearby Whittier for junior high and high
school, Smith had modest expectations of becoming a French
teacher when she enrolled at UC Irvine in 1966, what she
called “a fateful non-decision.” By happy accident, she
discovered the Art Department, where her adolescent
hobby of making collages of words and pictures was considered a form of art. “As soon as I fell into the art world, I
ceased to exist in a vacuum,” she said. The newly developed
program had a radical faculty, including artists Robert Irwin and
Vija Celmins, and a flexible curriculum. “They gave me permission.
They gave me encouragement,” she said.
Irwin, a founder of the Light and Space movement, recalled,
“Most students think they are going to learn to manipulate an existing medium. They don’t realize that if they have an interesting
sensibility, they’re going to have to invent a medium.” For Smith,
that medium began after college as hand-typed texts combined with
photos or symbols that were presented as manuscripts to be read.
For Clues and Souvenirs (1971), she typed out the plot of a
Perry Mason episode but added a hand-drawn copy of a Dick
Tracy comic and a Philip Marlowe quote that only frustrate
solving the mystery.
As art, such works were viewed as a continuation of
Southern California’s often irreverent 1960s conceptual art
movement, especially as exemplified by artists using language, like Ed
Ruscha or John Baldessari. “I don’t think that I’m specifically interested in Southern California, but I’m a product of it. The place in my
work is not so much here but everywhere,” Smith said.
© ALEXIS SMITH; COURTESY OF GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

NOW OPEN: THE BIG ORANGE

S
© ALEXIS SMITH; COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO

IN THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR
As the 1970s art world was being redefined by the women’s movement, Smith attended consciousness-raising groups, and her collages
increasingly included stories about women who are torn between the
demands of love and life, especially career. For example, the text of The
Red Shoes (1975) is typed onto pink paper with added sequins and a
color image of Alexis Smith, her actor namesake, dancing as fast as she
can. That same year, the artist commissioned Your Name Here (1975),
her own director’s chair with the name Alexis Smith on the backrest,
wickedly taking charge of the stories she was retelling.
Graduate school for Smith consisted of working for Frank Gehry in
the mid-1970s as his “Girl Friday.” Being in what was then a modest architectural office helped her learn how to work with others, facilitating
technical challenges from fabrication to lettering.
“It had the most important influence of all…which is that they told
people they would build things they had no idea how to build. None,
zero, right?” she said with a laugh. “The secret is to say you can do it,
even if you don’t know how to do it. Right? That’s like the magic key.”
That key opened a door for Smith, and she dramatically increased
the scale of her art. Her breakthrough installation, re-created for the
MCASD retrospective, was Raymond Chandler’s L.A., shown in 1980
at Los Angeles’s Rosamund Felsen Gallery.
A bale of actual hay signified the rural past. Gallery walls were
stenciled with the 1940s L.A. skyline and neon signs that promised
adventure. It was the journey of the aspiring starlet or the hopeful hustler, characters often doomed to tragic endings in Chandler’s dark and
droll novels. Smith’s black-sandpaper collages referred to the passing
highway. She added the evocative text of a chapter from his 1949 novel,
The Little Sister, which includes this passage: “I smelled Los Angeles
before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that has
been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were
wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented
neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really
made something out of nothing.”
“Hollywood is a fantasy place that has a real locale—here, L.A., where
I live. It’s also a place of the imagination.… It’s the quintessential American transformation myth—a nobody one day, and a somebody the next,”
Smith explained to Richard Armstrong, then a curator at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, for her retrospective there three decades ago.
In the ’80s, the idea of appropriation was a critical sensation, and a
generation of women—Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer—

outhern California’s reputation as a rich center for contemporary art gets a boost this October with the opening of the
Orange County Museum of Art at the Segerstrom Center for
the Arts in Costa Mesa. Pritzker award–winning architect Thom
Mayne’s gleaming, multilevel structure includes a park, a lightfilled atrium and galleries, and impressive stairs similar to
those at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mayne
has called them “a social conduit,” saying, “We were interested in developing a very urban idea in a suburban environment.” The 53,000-square-foot
building replaces what was previously known as the Newport Harbor Art
Museum, shuttered in 2018.
Director and CEO Heidi Zuckerman, who was appointed in January 2021 and
is highly respected for her former role as director of the Aspen Art Museum,
nods to local history with her opening show, 13 Women, a multigenerational
presentation of art from the permanent collection that includes Vija Celmins,
Mary Corse, and Mary Heilmann. The artists will rotate in over the course of
the year and will also include Alexis Smith. The show title’s number 13 refers
to the women who in 1962 founded the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, the precursor
to both the Newport Harbor Art Museum and OCMA. That first venue had a
reputation for cutting-edge shows, including the early work of multimedia
artist Chris Burden, who spent some time as the gallery’s preparator. Zuckerman says, “My overall mission and vision for the institution is to look back
to move forward. It wouldn’t be appropriate to open this building—60 years
to the year that we first opened—without acknowledging the 13 visionary
women who started the museum.”
OCMA is dedicating another show to Fred Eversley, an artist whose
minimalist resin sculptures made him a force within Southern California’s
Light and Space movement. A monumental sculpture by Sanford Biggers was
commissioned for the plaza and will be unveiled at the museum’s opening.
In addition, the museum is bringing back its predecessor’s popular California Biennial, with works selected by Elizabeth Armstrong, an organizer of
three earlier biennials, with Gilbert Vicario and Essence Harden. Zuckerman
notes that the museum first hosted a biennial in 1984: “It was really important to me that when we open this big, beautiful, new building, we have these
kind of markers of our history.”
Zuckerman says her personal goal is for museums to be for everyone.
This includes OCMA, where she scored a victory by securing, through sponsorship, free admission for its first decade. Q
—H.D.-P.

DUSTIN SNIPES

Heidi Zuckerman, director and CEO of the Orange County Museum of Art.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 103

© ALEXIS SMITH; COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO

The Girl Can’t Help It (1985).
were seen as critiquing the ways photographs and language represented
hierarchy and power. While Smith’s art came from a similar perception,
she was using actual stuff of the past to make her point. “I think I’m too
sentimental and connected to people’s real passionate experience of life
to be very interested in deconstruction,” she told Armstrong.
Her studio encompassed Southern California swap meets and thrift
stores, a rich trove of common history, from books and posters to
household kitsch. “I’m someone who starts out in fine art and thinks
it’s not as vital as the real world,” she said. “So I came up with a fine art
that has the vitality of the real world.”
Smith targeted the thorny issue of the ways women have been represented in fiction and film in her standout 1985 show Jane at Margo
Leavin Gallery in L.A. It included pictures and quotes from a wide
range of Janes, from Jane Austen to Jayne Mansfield. Smith, as always,
kept the tone light but serious. Pinups and socialites, the repressed and
the excessive, royalty and pretenders, all had been presented in some
form of fiction, film, or fact.
Anthony Graham, the associate curator who organized the MCASD
exhibition, writes, “Smith’s critique is always more subtle and more
severe, focusing not on the women but rather the men who underestimate them.”
He cites a large piece from the museum’s own collection. Smith, an
avid follower of college football who for many years had season passes
to UCLA games, embraced double entendres in her wall painting of
Marilyn Monroe wearing giant sunglasses that reflect football players,
a varsity letter on the left, and a vision-exam chart on the right. Printed
at the bottom of the lenses is the Dorothy Parker quip “Men seldom
make passes at girls who wear glasses.” Graham writes that “Smith
turns the phrase on its head, subverting the sexual gaze to make the
men the object of desire.”
Despite showing with Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City,
Smith, as a woman working in L.A., had less visibility than her East
Coast peers. That changed in 1987 when the Brooklyn Museum
showed Same Old Paradise, a 22-by-62-foot mural of the landscape
of her youth, sun-kissed oranges and wide horizons, with an open
road rendered as temptation but also as a massive serpent. “I needed
a metaphor for California and I went back to the Garden of Eden—a
paradise of lush plants and opulence that harbors the extremes of good
and evil, where ignorance is bliss,” she told Armstrong. Large collages
104 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

quote a sequence of passages from Kerouac’s On the Road, including “I
was rushing through the world without a chance to see it.”
That mural, now on the UC San Diego campus, fueled a twodecade parallel career doing substantial public art projects around the
country, including The Snake Path (also at UC San Diego), which uses
a serpentine theme as a twisting path leading to a library.
“People who wind up doing a lot of public art have a sort of missionary quality, the civic spirit of people who would like to upgrade
the environment,” Smith said. “For an artist, it’s a vehicle for doing
something meaningful.”
These huge and time-consuming ventures, which also include the
Restaurant at the Getty Center and the terrazzo floors of the Los Angeles Convention Center, were completed at the expense of regular visibility in galleries. That has changed recently. Smith is now represented
by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York and Parrasch Heijnen in L.A.
And she’s being embraced by MCASD.
The museum’s original 1916 Irving Gill residence has been renovated several times, and it most recently underwent a five-year project
that added 30,000 square feet of gallery space with an orientation
toward the Pacific. The upgrade was overseen by museum director
Kathryn Kanjo, who explicitly wants upcoming exhibitions to highlight “trailblazing women artists from the recent past.”
Like Smith.
If much of today’s art is dedicated to personal identity as defined
by gender, race, or ethnicity, Smith’s art has explored the construction
of identity with all its complications and conflicts. Smith became a
ventriloquist in seeking phrases from the past to comment on issues
of the present. Despite the intentionally easy appeal, each work should
be appreciated for the deep and sophisticated layers of meaning. “You
have to read into each piece for yourself; there is no correct interpretation, no right answer,” she said. “The art is something that happens
in your head.” Q
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is the author of Rebels in Paradise: The
Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s and Full Bloom: The Art and
Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her article about the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “New Times, New Histories,” for Alta Journal, Fall 2021,
was a 2022 Southern California Journalism Awards finalist in the
Criticism of Art/Architecture/Design category.

POETRY

By MICHAEL TORRES

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California, where he
spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection, An Incomplete
List of Names, was a National Poetry Series selection and was named one of
NPR’s 2020 Books We Love.

The idea of a “history” has such a heavy weight to it. I’m fascinated with the possibility of histories of something seemingly insignificant or even unworthy of having a history told. For a few
years, house parties were very important to me. They could shape a person’s view of the world;
they could offer opportunities and lessons. I’ve witnessed this. So much went on in that short
period of time in my life. How could I not go back years later, in writing, and try to capture
some of it? Q

A Brief History of Pomona House Parties
We stack packs of Bud Light in our arms, and in the backyard, minutes later, that’s us, creasing
cans in our grip. Before sweat, spit, and the fights we start, we smell like Drakkar Noir, Curve,
Cool Water, and a small vial of Calvin Klein CK One I bought at the dollar store earlier that day,
that I thought was the real deal until further inspection when in faint cursive above the label it
read: Inspired by. In the brief history of house parties, I’m inspired by Danny who launches
himself into Jonny’s pool wearing all his clothes. I pass out on the homie’s couch from smoking
a cigar like a cigarette, or I pass out in the backseat of Rudy’s car after being too down to chase
tequila with beer more than twice, and within two minutes. Or I pass out high and on an empty
stomach as I try to stand upright for a photo. There’s my body, captured in its collapse towards
confetti. A billow of dust and fun. In the brief history of house parties, we watch in awe, the
women ride mechanical bulls, then we boo the guys who want to try it until we realize we too
could participate, and we turn everything into a competition. In the brief history of house parties
Jonny yells, What did I do? to the woman he invited but forgot to dance with. Everyone watches
her leave. Too many guys show up with muscle tees under their button-ups. Every pair of jeans
ironed. And when too many guys show up, more women leave. Then more guys show up,
investigating, prodding, asking, Where all the girls at? They proceed to drink all the beer we
brought; they talk to us wrong, like they know us. No one knows us. Jonny, beyond buzzed, says
something about his dad owning a Russian bayonet, and me and the homies know (or hope)
those words are aimed at everyone drinking our beer. And Jonny’s dad does get the gun out in
the brief history of house parties. And glass shatters over pavement like a perfectly misplaced
syllable. No one thinks of brooms when the strobe lights are still swooping. The fogger pumps at
full capacity, and makes a mystery out of our ordinary lives. Later, after the final page in the
brief history of house parties, we’re at the Jack in the Box drive-thru. We ask for three orders of
the Two Tacos; Stuffed Jalapeños. We yell about what we said and who swung first. We request
ranch; a Big Cheeseburger. Napkins, yes, thanks. We hardly believe how it went down. We ask
each other, where were you? We ask for extra ranch. More. Please. Thank you. In the postlude to
this brief history of house parties, no one lets Danny inside their car because his jeans are still
drenched and he smells like chlorine. We pull away and into a parking spot, and he pops out of
the trunk like, Did you remember my Jumbo Jack on sourdough bread? Our laughter one part
flail, one part apology.

PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 105

ALTA PICKS
Recommendations for the best of California and the West

Our Binge List
Looking for a quintessentially western show that isn’t necessarily, well, a western? As the weather
starts to cool and the days get shorter, it feels like the perfect time to catch up on some buzzworthy
fare. Ranging from heartfelt comedies to thought-provoking dramas, here are half a dozen shows to
stream that open windows onto radically different, unforgettable worlds.

HACKS
Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder bring to life the
dynamic duo of Deborah Vance, a legendary Las
Vegas comedian quickly falling out of the spotlight,
and Ava, a young, unemployed comedy writer. Their
intergenerational chemistry is captivating from
episode one, when Ava lands in the desert heat and
proceeds to insult, and impress, her new boss. Watch
on HBO Max

HBO MAX

THE PEOPLE V.
O.J. SIMPSON:
AMERICAN
CRIME STORY
NETFLIX

THE LINCOLN LAWYER
After a year spent recovering from drug addiction,
Los Angeles defense attorney Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) inherits a law practice—one that
he operates from the back seat of his Lincoln. This
means that most of this legal drama, adapted from
the Michael Connelly series, unfolds on the road,
showcasing L.A. hot spots like the Viper Room as
Haller hightails it out of trouble. Watch on Netflix

106 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

FX NETWORKS

The 1995 “trial of the century”
was re-created in 21st-century
style, and this dramatization has
the Emmys to show for it. Sarah Paulson, Sterling K. Brown,
and Cuba Gooding Jr. star in
this 10-episode limited series
that recounts the landmark Los
Angeles event in gripping detail,
right down to the Juice’s freeway
car chase. The show is riveting
for those who remember exactly
where they were when the verdict
was announced—and also for
those born years later. Watch on
Hulu

GRACE AND FRANKIE
After their senior husbands leave them for each other, hippie, Del
Taco–loving Frankie (Lily Tomlin) and straitlaced Grace (Jane Fonda)
end up unwilling roommates in a seaside house in San Diego’s La Jolla
community. Their mismatched friendship yields a vibrator company
for older women and spurs witty dialogue, in addition to sweet and
weighty moments between the two acting pros, often set to the pair
gazing out on the Pacific Ocean. Watch on Netflix

AMC

DARK WINDS
New Mexico’s stunning plains serve as the backdrop to this western
drama set in 1971. Zahn McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon play police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, unlikely partners (familiar to Tony
Hillerman readers) brought together to solve crimes that occur on an
outpost of the Navajo Nation where the characters come to terms with
what justice means on Indigenous land. Watch on AMC+

NETFLIX

HBO MAX

INSECURE
It’s a vibrant Los Angeles we don’t see on-screen often enough: middle-class and wealthy Black people whose experiences cannot be reduced to
pain and trauma or hokey sitcom humor and platitudes. Instead, show creator (and star) Issa Rae celebrates the quotidian through the eyes of
smart, complex, lovable women, while a West Coast realness plays out in conflicted dialogues between the main character (also named Issa) and
her own image in the mirror. Watch on HBO Max
—JESSICA BLOUGH, ELIZABETH CASILLAS, ANITA FELICELLI, AND AJAY ORONA

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 107

GATEWAY, LOS ANGELES

Cities
in the Sky
THE DESIGN FOR A LOS ANGELES HIGH-RISE STACKED MULTIPLE
BUILDINGS, VERTICALIZING NEIGHBORHOODS INTO A SINGLE
STRUCTURE. IT WAS NOT BUILT, BUT IT CASTS A LONG SHADOW.

Rendering of the Gateway
in Los Angeles by Gensler
Architects, from 2016. The
proposed building consists
of a luxury apartment block
supported by two residential
towers that rest atop a hotel.

LOFTY AMBITIONS

By JOSEPH GIOVANNINI

B

ack in 2016, a unicorn landed on the counter of Los
Angeles’s Department of
Building and Safety, an unexpected, improbable, apparently fringe project that
took new eyes to see. Architectural anomalies seldom make it past
the door at the LADBS, but here was the
50-story Gateway, made up of stacked
buildings with funky facades: twin 20-story
residential towers rested on a big, 15-story
hotel block, and they supported a block of
luxury apartments above, itself surmounted by an architectural asteroid from a faraway galaxy.
Usually, high-rise buildings are cautious, well-behaved point towers straight
out of Euclid that rise in a single leap from
base to top, their facades as pin-striped as
the suits of the bankers who finance them.
This was not that.
Unusual circumstances produced this
unusual submission. Designed by the Los
Angeles office of Gensler Architects, it was
one of several projects submitted by developers panicked by an impending legislative
change that threatened to downzone, and
devalue, their real estate in or near Downtown Los Angeles. The site of the unicorn,
north of the Santa Monica and east of the
Harbor Freeway, was loaded with potential,
since the critical mass of a huge high-rise
could redefine the area and create its own
real estate value.
Scrambling to get in under the wire,
before the downzoning passed, developers
hired architects to create “placeholder” designs meant to win entitlements (the right to
build). Architects quickly put together projects, designing for density even if the likelihood of their being built as designed was
sketchy. The upside of the real estate thought
exercise was that circumstances lifted the
onus of plausibility, encouraging speculation
of an architectural sort in a building type
usually straitjacketed by value engineering.
If the Gateway was a broad-strokes idea,
the details yet to be resolved, it was brilliant
in concept, a breakthrough original enough
to move the architectural needle in Los Angeles and even shift the paradigm of what a
high-rise in the United States could be.
It was larger than a building, edging toward urban design. Megabuildings have the
potential to become self-contained cities:
what Gensler was proposing was stacking
and compressing three or four diverse urban blocks of Downtown Los Angeles into a
building of buildings. The composite structure verticalized the idea of several largely horizontal Los Angeles neighborhoods,
combining all their sociology and functions

PHOTO BY GENSLER ARCHITECTS

into a stack of mixed-income neighborhoods. Each building within the cluster expressed its own character, whether a hotel
or market-rate housing or luxury digs.
In the 1930s, modernist sculptors took a
great leap forward when they started piercing a clay or bronze mass with a void, introducing the notion of space into the solid.
Now, decades later, architects were proposing the same, breaking down a building into
parts that introduced voids into monolithic
blocks. The openings meant that light, air,
and space traveled through the building
and that the roofs of some sections became
the ground for others: you could go outside
on the 20th floor for sun, coffee, and a chat
or a swim; birds could fly in for a breather.
The ground rose into the sky, bringing the
environment, not to mention the community and neighborhoods, into the body
of the building. Southern California’s climate would encourage designs for indooroutdoor living that were already underway.
Residential styles imported to L.A. from
the East Coast at the turn of the last
century didn’t acknowledge that winterdefensive houses had migrated to a Mediterranean climate, but eventually, architects
got the memo, and Victorian piles sprouted
generous verandas; Craftsman bungalows,
sleeping porches. Starting with R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra, modernists introduced the idea of indoor-outdoor living. A
hundred years later, at the counter of L.A.’s
building department, Gensler’s unicorn was
doing the same, opening the closed form of
the high-rise imported from back East with
multiple rooftop terraces that embraced the
out-of-doors.
As unusual as the Gateway might have
seemed to incredulous inspectors in L.A.,
the time had come, or was coming, for
the new paradigm: Segmented sky cities,
proposed and built, had already been surfacing elsewhere in other practices, mostly
outside the United States. So why not here?

FLOATING
MEGASTRUCTURES
In Hong Kong in 2012, the New York
firm Kohn Pedersen Fox had already developed the idea in a packed urban center,
though for environmental rather than zoning reasons. In one of the densest agglomerations on earth, the developer of Hysan
Place, an office building and shopping
center, wanted to build a sustainable form
that would flow cooling breezes through
the body of the building to air-condition
the surrounding urban canyon, where walls
of buildings immobilized the tropical air.
KPF architects Robert Whitlock and Wil-

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 109

INTERLACE, SINGAPORE

A new type of
high-rise contains
multiple urban
areas—parks, schools,
offices, residences,
entertainment, retail—
within its stacked
sections, resembling
a city in the sky. To
date, most of these
structures are being
built outside the
United States.

18 ROBINSON, SINGAPORE

RAPHAEL OLIVIER

HYSAN PLACE, HONG KONG

liam Louie, with Bruce Fisher, pulled the
36-story, 716,000-square-foot mixed-use
structure apart, segmenting it into a shopping center at the base with separate,
stacked office blocks above. The individual
blocks created sky gardens.
Whitlock followed up his Hong Kong
success in Singapore on Robinson Road,
where he cleaved the base of an elegantly
faceted crystalline glass tower with a gash of
landscape on rising terraces that created a
spiraling oasis of greenery 10 stories up into
the 30-story office building. The architect
chamfered the base of the tower according
to the arc of the sun to maximize daylight
reaching the roof terraces. The resulting
mid-rise park gave employees access to
outdoor spaces and reduced the heat-island
effect, in which hard surfaces like concrete
and dark glass absorb radiation from the
sun. Opening the usually closed skyscraper
form imported into the body of the building
Singapore’s character as a garden city.
“It’s important for employees to have
access to outdoor spaces—they’re no longer
working in their father’s office building,”
says Whitlock. “Developers are pushing for
wellness ratings, and that means breaking
the extruded box so that each use gets its
own ground floor and an outdoor connection.” He adds that as buildings get taller,
breaking form structurally helps offset increased wind loads.
“I’m seeing a lot of porosity in taller
buildings of large-scale projects,” says William Pedersen, a founding director of KPF.
“There’s a growing acceptance among both
developers and tenants for allowing nature
to penetrate into the building. Tenants like
it, and developers find offices with outdoor
space highly marketable. There’s more potential for a building to become a city within a city. The development bodes well for
the tall building.”
In 2011, KPF took the idea to an extreme
in a concept proposal for a super-tall complex of stacked towers, Tokyo Grand Design.
The architects basically split the bulk of a
single massive tower into skinnier towers
standing atop one another in three vertiginously tall piles that were themselves connected by landscaped bridges. Separations
and displacements of each vertical block
allowed sun, air, and view into the voids.
Terraces populated even the upper reaches,
but at the base, the towers transformed into
an alluvial fan of greenery, creating a vast
urban park serving the whole building and
the surrounding neighborhood.
Southeast Asia has been receptive to sky
cities. More than 50 years ago, Japanese architects conceived megastructures to float
above cities, but no one thought these
imaginative shock-and-awe provocations
would ever be built. Proposals smaller than
the Tokyo Grand Design have actually been
built, and rather than hovering over cities
like the megastructures of a previous generation, they are rooted in the street grids
of existing urban fabric, and they involve
conventional rather than exotic construction and engineering.

The brilliant New York architect Paul
Rudolph, who died in 1997, did build what
in retrospect might be considered forerunners of the current crop of segmented
buildings, all outside the United States. An
admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, who broke
the box horizontally to work the building
into the landscape, Rudolph instead broke
the vertical box to bring the building into
the sky and the out-of-doors into the tower.
In several Singapore projects, built and
unbuilt, he fanned and terraced low-rise
buildings out from the base of a tower (as
at the Concourse on Beach Road), or he
perforated the building’s skin into threedimensional honeycombs of terraces (as at
the Colonnade). In the 1979 project Marina
Centre, a virtuoso design, he bridged open
spaces with apartment blocks and separat-

FIFTEEN FIFTEEN,
VANCOUVER
BINYAN STUDIOS

ed towers from one another and from their
bases, multiplying outdoor decks.
The American master never built his
1990 Gatot Subroto condominium complex of eight towers in Jakarta, which
featured three-story blocks pinwheeling
outward, each block leaving void decks between it and the next (the outdoor sky gardens added up to more than the footprint
of the whole site).
But 17 years later in Singapore, Ole
Scheeren, a German architect with offices
in Beijing, Hong Kong, Berlin, and Bangkok, proved Rudolph’s Jakarta proposal
practicable at the Interlace, a vast complex
of 31 apartment blocks containing more
than 1,000 units. Each six-story block is
elevated, some atop others, liberating the
ground or rooftops beneath for outdoor
space. Scheeren spun the blocks off the
orthogonal in dynamic hexagonal patterns
that shape large-scale open courtyards at
many levels.
Applying the idea of segmentation to a

PHOTOS BY TIM GRIFFITH

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 111

HYPERBUILDING, BANGKOK

OMA

New sky cities owe a conceptual debt to Rem Koolhaas’s Hyperbuilding in Bangkok, from 1996
(above). This one-kilometer-tall megastructure redefined notions about what is possible when
stacking structures, creating self-contained urban neighborhoods while leaving ground below for
parks and nature preserves.

KING POWER MAHANAKHON, BANGKOK

WILSON TUNGTHUNYA; COOKFOX ARCHITECTS

112 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

ONE SOUTH FIRST, BROOKLYN

point tower in Bangkok in 2016, Scheeren
pixelated parts of the tubular, 78-story,
mixed-use structure, King Power Mahanakhon. Cubes pop into or out of an otherwise
regular high-rise tube in staccato rhythms.
Last year, the City of Vancouver approved
construction of Scheeren’s Fifteen Fifteen,
a 42-floor, omnidirectional condominium
tower with apartments projecting like cannons out from the body of the building,
their roofs forming the terraces for the
apartments above.

MUSEUM PLAZA, LOUISVILLE

BUILDINGS OF BUILDINGS

MUSEUM PLAZA/PR NEWSWIRE

MIRADOR, MADRID

Scheeren is a graduate of what might
be called the Rem Koolhaas Academy of
Young Turks, and several other alumni have
pursued a strategy of stacking buildings. In
a graphic application of the idea to the Mirador, a huge, 21-story residential building
completed in 2005 in Madrid, Jacob van Rijs
and Winy Maas of the Dutch firm MVRDV
textured and color-coded a massive, conventional apartment block, distinguishing
numerous different “neighborhoods” within
an architectural collage that attacked the
modernist idea of standardization. The architects then stacked separate blocks atop
the block, leaving a large semipublic outdoor
space between them.
In 2005, Joshua Prince-Ramus of Rex,
a Koolhaas grad based in New York, proposed the spectacular riverside Museum
Plaza in Louisville, Kentucky, a stack of
six towers and blocks that all look like the
Seagram Building, by Mies van der Rohe,
buttressed by a truss set on the oblique.
In 2012, Bjarke Ingels of Big—based primarily in Copenhagen and New York—
proposed an even more startling vision of
stacked buildings in Seoul, configured like
a monumental three-dimensional tic-tactoe board, a city in the sky.
These projects owe a major conceptual debt to Koolhaas’s Hyperbuilding, a
self-contained, one-kilometer-tall megastructure imagined in 1996 as a “test” for
the next urban step for a city of 120,000
on a site in Bangkok. Eliminating the commute that has choked flat urban grids, he
proposed that an entire vertical city—residential, medical, retail, educational, and
cultural spaces, all connected with cable
cars, gondolas, and high- and low-speed
elevators running on a diagonal—be built
within its armature of columnar towers. Entire buildings hung from habitable, soccerfield-size platforms that acted as parks with
12-kilometer-long promenades. Hyperbuilding remains an extreme statement of
the idea of “stacking” or “piling” structures
while creating ground in the sky and saving
ground below for nature preserves.
In Hyperbuilding, Koolhaas pushed the
idea of a building of buildings to its improbable but logical extreme, and it has served
as a model or inspiration for less-complex,
real-world projects at a smaller scale. In
Jersey City, scaling down and simplifying
the vision in 2006, Koolhaas’s firm, OMA,
stacked four autonomous blocks, each with

a different program—apartments, hotel,
artist-studio residences, gallery space—
into a 52-story tower called 111 First Street.
Giving each tower its own program and
outdoor terrace broke the surrounding
monotony of single-use towers with no
outdoor space.
Gensler may have presented its unicorn
to the Los Angeles building department in
2016, but it was the New York firm Cookfox
Architects that actually broke ground on
its version of a unicorn, One South First,
the next year in Brooklyn. It’s obvious now
that the design was more than a sacrificial
placeholder. Anyone traveling along FDR
Drive in Manhattan will spot an unusual
conjoined pair of thin buildings across
the East River in trendy Williamsburg.
A very tall hole segments a mixed-use,
480,000-square-foot, 42-story megastructure, which combines apartments, offices,
and retail in a three-part complex set on a
three-story commercial podium. The city
that invented the notion of a towering
skyline, New York challenged its own Manhattan paradigm with a multipart building
that is unique, green, elegant, and inclusive (20 percent of its residential space is
reserved for affordable apartments) and
that has the critical mass of a small city.
Roof-decks are landscaped and usable, and
the building’s a good neighbor, designed to
complement a much-loved historic monument, the adaptively reused Domino Sugar
refinery next door. Gensler’s unicorn may
be funkier, but New York beat Los Angeles
to the punch.
Plan checkers at the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety might
have blinked when they opened their computers to see the Gateway. But population
statisticians predict that 68 percent of
humanity will occupy cities by 2050, and
sky cities may well populate our not-toodistant future. Prospecting for land in
the sky makes sense as cities densify and
technology and growing concentrations of
capital allow and even encourage it. The
beneficial irony of stacking buildings is
that segmenting buildings as they climb
proliferates the potential for open space
and greenery, contributing to their sustainability. There is the humanistic dividend, too, of breaking down the scale
of a Manhattanized world of monolithic,
one-style skyscrapers into neighborhoods
that allow people to escape elevators into a
more pedestrian environment.
The downzoning that scared developers
in Los Angeles did not come to pass, so
Gensler’s unicorn will not be built. But it
still stands, along with a few others that
have sneaked into our skylines, as a paradigm shift that pokes big, constructive,
sunny, green holes in the high-rise as we
know it. The sky is the new limit. Q
Joseph Giovannini is a New York– and
Los Angeles–based architect and critic. His
most recent book, Architecture Unbound:
A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde,
was published by Rizzoli last November.

JTB PHOTO

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 113

FICTION

By DANIEL A. OLIVAS • Illustrations by VICTOR JUHASZ

My Chicano
Heart

N

ACHO SIGHS AND THEN EMITS A WHISTLE OF
exasperation through his teeth. He can’t
bring himself to look at his wife, Maricris,
because he suspects that he will start to
weep, and Nacho knows that he is an ugly
cry. So Nacho forces his eyes to focus on the
balustrade that runs along the perimeter
of their porch. And this makes him wonder about the men—for
surely only men did that type of work in 1927, the year their house
was built—who shaped and sanded and painted the balusters
and handrail. Had the women or men in their lives taken their
hearts, too—in the same way Maricris had taken his—and had
they fought with all of their essence to retrieve for themselves that
most crucial of human organs? Nacho’s thoughts wander further
afield and he considers the state of their balustrade: it is sturdy
and well crafted, but it could use a good sanding and a fresh coat
of paint. But then Nacho’s initial thought returns. He sighs, finally
surrenders, and turns his eyes to his beautiful wife.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 115

“Maricris,” he whispers. “Por favor, give me back my heart. You have
had it for 10 years.”
Maricris sits back in the porch swing that Nacho installed for his
wife’s 35th birthday five years earlier. Maricris cradles her mug of hot
Nescafé—thick with half-and-half and three tablespoons of brown
sugar—as if it were a baby chick or hamster or live grenade. And then
she spits out an emphatic “No!” with her red lips forming such a perfect that Nacho falls in love all over again. And then Maricris lets
out a hearty “Ha!” because she sees that her husband has fallen for her
once more. She then sips the hot coffee and savors both the rich flavor
of her favorite beverage and her undeniable power over this man.
Nacho realizes that his wife is more beautiful at that moment than
at any other moment including their wedding day. And the inevitable
moistness starts to well up in Nacho’s big, brown eyes—eyes he inherited from his mother and that resemble so many of the big, brown eyes
of the Mexicans from Jalisco—and he blinks but the tears have turned
Maricris into an expressionist painting and Nacho surrenders and allows the tears to drop freely from his big, brown, Jalisco eyes.
And then Maricris says it again, but this time in her own whisper:
“No.”

N

acho knows that he has no one to blame but himself. The day before they married, Maricris had
asked him for his heart. Nacho could have said no,
stood on principle—asserted his independence as
an adult—and that would have been that.
But no. Nacho could not deny this woman anything.
So, as they lay in bed that long, luxurious day before their wedding, Nacho opened up his chest as Maricris greedily looked on, her
mouth almost watering. He gingerly lifted his beating heart from its
home and plopped it into Maricris’s open palms. Nacho remembers
Maricris’s grunt of delight while she beheld his heart as it undulated
and wriggled in Maricris’s beautiful, brown hands. She then scurried
out of bed, in her naked splendor, and plopped Nacho’s heart into a
small, hand-carved, wooden box that sat on her dresser, a box Nacho
had never noticed before. From his vantage point, Nacho could not see
the box’s top, which was adorned with a replica of a José Guadalupe
Posada woodcut of nine rollicking skeletons riding old-time bicycles
over a lone—and now doubly dead—skeleton wearing armor. But over
the years, Nacho would become quite familiar with the Posada calacas,
memorizing each particular horrific grin of the vainglorious skeletons,
and he would feel deep remorse for that lone skeleton whose life had
been extinguished yet again even in death.
Nacho remembers in exquisite detail how Maricris then closed the
box with a loud snap and scurried back into bed. She meticulously
wiped Nacho’s thick, warm blood from her hands onto her immaculate, white sheets, then snuggled into her man and gently examined
with her fingertips the fleshy edges of the gaping hole on Nacho’s chest
that slowly closed until only a violently pink line ran like a deserted
road from Nacho’s throat down to his navel. Nacho could have said
no, and Maricris would not have his heart today. But Nacho had little
control when it came to Maricris’s desires. And, of course, Nacho could
see that Maricris knew this about her man, which only made Nacho
love her more.

F

or 22 days after they married, Maricris kept Nacho’s
heart in that small, hand-carved, wooden box that
sat on her dresser. Then one afternoon at 3:03 p.m.,
Maricris wandered into what was once her bedroom
but was now theirs and happened upon Nacho standing before the dresser, arms akimbo, motionless,
staring at the closed wooden box that held his beating

116 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

heart. Maricris crept behind her husband and looked over his shoulder and down toward the box. Finally, after 12 long seconds, Maricris
shouted: “Boo!”
Nacho did not start. Indeed, he did not react in any manner whatsoever. But his heart jumped so hard that it jostled loose the little
brass latch on the box’s lid and almost leapt from its splintery home.
The next day, Maricris drove to the hardware store and returned
23 minutes later. Nacho watched from the dining room table as
Maricris cleared the floor of their guest closet and set up a new,
12-pound Stalwart Digital Safe that had been called a “best value” by
a woman who hosted the Security Nerd blog and who proclaimed:
“For its price point, this is one of the best home safe options on the
market. It has safety features such as an automatic lock after 3 incorrect entries on the keypad during any one-hour period and the LED
keypad gives an added layer of security. Plus, you can even make customizable codes for guests. There is also an override key if you forget
your code or if the battery runs out.”
After Maricris opened the safe and set the security lock, she
marched to the bedroom and returned with the wooden box. Nacho
could hear his heart beating woefully as Maricris set the box inside
the safe, closed and locked it.
“There,” said Maricris. “No more temptation.”

N

acho sometimes imagined that their life together
was like a stage play with their dialogue written by
an anonymous playwright and rehearsed over the
course of six weeks until they were ready to act out
their roles for an unseen audience. One occurrence
felt particularly like a scene from a theatrical work
in progress:

(Scene: Present day. MARICRIS and NACHO sit at their breakfast table lingering over a lazy Sunday brunch. They are
very old-school so they each read a section of the Los Angeles
Times, both lost in the printed words. After two beats, NACHO
breaks the silence.)
NACHO: (newspaper up to his face, reading) Mi amor…
(MARICRIS grunts, absorbed in reading her section of the
newspaper)
NACHO: (lowers newspaper, looks at MARICRIS) Mi amor…
MARICRIS: (not moving newspaper from her face) Sí, mi vida,
sí…I am listening…
NACHO: (skeptically, but pushing on) It says here, mi amor…
MARICRIS: (not moving newspaper from her face) Sí, mi
vida, sí…
NACHO: It says here that a new study shows that married
men live longer than unmarried men.
MARICRIS: It only feels longer, mi vida.
NACHO: (lifts newspaper back to his face, ignores MARICRIS’s
joke, and continues reading to his beloved wife) And a 2009
study reported that men who married more educated women
also enjoyed a lower death rate than men who married less
educated women.
MARICRIS: (putting newspaper down to look at NACHO) Gracias a Dios that I got that master’s degree.
NACHO: (putting down newspaper) Sí, mi amor. (beat) ¿Mi
amor?
MARICRIS: (lifting newspaper up in a vain attempt to end the
conversation and continue reading in peace) Sí, mi vida…
NACHO: (beat) May I have my heart back?
MARICRIS: (not moving newspaper from her face, calmly,
with little emotion) No.
NACHO: (imagining the perfect that his wife’s mouth just

formed) But why not?
MARICRIS: (putting newspaper down) Why should I? You
gave it to me.
NACHO: I miss it.
MARICRIS: You do?
NACHO: Sí. Very much.
MARICRIS: But you knew what you were getting into when
you fell in love with me.
NACHO: I did?
MARICRIS: No hay rosa sin espinas.
NACHO: (considers his beloved wife’s observation for a beat)
Ni modo. I ask again: May I have my heart back?
MARICRIS: (beat) OK.
NACHO: (surprised, elated) OK? You will give me back my
heart?
MARICRIS: I didn’t say that. Listen to my words.
NACHO: (crestfallen, confused) What?
MARICRIS: I will let you visit your heart, once a week.
NACHO: (seeing an opportunity) Oh?
MARICRIS: (suspicious of her beloved) But they will be supervised visits.
NACHO: Supervised? By whom?
MARICRIS: By me, of course. By me.
(MARICRIS stares at NACHO with these last words. After three
beats, NACHO grows uncomfortable, clears his throat, lifts the
newspaper to his face to block MARICRIS’s gaze)
NACHO: (resigned) Sí, mi amor. That will be fine.
MARICRIS: (lifting newspaper up to her face) And I will look
into a PhD program. Maybe I can add a few more years to
your life.
(End of scene, curtain)

T

he supervised visitations with his heart proved to be
more difficult for Nacho than he had expected. At
first, he derived great comfort—and maybe a little
relief—from their new weekly ritual. Maricris and
Nacho would finish their Friday night traditional
dinner of chilaquiles that Nacho took great pride in
cooking, using his late father’s recipe. And then after
one or two cups of Nescafé and perhaps flan, tamales dulces, or tres
leches cake, Nacho would clear the table while Maricris went to the
guest closet, unlocked the safe (the keypad’s beeping sound would
inevitably make Nacho’s scalp tingle in anticipation), and brought
the wooden box to the now-cleared dining room table. And inevitably, Nacho would reach over to the latch, but Maricris would gently
pat her husband’s hand away with a soft ah, ah, ah (as she would
to her child if she had one), and proceed to open the box herself.
And Nacho would sit back, sigh, and take in the view of his beating,
veined, ruddy heart. After three minutes of visitation in which the
sounds of the married couple’s breathing fell into a call-and-response
rhythm with the lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub of Nacho’s heart, Maricris would close the box, fasten its latch, and take it back to the safe.
With four beeps of the keypad as Maricris locked away Nacho’s
heart, the ritual would end.
After six weeks of these supervised visits with his heart, Nacho
grew restless. The comfort and relief he had once felt were replaced
by trepidation and extreme dread. He needed to develop a plan to rescue his heart once and for all. Unbeknownst to Maricris, Nacho had
tried several potential combinations on the safe’s keypad, but to no
avail. He went through the usual numbers: their birthdays, wedding
anniversary, the date of their first date, but they all resulted in an unpleasant buzz emitted by the keypad that mocked Nacho and sounded
like it yelped Loser! each time he tried and failed.
But then Nacho’s luck changes.

In the middle of one summer night, Nacho extricates himself from
his beautiful wife—who snores softly and soundly—puts on a robe,
and pads downstairs to try his hand again at the safe’s keypad. He
opens the guest closet and aims his Rayovac flashlight at the safe. And
what he sees makes him jump. What? This can’t be. The safe’s door is
ajar! Maricris must have failed to push it closed after the last supervised visitation two days before. Nacho squats and slowly opens the
safe. And there it sits: the wooden box! Inside it, the gentle lub-dub,
lub-dub, lub-dub of Nacho’s heart begins to quicken. Nacho lifts the
box from the safe and slowly opens it. Oh, joy! His heart beats faster
and louder and then Nacho lets out a little Ha! but then realizes that
he needs to be stealthy, so he closes the box, shuts the safe, and stands.
Nacho steps warily from the closet, closes it with a soft click, and hugs
the box to his chest.
What next?
In the garage, Nacho keeps an ancient pair of Levi’s, a Lila Downs
T-shirt, and battered Chuck Taylors that he wears for yard work. He
listens to the soft snoring of his beautiful Maricris upstairs, hesitates,
but then creeps through the kitchen to the back door, which leads to
their garage. Nacho enters the garage but leaves the light off since the
moon is riotously bright and fills the garage with a translucent, undulating glow through the row of rectangular windows that line the top
of the garage door. He tenderly sets the box down on the workbench
and opens a plastic bin that holds his clothes and shoes. Nacho strips
off his perspiration-drenched pajamas and robe, and he stands for a
moment, nude, in the moonlight. He reaches up with his right hand to
the long scar that runs from his throat to his navel, and he gently fingers the ridged road of flesh. And Nacho smiles. After a few moments,
he dresses, lifts the box from the workbench, and opens the side door
of the garage, which leads to the side yard.
It is a warm Los Angeles night—almost 80 degrees—and the
moon is even more dazzling than Nacho expects. He closes his eyes,
breathes deeply, steels himself. You can do this, he says to himself.
You can do this.
Nacho walks through the side yard and makes it to the sidewalk in
front of their house. He looks to his left, then to his right, and then to
his left again. He makes a decision to go left because it seems like the
appropriate direction. Nacho first takes one step, then another, and finally he finds himself trotting, and then after a few moments, he is running, faster and faster and faster, clutching the beating box to his chest.
And with each step, his heart beats harder and louder. As Nacho runs
along the deserted sidewalk, the moon glows brighter and brighter and
his heart beats louder and louder until Nacho can no longer distinguish
his heart from his breathing from the magnificent glow of the moon.
And as he runs, Nacho feels moisture on his face. Is it raining? No, the
sky is clear, not a cloud to be seen. No, it is not rain that covers his face,
but tears that are pouring from Nacho’s eyes, tears so big they could be
dollops of honey or hand balm or hot blood from a gaping wound. Tears
so big that Nacho can no longer see anything but a blur. And as he runs
down the sidewalk clutching the beating box tightly to his chest, Nacho
no longer knows what he feels and no longer knows what he is doing
and no longer understands anything at all.
After 28 minutes of running through neighborhoods he no longer
recognizes, Nacho finally lets out a loud “Oh!” and then stops running, staggers to a standstill, out of breath, his heart beating hard
within the wooden box. And Nacho again lets out a loud “Oh!” He
looks up at the moon that now appears larger than it has ever been,
and he feels as though the moon will swallow him up in all its lurid
magnificence. It is, indeed, the most stunning, frightening moon he
has ever witnessed. And in the silence of the night—a silence punctuated only by his beating heart and heavy breathing—Nacho sighs,
shivers, and finally whispers: “Oh.” Q
Daniel A. Olivas is a lawyer, a playwright, and the author of 10 books,
including How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories.

ISSUE 21 • ALTA JOURNAL • 119

TRAILBLAZER

THE NEXT WEST

SEX ED

Securing
Reproductive Care

I

had to learn everything the hard
way,” Nicole Martin says of growing
up near Albuquerque, New Mexico,
and being taught what she calls
a “fear-based,” abstinence-focused
sex education curriculum. Martin,
who’s Navajo and Laguna Pueblo,
attended college in Colorado for Native
American and Indigenous studies and
gender and women’s studies. She figured
she could use her degree to teach “what
public school didn’t teach me,” she says.
After graduation, she volunteered for
environmental justice and Native liberation groups, which led her to Indigenous
Women Rising, an organization focused
on equitable and safe healthcare. The
group’s cofounder, Rachael Lorenzo,
was looking for help to launch an abortion services fund. Martin signed up in
2018, and at the end of her first day, she
approached Lorenzo. “I told Rachael,
‘This is who I am.… If you want to start
sex education, I’m down,’ ” she says.
Martin, who is 31, now leads IWR’s
sex education curriculum, which she
has taught to middle schoolers in Albuquerque. She also supports the growth
of IWR’s abortion fund, which has
helped nearly 1,000 people across 37
states access not just abortions but also
the necessary transportation, childcare,
and hotel accommodations.
After being nominated to cochair an
organization called Respect New Mexico
Women, Martin helped spearhead the
successful repeal of three statutes that
criminalized abortion care. She never
shies from an argument with white male
state senators who push back. Even now
that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, she says, “New Mexico will always be a safe place for people
to seek abortion care.”
Roe v. Wade, Martin says, “has only
protected the few,” and Indigenous,
Black, and LGBTQ communities often
“struggle to find great healthcare.” She
has long striven to give her community
access to lifesaving reproductive care.
Today, she adds, “we’re willing to take on
any risks that come with that.” Q
—JESSICA KLEIN

120 • ALTA JOURNAL • ISSUE 21

PHOTO BY ERIC DRAPER

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