The Beast

Corroding tractor wheels and tread, Bodega Bay, CA

All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Ecclesiastes 3:20

The sand master is reclaimed by the sand. When exposed to water and oxygen iron corrodes and breaks down through an electrochemical process enhanced by the presence of salt. Rust results from iron losing electrons to oxygen under the right conditions. The constant salt spray off a pounding ocean is a perfect crucible for rust. The once mighty iron treads of this bulldozer-like machine have been reduced to an inert curiosity. It's hard to imagine these parts were all once independent and well-lubricated, turning, pulling, yielding to the thrusting power of a diesel engine and thousands of tiny percussive explosions every minute. The peaks of the thick sprocket wheel look like mountains, also eroding, from very far away. The whole appears chiseled from solid rock. The beach behind is deceptively peaceful. The soft foam and fine sand belie the all-consuming ferocity of this slow-moving but all-powerful lip of the earth. The beach is the great equalizer, and that is why we bow before it.

The House that Jack Built

 

This old barn in Glen Ellen, California is a castle of light and rust. It is among the remains of Jack London's Beauty Ranch, a sprawling collection of defunct structures preserved as a State Park. A single photograph cannot do justice to the spirit of this place, where what remains of London's dream can be seen in crumbling ruins such as this, where filtered sunlight illuminates the spokes of an old iron wheel. It doesn't take special psychic powers to feel the haunting presence of Jack London here. Everywhere you look, everywhere you wander on the sprawling grounds of what is now a state park, the man who both wrote and heeded the call of the wild feels alive and present.

Before he was a best-selling author Jack London was a seal hunter, an oyster pirate, a gold prospector and a war correspondent.  His biography reads like one of the adventure stories he's so famous for, but his life can best be summed up by his personal credo:

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out  

in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom  

of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.

This was a man who lived. This was a man who did things and built things and let it all ride on a dream. Jack London dreamed. His prospector's soul never died. The man who wrote To Build a Fire - regarded by some as the greatest short story ever written had a fire burning inside of him. He was a perfect meteor who burned out in a brilliant blaze. He wrote these lines several weeks before his dream house was destroyed by fire.

This is what's left of Wolf House, the remains of what was to be a 15, 000 square foot mansion nestled in the Sonoma County redwoods on London's property. It is a sad and lonely place. These walls, with empty holes where windows were to be hung, seem like a more fitting tribute to the man than the grave marker he left for himself. What better tombstone than this?

Leaf-filtered light streams through the empty shell of London's physical legacy, just as his own body, wracked by kidney failure and weakened by an early bout of scurvy, was itself a broken filter through which the light of words poured through. And they were good words, strong words, words that spoke of men who struggled against the forces of nature and were vanquished by it. London's effort to ranch these harsh lands was also a struggle against nature and in the end, as it always does, nature won.

The stone that marks Jack London's grave was taken from the remains of the Wolf House ruins. There is no other marker above it, no epitaph or polished marble. His work speaks for him instead. A writer's work is his epitaph and this is especially true of a man whose best character was the wild. A stone covered by moss and lichen and ferns and dead leaves. London poured everything he had into this place. He wrote his last few books in order to support it - and those were the most controversial. He was accused of plagiarism and admitted it, to a degree. He needed the money to build his dream house, which wound up succumbing to that great force of nature, fire. In To Build a Fire, the man dies for failure to build one. The irony is staggering. Sometimes real life is even more poetic than poetry.

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The House Where Nobody Lives

We lie in our warm beds and we listen to the sound of rain pattering on the roof. The walls that surround us are our walls and within them we pretend that we are safe. But what is a house and how safe are its walls? A house is, at best, but a temporary shelter constructed of materials that will quickly decay when exposed to that universal solvent we call water. This five room shack near Philo, California is only about a year or so away from collapse. It is a ruin that will not last the ages like some Roman temple or Pueblo cliff dwelling. No future archeologist will lie on her belly for months with a dental pick and brush, slowly revealing the remnants of this lost culture. Whoever lived here was not fascinating; nor craftsman enough to leave a lasting imprint of his legacy.

But what can we say about the occupants of the skeletal remnants of this old house? The oxidized wires at the left foreground of the photograph are what remains of their mattresses- where they slept and dreamed and laid sick and made love. Once they were brand new and pleasant to drowse upon, but the rain has eaten away their soft outer coverings and reduced them to a rusted metal mesh, revealing their functional core - row upon row of coiled iron springs. Nothing is safe from the corrosive power of water.

Standing in the back doorway, looking in through the kitchen, we can can see out the open front door to the road beyond where the photograph above this one was taken. Their stove lies toppled on its side. The white basin at bottom left is the kitchen sink. Someone stood here, night after night, washing dishes, baking pies. Someone stood at the window watching the rain and listening to the occasional passing automobile. Voices carried through these rooms, and lives were lived within these walls. But we cannot tell what kinds of lives they were, whether they were mostly happy or mostly sad. Though from what remains, it's hard to imagine them as anything but the latter. This is what the visible signs of decay do to our thinking. A corpse only reflects the form of the body that once lived. Not even the mortician's make-up will fool us into believing that he who lies before us is the person himself.

A closer look at the stove reveals the broken clock, frozen forever at 7:29. AM or PM? Does it even matter? Let's imagine it was morning, a time when this kitchen would have been in full swing. Who used to watch these little black hands sweep slowly round and round? How many pies did it measure? How many boiled eggs? Maybe none. Maybe the occupants of this shack were not quaint or reflective or adept at the fine art of baking. Maybe they were bitter and lazy. Maybe the cupboard in the background was chronically bare. We don't know anything about the people who lived here. We know only that people lived here. We know that they cooked and that they ate and slept here. But what they cooked and how they cooked it, and how well they slept, or even if they pondered the rain are all just wistful conjectures. It's hard to imagine that this was ever a nice place to live but again, that's because we are staring at a rotting corpse and not the living thing.

A house is a living thing when it is occupied by living people, and when those people are gone the house dies. In the Tom Waits song, The House Where Nobody Lives, he sings the following closing lines:

What makes a house grand
Ain't the roof or the doors
If there's love in a house
It's a palace for sure
Without love...
It ain't nothin but a house
A house where nobody lives...

And it's true. And what we see here is such a house, a house in a state of advanced decay that is not pleasant to look upon. Decay, in this stage, is ugly. It is a wet decay of mold and rot and reclamation. Walls peel and plaster swells as moisture seeps in and does what it does to wood that is dead. This is the natural process of recycling that requires no assistance from man. Nothing really needs sorting or melting down. Nothing we make with our feeble hands really needs carting of to some special facility to be rendered useful again. It will all return to dust and become reabsorbed.

Now the camera peeks in through that same kitchen window where we imagined the forlorned occupant staring out at the rain and the passing cars. What we can see here on the front of the cabinets in the foreground are the remains of yellow paint. Surely this was once a bright and happy place. The light here in the kitchen is good light and the large window that looks out back provides a pleasant view of moss-covered oaks. It was not a large house and they were not wealthy people but they did have all three of the three necessary L's for happiness - location, location and location. What more do we really need than a roof, a bed and a space for preparing our meals? Listen to the Tom Waits song for the answer.

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