This was on a surfing trip to the Osa Peninsula, on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, in 2004. I have a lot of photos of traditional and innovative bamboo structures.
So much “content,” so little time…
I believe this was somewhere near Lake Tahoe. Shot in 2004.
Left to right:
I would fly into San José del Cabo, pick up the truck at my friend Chilon’s house, drive out to an arroyo on a ranch, down to the beach, let air out of tires and go 2 miles or so on the sand to Roosterfish Cove. All alone for days. No clothes nec.
My mom and dad were married in San Francisco in April, 1934. It was in the middle of the Great Depression.
In August of that year, they took the Suntan Special, a train that ran from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, for a vacation. According to my mom, I was conceived on that trip, and born in San Francisco in April, 1935.
I was the first-born in the family, and my parents didn’t quite know how to cope with me. I wasn’t so much rebellious as curious and energetic. Plus at an early age I didn’t believe in following rules.
At one point they took me to a psychiatrist and I remember having a great time hammering wooden pegs into different shaped holes and answering his questions about ink blots. I suspect he told my folks that I wasn’t psychotic, just high-energy. Years later, when my mom was in her 90s (she lived to be 103), she would reminisce about my stunts. “You remember when you…”
I’m writing all this stuff about early years to give you a picture of my background, attitudes and outlook on life, which all led up to my finally breaking out of the prescribed business career.
My mom and dad on their honeymoon in April, 1934 at Weaver Lake, a remote lake (then) in the Sierras. My dad and his fishing buddies had built a cabin and pier there. The lake was full of trout. I had a happy childhood. My parents loved each other. We always had food and shelter. Our family functioned. I’ve often thought how lucky we were.
There were 26 kids on our block. (The 100 block of Ulloa Street — next to the intersection of Portola Drive and Laguna Honda Blvd.) On any given day, there would be at least a dozen of us playing in the street. Kick the can, hide and seek, bike riding, roller skating, riding Flexi racers, playing football or baseball. No parental supervision at all, ever. No little league, no automobile transportation to distant soccer fields. We were on our own.
There was a cave about half a mile away; we never went very deeply into it. In wet years, there was a shallow lake across from our house and we had a raft.
There was a Catholic church across the street (St. Brendan’s) and everyone on the block was Catholic except for us. My mom was a Christian Scientist (we never went to doctors).
During World War II we had a large community vegetable garden on a quarter-acre lot next to our house, and my dad and the neighbors raised a ton of vegetables.
We went all over the city on foot, bikes, roller skates, streetcars, and busses. It was about a 2-mile walk to West Portal grammar school, a 4-mile bike ride to Golden Gate Park.
Some city kids made their first skateboards in the ‘40s by taking apart metal roller skates and mounting the wheels on a piece of wood. On our block, the Guzman brothers built a funky flat-roofed little house on metal roller skate wheels and rode it down the hill. A bunch of us then did the same — early RVs!
We would go into the “cloak room” of our classroom (out of teacher’s view) at West Portal grammar school, take deep knee bends until we were out of breath, then put thumbs in mouths and blow until we passed out. We got in trouble once when I failed to catch Fletcher Pence as he fell, and he cut his forehead.
Read More …
From our book now in production:
Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture On the California Coast
Beach sculpture by Bob Demmerle
Lesley took me there yesterday. It’s a stunning place. The plants are exquisite, like the ones at Berkeley Horticultural Nursery. They also have ingenious metal sculptures of animals, old iron buckets, huge ceramic planters (from Viet Nam), a couple of old galvanized bathtubs, antique porcelain pots, and a ton of other stuff. It’s up a hill at 3995 Emerald Drive, on the west side of Petaluma Boulevard as you’re driving out of town to the freeway. An oasis of beauty.
This was on a back road to Petaluma from the coast. They were selling chicken eggs and duck eggs. The gambrel roof shape is like taking a gable roof and lifting it up in the middle of each side. It makes for a lot more usable space. That’s why a lot of barns have gambrel roofs. This little building looks like a a Tuff Shed — prefab buildings that get erected in one day.
From Leo Hetzel
In the midst of production of the driftwood shacks book, I discovered three more at Salmon Creek, Sonoma County.