Wooden Mummies and Iron Bones

In the gold rush ghost town of Bodie, California the hulk of a rusting roadster sits parked outside a long abandoned home. At almost 9000 feet of elevation the air in Bodie is extremely dry. Winter temperatures commonly plunge to 20 below zero and the snow pack averages between 15 and 20 feet - well above the eaves of the house. It is a harsh environment and it is remote. Yet miners flocked here.  Wages were high and the work steady. But Bodie was not a place where a man could strike it rich. Bodie was a company town and men were mere tools used to extract more than 100 million dollars in gold and silver from the ground below the eastern Sierras. Life here was not pleasant. The stamping mills that pounded rock into a fine powder ran twenty-four hours a day, six days a week and gold was extracted from the powdered quartz with mercury vapor and cyanide. The work was dangerous and, in the long run, deadly. But men will risk their lives for money and go to great lengths to extract great wealth from the ground. At the time, Bodie employed the most cutting edge technologies. No expense was spared to dig deeper, work faster, and increase yields. Huge tracts of natural resources were exhausted. Vast teams of mules and horses were broken. Thousands of men were driven mad and pushed beyond their physical limits. And all that is left now are skeletons. Skeletal homes, skeletal vehicles, skeletal tools. Everything made of flesh has gone or decomposed. What remains is only wood and iron. Washed by rain, frozen by ice, flattened by the weight of snow, baked by the sun and dried by the thin mountain air, everything is cracked, warped and sinking. Death is a visible, tangible force here. Corpses do not rot. The town where these people ate, slept, lived and died is a tomb filled with wooden mummies. One can feel the weight of suffering and despair. It is oppressive. Bodie is beyond spooky. It's horrifying. It is a dying testament to the awful power of greed. Gold, during the peak of Bodie's heyday, was $20 an ounce. Today it is over $1500. Gold is the ultimate currency. It always has been. Gold is power and, to some, gold is life. Gold is wealth and wealth is about staving off death. But gold is simply a mineral, a certain kind of rock with some interesting properties. Unlike the iron bones of Bodie, it never rusts. Humans will do inhuman things in pursuit of shiny rocks. We're not unlike crows, who are attracted to shiny things. It if glitters, we want it. Nothing glitters in Bodie anymore. Only the bits of glass from the broken windows and whiskey bottles that litter the ground. Bodie is old and weathered and dull. That's why it is so beautiful. Because old, weathered and dull is the truth.

o O o

The Sparrow & the Martin

Once built by man, never again devoid of him. It seems that we cannot leave even our relics alone. It is by some instinct that we must claim that which is abandoned. The pyramids, the Parthenon, Stonehenge. They stole the nose off the Sphinx and broke the arms off the Venus de Milo. There is no thing sacred. Kilroy will always be there. Just ask Holden Caulfield. There is nothing safe from vanity, ego, pride and the desire to be seen, to be heard. Men have painted words and symbols on walls for 30,000 years. We just can't stand blank space, or silence. That which is empty must be filled. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Men do this thing with markers and paint. It is primarily male, the adolescent male. The adolescent mind. I am here, I am here. I assert my existence. I assert my self-imposed identity  (that shall remain hidden and secret to all but myself). The irony of graffiti is that it is an aggressive act of anonymous self-proclamation. I demand to be heard - mysteriously. You *will* hear me (but never actually *know* me). One creates a false identity, a tag, a nom de spray, then applies it under cover of darkness and runs away. It must be quite an addiction this. To piss on a pole and have it remain for all to see and smell. Here, by the ocean, in the old gun emplacement, are dozens of fake names left by real people in a place designed to kill other real people now long abandoned and left to decay. The insecure have reclaimed that which was intended to secure. The coward has claimed the enclave of the brave. The walls, though mortar-proof are not idiot-proof. But who are the real idiots? The graffiti scrawlers? Or the men who built the gun emplacement only to have it become obsolete before it was even finished? Those who simply wish to be recognized as human, or those who seek to destroy humanity? Maybe the real geniuses are not the engineers who construct our towers and bridges but the kids who claim them. Like the Sparrow who steals the Martin's nest.

o O o

Building 231

Steel, iron, rivets and rust. That's about all that remains here in Building #231 at the old Hunter's Point Naval Yard. Scrap metal and ghosts. The air here is rank with the smells of mildew, diesel fumes and engine grease. And though it is as silent as a church now, you can almost still hear the shouts of men working, joking with one another,  the clang of iron chains and the endless rhythm of hammers. This cavernous structure was once a machine shop where naval vessels and submarines were repaired and maintained by dozens of men working round-the-clock shifts.

Now it is a cathedral of scrap iron and toxic waste. This is a superfund site, where lead and radioactive materials were routinely handled and carelessly disposed. But it is quiet now, and empty. Where row upon row of men once stood at machines there is now a vast empty slab of oil-stained concrete. Photographs cannot to justice to the enormity of the space. It is vast and lonely, but everywhere you look one is reminded that people spent a good portion of their lives here. This facility was built to serve machines, but it was inhabited by people. Mot of whom are dead now.

They were not mere men, they were members, they formed committees, they were part of groups. In this room, which the sign above the door says is the planning office,  ideas were conceived, drawn up and put into action. On the shop floor, in the images above, the plans were carried out by men with tools wielded by flesh-and-blood hands, not pneumatic robot arms. Building 231 was a place where things were built and fixed by men who were paid to use their bodies and minds to solve problems.

 

The human eye is perhaps the most sophisticated and complex marvel we possess. It is also the most vulnerable. The exposed soft tissue of the eye is subject to damage from flying bits of debris. A tiny speck of metal dust can blind us. Yet a floating mote of it can dazzle. The eye is the only sense organ that can perceive the passage of time, that can witness it. Time cannot be tasted, touched, smelled or heard. But the eye can see time passing. It can see light. And light is a clock.

Men worked here. Building 231 was filled with men, men who fixed ships so that we could stop fascism and imperialism and communism. There is always an ism to fight. We go to war against isms and build entire industries around them. And whenever we manage to defeat one ism we find a new ism to rally around and to justify both the mechanations and humanations of war. But all wars end, and old enemies surrender, only to be replace by new ones. And then men always come when they are called.

The Building 231's rot out and fall to rust but the men always come. Places like the Parthenon and the Coliseum crumble, but the men don't fade. They always come. Ambition draws them. Noble causes draw them. Money draws them, and promises of a better life. Structures of vast scale draw men. What is it about them that does? Is it the promise of being part of some cause greater than themselves?

Everywhere the eye turns in Building # 231 there is evidence of men. The objects they held in their hands. The brooms they pushed, the helmets they used to protect their heads, the shoes they wore. A ghost ship is so called because of the ghosts. Building 231 is full of them. Just go there. You can feel them. The air is thick with spirit. And you don't need a Quija board to find them. Or a camera.

o O o

The Absence of Cows

A lonely cow pasture, a water trough and a well-trodden crater filled with muddy water. This is West Marin and these rolling green hills feed the dairy cows that make our milk and cheeses. It's hard to imagine milk here, unless its of the chocolate variety but anyone who's spent time on a dairy farm knows that cows are dirty animals and mud is as much a part of their milieu as it is a for a pig. Marin is the dairy capitol of California and California produces the most dairy in the United States. Such sights are common all over Marin but you have to get out and look for them. But this is how it always is. It's not what you're looking for, it's the accidental discovery that yields the greatest reward. Which is why photography is the perfect metaphor for life. I park my car and walk, never really knowing where I'm going or what I will find. I trust that what I need will present itself, and it always does. I find great aesthetic pleasure in the arrangement of geometric shapes in this image. Circles, rectangles and curved lines. And I love the feeling of recent emptiness. I know that earlier the cows were here -many cows. I can see the impressions made by their hooves. And I can imagine them standing around the trough drinking, because I have watched this ritual before. So what I find so compelling about this image is not what it shows, but what it doesn't It's the negative that moves me. The absence of subject matter that the objects conjure. It's the emptiness that I am drawn to and the ghostly feeling the emptiness evokes.

o O o