Landscape: Memory (2 page)

The wind moved above us, us listening to the stillness.

In that last hour before nightfall we gathered wood and set up our small camp in the shelter of the ruins. We laid our blanket out and secured our little pet, its string leash tied to a thimble berry bush. (By morning he was gone.) We took stock of the few provisions I'd brought and sketched a crude map of our travels. Before night came we went down to the lagoon and swam. We splashed and screamed loudly, did dolphin dives and wrestled each other under for dunkings. We swam hard and fast out to an imagined marker and back again, Duncan being the fastest. We floated, slow and silent, to ambush birds who flew, and when they flew we burst from the water as if we could chase them through the air.

We did all that, of course, as anyone could have done. That is, it doesn't matter that we swam there and then. What I'm remembering isn't exactly that. It's a moment that concerns me, a picture around which my memory gathers.

Standing still in the cold salt water, our feet in mud, the thin surface of the bay slipping away flat and wide, cutting across us just below our bellies. Standing still and the air on our bodies, moving in the trees and soft through the hills. There was a moment in the evening sky then. I can feel precisely the position of my eyes, my head held still, looking west across the water and up into the last light of the sky going dark over the far horizon. Duncan stands still and silent close by me.

The wild, marauding birds have all taken flight, a line of dark simple shapes slipping farther and farther into the empty sky. Only the loons remain with us, still and perfect, floating in the absolute calm. Their small bodies bob in the strange dusk. They slip across the water. And their long, lowing song fills me, as full and enveloping as the sweet, cool evening. That is my most vivid memory.

1 1 AUGUST 1914

All of Europe is at war. They've got pictures in
The Call
and maps with x's and o's. Father's brother Maury lives in Britain and he'll soon be fighting. Perhaps we should send in the Seals. This season already looks to be a bust. Two more months before the slaughter ends.

A ball club is being formed in Oakland for men with one or more artificial limbs. They've got an ex-minor leaguer and a bunch of big hitters with A. F. Ruff at the helm. I have a great interest in baseball and adversity.

Duncan doesn't share my enthusiasm. He is simply a baseball fan, without so much complexity as me. Mother says my fascination with oddities is a natural by-product of the sophisticated education they've planned for me. "Many athletes are tremendously susceptible to the effects of drink. So it is with the mind, pumpkin," she's told me. "The highly trained mind will naturally find intoxication in the strangeness of everyday life."

But I don't see it. It all seems so very separate. What has Ruskin to do with limbless ball players? Or Pliny with exploding aeroplanes? I'm happy with my studies, as Mother's planned them, but our little sessions are not nearly lurid nor seedy enough to match my everyday fascinations. Natural history, which Father teaches me, is far more titillating than the various cultural subjects (this year they include painting, art history and drama) for which Mother is in charge. The egret, I learned only yesterday, must vomit copiously into the nest as a means of feeding its young. And that is typical. I remain entirely thrilled by my subjects with Mother. Painting and drama, especially, are among my favorite things. But they occupy a world entirely separate from limbless ball players and vomiting egrets.

12 AUGUST 1914 

This from
The Call
:

I'm looking west down Pacific at fog lying low on the Presidio woods. Mother thinks I'm reading Ruskin, but it's
The Call
I'm more interested in. I save Ruskin for those cozy moments curled up by the fire. Mother and Father sitting close by to answer questions and tell me what words mean what, and how it is there's a Truth of Clouds and a Truth of the Sky and a Truth of Water.
The Call
is my private pleasure.

Father left this poem in my boot:

"Advice from the Elder," he'd entitled it.

The poem, I suspect, is more for him than me, though it may pertain to my summer garden, which contains no millet, or frogs as of yet.

28 AUGUST 1914

 Today I messed around with Duncan, mucking about the woods out west of the golf course and returning home around four o'clock for drawing. Mother and I've been working our way through
The Elements of Perspective
and will soon be on to Williams's
The Art of Landscape Painting.
Mother said 1I should choose a project to give focus to my studies and I've chosen to paint what I saw in Bolinas, that moment. The memory is still clear, it being just four years ago, and I want to capture it in a painting. I'm still no good at drawing but the Ruskin book is very specific and soon I'll be able to make the proper shapes. Right now my clouds are blobs and my land looks like fat serpents. I won't start with the paints until I get the shapes right.

Mother can't draw either, but she is working along with me, step by step, attempting a panorama of the fairgrounds. I can't imagine all those details, pillars and domes and thin minarets, each part tiny and perfect. But she seems content, measuring minute ornaments and touching her pinpoint pencil to paper, erasing more, it seems, than she puts down. My picture, being at dusk (crepuscular, Mother says), is not so demanding.

Running home, past Locust and Laurel, up near the top of our hill, I could hear her confident singing waft out the open window, mixing in with the various booms and bangs of construction from the fairgrounds. I saw her through the window, her thick brown hair pinned up in a messy bun, her jaw and mouth extended. It's that frog face she makes to help "open her throat," as the book instructs. Her voice quivers too.

I signaled my arrival home with a healthy banging about in the vestibule. She had the drawing kits out, flat wooden boxes with small metal hinges and button snaps to clasp them shut. Mine has charcoal smudges not just because I'm messy but also because I use soft charcoals. She's still sketching lines and will be forever. I'm trying to draw the very air so pinpoint lines won't do.

"You," she said, all motherly, turning away from the window. "You are a mess." I was. I was smudged and muddy and standing on our best carpet in the big front parlor. Mother stood shaking her head in silence. We both sighed, I with impatience.

"Up to your room with you now. We're late as it is."

"Won't we be drawing outside today?" I asked. It seemed silly to clean up for the outdoors.

"We'll be in the park. People do not enjoy filthy children in public parks."

"But
I
enjoy filth." This raised an eyebrow.

"You'll reserve that pleasure for more private settings. Don't be a pest."

"Father goes to the park looking like a dirty dog if he wants. No one pays him any mind." It was true. My father cares less about collars and clean shirts than even me.

"You're not your father, dumpling." She had her hand up to her temple. "Please don't make me tense." I knew it was time to be nice. I smiled and tried to look willing. "You may wear something colorful and light. No need to be fancy," she assured me.

"Will we picnic?"

"Of course, pumpkin. We'll feast."

* * *

I carried the feast: roast beef and French breads, peaches, soft cheese and cress (for minerals). A Nehi, of course, and sparkhng water for Mother. With the sun disappearing and a low fog floating in, we forsook the park and took the steep steps down to Cow Hollow. I was bundled in my best white sweater, woolen socks pulled up to my knickers, the wicker basket held snug to my chest. Mother preceded me, the hem of her gingham dress sweeping the stone steps as she rushed along. The drawing kits and blanket were tucked up under her arm. I was hungry and that made even the air delicious, its salty moistness rolling in around us.

Cow Hollow marks the "Station Point" of Mother's panorama, the point from which the picture is seen. It's Lesson One in Ruskin: "Sight Point, Sight Line, Station Point, and Station Line." It's no surprise we end up there every third session or so, as her drawing relies on the visual and mine requires only memory. I'll draw anywhere. Her model can be seen only at the Cow Hollow "studio." "We're off to the studio," she'll say, and off we'll go, down the steps, a few hundred yards to the small grassy field. The blanket laid, we set up under our favorite tree, kits on laps, pencils in hand and soon the afternoon is gone.

Good enough for me. I love the panorama, the closeness and noise of the construction, the bare trace of swamp-smell creeping from out of the landfill when the wind blows in off the bay.

We spread the blanket out on our spot and placed Ruskin within easy reach (though Mother never consults the text, and I only intermittently). Our primary focus is on the play of charcoal and paper, and on the food.

"Do try the cress with a smudge of cheese, dearest," Mother implored me, balancing her sketch in one hand while she pushed the cheese about the plate with a knife. I was quaffing my Nehi and so could not reply. The cress and cheese, truth be told, was an innovation of mine from our last lesson, two days earlier.

I looked to the sky thoughtfully and tried again to imagine the shapes of the formless, insubstantial clouds that washed across that twilight memory from Bolinas. Inevitably I thought of fingers reaching, but when put to paper they proved as wrong as any other reconstruction. Mother's pencil was tick-tacking briskly across her panorama, marking each point with confidence.

"Do you suppose I could leave it all in darkness?" I asked, seeking instruction. Mother looked up with a bit of beef dangling from her bright smile.

"Your project must suit your ambitions, dumpling," she began, obviously as a preface. "But I understand your ambitions to be a good sight more than rendering the mere darkness. Don't be daunted so early on." And she gazed at my uncertain sketch with compassion. The fog moved in silence nearby the fairgrounds, tumbling now from the tree tops high on the Presidio's hills.

"I want my rendering to be true, though. Mummy. What if it was truly darkness?"

"Well, was it? You've the best judge of that." She was no help at all. I put my soft charcoal back to the paper's face and made intuitive motions with my wrist, hoping the truth would emerge from some less conscious, perhaps muscular source. It was just no good at all.

"Perhaps you should pay closer attention to Ruskin. I believe this volume is meant to address just such problems as you might be having." She pushed the heavy book past some bits of bread and up against my tired bum.

Ruskin went on from the basic perpendiculars into ever more complex geometric puzzles, outlining in detail a matrix of simple forms which, if properly executed, would, he promised, guide one to a true rendering. Mother, it seemed, was right. I put aside my dirty sheet and began with Problem One, "To Fix the Position of a Given Point.''

Our afternoon turned quickly into a cold, foggy dusk and we packed the picnic and returned up the steep stairs to the house and a warm fire (once I'd hauled the wood) in the fireplace. I kept reading Ruskin most of the evening, out of sheer enthusiasm for finally finding a guide who, it was promised, would lead me to fulfill my fine ambition. Father descended from his study to cook a hearty peasant soup and our evening ended with a chapter of Melmoth read by the fireside, mostly by me in my most dramatic voices, and then sleep.

A letter arrived today, to Father from his brother Maury. It said simply:

Dear Robert,

I've joined up. Kitchener, and all that.

Good God this boot stinks. Our captain's got us marching six or eight hours each day. Rather nice countryside though, Sevenoaks or thereabouts. Could you possibly send me a piano? Oh, yes, the facts of the matter: Fifth Battalion, medical. I chop and sew. Two more weeks in Blighty, then to the front. I'm in for the duration, Christmas or thereabouts. I need (if not a piano) clean stockings. More American cigarettes, please (very valuable for trade). Jeffers, Tolland and Smithy here with me (and they smell worse than even I). Of birds here, many and cacophonous. I could not begin to name them.

Hymns sung to high heaven each evening at dusk. I'm taken by the wide green hills, though not so crazy in awe as those many east Londoners down with us. The likes of them haven't seen more than brick and coalbins since they came into this world. I'm reminded most of our boyhood summers near Cooperstown—waking with the noisy birds by dawn, the lush green trees waving in the slight winds, the world fresh and dew-covered. And oh, this regimen of marching and mock battles. I'm fit as a horse and dead asleep come every evening. A war at last. Thank God I came across the Atlantic to a civilized nation where they still fight wars. I pity you your neutrality and trust it will not last. More soon.

30 AUGUST 1914

Duncan and I slept with the windows wide open and woke to a pair of yellowthroats resting on the windowsill, which aside from being very storybook is rare enough that I got a tingle down my spine and tried quietly to sneak out and up the stairs to tell Father. But when we came back they were gone.

We used, it seems, to get many more and stranger birds around the house. Of course it might be like Christmas and birthdays in its just seeming to have been more glorious because I used to be little and when you're little everything else is so much more than you, so much bigger and grander and more mysterious. But Father tells me no, it isn't just that, there really were more and stranger birds then, and they've gone because the marshlands have gone.

Much of the flat stretching east from the Presidio was wetlands just three years ago, swamp and ponds and tidal marsh. Pickle weed, cordgrass. It smelled like a dying sea monster, like something from very deep and long ago slithering in amongst the muck. This was my father's favorite spot for birding, either up on the hill with his spyglasses or crawling about in the marsh. We built a low wooden shelter where we could stay and sometimes he'd be down there overnight to see or hear whatever was to be seen or heard.

The hut was a low lean-to facing east, covered with reeds and cordgrass for camouflage. It had a small cookstove near the open end. I saw it get buried under a river of mud from the dredging hose, in April two years ago, when they started filling in the wetlands to build the Fair. The dredging machine looked like an overgrown insect, with its metal-boxed body and that hideously long, belching hose jerking about as though with some strange life force. It buried our hut with one spastic blast and swung crazily away, spraying and spewing enough to bury the swamp in a matter of months.

Though that's forced the birds to nest in more distant parts of the bay, we have gotten, instead, something more and stranger than any exotic animal could ever hope to be. They're building the Jewel City on that foundation of muck pumped up from below the sea. The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. P.P.I.E.! "The definitive event of our epoch," as the mayor has called it.

Already the central courts have the look of a unified city, planned in perfect symmetry and pleasing to the eye in all directions. Jules Guerin, the Color Master, has orchestrated the placement of each panel and ornament, the whole assemblage running the range from tawny earth tones to bright cerulean blue and bursts of orange, with every color chosen to accent the natural features of the bay and surrounding hills. Guerin, it is said, has even worked with the various tones of fog. Mother, who actually met this wizard, says Guerin has found his inspiration in the ancient cities of the Orient, with which he is familiar.

The grounds are open on Sundays now, despite the Fair's being still unfinished. Thousands come each weekend to see what there is to see and to measure the progress that's been made since the previous Sunday. Lincoln Beachey flies daredevil loops in his aeroplane above the bay. The throngs promenade down the broad avenues and amongst the beautiful gardens of the central courts. We saw Beachey's historic indoor aeroplane ride, the first and longest in history, from one end of the Palace of Machinery to the other. Duncan's dad got us in to see it, as he is an artisan in the Sculpture Factory.

Father hates the Fair.

1 SEPTEMBER 1914

Today the sky is clouds, pale and bruised on the underside, dropping low into the trees, wrapping round the headlands but not yet in on the bay. The salt air is in my nose and mouth, filling me in deep breaths. 1 fear the Seals are a lost cause, having dropped another series to Venice. Schaller is the only Seal not in a swoon and the pitching has never been capable of hindering even a flea. I've told Duncan that I won't go again until they put together at least a week at .500. "Fat chance you won't," he says. "If I do I'll stay mum in the stands. And no autographs or watching warm-ups." Really I intend to bring my Ruskin and do work while the hapless home-nine flails on field.

Mother will be Winged Victory, standing fifty-seven feet high where the Avenue of Progress bumps up against the Esplanade. Duncan's father will render her in false marble. He's invited us down to watch.