Pescadero Memories

Story by John Vonderlin ——-many of John’s terms are described here

Flotsam in the nearshore takes that path in our area because it is driven by the longshore current (littoral drift)–which in turn is driven by the prevailing northwest winds. I believed once they floated in, they were trapped and were subsequently rounded off by rubbing against the rough grit of the sand, just as in a rock tumbler.

I believed this effect, which should exist in almost any promontory-bounded cove, was strengthened by the topographical features of the shallow, flat reef that extended almost continuously along the length of the beach out to about fifty yards.

The reef’s rocks were composed of numerous sedimentary layers turned on edge with the differential erosion of the layers of varying hardness causing a series of parallel grooves and ridges. The ridges and grooves because of their southwest to northwest orientation would tend to guide any flotsam retreating from the beach directly into the prevailing northwestly winds, sending them backwards toward the beach.

I began to photograph easy- to- identify pieces of driftwood and noted they did indeed hang around for months. I also noted that occasionally in high surf conditions small quantities of driftwood were escaping past the southern promontory, to be temporarily spread thinly over the beaches to the south; then disappear.

I began to call the small embayment where they were usually concentrated Roach Motel Embayment, after the commercial about the baited box in the commercial that brags, “They check in, but they don’t check out.”

Still, so many of the pieces I was finding were different from the normal driftwood I was used to finding, I knew I wasn’t seeing the full picture. Plus I was perplexed that in all my trips there, I’d never actually seen any pieces float in. One day while collecting some more pebbles I learned…”The Rest of the Story.”
I hadn’t ever seen them floating in because they weren’t. The pieces weren’t floating in because at some point in the oceanic phase of their existence they had become waterlogged and sunk.

As they bumped along the nearshore bottom on their southward trip, from who knows where, they were being ejected onto the beach by a feature I came to call Neptune’s Vomitorium. This feature apparently also provided the path for the ejection of the pebbles and other objects onto the beach.

In a short aside, if you websearch “sinkers lumber,” you’ll find there is a number of thriving businesses that specialize in producing lumber from recovered waterlogged trees, many harvested from virgin forests hundreds of years ago before they sank to the bottom of lakes or rivers.

I further believe that after being ejected on the beach at Neptune’s Vomitorium, they would be moved southward by the waves a short distance down the beach to the Roach Motel Embayment.

At that point the factors I mentioned earlier came into play, more or less restricting them to this stretch of the beach.This also provided the explanation of why these piles of driftwood contained so many unusual shapes and types. Just as with rocks, where the harder a rock is, the better it tends to take a polish, the harder and denser pieces of wood; that is, knot holes, the underside support of branches, forks, heartwood, etc. were durable enough to last long enough to be rounded into attractive shapes. They weren’t doing it on the beach to any degree though. They were doing it during their silent procession along the ocean’s bottom in the nearshore.

With more research I discovered, Neptune’s Vomitorium, was at the site of a paleocreek. During the Ice Age, the ocean level was hundreds of feet lower because of all the water locked in glaciers. Consequently, the coast at that time was far offshore from its present position.

I’ve read that ten thousand years ago that was almost out to the Farallones. The creeks that ran off our local hills and mountains eroded canyons and valleys that have since been submerged by the rising waters that resulted from the melting of the glaciers. The ones that haven’t filled entirely with sediment are called paleocreeks.

For some reason, at Neptune’s Vomitorium, there is an interaction between the longshore current, the paleocreek, and other subsurface topography to episodically, but regularly, regurgitate large amounts of non-buoyant objects onto the beach like no other place I know.

Those objects include the pebbles from the offshore quartz ridge, waterlogged wood, and enormous quantities of non-buoyant marine debris from the fishing and crabbing industry, your lost beach items, and whatever lost or discarded trash that bounces along the bottom of the streams that drain the local watersheds.

In the last three years I’ve collected about ten trash cans full of these little treasure.

I sort them by size and shape for various planned artistic endeavors. Initially, I would drill them and string them by the hundred into what I called “Ocean Garlands,” a beachcombing version of the strings of popcorn we make for decorating our Christmas trees.

Lately, I’ve been using some of the more unusual ones I find in some of my thematic art exhibits. Check out the oval-shaped piece of wood.

Do you recognize what it once was?***

I’ve combined this mysterious piece of driftwood with a golf ball core, the regurgitated remnant left after a poor shot’s long and degrading journey of nearly twenty miles to Invisible Beach, from one of the Ritz Carlton’s, world class golf courses, and a Hole-in-the-Heart Valentine Rockomorph. It is part of the several hundred pieces of art I have assembled for my “The Silent Procession from The Sunken Cathedral to Neptune’s Vomitorium.”

At this time, I want to move on to my next claim: Invisible Beach is the best marine-debris-collection spot on this coast. Enjoy. John Vonderlin

*****For the answer to what the driftwood was….see below

Hi June,
Neither I, or my beachcombing friend who found it, figured out what it was. However, several people recognized it when I showed it to them. It’s the head of a push-broom. The two slanted holes allow you to change the angle of the handle, keeping the bristles from getting too slanted in one direction, limiting it’s effectiveness. Enjoy. John Vonderlin.

Story by John Vonderlin–but his friends call him “Dr. Science.”

Part II

Hi June,

When I first started taking the long hike to Invisible Beach, to see the colorful pebbles, I noticed a nearby area where a number of rafts of small driftwood were gathered. After I had photographed and collected a few handfuls of pebbles, I walked back and checked out the piles of small driftwood strung out in sinuous linear patches by the receding tide’s waves.

I immediately noticed that a good proportion of the small pieces were nicely rounded, many with unusual and pleasing shapes. Already having a large collection of bigger pieces of driftwood at home, I gathered up enough to fill my backpack and headed home.
So it went, every time I visited the beach to gather pebbles, I’d see the driftwood piles in the same embayment and grab a few hundred more.(#1)

I also began to theorize why they were there and what was causing them to be so rounded. They were quite different from the usual piles of small driftwood you might see elsewhere. I began to call this part of the beach, Nature’s Grand Tumbler.

My theory was that the two rock promontories on either end of Invisible Beach, tended to restrict the normal flow of beach-stranded driftwood further southward.

…more…

Lizzie McCormick, the hotel owner’s daughter married Herman Frey, the town constable and owner of the Elkhorn Saloon. For ten years the happy couple lived at Lobitos*.

During that time the ship ‘Colombia‘ ran aground and broke-up near Pescadero. The villagers rallied and rushed to the scene where they liberated its cargo of white paint. For many years afterward Pescadero was known as “The Spotless Town” because all the houses in town had a fresh coat of the same color paint.

Which brought Ma Frey back to the topic of her vegetable garden and some practical advice.

“The moles have been bad,” she said. “You have to take the corn and dip it in coal oil–that’ll keep the moles away. And you put mothballs where their runs are.

“There’s nearly an acre,” she went on. “Jim, the deputy sheriff, plowed it. You can’t get horses anymore. You either have to spade it or use machinery.”

There were other things on her mind. “I’ve answered a puzzle,” she said, “and I’m gonna get rich. There’s a contest and it doesn’t close ’til the 31st of May–that’s my wedding anniversary. They sent me a form to fill out and I got it all perfect.

“I’ll get $50,000 for the first prize, I think. When I get it, I’m going to do good. I have lots of friends that need operations.”

And that was just like Ma Frey to care about her friends and neighbors in Pescadero.

——————–

*Lobitos: “The farming district hereabouts was so named from the creek around 1870 (in the ’60s the name had been Bald Knob…) The Lobitos Station of the stagecoach line was established in 1878, and within a year or so turned into the present hamlet. (The 1941 Army map very mistakenly calls the place Tunitas, and the USGS, against the advice of its field engineer, has repeated the blunder.)–From “Place Names of San Mateo County” by Dr. Alan K. Brown

**Lobitos Creek: Land grant records of the late 1830s call this the ‘arroyo de los Lobitos’ (Seals creek). Deeds of the early 1850s have an alternate Spanish form: ‘arroyo Lobos Pintos’ (spotted seals; the two terms mean the same thing, seals as distinguished from the large unspotted sea lions). According to Pablo Vasquez, the name comes from the fact that there were large seal rookeries on the shore here. This would be hard to disagree with. A small branch going off the creek a mile and a quarter below Bald Knob has long been regarded as the South fork.–Place Names of San Mateo County, Dr. Alan K. Brown

***Bald Knob: (West of and above Tunitas Creek road 2.4 W of Skyline…) The name has been in use since the late 18550s. There is now a growth of young pines on the summit which before was conspicuously bare. ‘Knob’ is not a regular word for a kind of hill in this part of California, so the effect is semi-metaphorical; Bald mountain has always been an alternate form. In the 1860s Bald Knob was also used as the name of the ranching district down to the west. Wheeler’s San Francisco County map of 1855 has the name Zaremba mountain, for totally unknown reasons.–Place Names of San Mateo County, Dr. Alan K. Brown

Photo by Jerry Koontz, jerrysphotos.com

One of the famous landmarks in Pescadero was (and is) “Lincoln Hill,” on the south side of the town. “I’ve been on it enough,” Ma Frey, who tooled around in a 1935 Ford, said. “When I was a kid, we used to run up to see how fast we could get to the top, and when I was grown-up, I used to have to climb it all the way to get my cow. There was a nasty bull up there and I wouldn’t let the kids go up. I never was afraid of that bull.”

Lizzie Frey was born a McCormick [("It's Mick," she interrupted, "We're no Macs; we're Irish."] north of Pescadero, two or three ranches up Pomponio Creek. When she was a teenager, her father, John McCormick, purchased a hotel in town.

Her dad owned the Pescadero House, Swanton House and two livery stables. Both hotels were famous in the 1890s.

…to be continued…

Here it was, 1951, and Ma Frey complained that the only remaining celebration in town was the annual three-day Portuguese Chamarita festival.

“I suppose I’ll march in the parade,” she agreed. “I remember when I used to dance three nights straight at the Chamarita, and work all day–I had boarders and seven children besides–three boys and two girls survived and are living now. We had music and a band and enough people to have a dance.”

There were 500 people that lived in Pescadero in 1951. Ma Frey remembered when twice that amount lived there. Now the town’s biggest buildings, three hotels, were shuttered.

…to be continued…

[I wrote this in 1993]

One of my favorite Pescadero characters is Lizzie McCormick Frey (affectionately known as “Ma Frey,” pronounced “Fry”). But I never met her. Yet I can almost hear the bespectacled 70-year-0ld widow chatting –in her trademark, deep voice–to a San Francisco reporter in 1951.

It was spring and Ma Frey and the journalist conversed outside her 8-room white house located next door to the Native Sons Hall. In Pescadero.

Her garden was “coming up fine,” she said, and she “had chickens and ducks, and I don’t know how many rabbits and somebody threw off two female cts here–and now I’ve got ten cats.”

Ma Frey had five kids and they were still keeping her busy. To help pay the bills, she rented to one boarder and took in the wash.

“I’m washing now,” she told the reporter. “I’ve got two tubs and no time to talk to anybody. A person can’t walk and walk too.”

But talk she did, her choice of words revealing a longing for times past, the way it used to be–apparently an action-filled town. Ma Frey didn’t go so far as to say that Pescadero was turning into a ghost town–but she did say that it wasn’t humming as much as it used to–back when she used to tend bar at the Elkhorn Saloon, today the location of Pescadero’s post office.

“It’s going downhill all the time,” Ma Frey said. “I hate to see it. Why they used to celebrate the Fourth of July and everything here. They’d even shoot off the cannon.”

….to be continued…

Invisible Beach: “Not even Big Sur, Jade Cove, or Cambria’s, Moonstone Beach, further south, have such an interesting pedigree or range of attractive stones.”

Part I

Hi June,
I’ve asserted that Invisible Beach is the most amazing, unusual, interesting, etc. place on the San Mateo Coast, if not the California or Pacific Coast. So far, I’ve only nibbled around the edges of the buffet of its wonders.

This assertion is based on three basic claims. One…it is the best rock collecting spot I know of on the West Coast. Two…it is the best small driftwood collecting spot I know of on our coast. Three..it is the best non-buoyant marine debris collecting spot I know of on the West Coast.

I realize that because my travels are limited, I can’t be sure. But thanks to my research on the Internet, various books, newsletters by collectors, and postings on various forums, I’m pretty confident I’m right. Let’s see if I can convince anybody else.

Earlier, I sent you a picture of the many varieties of the quartz family that can be found there. While their monetary value is minimal, their existence as the last significant remnant of the offshore quartz ridge that also created Pebble Beach, gives them some historical cachet.

Pebble Beach was Pescadero’s claim to fame in the last half of the 19th Century. It brought thousands of wealthy tourists and acclaim to sleepy Pescadero, in its Golden Age. to gather those pebbles. The protracted beach access legal battle between Loren Coburn and the townsfolk of Pescadero, with its mob violence threats and his wife Sarah’s subsequent murder as detailed in your book, “The Coburn Mystery,” added an aura of sadness, mystery and legal significance to their existence, carried on to this day by the pebbles found on Invisible Beach.

Not even, Big Sur, Jade Cove, or Cambria’s, Moonstone Beach, further south, have such an interesting pedigree or range of attractive stones.

While almost all the pebbles, despite their colorfulness, are too common to quicken the heart rate of a serious collector, there is one variety that I have never seen elsewhere. Nor have any of my postings of pictures on Rockhound forums produced either an explanation of the details of their origin or any information about the existence of ones like them from elsewhere.

I refer to hollowed out triangular quartz rocks as pictured in the attached photo.

Lastly, beside the pebbles, a few Donut NotRocks (collected and strung with shells in necklaces by the Ohlone natives of this area) and the extensive Tafoni structures on the rocks that bound the beach on its northern end, there is an unusual pareidolic rock, shaped like a whale head, that sits in the throat of Neptune’s Vomitorium, the channel that regurgitates the various oddities onto Invisible Beach. I’ve attached a photo of it.

Have I made my case?

To read more of John Vonderlin (and ‘Invisible Beach’) click here

The Poem of Pescadero by Mrs. H.L. Good

“Like a bird’s nest in an old oak tree,
Or a pearl within a shell,
Lies the village Pescadero,
Near where restless seawaves dwell

Round her rise the rugged hilltops,
And beside her runs the stream
Where the silver brook trout, gracefully,
Glide along like loves young dream.

Every object has its shadow,
Pleasure is tempered oft by pain,
And upon the hillside yonder
In the sunshine and the rain.

Lies a little group of earth mounds
Telling plain as mute things can
That our dearest joys are fleeting—
Even life is but a span.

In this little happy valley
Generous souls have proved their worth
And to loyal hearts who love her,
She’s the dearest spot on earth.”

A sweet story from the Redwood City Tribune, 1924:

“Over 50 years ago a subscriber to a well-known farm journal of California picked up an incomplete part of a poem about Pescadero on Market Street in San Francisco. Finding the lines to his liking, he sent them in to the editor of the journal, who caused them to be printed, with the request that the remaining versews be sent in by anyone who might have them.

“Mrs. D.E. Moore of Redwood City was Miss Mary Hayward of Pescadero when the poem was published. Her mother read it when it appeared in the farm journal and committed them to memory. In fact, the entire family memorized the incomplete poem and repeated the verses from to time as occasion fitted.

“This continued for half a century, Mrs. Moore’s mother passing on in the meantime.

“Last March Mrs. Moore headed a committee which gave an ‘old fashioned dance’ in Pescadero. In conjunction with the dance a program was arranged in which a number of older residents of the community participted. Believing that the poem of Pescadero, which she had known as a child, was appropriate for the occasion, Mrs. Moore asked a neighbor and lifelong friend, Mrs. H.L. Good, to read it as an encore.

“It was then that Mrs. Good recited the verses as Mrs. Moore had known them–and, to the latter’s amazement, added what were evidently the missing stanzas. She had been the original author….”

…to be continued…