Mysteries of a Quiet Life: A Memoir

Mysteries of A Quiet Life:

A Memoir

DEDICATION

To my grandfather, Francis Ralph Rambo

1894-1990

Artist. Writer. Historian. Master storyteller.

For over fifty years he was the principal graphic artist and Art Director for Muirson Label Company in San Jose, California. After retiring, he wrote and published eleven hand-lettered and illustrated books—history, short memoirs—as well as maps about the Santa Clara Valley. At age 96, he took The Writer’s hand and said, “I want to leave something of myself in you.”

The Writer told him, “You have, grandpa. You have.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Backstory

(I).Home

1). 1942

2). A Sort of Love Story

3). The Old Neighborhood

4) Idaho Gothic

(II). Working

5). Final Edition

6). Images

7). The Messenger

(III). Tideline (67)

8). The Beach in Winter

9). Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

10). San Gregorio

(IV) The Walls

(V). Where the Road Ends

11. The World No One Knew

12). Memorial Day: Voices

13). Dreams

14). Fog-fall

15). Ghosts of Skyline

16). 15 Seconds

17). The Russian Book

18). There was a Child…

19). Dark Man

20). Tendrils

21). Ghosts (or) The Man Who Walked

22). Passages

(VI). Frankie Blue Eyes

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Backstory

Among the standard categories of genre literature, “memoirs” are the red-headed stepchild.

No website, online writing expert, editor or agent agrees on a what a memoir is, or should be. Reputable sources state a memoir should be at least 70,000 words. Or longer. Except when it should be shorter. Memoirs must have an “arc.” But the experts never explain precisely what the arc should be. They stress that diary or journal entries from family members are not acceptable. And no vignettes, As one agent stated in her online guidelines for prospective clients, “If you have vignettes, don’t bother to try and get published.”

But real life is not an “arc.” It’s mostly vignettes. Small stories. Memories…

But random unconnected moments and recollections are not enough to create a book (or chapters in a blog) that anyone outside a writer’s family would want to read. Like short stories, novels and nonfiction, a good memoir must be about something. It needs structure. A unifying “Red Thread” tying all the stories together. So what Red Thread runs through this memoir? Mysteries. Sometimes eerie. Unsettling. Incidents with no real beginning or end. But afterwards, always questions. What just happened? What was that about? What did I see?

The stories are organized by theme, and within those themes, chronologically, beginning with diary entries written by the author’s paternal grandfather over a decade before the author was born because, as a child, the first stories she remembers hearing about life, history and memory came from her grandfather.

Thank you, Grandpa.

(I) HOME

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

of dead and living.

(T.S. Eliot. Four Quartets. #2. East Coker).

(1). 1942

In 1894, my grandfather, Francis Ralph Rambo was born in a two-room house in a prune orchard in Cupertino, California, when the Santa Clara Valley (now Silicon Valley) was known as The Valley of Heart’s Delight, The Garden of the World, and The Earthly Paradise. In the late 1920s at the height of the orchard culture, the Santa Clara Valley had an estimated eight million orchard trees; a landscape so beautiful that every spring between the early 1900s and the Great Depression, people could take organized “Blossom Tours.”

For ninety-six years through four wars, the Depression and two catastrophic earthquakes, The Valley was my grandfather’s life, work, art and obsession.

He graduated from Santa Clara High School in 1912. In 1915, shortly after marrying his childhood sweetheart, Katherine Coker, he was hired by Murison Label Company (among their specialties: designing and printing art for fruit boxes and canning companies) to work in the foundry at a wage of $7 for a six-day work week. One year later, when the head of the company discovered my grandfather’s talent as an artist, he was reassigned to the engraving department.

William (my father) was born in 1916. My grandmother had tuberculosis, which may have contributed to at least two miscarriages, and the reason why James, their second and last child, was born seven years later.

In April of 1941, William (Bill) married Edith (Edie) Dillingham. They lived in Eureka, California, where Bill was an announcer and the chief engineer at a radio station. In the summer of 1942, before moving to Boston, Bill and Edie visited my grandparents, who always referred to them as “The Kids.”

In 1964, two years before retiring as Murison Label Company’s art director, my grandfather fashioned a new career as a writer and illustrator specializing in the history of the Santa Clara Valley.

In 1987 at the age of 93, he published his ninth and final memoir, E Day 1906: Witness to an Earthquake.

He died in 1990. After his death, while sorting through a cache of his personal papers, my parent’s found a small black leather diary he’d kept in 1942: the only diary they ever found.

In brief, often cryptic entries. he mentions his close friends Ed Johnson and Ellsworth Zahn. “Moffett” was Moffett Field, a naval air station near the city of Sunnyvale. “The Boys” are my grandmother’s brothers, Fred, Frank and Bert.

On December 20, 1941, a new Selective Service Act required men between the ages of 18 and 64 to register for the draft. On April 27, 1942, the fourth registration—“The Old Man’s Draft”—was held for men between 45 and 64.

From the vantage point of 2026, I can see my grandfather’s past and his future: the devastating death of his wife in 1952; his son, James, in 1978, and his anguish as he witnessed the relentless urbanization of the Santa Clara Valley into “Silicon Valley.”

In these excerpts, the diary reveals a pattern of life common to most people--even those on the home front in wartime--who live one day at a time, observing, reacting, planning, making decisions based on past experience, in anticipation of the future they cannot foresee.

###

1942: NEW YEAR’S DAY: Cold, heavy snow on mountains. 3 alone. Turkey dinner de luxe. Manila holding out. Hilo shelled. Transports with wounded from Hawaii out to Moffett.

JANUARY 7: Cloudy. Katherine had knitting class at Red Cross. Jim registered at [San Jose] State.

JANUARY 25: Rain. Battle of Macassar Straits. 8 Japanese ships sunk. McArthur wins the battle. Sugar rationing coming.

JANUARY 30: Rain. Japanese to be moved away from defense areas.

JANUARY 31: Siege of Singapore starts. Bought shoes.

FEBRUARY 4: Rain all day. Alien curfew law.

FEBRUARY 11: Brite and fair. Singapore holding out. Bad news on all fronts. Tried out steam whistles.

FEBRUARY 15: Brite and fair. Singapore Falls. Pruned yard.

FEBRUARY 16: Heavy fog. Bad news all fronts. Pruned apricots and apples.

MARCH 23: Union organizing all departments. Japanese moved to Manzanar.

MARCH 27: Warm. Saw ‘Swamp Water’ and Laurel & Hardy. Blossoms in full now.

APRIL 7: Cloudy. Big Japanese drive on Philippines. Russia pushing Nazis back. Johnson’s father died yesterday.

APRIL 25: Took ride to old prune ground, Morgan Hill and Uvas. Yanks take over New Hebrides. Registered for draft.

MAY 9: Fog & wind. Went to see the boys. Frank not farming. Fred planting corn and tomatoes. Coral Sea battle over. Waiting final report.

MAY 15: Showers. Birthday cake at lunch room. Got camera. Russia attacks Kharkov. Hitler calls on Japan for help.

MAY 21: Cooler. Transplanted tomatoes again. U.S. sub sinks Japanese cruiser.

JUNE 20: Warm. Saw Jack Benny. Sevastopol tottering. Tobruk taken. Low ebb for allies.

JUNE 22: Warm. Seaside Oregon shelled. Bad news on all fronts. Got Jim cannery job.

JUNE 30: Cooler. Jim registered for draft. Egypt still threatened. Katherine still in bed.

JULY 6: Clear. Kids shopping for car. Five destroyers sunk in Alaska.

JULY 7: Clear. Kids about settled on Nash. Nazis drive 120 miles into Russia.

JULY 8: Fair. Kids decide to go east on train. Russians retreating. English holding Rommel.

JULY 10: Russians falling back. Bill and Edie packing. Farewell barbecue.

JULY 13: Russians retreating. U.S. in Port Moresby. Kids in Ogden.

AUGUST 25: Prunes at peak. Battle of Solomon Islands start. Battle of Stalingrad. Duke of Kent killed.

SEPTEMBER 27: Planted Sweet Peas. 42 Japanese planes shot down in Solomons.

OCTOBER 11: First big rain of year. Worked on chicken pen. Hulled nuts. Nazis laying off Stalingrad.

OCTOBER 24: RAF pounding Northern Italy. Hulling nuts.

NOVEMBER 4: Clear & frost. Rommel’s army in wild flight. Coffee getting scarce.

NOVEMBER 7: Yanks invade North Africa.

NOVEMBER 17: Rain. 2 admirals killed in sea battle. Allies pincer movement on Rommel. Los Gatos Creek running. Rain all night. Sold nuts.

NOVEMBER 25: Clear. Ellsworth baby announcement.

DECEMBER 1: Allies close to Tunisia. GAS RATIONING.

DECEMBER 6: Rain. Pearl Harbor anniversary. Ellsworth lost the baby.

DECEMBER 13: Clear & fog. Rommel driven out of Agheila. Planted lettuce and rhubarb.

DECEMBER 14: Warm & clear. Jim enlisted. Sworn in at 7:30 nite.

DECEMBER 31: Foggy. Plant not working. Flood in Pennsylvania. Jim’s dinner.

Finis

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(2). A Sort of Love Story

If I excavated the boxes and filing cabinets of my dad’s family archives, I could probably find the original 1911 photo of his Aunt Trix that appears in a 1976 newspaper article. I don’t know which newspaper, because it was copied in pieces onto four pages and the only clue at the top is “Penny Saver.”

“Trix” was her nickname. She was born Clara Baumgart on May 21st, 1893. Her father, Joseph, owned a dairy farm in Stevinson, California, in the San Joaquin Valley.

At 16, she began driving a two-horse combination five-passenger buggy and freight wagon eleven miles each way between Stevinson and Newman. The buggy and the horses belonged to her family. In the article, she recalls having to use hot bricks in the winter to keep her feet warm (one time the bricks set the wagon on fire). From family stories and my own memories of The Valley, I also know she had to deal with summer temperatures as high as 112 degrees; spring floods from the Merced River, dense fog and dust storms.

In the photo, wearing what appears to be some kind of light colored long-sleeved “duster” overcoat, and a big floppy dark hat, she’s sitting in the wagon, on the driver seat, looking back and grinning at the camera. I know that in her youth she was blond, with freckles on her nose.

Stevinson is now just another dusty little Valley town, about to be overrun by urban development. A hundred years ago it had two newspapers, a two-story hotel, a livery stable and general store. There was a Protestant church, a Pentecostal church and a Catholic church. Trix’s mother had designed the Catholic church, and everyone in town helped to build it. Stevinson’s residents boasted that someday the town might become another Turlock, or even a new Merced.

Among all the young, fresh-faced farm lads who took her to dances at The Grange Hall; bought her ice cream at the general store, or competed, strutting and preening to impress her at community picnics, George Hagerman always stood off to one side. In my family, I never heard him called George, just “Hagerman.”

He was a farmer, a master carpenter and bricklayer. He was also ten years older than Trix. He loved her. He wanted to marry her, but she couldn’t make up her mind. She was young, feisty and a free life was a good life.

One day, early in the spring of 1916, Bert Coker came to town. Bert was Hagerman’s best friend. Like his brothers Frank and Fred, Bert was also a master carpenter. Their sister, Katherine, who’d married Ralph Rambo, would become my grandmother.

The Coker family...well, that’s another story. They were all handsome. Not “pretty”, but handsome in the classic sense. They were hard workers, but fiercely independent, and cursed with a restless spirit. “Fiddle-footed.” Few Cokers ever worked successfully for anyone else. They were also good people, often stubborn and contentious, but never mean. Their sense of humor combined with a taste for reckless adventure often got them into trouble.

Like many Cokers, Bert had black hair and blue eyes. He wasn’t tall, perhaps 5’ 9”, but strong enough to pick up a bale of hay and throw it into a wagon. He was a hard worker, honest, kind, and he danced well.

In the San Joaquin Valley, in Spring, there is a time of transition between the dank cold winter and murderous summer heat. Days grow warmer, but nights are still chilly. Orchards are in full bloom, and the fields full of wildflowers. There is fresh grass beneath the oak trees along the Merced river and sometimes, especially under a full moon...

Bert and Trix did what respectable people had to do when they found themselves in trouble; they got married. At the wedding, Hagerman was best man.

I’ve seen a photo of the Baumgart-Coker-Rambo clan posing in front of Fred and Frank Coker’s compact but sturdy house they’d built on their farm near the Merced River. By that time, Bert and Trix had three children; George (named after Hagerman) Irene and Dolores. Trix holds Dolores, still an infant. Bert has his arm around Trix. Hagerman sits on the ground in front of them, with his arms around the toddlers, George and Irene.

Bert had a deep secret; he wrote poetry. According to the few people who ever saw the poems, they were beautiful.

In 1937, Trix became Stevinson’s post-mistress. After selling the Baumgart dairy business, she and Bert moved into a modest, charming Victorian house.

According to my father, Bert’s fondness for liquor crossed the line into alcoholism during World War II when his son, George became a fighter pilot stationed in England. Bert was never a mean or loud drunk. Just sad. and quiet as the evening.

After the war, George became a crop duster. He’d inherited the Coker sense of humor and good nature--but also the fierce pride and willingness to fight anyone whom he believed had insulted him or the family. In the Valley, he had enemies.

In 1947, one of them probably stretched the wire across the field where George was working. He may never have seen the wire before his plane hit it. He died in the crash.

Bert died a few months later. Hagerman took care of the funeral arrangements.

Trix kept a promise she’d made to Bert years earlier. After his death, she burned all his poetry.

Hagerman still loved her, and she may have loved him. But she didn’t want to marry again. She was no longer young, and she was tired. Hagerman respected her decision--but he was always there when she needed him.

She worked as Stevinson’s post-mistress for another thirty years. I remember listening to her stories of how, every year, she attended post-mistress conventions in New York City.

Hagerman died in 1952.

In 1977, Trix moved to Anaheim and lived with her daughter, Irene and her family. She died in 1979.

Years later, driving back from a trip to San Diego, I spent the night in Paso Robles, four hours from my home in Foster City, south of San Francisco. The next morning, with time to spare, I decided to detour and visit Stevinson. I hadn’t been there in over thirty years, and I wanted to see if anything I remembered still survived.

The Victorian house had been torn down. Tract homes covered what had been pastures and farm fields. But on the other side of town, at the Sunnyhill Cemetery, nothing had changed. Small, perhaps a couple of acres enclosed by a low stone wall, it was still surrounded mostly by fields and a few farm houses. There were no trees, just immaculate green grass and neat rows of headstones. Cloud shadows drifted over the treeless Diablo Range.

Trix was here with Bert, Hagerman and George; Fred and Frank Coker; Trix’ parents, sisters, brothers and other relatives, neighbors and friends; generations of people whose names I didn’t recognize. The old caretaker came out of the tool shed, and we wandered among the graves, chatting.

“They’re good people,” he said, looking across the cemetery. “Yeah. Good people.”

When I left Stevinson, it was late afternoon and the Diablo Range had deepened from gold to shades of fiery orange. But I had time, and I wanted to visit Fred and Frank Coker’s old farm just fifteen minutes away near the Merced River.

The farmhouse remained, but there were holes in the roof. The front door sagged off its hinges, and the windows had no glass. Fog rising from the water hid the outlines of the fallow bean and corn fields.

When I saw people on the river bank, gathered beneath the oak trees, I slowed down, then pulled over and stopped. Some of the people looked familiar, but I couldn’t be sure because they were made of mist, with only a few touches of color, perhaps from a yellow dress, blue overalls, a red-checked lumberman’s jacket.

I heard nothing except the river. They didn’t seem to notice me. I drove away, as they faded into the backwash of twilight.

_______________________________________________________________________

(3). The Old Neighborhood

I never had trouble keeping up with our next door neighbor, Mrs. Anderson. She was short, rotund, ancient; older than I could imagine.

One day when I was about five years old, I followed at her heels while she puttered in her overgrown garden among roses and oleanders behind her two-story Victorian house. In a floppy straw hat, flowered dress, sensible shoes, wire-rimmed glasses and tatty old sweater, she knelt in the grass by the big fishpond, pulled back a lily pad, exposed two large floating goldfish with their guts eaten out, looked up at me and said furiously, “See what those cats did!”

It wasn’t a nice thing to look at, but I wasn’t frightened or even upset. In my neighborhood, stranger things could happen and often did.

Besides, the cats didn’t belong to us. Stray and streetwise, dozens lived in the basement of my family’s rented Victorian house at 812 Myrtle Street, in San Jose, California. A previous owner had ripped out the inside stairs and put them on the outside, creating a duplex. My grandfather lived on the second floor. My parents, baby sister and I lived on the first.

It was a tired old house. Wind across the chimney sighed and muttered behind a sheet of plywood blocking the fireplace we never used because it had been damaged in the 1906 earthquake and never repaired.

My grandfather had a potbellied stove in his living room. On windy nights the stove made weird noises, which my grandfather explained came from a family of owls who lived in the stovepipe to keep warm. He also reassured me that other strange noises in the walls were harmless. It was just the rats going bowling.

At the corner of Myrtle and Emory Street, a big white wall hid everything behind it except a few tree tops, and the arched second-floor windows and red tile roof of a house I’d heard was beautiful, in which three elderly sisters kept exotic animals, including a blue screeching Macaw parrot that spent sunny days tethered by a thin golden chain to the twisted branch of an old lemon tree.

One night, the usual background noise of ardent passion and ritual combat from our stray cats escalated into chaotic yowling and screaming that finally drove my patient, kind, animal-loving father absolutely starkers. Storming into the front yard, he stopped suddenly to reconnoiter when he heard unusually deep growls, and saw two pair of glowing eyes from cats hiding under our front porch steps. Larger than any cats my father had ever seen, the beasts slithered out, bounded past him and leapt over the board fence into Mr. Moloney’s backyard, sending his three mean bulldogs into shrieking hysterics.

The next morning, my father learned from a neighbor that the big cats were actually ocelots that had escaped from the House of the Three Sisters.

It was a time of transition. The kids who played, scuffled and reached through wrought-iron fences to illegally squeeze snapdragons in other people’s gardens were not yet labeled ‘Baby Boomers.’ A few houses still had derelict water towers and old stables converted to garages. One day, I saw old Mr. Watkins drive a horse and buggy down his driveway and across the street into the back yard of a house where a few gnarled orchard trees still bloomed white every spring.

The neighborhood kids I remember most vividly were Little Frank, whose father, Big Frank, drove a bread truck by day and a mafia staff car by night; Luna Celeste who wore large gold hoop earrings, and whose skin and wild, naturally curly hair were the same shade of light bronze; and Yolanda, whose lean, taciturn mother worked the night shift at the cannery. Yolanda had a tiny grandmother passionately devoted to TV soap operas, and a shy uncle named Joe from Guadalajara who was always walking downtown to go to the movies.

The backs of four houses, including mine, shared an unfenced vacant lot. One rainy night, from my bedroom window I watched Yolanda’s father, her Uncle Joe and several other men building an addition onto their family’s kitchen, sawing, hammering and laughing beneath the new roof, the side walls still unframed, in yellow light spilling through the open kitchen door and windows.

On the corner, a few houses down the street from my own home, there was an immaculate two-story Italiante Victorian with a wrap-around porch connecting the front door with the parlor door. The front lawn was immense, edged along the sidewalk by big trees. The house was so beautiful and mysterious that I didn’t even dare step on the lawn. The people who lived there were ancient, rarely seen and wildly extravagant. At Christmas they had two trees; a big one in the living room and a little one in the parlor.

Adults made rules, but kids also had their own rules based on a tribal belief system full of legends and lore, some of it so dark and arcane that it would have left the Arch Druid whimpering and sucking his thumb in a corner.

For example, there was The Big Bat Thing that lived on Myrtle Street in a huge malevolent elm tree covered in ivy that also provided cover for squirrels, owls and rats. Occasionally, in a fit of temper, the tree would drop a rotten branch and bash in somebody’s parked car. The Big Bat Thing had sharp claws and a pointed beak and only came out at night to eat kids who disobeyed their parents and stayed out too late. But at that age I never stayed out too late, so I wasn’t afraid.

Myrtle Street was only a few blocks from the Southern Pacific switchyards where the tramps came from, and everyone knew they did bad things. One kid told me, “Don’t talk to the bums. They steal little daughters from the cook.” At the time it made perfect terrifying sense. Now, as a rational adult, I have absolutely no idea what he meant, although I suspect it may have been his confused and murky memory of an old movie.

One day, walking home from school, flocking with a bunch of kids on the sidewalk along a main street called The Alameda, a fragment of serious conversation floated past, “...And the boy was lying naked right here and a truck driver found him.”

I attended the monolithic grey stone and concrete Hester Elementary School which still had a few cracked walls from the 1906 earthquake, and a principle named Mr. Harrington who was eight feet tall and kept a big paddle with poison spikes.

The school grounds were officially divided into “Little Siders” (kindergarten through third grade) and “Big Siders” (4th through 6th). No one was allowed to cross the line. Big Siders were scary and possibly dangerous. One kid, the scariest, smoked cigarettes and wore a white undershirt.

Behind Hester across a chain link fence, there was a dark overgrown backyard with dog kennels made of wood and tar paper. I felt sorry for the sad little dogs, because everyone knew that their mean owners liked to eat them.

Hester was built on a major San Jose street called The Alameda. Beneath The Alameda there was something called an ‘underpass’ which I never saw. I knew people used it to keep from getting hit by cars. But the real reason it had been built was because two kids Broke the Rules.

In a prominent place in the school’s main corridor there was a metal plaque etched with the profiles of a brother and sister who’d crossed The Alameda against the light and got run over by a car, probably driven by the Angel of Retribution. At least that’s what our teacher implied when she told us the story.

Walking between my home and school along The Alameda required passing a tall old privet hedge almost a block long. Close to the hedge, I was always wary, because that’s where the Bad Nuns lived.

Actually, they lived in a house behind the hedge. Although we never actually saw any nuns, we knew they were there. Just out of sight. Waiting. (The rumors may have started among kids from St. Leo’s Parochial school, a few blocks from Hester, who told tales of terror, like the one about the poor sap who called Sister Mary-Francis, “Sister Mary-Frankenstein” to her face).

One day after school, on a double-dog dare, a brave crazy kid ran through a gap in the hedge and along the inside until someone yelled, “There’s a nun behind a tree!” The rest of us never saw her. We were running too fast.

Curiosity is often stronger than fear, and sometimes I’d spy through the hedge at the only visible part of the house: the front, made of wood painted white, a broad shady front porch, and big windows with long green shutters. The house looked kind of peaceful, even pretty, although I kept those feelings to myself.

The Alameda had once been a fashionable neighborhood with an eclectic mix of architecture dating between the 1860s and 1920s. In my childhood, many old houses were being demolished or converted into offices.

One of the houses was long and white, possibly stucco, once elegant, now empty. Decades earlier, when The Alameda had been widened, the house lost its front yard, leaving only a narrow strip of cracked concrete next to the sidewalk.

One hot windy day, with small dry weeds rolling across the sidewalk, I stared through floor-to-ceiling windows into an enormous room. In the back wall there were two sets of French doors obscured on the outside by leafless bushes. Sunlight filtering through the front windows cast long narrow patches of light onto the polished wood floor, leaving the rest of the room dim and full of ghosts.

Across The Alameda, three steps up from the sidewalk, there was a compact dark red Victorian called The Century House. It was pretty, and I knew that nice people must live there.

One day it was gone. I was shocked. I had no idea that houses could just disappear. I convinced myself that I’d simply lost it. For a long time I waited for it to reappear, maybe somewhere else.

Sometimes in the evenings, my grandfather and I walked to the switchyards at Emory and Stockton, where we’d wave to the train engineers, who always waved back. Across the tracks there was a plain wood cafe where the railroad workers ate. It was a mysterious place on the edge of my world and I wanted to go there and look. My grandfather always told me, “Someday...” but we never did.

Hester Elementary has been replaced by a modern school. On the Alameda, along the route I followed to school, only a few old houses survive. The rest--including the House of the Bad Nuns--have been replaced by office buildings.

The kid I used to be remembers a big white wall, a lemon tree, a blue parrot, windows, a red tile roof and stories about three sisters and their strange pets who all lived in a beautiful house. The wall is gone, and the grown-up I’ve become admires what has been revealed: an early 1920s white stucco Spanish Mediterranean-style mansion on a one-half acre lot with a formal garden in front and, in the back, visible behind a wrought-iron fence, another garden with citrus trees and a swimming pool.

The kid, however, is puzzled, because it’s in the nature of ghosts to be confused, trying to impose images of what they remember from the past onto what exists in the present. There was just a wall, the tree, sometimes a parrot, a roof and windows. I never saw any of this. I don’t remember. It can’t be the same place. How can something exist, how can it be real when I don’t remember?

On Myrtle Street, although the malevolent Elm was cut down, displacing all the little animals, the birds and The Big Bat Thing, most of the old houses (including my family’s battered Victorian duplex) have been restored and gentrified into a beautiful set for a nostalgic movie about “The Old Neighborhood.” Only the ghosts know what’s missing: the vibrant energy of a neighborhood in transition between cultures, traditions and generations.

In my dreams, I sometimes return to the old neighborhood, always mixed with streets and houses from other lost places; at peace, and yet with a purpose I can’t explain, where I often stop at the railroad tracks, wanting to cross over and enter the cafe with the open door.

______________________________________________________________________

Idaho Gothic

(Exile)

Since 1945, my mother’s sister, Lella, her husband, Sam—WWII veteran of North Africa and Italy—and their daughter Edith (“Skip”) had lived in Honolulu. In the winter of 1950, before my uncle shipped out to Korea, the family visited my grandparents in Rigby, Idaho. Skip was 14. When my aunt and uncle left, Skip stayed in Rigby and spent a lot of time alone with her small transistor radio, trying to find her favorite program, “Hawaii Calls.”

In 1894 my maternal grandmother, Willie Self (her parents wanted another boy) was born in Midland, Texas. At age five she slipped on an icy sidewalk and broke her right hip. Because her family, devout Christians believed in “laying on of hands” instead of professional medical treatment, she spent the rest of her life with a fused right hip, bent knee and leg four inches too short. When she stood, her right foot pointed straight down.

In 1892 my grandfather, Ray Dillingham, was born in the backwoods of Adair County, Kentucky. At age twelve, an accident while repairing a barn roof left him with a withered left arm and permanent contraction in his left hand. At fourteen, he ran away from home. In 1915, in Clayton, New Mexico, he married my grandmother. Because he rarely spoke about the nine years prior to the marriage, family stories were based mostly on rumor and conjecture.

At age thirty, he lost his left leg above the knee to blood poisoning.

In 1934, my grandparents settled in Medford, Oregon, where Papa Ray found a secure job as a farm manager, and my grandmother ran a combined bakery and candy store.

In 1948, age 56, traveling in eastern Idaho, he found a new business opportunity in Rigby, a small town with a thriving economy based on farming, ranching and the Union Pacific railroad. After buying a small cafe called The Do-Nut Shop, he quit his job in Medford, uprooting my grandmother from her friends, a comfortable home and the job she loved.

The shop’s location was ideal, downtown in the West Main Street shopping district near the railroad depot, the Hotel Rigby and two movie theaters, the Royal and the Gem. None of the buildings on West Main were over two stories high, but most were either brick or sandstone, as sturdy and practical as the Mormons who’d established the town in 1883.

Rigby, Papa Ray believed, had potential.

In 1950, the population was 1,826. In 1960: 2,281, In 2000: 2,998.

My parents and I had made previous summer car trips to Rigby, but the trip when I was eight was different: the first time they left me there for most of the summer, and the last time, until I was twelve, they returned in person to pick me up. For the next five summers we’d drive to Rigby; they’d stay a few days, then leave. When my visit ended, my grandparents would drive me to the airport in Idaho Falls, where I’d take a flight back to California.

At the time I no more questioned being left in Rigby than I would have questioned going to school. I was an adult before I connected the summers to my mother’s emotional instability and the probable agreement between my parents and grandparents that for my mother, having me around all summer was too stressful.

Papa Ray’s 1948 “downtown” was not the one I knew. In just over a decade, many old buildings had either burned down or been deliberately demolished. Others had their facades covered with aluminum siding or stucco. The Royal Theater site was a parking lot. I was eleven when the Main (formerly the Gem) was remodeled into a furniture store. In eastern Idaho, Union Pacific had eliminated passenger service, and Rigby’s train depot was boarded up and abandoned. Except on weekends and during events like the Pioneer Days Parade, downtown was bleak and disturbingly empty.

What hadn’t changed were shady residential streets with bungalows, frame houses and modest single-story “pioneer” Victorians with front bay windows, friendly yet self-contained, that I imagined had secure happy families because I rarely saw and never met the people who lived in them.

In five summers, my grandparents and I never had a complete conversation. Our interactions were mostly limited to imperatives like breakfast is ready, we’re going for a Sunday drive and gramma telling me, we’re going to the picture show. It was always just gramma and me, because Papa Ray never went to movies.

The only one I remember was Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. The banshee terrified me, and when I put my hands over my face, Gramma tried to pull them down, telling me, “Look! It’s beautiful!”

In the evenings after work, in the apartment above the shop, my grandparents and I watched TV, mostly westerns and variety shows. Papa Ray in his red plaid bathrobe, without his artificial leg, sat in his wheelchair. Occasionally his bathrobe would slip, revealing what remained of his leg. It was not a pleasant sight, but I wasn’t repulsed. Just a little embarrassed, as if I’d invaded his privacy.

I was a voracious reader, but the apartment had no books. So I’d visit the one-room public library and, one-by-one, check out (again) all the pre-WWII editions of Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift and other “juvenile” books. Then I’d re-read the library’s few history books and after that, out of desperation, novels for adults, most of which left me bored and confused, so I never finished them.

I usually hung out with Darla and Twila, about my age, whose family lived in a frame house about two blocks from the shop. The family had three other kids, including Donna Mae, a high school student. Their father was gaunt and frail with strange intense eyes. Their mother, thin and grey-haired with black-framed glasses, screamed and scolded if kids played too close to the backyard cellar door, or washing pinned on the clothes lines.

Darla and Twila once told me how excited they were about the upcoming October potato harvest “vacation” when all the schools shut down, allowing kids to work in the fields. The previous year, Donna Mae had made almost $100. I was amazed and envious. It sounded like fun, and so much money!

Years later, I learned the work was peonage and exploitation. Farmers hired kids because they came cheap. For manual labor not only strenuous but dangerous even for adults, a generous wage was just over a dollar an hour.

During the harvest, local newspapers, including the Rigby Star, had brief laconic articles about unskilled underage kids injured in the fields when they were hit by tricks, or their arms and hands were caught by the rollers and chains of potato combines.

One day on Main Street, I watched the Pioneer Days parade led by Donna Mae in a drum majorette costume, high-stepping and twirling her baton. A few years later she was married with two toddlers.

One of my grandparents’ closest friends was Mr. Farmer, a banker and the richest man in town. He was also ugly with sallow skin, pockmarks on his sagging lower cheeks and a nose like a potato. He always wore dark suits and a fedora.

As a kid I was impressed, vaguely associating “richest man in town” with stories in books and TV shows. As an adult, I wonder what was it like to be the richest in a small town where, beyond the essentials, there was nothing much to buy and most people lived like everybody else.

A few blocks from the shop, one of Gramma’s friends, Frieda, had a beauty parlor inside her house next to the city park with a swimming pool rumored to give kids polio. When I was twelve, Gramma took me on a forced march to Friedas and a couple of hours of shampooing, curling, drying, cutting, back-combing and fluffing, giving me a dippy-looking bouffant that I hated, but Gramma and Frieda loved because it looked so cute and “modern,” just like on TV.

From time-to-time, in the alley between the shop and the Eckersell Funeral Home, my path would cross with the four friendly and mischievous Eckersell kids who lived in the big apartment over the family business. They were usually accompanied by a few cousins, including a girl who always wore what looked like the same flower-patterned dress with thick white knee socks and heavy shoes. Her thin mousy brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her shoulders were slightly hunched. She never smiled or spoke words, but grimaced, and occasionally made noises like a giggle, a grunt or a growl.

One day the kids and I were upstairs in the apartment’s living room with white pillars, white walls, white plaster molding, dark brocade curtains and heavy ornate furniture, like the room hadn’t been redecorated since the Eckersells bought the business in 1928. When one of the kids asked if I wanted to see a dead body, I said okay. Sure. Why not?

It was downstairs in the funeral parlor, in an open casket; an old man in a dark suit. I was not horrified or scared. Just interested. A kid dared me to touch him. I did, with my forefinger. His cheek was cool, and felt like firm cheese. Overhead lights focused on the body left the rest of the room in deep shadow. Not black or blue, but brown. That bothered me. It still does.

Just before my thirteenth birthday, Papa Ray told me I was no longer allowed in the shop (the kitchen was okay) because customers “Didn’t like to see little girls in the shop.” Gramma told me—without giving a reason—that I could no longer associate with Darla, Twila and the Eckersells. I did anyway, and when Gramma caught on, she told me that while I could still go outside, I was confined to the adjacent parking lot.

On the morning when my parents appeared (without telling me they were coming) to take me home, I got up so fast from the breakfast table I almost knocked my chair over.

I never went back to Rigby.

But the writer never left.

______________________________________________________________________

(II)

WORKING

(5). Final Edition

Between Watergate and the Bi-Centennial, with a major in journalism, I graduated from Whittier College in southeast Los Angeles. My goal: become  a newspaper photographer.

But I was confronted by the reality that rising production costs and declining circulation were forcing traditional newspapers to downsize, cut staff, merge or go out of business, which meant I was competing for work with veteran journalists.

It took two years, sending out over 100 resumes by letter and cold-calling editors while working at menial yet weird jobs that paid little but taught me something about life, before I was finally hired as a photographer at the Whittier Daily News. (The irony did not escape me that after sending out resumes to newspapers all over the country, I was hired in the city where I had graduated from college).

The job was part time, but the owners--two old tight-fisted right-wing capitalist reactionaries--assured me that within a year, I would become a full-time photographer. Until then, I would do whatever was needed, from outside photography to darkroom printing, reporting when necessary, and taking care of the teletype machines.

Whittier had been founded by Quakers in 1887, and “Uptown,” the old residential section with its eclectic mix of Victorian houses, bungalows, cottages and modest apartment buildings surrounded by gardens and trees, had a lingering quiet aura of insular respectability.

“Uptown,” on Bright Avenue, I rented a one bedroom apartment in a two-story 20-unit building so modest that it refused to look directly at the street. Instead, it presented a row of three garage doors attached on the left side to a superfluous brick arch leading to a narrow self-contained courtyard, where all the apartments--ten on the second floor and ten on the first--faced a strip of lawn separated by a board fence from the large bungalow next door.

The second floor apartments shared a common walkway. On the first floor, where I lived, front doors opened onto a sidewalk next to the lawn. At the other end of the sidewalk, another arch provided access to the alley behind the building.

On my first day at work, I was astounded to discover that one of the staff photographers was an old friend. During our senior year at Whittier College, Sam and I agreed that we did not do “tempestuous” very well. At the paper, between one day and the next, we became the best of friends. Sam was self-taught but extraordinarily talented with a passion for commercial work. The third photographer, Mark, was a boisterous ex-football jock who’d graduated from Fullerton College, which at the time provided cheap labor for a place that Mark and other cynical Fullerton College students called “Miseryland” and “The Tragic Kingdom.”

The three of us were watched, spied on and sometimes interrogated by the head photographer, Harold. Approaching age 70, he still had a full head of black hair streaked with gray. In his youth, his gaunt face must have been exceptionally handsome. Irascible, suspicious of our motives, he derided our Nikon and Olympus cameras, preferring to use Speed Graflexes from the newspaper’s stash of old photo equipment.

Because The Whittier Daily News was an afternoon paper, most of the staff worked in the morning. My job included the tapping, chugging, rumbling teletype machines, which printed wire service news 24-hours a day onto large rolls of yellow paper about eight inches wide and several inches thick. Twice a day I had to change the roll so that it never ran out, and to search for stories that the editors wanted to use in the paper. It also meant I was always the first to arrive at 5 a.m. to put a new roll in the machine, clean up paper that had accumulated on the floor overnight, rip the paper to separate the stories--a skill that involved using a ruler instead of scissors--clip them together and hang them on a bulletin board.

It was a process so fast, so simple and automatic that I no longer recall if the stories were kept in sequence, or if I had a method for sorting them into specific categories.

Time has layered over and buried many details of the job. I know that I would sometimes go across the street to a deli for a cup of coffee, or back home for a quick breakfast, but when and how often I can no longer remember. I do know I was always back at work by 7 a.m. By 9 a.m., the newsroom staff began raiding the coke machine because for people who habitually began work around sunrise, 9 a.m. was the middle of the day.

By late afternoon the newsroom was mostly empty, although reporters and photographers were still out working on stories for the next day’s edition

After hours, the photographers were allowed to use the darkroom for their own projects, and because I still dreamed about having a full time career in photojournalism, I took advantage.

I usually arrived in the early evening when I had the newsroom to myself, except for a half dozen new VDT’s (video data terminals) lined up on a long table. Like many newspapers, The Whittier Daily News was in transition from typewriters to computers.

The VDT’s were never shut down. At night, when it was just me and them, I observed, from a safe distance, the constantly changing displays of indecipherable symbols, fragments of symbols and words broken by sudden silent starbursts and visual explosions. Sometimes the entire screen image appeared to roll over, reappearing with entirely news patterns and cryptic codes. I had the eerie feeling that the VDT’s were not only alive but sentient, and I was a witness to behavior never seen in the daytime.

My strongest memories about working at night in the darkroom involve the smell of chemicals, the sound of running water, and songs on the radio. “Time Passages” by Al Stewart, “Give Me the Night” by George Benson, “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan, “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson and “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago.

Sometimes, always around midnight, Sam would arrive. There was never any warning, no phone call, just Sam opening the door and standing there with that sweet sad smile. He was living with his girlfriend, Lisa, and while he never talked about it, I knew when he came to the darkroom, they’d had another fight.

They’d been dating since high school. Lisa was sweet-tempered, bright, artistic and manipulative. At age 24, because she still did not have drivers license, it was Sam (whom I never heard complain) who regularly drove her to and from her job at Nordstroms, as well as to art shows, job interviews and other appointments. Why he tolerated the situation baffled me--until years later, when I realized the answer had been in the only argument we ever had at the paper: his contention that in the first Star Wars movie, Leia, a princess dressed in white, not only holding a gun but shooting at Storm Troopers was not only absurd, but unladylike, and she could have been just as heroic by remaining stoically passive and waiting for rescue.

Usually Sam and I developed film and printed until the hour of deepest night, just before sunrise. Then he’d return to Lisa and I’d go home and sleep, before youth and adrenaline got me out of bed, sometimes to work, other times, on my off-hours, to gallivant around L.A., my spiritual home, taking photos or exploring second-hand bookstores.

I remember incidents at the paper, but after so many years, the daily routine that tied them together has faded like an old photo, until the details are just guesswork.

On my way to work, I’d usually stop at Winchell’s Donuts down the street for a take-out order of two glazed doughnuts (at the time, eight cents apiece). At Winchell’s I discovered the Night People who, by choice or necessity, lived in a world that most people never knew existed.

Regular customers included a truck driver for a hospital linen service with a red birthmark covering half his face. A young woman, always with her four dogs waiting in her pick-up truck, worked at Knots Berry Farm. There might be a few college students, studying. From time to time an older man, dressed in a style I thought of as “Rumpled Academic” would be sitting in a back booth, writing in a notebook, sometimes rubbing his chin or tapping his pen against his forehead. There were cops, office and factory workers changing shift. The shy, silent frumpy housewife who always wore a chiffon head scarf, nylons with seams up the back, a worn yet respectable knee-length cloth coat and sensible shoes, was actually a man.

Their world fascinated me. I felt comfortable there, but also frustrated because I knew it wasn’t something I could photograph. It was also the first time I realized that while some things cannot be photographed because they’re too ephemeral, too elusive, words might accomplish what a photograph could not.

Although my job description did not include “reporter,” I had a reporter’s instincts, and ambitions to add the job to my resume. At night, every time I heard a nearby siren, I was up, dressed and out the door, tracking down the story, always on foot. I witnessed fires, a lot of aberrant human behavior, got the facts from cops and firefighters, and discovered Uptown alleys, hidden courtyards and houses-behind-houses that I had never noticed in daylight.

Walking home, accompanied only by my own thoughts, I also discovered that at night, when the only illumination comes from streetlights, and no shadows move to mark the passing hours, time does not exist.

One night, I heard someone singing on the second floor of a big old wood frame house. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell, and I couldn’t quite make out the words. The tune was pensive, and the singer seemed to pause and sigh between the lines. Stopping at the low, slightly crooked wrought-iron fence surrounding the front yard, I smelled damp earth and wet grass, but the strongest scent came from roses.

The song stopped. I waited, then went home. The next morning, I returned to the yard. There were no roses.

On a night of fog and drizzle I heard Spanish guitar music played on the front porch of a white cottage only a block from my apartment. Because the porch was screened by wisteria, and the light over the front door was out, I couldn’t see the musician. I stopped to listen. The music paused, perhaps while the person tuned a guitar string. It started again, played with skill and assurance. Entranced, I moved closer. The music stopped. I waited; silence. I left. I never heard it again.

During my first year at the paper, I’d write news stories about the police and fire incidents I’d witnessed, typing the final draft at the office between the time I finished tending the teletype machines and the arrival of the news room staff. I would then give the hard copy to the news editor, who always buried it and used his own stories based on information provided by the police or fire department; stories full of inaccuracies, omissions and details that I knew had never happened. Finally, I gave up my reporter ambitions, and concentrated on photography.

The second time the owners of the newspaper backed out of their promise to give me full-time employment, I quit with few regrets because I’d just been accepted into the graduate photojournalism program at the University of Texas. Sam was going to Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, one of the most prestigious commercial photography schools in the country; a great honor for a self-taught photographer. Mark had already moved on to sports photography at the Los Angeles Times.

The day before I left for Texas, Sam and I had coffee at Winchell’s. He seemed subdued, preoccupied, and I was too full of my own plans to ask the right questions.

Years later, by chance, I learned that the day before, Lisa had told him she was pregnant.

Panicked because Sam had decided to move--without her--three hours away to Santa Barbara, and terrified about living on her own, she had deliberately stopped using her birth control.

Sam eventually married her, and never went to Brooks Institute.

I’ve never returned to Whittier.

In the first years after I left, I was too busy. After the catastrophic 1987 “Whittier Narrows” earthquake, I didn’t want to. I’d read news stories about developers who’d bought damaged commercial and residential properties, tearing them down and destroying the charm, character and cohesiveness of the old neighborhoods.

My apartment building had survived. But the one time I took an online street-level google-map tour from the Whittier College campus through downtown, I got lost. Most of the old buildings, from the venerable 1915 William Penn Hotel to Greenleaf Second-hand Books, the deli across from the newspaper building, the antique shops, cafes and little stores with second-floor apartments, had either been remodeled out of recognition, or demolished and replaced.

Several years ago, possibly through the college alumni office or directory, Sam found my email address, and sent me a message. Shocked, but delighted, I answered. In his second email, he told me that he and Lisa were still married and living in Whittier. They had two sons, born twelve years apart. A few years earlier, only in his late 50s, he’d retired--although I suspected he’d actually been downsized--as head photographer at the Orange County Register. He made a statement that I chose to take as a compliment, although it haunts me because of the implications about his own life: You have found your place in the world.

We continued emailing, until I noticed that all his messages were sent after midnight when Lisa was probably asleep. I stopped responding, and never heard from him again.

Recently I googled the Whittier Daily News, hoping to find old photos I’d taken, news stories I’d worked on, and staff bylines because I couldn’t recall everyone’s name. But the paper’s online archives only date back to 1998. Older papers exist on microfilm, and hard copies in bound volumes, but only in the Whittier public library, and a backroom of the newspaper building, It’s as if all the local news from that time; spot news, drama, tragedies, major events; everything we considered important enough to print, never happened, and everyone we knew, or wrote about, interviewed or photographed, never existed.

When I drive between California and Arizona, I use the 210 freeway through Los Angeles, with my car radio tuned to the best oldies stations. The weather is always warm. Smog transforms the San Gabriel Mountains on the north, and the L.A. Basin to the south into yellow and sepia-toned Impressionist paintings. In the city of Duarte, I see the first exit sign for the 605 freeway.

In the haze, listening to a Golden Oldies radio station, I pass through a time warp. Along the freeway, I recognize little, and yet everything is familiar. Nothing has changed. I’m young again.

I take the 605 south to El Monte, where I’ll pick up I-10. But the Beverly Boulevard exit to Whittier is only seven miles farther south. Maybe, if I take the exit and keep driving...

_______________________________________________________________________

(6). Images

Working as a free-lance nature photographer, I specialized in urban-interface wildlife and landscapes on the west side of San Francisco Bay, in the Santa Cruz Mountains and along the San Mateo County coast. I had one-person exhibits at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, the Coyote Point Museum for Environmental Education, and Stanford University. I was a regular exhibitor at the headquarters of the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. By invitation, I’d given combined lectures and slide shows at meetings of the Sierra Club and Audubon Society. In 1992, during hearings on establishing federal protection for an area called Bair Island, the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge--established in the early 1950s to save and restore San Francisco Bay wetlands--used one of my photos of an endangered bird, called a Clapper Rail, on the cover of a promotional packet presented to members of Congress.

None of which put beans on the table.

Photography was going digital. In 1998, after I’d received two rejection letters from photography magazines and one from a stock photo agency informing me that although my work was excellent, it could not be used because slides could not be enhanced (a polite weasel-word for “manipulated”) I knew it was time to find a real job.

On impulse, I called the publisher at Homes and Land of the Peninsula magazine. “I’m a photographer. Do you have any jobs--”

“Yeah. one of our other photographers just quit. Come on over.”

I got the job. My regular territory would cover nine cities north of Silicon Valley and south of San Francisco: Foster City (where I lived); Redwood Shores, Redwood City, Belmont, San Carlos, Woodside, Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto. My base salary, $6 per “standard” property (plus gas); $10 for properties in cities “out of the area,” and $10 each for portraits of realtors.

The schedule my boss described sounded easy, if not indolent. Work for one week, off the next. For me, the job was ideal. I set my own schedule. I answered only to my boss, and to myself. The quality of my work was entirely my responsibility. However, during my first month, I discovered I would never really be off-work, because I could be called in at any time.

Scott, the other photographer, had family obligations as well as a thriving free-lance photography business. His territory for the magazine covered all the cities north of mine, including San Francisco and the San Mateo County coast. Whenever he was not available, or had been unable to finish that week’s assignments, I filled in. Panicked realtor’s also called the boss about jobs that had to be done immediately. Meltdowns in the magazine’s cranky archaic computer system sometimes fried the previous week’s work, which meant that Scott and I had to scramble, shooting not only our current assignments, but the one’s production could not salvage.

50ish, born and raised in a small town on gulf coast Florida; fond of Hawaiian-style shirts, about 5’10” with a shoulder-swinging duck-walk swagger, my boss looked like a tough but kind-hearted waterfront bartender in a 1930s B-movie. And he really was a nice guy. Unfortunately, he also had a temper and the tact of a howitzer. On my first day, he told me that ‘Becca, the photographer who’d just quit, would stay on an extra week as backup, both of us shooting the same properties because I’d have no idea what I was doing.

He was right. I didn’t.

I’d grown up on the Peninsula. But during my first week, I still got lost. Frequently. Because once I left the freeway and the main roads, I knew nothing about the neighborhoods. Neither did I understand the subtleties of architectural light and shadow, or how to choose angles emphasizing a property’s advantages, while hiding the problems. I did not know how to arrange my schedule efficiently.

A week later, ‘Becca left for good on a book tour with the author of an expensive cookbook, for which ‘Becca had taken the photos. On my own, trying to master the job through a process my boss called “forced learning,” I quickly realized that the key to success and survival was the ability to become a shape-shifter.

On a typical day, my assignments included trailer parks, tract houses, mansions, condos, townhouses, construction sites and mountain cabins. I had to deal with property owners who were sometimes fearful, suspicious and occasionally hostile.

Realtors gave me gate codes to fenced properties, and the combinations to front door lock boxes containing house keys. I opened gates and prowled through backyards. Never, not once, did neighbors call the cops, or even ask what I was doing.

The job demanded tight scheduling and arcane mental computations--often made while driving--on how to organize the day based on the average length of time needed to photograph a single property (exterior, five to ten minutes; interior, variable, depending on whether the owner was home, the realtor present, or both); driving time between cities and properties while factoring in appointments which might take an hour or longer, and how much time I usually took for lunch (approximately thirty-seven minutes).

I had supplies and back-up plans for locked gates and unexpected detours; construction sites ankle-deep in adobe mud; bad weather, bad dogs and crazy people.

In 1998, car-based GPS was still in the testing stage. Google maps would not come online until 2005. I depended on map books, especially the Thomas Guides. Every week I photocopied maps of cities where I planned to work; highlighted streets with the assigned properties and placed the pages in a binder, which I kept in my car. I also created a master template for a time-sheet with spaces for mileage, gas, dates, addresses, realtor’s names, and notes about incidents and problems.

Big chainlink fence. Gate. Can’t see the house. Driveway, four cars. Dogs.

Realtor gave wrong address, owner says house not for sale.

No photo. Tree fell through the roof.

Gradually, after repeatedly photographing the same neighborhoods, I became familiar with their streets, house numbering, shortcuts, parking and the best times of day to photograph.

During the first week, I suffered ranting dashboard-pounding frustration while trying to find properties on a particular section of road in a pleasant suburban neighborhood in the hills above Redwood City where, for reasons known only to crabbed and spiteful Dickensian planning department clerks, the street numbers were not consecutive. 500s were embedded with the 200s mixed with the 800s across the street from the 300s. There were mis-numbered mailboxes in front of construction sites for houses that did not exist. I found the solution when I finally abandoned linear thinking and “imprinted” building sites and houses with landmarks, from dead trees to fire hydrants and porta-potties.

It took about a month before I gained enough self-confidence to relax and stop obsessing about problems and situations over which I had no control, while finding ways to solve the ones I could. In Redwood Shores, for example, there were enclaves of townhouses and condos protected by electronic gates--but only at the entrance. All I had to do was park outside and wait until someone in another car drove up and opened the gate. Then I’d follow them through. If I was in the mood to walk, or pressed for time and the property was close by, I had the option of parking on the street outside the enclave, then walking through hedges never dense enough to stop me.

Every Tuesday morning, my boss would have the property assignment list, which was supposed to be complete, but seldom was. Throughout the week there was always a chance I’d be called back for additional assignments. Because working six days was really no different than working five, I’d go to the office on Monday morning, pick up the assignments already available, and begin shooting a day early.

How many properties I photographed per week varied with the time of year. In summer, the busiest season, I could average between seventy and eighty. (My record: 92 in five days). In November and December, usually fewer than thirty for the standard “long” issue. However, in November and December, the magazine also published additional “short” issues, for which I was the only photographer. The fact I usually had fewer than a dozen assignments did not mean less work. Most of the properties were in Scott’s territory--northern San Mateo County and San Francisco.

Born and raised in The City, Scott knew all the side-streets, the best places to park, and when to avoid certain areas when regular events took all the nearby parking. Knowing none of this, I spent most of my time cussing, driving erratically, making illegal u-turns and wishing fervently that for this Pearl of the Pacific, Baghdad-by-the-Bay and the Cool Grey City of Love, killer asteroids could not come soon enough.

One day in 2001, with no warning, the boss told the staff, “We’re going digital.” He’d already bought cameras for the office: Nikon CoolPix 5000s. Scott and I could no longer use our own film cameras. We grumbled, but had no choice. And no chance to train. A few days later, Scott and I each picked up an office camera, which we’d keep with us at all times.

Within a few days, I was a convert who wanted my own digital point-and-shoot. However, in the office, it was Hell Week. The old computers had been scrapped. Gremlins infested the new ones. There were times the production staff wanted to re-program the new system with a fire axe.

We endured.

Now, on Sundays, instead of leaving a small paper lunch bag full of film canisters at the office, I’d enter the week’s images into a computer.

On Sundays, I had the office to myself: a one-room concrete block building about 40’ x 50’, probably over 100 years old. Facing the street, an industrial-grade metal roll-up separated two identical wood doors. Inside, there were two tiny antiquated bathrooms, and evidence that a center wall had been removed. In the back wall, exterior metal screens protected two heavily curtained windows, nailed shut. The only outside light came through clerestory windows near the ceiling.

Caltrain (formerly Southern Pacific) tracks were less than thirty feet from the rear of the building. When trains rumbled past, the back windows would go dark, and I’d put my hand on top of the computer to stop it from shaking.

Sometimes, while I worked, a mouse would run over my shoes. The office was full of mice, although they only ventured out when it was empty, or close to it. They were simply doing errands, visiting family and friends, busy with their own lives, and I enjoyed their company.

Early in the afternoon, the boisterous cleaning crew, using their own key, would unlock the front door and overrun the office. I was always glad when they finished, slamming the door behind them and leaving me in peace.

Based on my journal and invoice books, true stories of over 6,000 properties can be condensed and distilled into…

Work Week: Day One

(Properties #1-5)

At 8 a.m. I begin work in my own town, Foster City. There are five properties on my list, and the day begins auspiciously. My boss and the realtors do not like photos of houses with garage doors up and cars in driveways, and I’ve timed it right: at four properties, people have either left for work or they’re not up yet, because the doors are down and the driveways, empty. The fifth property has an industrial dumpster in front, and I can’t get a clear shot. The garage door goes up, revealing a rumpled woman in a yellow bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.

She tells me the dumpster will be there all week and probably longer because the family is cleaning and downsizing before the yard sale next week. I ask her to lower the garage door for about five minutes. She agrees. I photograph the dumpster as a record shot. I also make a note on my time sheet to tell my boss about the problem.

In this job, I follow the prime directive: cover my ass at all times.

(Properties #6-10)

Redwood Shores is an upscale planned community ten minutes south of Foster City, off Highway 101. (From my home, Redwood Shore’s northern edge is visible a half-mile away across Belmont Slough’s tidal marshlands). Like Foster City, Redwood Shores is built on a gelatinous landfill on tidal marsh. While Foster City is anchored to the outside world by a bridge from Highway 101, and the 9-mile Hayward/Highway 92 bridge across the bay, Redwood Shores is accessible by only two bridges from Highway 101, making it quieter and more self-contained; a good place to raise a family in a community where nothing much of interest ever happens.

At the back of the city adjacent to the marshlands, I pass a traffic circle at least 40 feet in diameter enclosed by a concrete curb about eight inches high, containing a two-story fake lighthouse and hilly rock garden filled with beautiful plants and flowers. It’s early enough so that the local marsh jackrabbits are still abroad. Those not romping among the plants and flowers are eating them. I salute the jackrabbits, and continue to my appointment: photographing the first floor interior of a two-story townhouse. I knock. The owner, a young woman in a white terrycloth robe lets me in, then walks upstairs.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she says. “Photograph anything you like.”

“Uh, thank you.” Okay, you silly woman. I’ll just hang around and loot the joint.

About ten minutes down Highway 101, at the end of the East Bayshore frontage road on Charlott Lane where I’ve never been, my next property is in the Marina Pointe condo complex across a tidal inlet from undeveloped Inner Bair Island, one of my favorite sites for nature photography. But I do not remember seeing any buildings that close to the island. (Inner Bair is one of three islands which belong to the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Middle and Outer Bair are accessible only by kayak, canoe or Park Service and Fish & Game airboats).

In a desolation of weeds and hard-packed dirt, the frontage roads ends at a temporary concrete barrier on a bridge over Redwood Creek, a tidal slough connecting the bay and downtown Redwood City. Marina Pointe is easy to find because the four buildings are the only ones out here, so new they don’t even have landscaping. Each building is three stories, orangish-tan, attractive with no particular style, although I’m sure “Mediterranean ambience” appears at least once in the sales pitch. Charlotte Lane is actually an alley between two buildings with garage doors on either side.

The Charlotte Lane building is adjacent to Redwood Creek. The realtor wants an exterior of a first-floor condo’s patio off the living room, taken from the dirt levee/bike path along the back of the complex.

The levee is about six feet wide, with perhaps four feet of clearance between the top and the mudflats now exposed at low tide. Approximately twenty-five feet of landfill separates the levee from building’s back patios.

In the wild El Nino winter of 1982-1983, I lived in a third floor condo on Beachpark Boulevard, one of Foster City’s main streets. Separated by a levee/bike path, the street on one side and Belmont Slough’s tidal marsh on the other were about seven feet below the levee’s top.

One night during a violent storm, I stood on my balcony, watching emergency crews sandbag the levee where the slough rolled over the top, driven by wind and unusually high Spring full moon “supertides.”

The day after the storm, along a two mile stretch of Highway 101 between Redwood City and San Carlos, the wide-open expanse of Inner Bair Island’s russet-red tidal marsh had been replaced by an inland sea. Exerting it’s ancient power and dominance, the bay had reclaimed over three miles between Outer Bair Island and Highway 101. Until the supertides ended, people kayaked between 101 and the bay.

Today, it occurs to me that most people buying--like most of the realtors who are selling--Marina Pointe condos probably do not remember the flooding, either because they’re too young or else not from around here. Realtors who do know the story (like the project’s developers, who certainly know all the hazards) are probably under no legal obligation to mention past history, or the certainty that another catastrophic El Nino will happen, with high tides capable of flooding every ground-floor unit.

Although no construction vehicles are present, I recognize the signs and portents: on all sides, piles of dirt and graded land. Marina Pointe is actually the first project in a new community.

Crossing Highway 101, I driving through downtown Redwood city into a quiet residential neighborhood I photograph so often that working there is Old Home Week, I anticipate a quick and easy “grab-shot” of the nice 1950s white wood-frame with two garage doors in front and the big tree shading the driveway. However, do not (according to the realtor’s instructions) include the adjacent vacant lot and wire fence posted with End/ Keep Out signs, which would reveal the house is on a dead-end next to the railroad tracks.

Dagnabit!

The garage doors are up and the driveway crammed with furniture, appliances and yard-sale junk. I think, Not a chance. No way in hell I can photograph this. A meagre yet wiry little man with a buzz cut, baggy, grimy jeans and a brown untucked shirt scuttles out of the backyard and begins rummaging through boxes.

I park and get out of my car. Igor scowls at me, moves a cardboard box full of magazines from one side of the driveway to the other, and scurries away. Something nudges the side of my leg. I look down. A large white pit bull smiles at me. Inside the garage someone whistles, then shouts, Daisy!

She charges into the garage. Moments later she returns, dancing at the side of her master.

Thin, about 6’ tall, he has thick greying dark brown hair--long on top, short on the sides, wire-rimmed glasses, jeans and a grey t-shirt spattered with white paint.

He explains he’s in the process of selling the house, which he inherited from his recently deceased father. He’s also having problems with his ex-wife, while his lawyer just told him, I’m sorry Dave, but you’ll have to go back to jail for a few days.

Oh.

He assures me that by Saturday, the driveway will be empty and the garage door down. However, with his permission, I photograph the house anyway, and make a mental note to tell my boss that this week at least, a photo with an empty driveway might not be possible.

I move on to a nice neighborhood, modest, quiet, not particularly old, on a street that leads nowhere in particular. The house is a single-story wood frame bungalow. The lawn is covered with old clocks, small chairs, tables, lamps and antique tools.

It’s Tuesday. Why are they having a garage sale on Tuesday?

I’m irritated because the realtor hadn’t bothered to notify my boss that there would be a sale. Photos of stuff on the lawn, as well as an open garage door are not acceptable. I’ll have to come back later, but I need to know when the sale will be over.

I park and get out with the intention of asking those middle-aged Viking-looking guys in the garage what was going on.

They explained that they were from Minnesota, packing up their grandfather’s house. I could look around inside, if I wanted, since everything was for sale. If I had any questions I could ask their wives, who were inside.

The house had a faint, evocative odor from all the meals ever cooked there. I smelled detergent, old rugs and tobacco. I liked the house. It was worn, but friendly and comfortable.

Like the owner, who was sitting in the living room, in his armchair, watching a football game and joshin’ the wimminfolk who were in the kitchen, packing dishes.

Perhaps a dozen other strangers browsing through his belongings had to step over his feet to examine bookshelves, a small floor cabinet full of curios, and a beautiful scale model of a WWII battleship. There was no evidence that a woman lived in the house, so I assumed that he’d once had a wife, confirmed when I saw old family photos still hanging on the walls.

When I saw people in his bedroom, sorting through his closet, and stacks of old blankets and quilts on the double bed, I was so rattled that I left. How could he remain so calm, so…self-possessed as strangers making personal comments rummaged through his possessions, his life?

My nest stop was Manzanita Street with only three houses: two single-story frame Craftsman bungalows and an 1882 brick cottage. There is no separation between the small fenced front yards and a 6-acre parking lot with a Home Depot, a self-storage business and fast-food restaurants. By night, the parking lot is a hangout for rowdy teenagers. Behind the houses, people driving eastbound on the Woodside Road overpass look down onto the back patios.

The realtor wants images of the cottage’s front exterior and living room. I get the outside shots, then climb the front steps and ring the doorbell. The bald man who answers wears a herringbone tweed suit and enormous glasses with deep yellow lenses. Although his shoulders are bent, they’re still broad. In his younger days, he must have been formidable. I tell him why I’m here. He stares at me, mutters, I’ll find my sister, then wanders away, leaving the front door open.

A woman appears from a hallway. Medium height, thin with an attractive angular face and white hair in a ponytail, she wears a grey cloth jacket, matching skirt and white blouse, nylons and sensible shoes. She has an accent. Scottish? Irish? Reserved, yet gracious, she allows me to photograph the living room. I think, This one’s gonna be a tough sell. The brick fireplace is beautiful but soot-stained. The only furniture is a coffee table, a few chairs and a green couch with a ripped back. The hardwood floor is bare. The buff-colored walls have lighter spaces where pictures once hung.

As I drive away, she remains on the porch, arms folded, staring at the parking lot.

The three houses originally belonged to a neighborhood established in the early 1860s. In the late 1970s, the city tore out almost eight blocks, leaving only this end of Manzanita Street. The woman may have been seeing ghosts: houses, neighbors, friends, a life once lived…

I make a pit stop at my favorite donut shop for a maple bar and a Pepsi, because I need a major infusion of caffeine and sugar to take me through my next assignments in Emerald Hills, an unincorporated section of San Mateo County bounded by Redwood City, Woodside, San Carlos and Highway 280.

(Properties # 11-17)

In 1920, two wily developers transformed a spring-fed pond for watering cattle into Emerald Lake, established a country club, and with a shrewd advertising campaign attracted people--mostly from San Francisco--who built summer homes around the club’s property. The lake is now the unofficial boundary between Emerald Hill’s upscale suburban flatlands and the hill community.

Although I don’t have a club membership, I’m free to look over the fence and admire the 2.5 acre lake, a rustic kid-heaven with small sandy beaches, a concrete dock, two water-level spraying fountains, a playground slide in the middle of the lake, shoreline Cattails, frogs and fish.

As always, wishing I was a kid with a membership (or had a friend who belonged, because guests are welcome), I leave the lake and head into the hills past old frame cottages, horse-property mansions, rambling early 20th-century “Shingle-style,” funky little houses and modest, classic stucco Spanish-revivals.

Because the highest elevation is just over 500 feet and there are no steep grades, people who do not know Emerald Hills might assume that the semi-rural winding roads with spectacular views are perfect for a leisurely drive.

Realtors, real estate photographers, first-responders, construction workers, residents and anyone with regular business in the hills know better.

Narrow streets (sometimes barely one lane) have blind curves, hidden driveways, overgrown vegetation, reckless drivers, heedless pedestrians, bicyclists, joggers, deer, dogs and kids running wild and free. Where off-street parking is limited, restricted or non-existent, vehicles must park on the shoulder, often reducing two lanes to one. Many houses have only street-level off-road parking “platforms,” with or without garages. Stairs lead down to decks and the house itself, sometimes descending two or three stories into a canyon. Some platforms also function as rooftops.

And yet Emerald Hills is among my favorite places to work because it’s beautiful; it has views extending across oak woodland to open hills from the bay area to the Santa Cruz Mountains to eternity, and so many houses I would love to own.

I pass one of my favorites: a battered tan stucco 1927 two-story Spanish-style that must have been designed, possibly using only hand-scribbled plans, by the original owner. On one side, what I assume is a single room on the second floor (which I would use for my study) projects from the house, creating the roof of a first-floor porch with two arches, next to a parched and weedy dirt side yard. The front of the house is so overgrown I’m not even sure what it looks like, except there appear to be two front doors, and a large screened window at ground level. From one limited angle, I can see the back and what might be the side of a huge window with a fantastic unobstructed view of the Bay Area.

As usual, the dreamer’s fantasy is rudely disrupted by the coldly practical mind of the real estate photographer wondering how much it would cost to fix the broken roof tiles and cracked concrete foundation, landscape the yard and repair all the other problems that no doubt exist in a house this old and neglected.

My next three properties are all appointments.

The first is about five minutes down the road. According to the realtor, who only wants exteriors of the back garden, the owner’s wife will show me what to photograph.

The house, a large white two-story Spanish Revival on top of a low hill, dominates the intersection of four streets. The front of the property--which must be close to an acre--is enclosed by a three-foot high dry-laid stone wall. I park on the street, walk through an open wrought-iron gate and follow a broad asphalt path up the hill. On both sides, the natural earth slope is terraced within two serpentine brick walls. Beneath light overcast, there are no shadows. In the subdued light under heritage oak trees, layers of gold-tinted oak leaves have an inner glow.

The design of the house is both simple and imposing. At one end, the second story has a massive arched window. Below it on the first floor, a row of three smaller arched windows. In front, the second floor has a projecting room with a balcony, made of black-painted wood. At the other end, there’s a two-story tower with wrap-around windows.

The dark wood front door has a small eye-level panel covered with an iron grille. I ring the doorbell. The panel opens. A girl peers at me. I state my business. She closes the panel and opens the door. Perhaps in her mid-teens, she wears jeans, an untucked blue work shirt, jeans and work boots. She retreats to the living room, watching as her mother, cordial and soft-spoken, greets me in the foyer. The only light comes from behind, through the living room’s back wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. On both sides of the foyer, there are closed double-pocket doors. The walls are off-white with dark wood trim. The floor is buff-colored terra-cotta tile. Like the house itself, the woman is gracious, elegant and understated; pale with dark hair, wearing a tan dress belted at the waist.

I follow her through the living room (with vintage furniture reminiscent of stately home parties in Agatha Christie mysteries) out the French doors onto the back terrace, overlooking rough stone walls, steps, terraces, flagstone paths, fountains, ponds and flowerbeds. To the west, with an unobstructed view of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the garden slopes down in several terraces to an artfully ruined arched “Roman” wall, separating the garden from the open hills.

The woman tells me the house was built in 1931. When she and her husband bought the property several years ago, the garden was in ruins and wildly overgrown. She hired landscapers to clear the debris, and masons to repair the stonework, including the water features. She’s a master gardener and her daughter, 15, aspires to become one. Together they designed a new “fragrance” garden, choosing, buying and planting all the vines and flowers, including heritage roses, night-blooming jasmine, honeysuckle, orange osmanthus, mock orange and nicotiana. They also restored a half-dozen old lemon trees.

Now her husband (I have the feeling he’s considerably older) wants to retire, move to a town called Boonville in far northern California, and buy a cattle ranch. Neither she or her daughter want to leave. They love this place. All their friends and family are nearby.

She tells me to photograph whatever I want, then goes back inside.

I suspect that if I ever return for another photo session, I will discover the husband went to Boonville, and hasn’t yet returned. In the garden, there will be a new flower bed on a low mound of freshly turned earth.

The second appointment is a mansion, one of a dozen in an enclave built within the last two years. Accessed by an electronic wrought-iron gate decorated on top with fat pigeons eating grapes, it’s an apt metaphor for the residents. I use the keypad. The gate opens. 8,000 square feet on one-third of an acre; two-stories, “L” shaped, made of pinkish-stucco, the mansion looks like a tract house on steroids. The brick driveway has a six-car garage.

I meet the two realtors handling the sale. They want me to photograph the interior. One of them says, “It’s...well, just do what you can.”

It’s like walking into an ice box. The walls are arctic white. The surface of the first floor is white marble. Six marble pillars separate the foyer from the step-down living room. There are two family rooms, each with a pool table. Even before I was hired by Homes and Land magazine, I knew better than to trust people who put fringed purple curtains with gold tassels above the kitchen sink. The swirly lavender & white marble counters cost $112 per square foot. There is a room with a spa which looks like Dr. Frankenstein has gone into cosmetology. The home theater has seating for twelve. On the second-floor, where I do not go, I’m told there are nine bedrooms and 9 1/2 baths.

“How big is this family?”

“Parents and two kids in high school.”

The father’s study has oak paneling, wall-to-wall dark brown carpeting, a small brick fireplace with real logs, an original high quality Victorian English landscape painting above the mantel, and antique Craftsman-style oak furniture.

“What does he do?”

“We’re not sure.”

“Why are they selling?”

“It’s too small. The design’s not right. They’re building a new one.”

The sale price: $12 million.

Over the next few years I watch the price steadily reduced, until the property finally sells for just over $2 million.

At the next house, all I need is an interior photo of what the realtor called the “sun room.” She had also told my boss, who told me, “She’ll talk to the wife. The husband might yell and slam doors, but he doesn’t mean it.”

Okay.

The neighborhood of spacious but unpretentious “Ranch Houses with Grace” dating back to the late 1940s and 50s. is conveniently urban, yet private on a cul-de-sac backed by the green hills of an open space preserve. My assignment is single story, made of white-painted brick, with an old-style lamp post between the driveway and the unfenced front yard paved with flagstone.

I ring the doorbell. A woman answers. She’s probably in her late 50s, wearing khaki slacks and a simple blue shirt. Her frosted brown hair is pulled back in a pony tail. She also appears to be on the edge of tears. She smiles, welcomes me, and leads me through the house, past a living room with a fieldstone fireplace, and what looks like a study with many books, a big desk and wood-paneled walls.

Over every window I see, the curtains are drawn. The house is dim. On a massive antique grandfather clock, the pendulums don’t move. It’s not, I think, as if time here has stopped, but as if it’s lost interest in moving forward.

She opens a door into a rectangular white-painted room of air and light. One end is filled with a built-in bookcase at least four feet high. Most of the books are about movies and the film industry. One shelf is occupied by video tapes of classic films. There are framed movie posters—which I suspect might be original—dating back to the silent era. There’s a small wood-burning stove and comfortable furniture. The flagstone floor is almost covered with old hooked rugs. In the back wall, floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the grassy hills. Beyond the small patio, a short walk would reveal spectacular views of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It’s a warm day and I wonder why the sliding glass door is closed…

I hear an exhalation, between a sigh and a grunt. I turn. Behind me, sitting on a couch with one end hidden by the open door, a man watches me. He’s neatly dressed in levis and a grey flannel shirt. His short dark crewcut is flecked with grey. He’s thin, angular but still handsome. He wears black-framed glasses.

The woman stands beside me. He stares at us, not exactly hostile, but suspicious and confused. I’ve seen that look in my own family.

Alzheimers. That would explain the realtor’s warning about yelling and slamming doors…but now, the man just shifts slightly, looks away and stares at the open hills. Perhaps the sliding door is closed so he won’t wander…

I take my photos and leave. The woman, silent, shows me out. Before she closes the front door, I see that her eyes are now wet.

At the end of a private road among the redwood trees, my last appointment is a three-story contemporary “rustic-chic” with many decks, bay windows and balconies. The realtor wants a shot of the front, and the view of San Francisco Bay. I park and get out of my car. Nearby in the dense foliage, something rustles. Twigs snap. A huge hybrid Saint Bernard-werewolf thrashes out of the bushes. It looks at me, and wrinkles its upper lip. I’m standing next to my car, but the driver-side door is closed. If I move too quickly, it could attack...

It lifts its leg on my car’s bumper. Then with its back legs, kicks dirt and leaves onto the rear tire. A pudgy Corgi waddles out of the bushes. He and The Beast sniff each other, then wander off side by side.

By chance I meet the owner walking down the driveway to his mailbox. He tells me the only place with a bay view is from his third-floor office.

It’s a large corner room with windows on two sides, all with fine views of redwood trees and mountains. But where is the bay?

He raises the sash window next to his desk. “The best view’s from the roof.”

A small shingled roof about four feet square, over a second-floor balcony. I think, At least I’m getting paid for this. I climb out, brace myself against the wall, lean slightly to the left, and photograph the view, which really is beautiful.

Most tourists and other outsiders would consider a drive among the Redwoods in the upper foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains to be a pleasure. Like most people who have to work up here, I don’t. The roads are narrow, winding and poorly marked. Today, by the time I realize there are actually two side roads with the same name (separated by at least 100 feet, on opposite sides of the main road) each with a row of several mailboxes because individual properties don’t have them, and the mailbox with the house number I’m looking for has been partially covered with weeds and the number faded away on the front, I’m already cranky.

After the recent rain, the road up to the house is mostly mud, roots and rocks. At the top of the hill I find free air, and paradise.

Decades earlier, the old-growth redwoods were logged out. Now the old road is wide open, lined with at least a dozen widely spaced vintage cabins, some made of clapboard, others of logs. There are low wood fences, and many gardens. On three sides the hilltop is ringed with younger redwoods. On the north side there are no trees, only a spectacular view. On a clear night, I think, it might be possible to see lights all the way to San Francisco.

The property is a charming compact single-story dark log cabin with yellow trim. On the left side, a short stout man with a grey crewcut , wearing a white t-shirt and blue overalls, paints the railing around a deck.

I park, get out of my car and walk towards him. “Excuse me sir…”

He turns. It’s a woman. Oops.

The conversation is brief. I’m here to photograph the exterior. The woman says no. I insist. She’s adamant. No permission. But it’s for the magazine. Your realtor—

No.

Okay. Does she have a phone? I’ll call my boss. Or the realtor. She jerks her head toward the cabin. I follow her into the kitchen. She puts the phone on the table, then stands back, arms folded. I realize I don’t have the magazine’s phone number. She puts the phone book on the table. The kitchen is well lit, but I have trouble reading the listing . I turn the book sideways, trying to read out of one eye.

She says, “Oh, are you there?” With her right forefinger, she taps at her eyes.

“Yeah. I’m nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other. It wasn’t really a problem, until maybe a year ago. I need reading glasses, I’m just not willing to admit it.”

“I got my first pair last month.”

I write the number on a piece of scratch paper. She dials, talks briefly to my boss, then hangs up.

We go outside. I take the photos. When I drive away, we wave.

I come down from the mountains to a somnolent upscale mid-century urban neighborhood on a wide straight street so steep that parking requires turning front car wheels towards the curb. According to my boss, the realtor gave him special instructions: The house is ugly. Just have her photograph the view from the deck.

It’s a 1960s two-story flat-front white colonial-revival with no curb appeal, although the patchy lawn out front has something that sets it apart from all the other houses on the street: stacks of small metal animal cages.

I knock on the door. The thin, middle-aged man who answers has a short salt-and-pepper beard and a harried expression.

He asks, “How do you feel about reptiles?”

I’m tempted to respond, “Are you referring to yourself?” Instead, I assure him I have nothing against reptiles.

I follow him up the inside stairs to the combined living room and kitchen. He tells me the sliding glass door to the deck is unlocked, then begins washing dishes. One corner of the living room has another stack of animal cages.

The deck has several large ceramic lizard statues. I slide the door back and step outside. The statues move. They’re alive. Iguanas. Big ones. A couple must be close to three feet long. It’s hard to know how many there are because they panic and stampede around the deck. I curse, especially when one tries to look up my pants leg, but otherwise ignore them, find the right angle and take the shot.

On the way back to my car, it occurs to me, But why so many cages?

On a quiet street lined with mature Sycamore trees, my next property is a nice mid-century modern with brick-facing on the ground floor, tan clapboard on the second, and two windows above the two-door garage. The small front yard has a modest lawn. A brick path leads to the stairway, parallel to the house, ascending to a small porch and the front door. To the right of the stairs, the first floor (technically the second, since the garage is on the ground floor) has a large picture window.

Inside, after the realtor tells me she wants images of the front exterior, living room and kitchen, she goes downstairs, into the backyard to talk to the owner’s two sons.

I take photos and the opportunity to look around, because I really like this place, especially the living room, convivially crowded with a couch, love seat and chairs, mostly rock maple with cushions upholstered with brown and red plaid or nubbly earth-toned fabric, including skirts. There are also two apricot-colored velour armchairs, a wood coffee table and lots of little tables. A light tan shag rug protects the hardwood floors. The only item I find discordant is the flat-panel TV attached to a wall.

The kitchen floor is yellow and white checkered linoleum. The counters, chrome-edged yellow formica. The knotty-pine cabinets, original. The kitchen table, white enamel.

On the right side of the living room, two steps lead up to the room with the big picture window facing the street. At one time it was probably a bedroom. The doorless closet running the length of the back wall is now filled with book shelves and filing cabinets. In front of the window there’s a big grey metal desk. On the left side, a large vintage ham radio set. On the right, a computer and printer, a heavy green ceramic ashtray and wood dish full of pipes.

I visualize the man who once lived here, sitting at his desk, at night, watching the quiet street, listening to the world…

In the master bedroom, clothes and shoes are still in the closets. On top of a sturdy mid-century dresser, an antique wood jewelry box. The double-bed is neatly made. In the adjacent pink tile bathroom, toiletries, bottles of perfume and aftershave remain on the counter. Towels and washcloths folded over wall racks.

Against one wall in the living room, mementos and framed photos of family and friends cover an antique wood harvest table at least seven feet long. On the wall above it, more photos.

Judging from the styles of clothing, the couple married in the early 1950s.

In the central hallway, both walls are covered with photos of the couple in London, Paris and Rome; Egypt; the Arctic, Australia, China and Japan.

I watch them grow older. There are no photos of the man or the woman alone.

I leave, but take the house with me.

My last assignment: go to an empty lot and take a photo of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s what my boss often bellows in his Southern accent, “Easy money, darlin’!”

It’s a nice drive through the oak forest along winding Moore Road, two lanes narrowing to one, with many private driveways. Following the realtor’s directions: turn right between the dead tree trunk and two broken stone pillars, dead-end, I find the private unpaved road that has no name. It’s blocked by a chain hooked between the pillars. Well...okay. From here I can see the dead-end. It’s not far, all downhill, it’s a nice day and I need the exercise. I park and walk.

It’s takes longer than I expect, about five minutes.

Halfway down, on my left, I pass the only other house on the road, a large new Mediterranean-style. At the dead end, the empty lot is on the right. On the far left, a double-wide trailer. A make-shift fence of plastic sheeting about a foot high separates the lot from the road. Squatting on the lot itself, a bulldozer. All I have to do is walk around it and photograph the mountains.

A man yells. I turn. Shouting about “private road” and “trespassing,” a tall skinny white-haired old guy in a blue jogging suit bolts from the trailer’s front yard, crosses the road and stops within shoving distance. I explain why I’m here, which just makes him angrier. He raves about people invading his privacy and how much he hates the new neighbors.

In this job, it’s not unusual to encounter eccentrics and crazy people. I use a tactic that’s worked before. Agree with everything he says. Apologize for intruding. The realtor sent me. I’ll take a few photos and leave.

Muttering, he returns to the trailer.

I step over the plastic sheet. The trailer’s front door bangs open. In a shouting, spittle-emitting rage, a woman runs at me, her shoulder-length grey hair flying loose. She wears a grey sweatshirt, floppy knee-length blue denim shorts, blue tennis shoes and white athletic ankle socks. She ought to be wearing a long gingham dress and a poke bonnet. In my face, she also rants about trespassing and private property. She orders me to leave. I refuse. She demands to see my permit and I.D. badge. I tell her I don’t have any, don’t need them and even if I did, it wouldn’t be her freakin’ business anyway. Her response includes “insolent” and “smart-ass.” Because, even while stressed, I try to remember my manners, I only imply that she’s bat-shit crazy.

“I’m sorry if I hurt your dirt, lady.”

“You can’t talk to me like--”

“Oh, yeah. I can. And I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what you think. I’ll take the photos ‘cause it’s my damn job.” I’m also thinking, what’s the point? Arguing like this, it’s stupid. Pointless. A waste of time.

She yells, “I’ll call the police!”

“Fine. Call ‘em. When they get here I’ll be gone. And when this house gets built, I’ll be back and photograph that, too.”

“Didn’t my husband tell you about the gun?” She strides toward the trailer.

She has to be bluffing. I walk around the bulldozer and photograph the view. From that angle, I can see the rear of the trailer, and the woman moving around what looks like a big cage. I hear dogs barking.

A dog run. Cazart! Is she going to turn her dogs loose?

I walk up the road, but force myself not to hurry. If I run and the dogs are loose, they’ll catch me for sure. At the new villa, the garage door is down. I can’t waste time ringing the bell or looking around for help because if no one’s home and I’m caught in the open...

Is the barking getting louder? The road wasn’t this steep on the way down.

Finally, back in my car, I think, At least it will make a good story.

End of day one.

Five days left.

_______________________________________________________________________

(7). The Messenger

In my job, the only thing I could not predict or plan for, was fate.

In 2001, on a cold foggy morning two days after September 11, I was on a suburban two-lane street in a city called San Carlos. Pre-dating the 1960’s, the neighborhood was a gracious, yet unpretentious mix of housing styles with gardens, heritage oaks, firs, maples and smaller ornamentals. The house I needed to photograph was a single-story brick English Tudor-California ranch with a walkway, also made of brick, leading from the sidewalk across a small yard to the front door. The back deck, propped on stilts, overlooked the Santa Clara Valley and San Francisco Bay. On this particular morning, the fog was so dense that the valley and the bay could not be seen.

Normally, photographing the front of the house would have taken about five minutes. But the SUV parked in the driveway was unacceptable to realtors and the editor of the magazine I worked for, who required that in photographs, driveways must be empty. So I knocked on the front door, hoping the owner was home so I could ask him to move the SUV.

He answered, obviously impatient, holding a cell phone to his ear. Stocky and fiftyish with blond hair turning grey, he wore a neatly pressed striped shirt and light-colored khaki pants. I told him why I was there.

He said, “Come back in fifteen minutes. I’m doing a deal.”

I agreed, and he shut the door in my face.

It was just after 8 a.m. I’d gotten an early start, I was ahead of schedule, so I could spare fifteen minutes. I sat down grumpily on the walkway’s top step next to the sidewalk, facing the front door. I decided that the house had no style. If I had the money I’d buy it, gut it and rebuild (except for the walkway; I liked the walkway.)

Behind me, across the street and parallel to the sidewalk, a low cinderblock retaining wall held back a steep vacant lot covered in trees and long grass. There were houses at the top of the slope, connected by other streets and driveways. I smelled wet grass and woodsmoke.

Chilly, hunched in my coat, I also became aware of the silence. There was no traffic. I heard no voices.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an old man walking slowly down the street. Tall and thin, he wore baggy khaki pants, a shapeless hat and zipped-up light blue sweater.

I went back to staring at the house--until I heard a dull thump, as if someone had dropped a large heavy bag of laundry.

I looked around, and saw the old man lying face down in the street. I ran to help. His face was covered in blood. Dark strings dangled from a nickel-sized wound in his temple. They looked like stitches, which had apparently ripped loose when he fell. One lens from his metal-framed glasses lay in the street. A broken end of the frame was jammed in his cheek. Silently he pulled it free, and groped for the lens.

A trail of spattered blood led from the street across the sidewalk and up the wall.

I tried to make him stay still, but he insisted on getting up. Frantic, afraid he’d fall again or get hit by a car, I ran to the house and knocked on the door. The owner appeared. I told him what happened.

He said, “I know him,” and ran past me into the street.

The old man was gone. We found him nearby, climbing a long, steep driveway to his home. The man went after him and put his arm around his shoulders. They entered the old man’s yard, and disappeared.

I was at a loss, undecided about what to do next. I wanted to know what happened, but that meant waiting for the man to come back. I had no idea how long that would be, and I had a long day ahead. I turned toward my car--and saw a deer standing on the slope where it met the retaining wall. It was a doe, and so close that if I’d walked a few steps forward, I could have reached out and touched her.

At eye level we stared at each other, in a sphere of silence-within-silence. Despite the commotion and fresh human blood that to the deer must have smelled rank, she was not afraid. She stepped off the wall, calmly walked past me and crossed the street; high-stepped across the man’s yard and vanished into a neighbor’s garden.

The man returned. He’d spoken to the old man’s neighbors, who were going to take him to the emergency room. If the neighbors didn’t call him back in ten minutes, he’d take the old man, himself.

Then he said, “I’m sorry I was rude earlier. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

I said I would, and thanked him. But I had fourteen more properties to photograph. We chatted. He moved the SUV. I photographed his house, and left.

In the stories and myths of many traditional cultures, deer are considered divine messengers, although the messages they bring are cryptic, ambiguous, never as straightforward as This is what you need to know. Sometimes, the appearance of the deer itself is the message, whose meaning must always be deciphered and interpreted by the person who receives it.

That evening, at home, remembering the home’s owner; the old man; the eyes of the deer, and the offered cup of coffee, I thought of 9-11.

Self-absorbed, disconnected from people outside our increasingly small restricted circles and always chronically short on time, Americans had grown impatient, often short-tempered and rude. As a people we had forgotten who we were until that September morning when, for a little while, we remembered.