Grab Bag #42

We have Halloween and Día de los Muertos this week. Over the past few days on my road trip to New Orleans for the National Trust of Historic Places annual conference I paid my own appropriate homage to ancestors.

How will San Francisco history find its way into this Grab Bag? Good question...

San Francisco Peaks

No, not Twin Peaks, Mount Davidson, and Mount Sutro. The other San Francisco peaks which people might be aware of in North America is a range of volcanic heights near Flagstaff, Arizona.

Nuva'tukya'ovi in Hopi, the range is a remnant of a stratovolcano that probably went boom about 200,000 years ago. 

I took a hike in nearby Walnut Canyon National Monument, which has some terrific cliff dwellings to appreciate. The creative people who made these unique rooms-with-a-view lived there for about 150 years in the 1100s and 1200s.

The story has been that years of drought and/or possible warfare made the site untenable and so it was abandoned. With that narrative, one can easily jump to pompous moralizing, connections to our time, our wars, our climate change, blah blah blah, and generally treat this amazing place as a cautionary tale and a site of tragedy and loss.

But interpretive signage, done with more recent Native American consultation, now notes to visitors that “from a Hopi perspective, the primary reason for migration is the fulfillment of a spiritual covenant” and that “where people stopped and built homes are all sacred places.”

Rather than abandoned, what we call Walnut Canyon is still a part of the spiritual lives and practices of the builders’ descendants.

Of course Native people acknowledge and grieve loss. Few can match their experience in loss. But to see some changes as part of continuing spiritual bond is powerful.

While I am not Hopi or Diné, I hope it isn’t disrespectful for me to borrow a little of this perspective in tumultuous times.

Athazagoraphobia

I once had a school assignment to describe a fear of mine.

I don’t have anxieties about heights or spiders or truck-stop coffee (maybe a little of the last), so I struggled.

Finally, I hit upon something: the fear of being forgotten, which apparently has a (ridiculous) name: athazagoraphobia.

I am not afraid of being forgotten myself. I want more than anything for others not to be forgotten and take that as a mini-mission with my history and preservation work.

Whether every life has its place or not, whether or not some very despicable people deserve to be forgotten, there’s still a drive in me to collect, document, retell.

“Art is to the community as thoughts are to the individual,” said actor and activist Wendell Pierce at my conference.

He talked about how art included preservation and history work; that those were the way people consider the past, assess the present, and envision the future.

Nothing is more important really.

History is necessary to make sense of today and to figure out where we go next as individuals and as a society.

So my fear is we forget, accidentally or even intentionally.

This has been on my mind of late, because my occupation is the preservation of significant places in a city that celebrates “disruption” and newness and maximizing potential wealth of every 25-by-100-foot parcel of land.

And this road trip takes me through different places with different priorities, but the same struggles to hold off amnesia.

Pilgrimage and Pyramid

I stopped at Fort Worth to visit my grandfather’s grave. He died years before I was born, when my father was just 12 years old. There was no money for a marker and both my grandmother and my dad used to talk about how that gnawed at them.

My brothers and I, as men, finally paid to get Archie LaBounty his marker. He wasn’t a grandfather when he died of his heart attack at 50 years old, but we put the title on anyway.

San Francisco, city of change, never liked the idea of “wasting” any of its land on the dead. “Compare the progressiveness of our northern rival with some of our silurianism! Seattle expands, whereas San Francisco permits some of its choicest lands, right in the very center, to lie worse than idle.” (A typical editorial, from 1912.)

The hallowed grounds around Lone Mountain where more than 150,000 San Franciscans once rested, were evicted, chewed down, built over for insurance company buildings and schools and duplexes and shopping strips. Gravestones, crypts, and markers were almost all discarded, used for sea walls and gutters and landfill.

But the marker below from the old Masonic Cemetery survives, moved with the man it commemorated to Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma.

Masonic Cemetery was cleared out in the 1920s. The memorial and man underneath it once lay about where the University of San Francisco’s baseball field is today.

Dr. Hugh Whittell was a little more verbose than my brothers and I were in choosing our grandfather’s inscription. He had advice: 

All you that chance this grave to see;
If you can read English may learn by me.

I traveled, read and studied Mankind to know;
And what most interested them here below.

The present, or the future state,
and love of power,
Envy, fear, love or hate,
Occupied each wakeful hour,

All would teach, but few would understand;
The greater part know little of either God or man.
Love one another, a very good maxim all agreed;
Learn, labour and wait, if you would succeed.

The doctor had his pyramid made a decade before he passed away in 1887. His pitch for immortality using a form favored by pharaohs (combined with his poetical advice) made his marker the “object of so much graveyard satire.”

The well-traveled Whittell also memorialized “firsts” he claimed to have participated in, ending with a pithy two-line summation of where it all landed him:

In the five divisions of the world I have been;
The cities of Peking and Constantinople I’ve seen.
In the first railroad I rode before others were made;
I saw the first telegraph operated, so useful to trade.

In the first steamship the Atlantic I crossed;
Suffered six shipwrecks, where lives were lost.
In the first steamship to California by the first Pacific Mail.

After my endeavors my affairs to fix;
A short time I shall occupy less than two by six.

Art is Everywhere

...including outside of Amarillo, Texas.

You can read about Cadillac Ranch, now 50 years old, an exclamation point that has become a decades-long conversation.

David and Brady (forever F.O.W.s) put my head shot on one of the cars in 1993:

Thirty-one years later, I dropped by with my real head.

The artists were part of the Ant Farm in San Francisco. The reason the ten caddies are in Texas is because that’s where the guy who paid for the idea had them put. Some other kind of story about art and money being told there, I think.

Coming around again, the angle of the automobiles is supposedly the same as the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt...

I am driving back west right now, as you read this, probably.

Regular San Francisco Story programming will return next Wednesday.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

To beer and friends like CVP. May the Woody beverage fund never run dry.

Sources

“Useful at Last,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1887, pg. 1.  

“A Pioneers of Pioneers,” Oakland Tribune, September 6, 1887, pg. 3.