In late December 1975 I got to California for the first time. Can a picture of Monterey cypresses stand in for the whole state? Maybe not--a glimpse of the Pacific would help make the shot more iconic--but those trees are part of my best memories of a drive down the coast from San Francisco to Carmel. (I used to call them "Monterey pines," but just today discovered that that type of pine is a more 'ordinary-looking'--i.e., less windswept--evergreen.)
I had flown to San Francisco for the Modern Language Association conference (held annually just after Christmas), which several friends/colleagues were attending as well. It was hard to stay indoors listening to panel discussions when an amazing city was waiting to be explored:
I can't tell you the exact locations of the above photos, but you can glimpse the Oakland Bay Bridge in the first shot, Alcatraz in the third, and the Golden Gate Bridge beyond the wharf in the fourth. At some point I visited Golden Gate Park and took a couple of pictures of the Japanese Tea Garden:
. . . and got to the ocean at the western end of the park:
That's Cliff House to the right in the above photo. From that vantage point you can see Seal Rocks more closely. (If you zoom in, you can make out sea lions dotting the sunnier slope of the rock.) Another rock nearby was occupied as well, by people:
Riding cable cars was probably my favorite thing to do in San Francisco. I took a couple of photos of other riders, though in scanning them I wasn't quite able to fill in the shadows that contrast the sunlit patches:
My only other photo of the city itself on this trip is one of Union Square:
Very eager to see the UC-Berkeley campus, I took the BART out for a visit one afternoon.
There was a fine vista from one high point of the campus:
And I particularly loved a eucalyptus grove I found on campus. In the first place, I had never seen a eucalyptus tree or inhaled its fragrance (except from a medicine bottle), but better, someone was improvising jazz on a saxophone amidst the trees while I was taking these photos:
After the conference was over, some of us stayed in the area for a few days longer. One day I joined one of my colleagues, Jeff Prince, and his wife, Tanya, in renting a car to drive down the coast to the Monterey Peninsula and Carmel-by-the-Sea. Below are Jeff and Tanya. (Sorry about the shadow over the right portion of the second photo. Some defect in the shutter mechanism marred a number of shots, and had to be fixed following my return home; in the photos to follow I've cropped out the shadowy parts.)
And here I am in the same location, in a painful-to-the-eye sports jacket:
Most of the pictures below were taken along the "17-mile drive" of the Pebble Beach district. I see that there is now a $10 fee for driving the famous route, but I don't recall it being a private road back then. I can't identify most of the specific locations, except for Bird Rock (the sixth one down). As you can tell from the number of photos I took, I was greatly impressed by the power of the waves and the ruggedness of the shore.
Stretches of the drive had nothing but the natural landscape, but as you see in a couple of the above photos--and in the next shot below--there were some stretches with oceanside homes. At some point we saw a redwood grove as well.
Here are three more views. In the third, you see on the right the "Lone Cypress"--it might not then have had this name, which the Pebble Beach Company has attempted to trademark, claiming rights to any photo taken of it!
One photo turned out to be more abstract than the others--I'm not sure whether this was intentional or not:
Lots of trees in these photos. Here's one I can't identify--it seems to be in a park.
Leaving the coast, we stopped at the 1797 Carmel Mission with its beautifully restored facade and bell tower. A couple of photos show the courtyard as well.
But my best picture from the mission grounds, I think, is one of some succulent plants growing in its garden:
I took one more photo before we found a place for dinner and drove back to San Francisco:
Another side trip from the city was northward, over the Golden Gate Bridge into a lightly populated part of Marin County with my friend Dede Freedman to see her brother, who was living there. It was a great time--besides the hospitality, I loved the evergreens and
the misty air blowing in from the coast. Heading back to San Francisco the next day, Dede took Route 1 along the coastal cliffs (a somewhat scary drive for the passenger looking at the sea breaking on the cliff rocks far below), and we stopped at Muir Woods. I regret that I took no photos from that excursion except for a few in Muir Woods, and these turned out to be the worst of the trip--I didn't figure out how to deal with the deep shade of the redwoods. I'll include the two least unsatisfactory pics.
My next post will take us back to less exotic (to me) scenes in Chicago, Cleveland and the East Coast.
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