Pescadero Memories

[While this original draft may be messy, it does contain more details and research than the edited version.]
By June Morrall

The Steeles moved from Ohio to California in 1855, first farming in Marin and Sonoma County. Seven years later the Steeles were forced to move when the Point Reyes property they rented was sold to new owners.

Then they heard that Loren Coburn, the San Francisco stableman and San Mateo County landowner, was looking for someone to lease his property at Ano Nuevo. Originally a deal was struck where Renneslear (”RE”), Issac (”IC”) and Edgar Steele rented the Ano Nuevo land for ten years. But by 1864 they owned it! [I believe what happened is that Loren needed cash up front for another project and the Steeles had the money.]

Besides dairying, the Steele brothers raised stock and cultivated grain. They built lovely homes for themselves at Ano Nuevo and at the famous Cascade Dairy. During the Civil War, Edgar produced a gargantuan cheese weighing one ton and donated it to the U.S. Sanitary Commission, forerunner of the Red Cross.

The Steeles had a personal reason for producing the giant dairy product: General Frederick Steele, who fought in the Civil War, was a close relative.

Edgar Steele also distinguished himself by demonstrating at county fairs new production techniques designed to yield higher quantities and qualities of cheese.

——————-

From: Coastside Cultural Resources of San Mateo County, California (1980)

Steele Brothers Dairies: In 1862, Rensselaer Steele and his three cousins established a chain of dairies between Gazos Creek and Ano Nuevo known as the Steele Brothers Dairies which became famous throughout the Bay Area for their products. A number of houses and barns still stand which were constructed by the family. The dairies are listed as a California State Landmark.

Cascade Ranch House: Built in the mid-1860s for Rensselaer and Clara Steele, the building is constructed in a classical form with a symmetrical placement of windows and doors, and is the most elegant of the buildings. A wide veranda with a balcony on the second floor runs along the front and both sides of the house. Alterations made to the house over the years have not destroyed its distinctive coastal character.

Cascade Ranch Dairy: This three-story redwood structure was the first erected by the Steeles after their location on the Coastside in 1862. The building was designed for function rather than style, which may explain the irregular placement of its windows. A wide band, or fascia, just under the eaves was the builder’s only architectural embellishment.

(Photo courtesy John Vonderlin)

Friends,
The house and I were on TV, along with Bob Dougherty, and other Local
Folks - Channel 5, Eye On The Bay, on 1/22. You can view the clip on
the WEB, here:

http://cbs5.com/video/?cid=6

Once you get to that site, choose the program titled “Point A to B
#4″. - about the 4th show down the list, on the left. The show is a
tour beginning in Cupertino, ending in San Gregorio. Once they get
into the hills, they stop at Alices, the Pioneer Market, and
Applejacks, then stop at our house for a brief visit. They get here
about half way through the show, which is about 20 minutes long.

Love Ya, Terry

Thank you John Vonderlin for sending this to pescaderomemories.com.

(Photo: Courtesy Tony Pera.)

I’ve combined many of those remnants with various natural oddities that I consider Natural Wonders to illustrate the dissonance created by the littering that is occurring in some of the most beautiful natural settings I’ve ever encountered, that is along the San Mateo Coast…..John Vonderlin

Neptune’s Body Farm

Story by John Vonderlin (email John: benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

Hi June,

People who are interested in Forensics are usually familiar with “The Body Farm,” a formerly clandestine plot of land at the University of Tennessee, where the decomposition of bodies is studied.

Hundreds of people have volunteered their bodies after death to aid in this study, hoping the knowledge gained can be used in crime-solving, or for other benefits to society. Popular TV shows, like CSI, frequently mention facts garnered from this, and similar areas of study, in the fictional cases their episodes revolve about.

This research is an outgrowth of a branch of study called taphonomy. (taphos…burial, nomos..law) The science of taphonomy’s original interest concerned the forces that lead to and control fossilization. From its introduction to paleontology in 1940, taphonomy has spread its concepts through various other disciplines.

I’m happy to say that includes the science (?) of identifying marine debris remnants, of which I’m one of the few students. As I mentioned earlier, I have a collection of hundreds of golf ball remnants that have been incorporated into “The Silent Procession from the Sunken Cathedral to Neptune’s Vomitorium.”

I’ve combined many of those remnants with various natural oddities that I consider Natural Wonders to illustrate the dissonance created by the littering that is occurring in some of the most beautiful natural settings I’ve ever encountered, that is along the San Mateo Coast.

This appraisal is generated not by homerism, as I live in Santa Clara, but rather by my frequent haunting of the incredibly varied, lightly touched, returning-to-wilderness South Coast that exists south of Half Moon Bay.

Neptune’s Body Farm principles usually work like this. Because I have found so many golf balls in various states of degradation, I’ve been able to identify remnants that look less– and less– like anything normally recognizable as a real golf ball. Because of the broad spectrum of remnants in my collection, the vaguest hint of dimples in a scrunched piece of white plastic, or a small rubber band tip emerging from a twisted bit of shriveled plastic, or just the faint imprint the rubber band winding leaves on the inside of the plastic makes it easy for me to identify what it is I’ve found.

But, it can also work another way. By finding the missing link between the unknown source objects and the unidentified objects in my collection, I can better understand the sequence of decay and identify the connection between both of them.

Here’s the story of my favorite solution to a longstanding mystery in my collection.

I have the “World’s Largest Fishing Line Ball,” (WLFLB), made up of some 3,000 pieces of fishing line knotted together, as well as three more full trash cans of line, still to be cleaned and tied to the WLFLB.

All of those are monofilament line in clear, or shades of light green and blue. I also have a box of monofilament line in a rainbow of colors that I’ll eventually use in some other “artplay.” Finally, there is the box of miscellaneous balls of line. Some of the balls are twine or cord. Some are kite string. Some are fly fishing line. The majority of them are made of some strong synthetic fiber: Nylon? Rayon? Polyester? Or? I’d never been able to figure out what their point source was. It had to be something common, probably from the fishing or crabbing industry, but what?

Well one day I found the “Missing Link” and everything became clear.

Eureka! All those balls of line were from the body plies in tires that had been degraded. After time and tide have ripped the tires to shreds, the virtually immortal synthetic fiber wraps itself in a ball and travels along the near-shore bottom until it is spit out by Neptune’s Vomitorium.

I just wonder if my “101 Tires,” project, which involves photographing, then disposing of tires that are making the same journey, is going to make these no longer mysterious balls of fiber no longer show up.

If so, I’ve got the market cornered.

Enjoy. John

Thank you Wikipedia:

[Body Ply
The body ply is a calendered sheet consisting of one layer of rubber, one layer of reinforcing fabric, and a second layer of rubber. The earliest textile used was cotton; later materials include rayon, nylon, polyester, and Kevlar™. Passenger tires typically have one or two body plies. Body plies give the tire structure strength. Truck tires, off-road tires, and aircraft tires have progressively more plies. The fabric cords are highly flexible but relatively inelastic.

By June Morrall

When San Francisco experienced growing pains, Pigeon Point felt the pressure and nearby Pescadero’s rich bottom lands turned into a thickly planted potato patch. The potatoes were popularly called “Irish oranges.”

Author/adventurer Colonel Albert S. Evans wrote in 1872 that he observed Indians and Chinese working side-by-side in the fields, digging up potatoes, filling 100 to 125 bags per acre, each weighing more than 100 pounds.

Barley, red oats, onions, early peas, lettuce, cauliflower, sweet corn, string beans, horse beans and Brussels sprouts were easily cultivated on the lowlands and sidehills; the sweetest strawberries thrived near the Pacific Ocean.

The artichoke, “the dainty aristocrat among vegetables,” was a latecomer to South Coast agriculture but the choke developed a flavor in the Pescadero soil attained no where else. Irish oranges (potatoes) and alll the other vegetables were shipped from Pigeon Point to San Francisco.

The coastal climate featured mild winters and boasted a phenomenon known as a “Second Spring,” when crops could be planted in the fall during what East Coast folks called an “Indian Summer.”

Dairies dotted the coastal slopes. Producers of cheese and butter, the Cloverdale Dairy was spread over 1700 acres.

The Steele family numbered among the most successful dairymen. They were a large family, seven brothes and two sisters, who moved from Ohio to California about 1855. The Steeles projected the image of the sturdy American farmer.

By June Morrall

The wharf and a small port community grew up at Pigeon Point Landing before construction of the lighthouse. A warehouse, cheese factory and a post office were built. On one of the bluffs, Portuguese whalers, and their families, who had migrated from the drought ridden Azore Islands, lived in a dozen rustic cottages on one of the bluffs

During the whaling season, looking through binoculars at the sea was a full time job. When one whale or a school of whales was spotted near Pigeon Point, the whalers got into two small sailing vessels to chase their prey. If they were lucky, they shot the whale dead with four to six “bombs,” a harpoon filled with poison. The dead whale was towed to shore, the carcss stripped of its fat. Then the blubber was processed into a valuable oil in try pots which sat in simple furnaces made of rocks and clay.

The Pigeon Point whalers didn’t waste a thing, cleaning and selling the bones as well. Barrels of whale oil were loaded onto the steamers that stopped at Pigeon Point.

In the end, the business of whaling was not profitable and the whalers abandoned Pigeon Point. The high expense of getting the oil to market, the low wholesale prices–but most of all the fact that the whales were being harpooned into extinction brought the curtain down. From time to time, whaling was revived but utimately the market brought it down. Some of the Portuguese whalers relocated to Pescadero where they were absorbed into other occupations.

The primitive loading arrangement at Pigeon Point took two and a half days to complete. Perishable items waited hours to be loaded. A small vessel rounded the reef and dropped anchor in the sem-sheltered cove. A heavy wire cable was stretched from the top of the bluff to the large rock monument some 200 yards from shore, and under the hawser, rising to a level with the steep rock bluff which half enclosed the bay.

Slings running down in the hawser were rigged and the cargo was lifted from the vessel’s deck, a tedious task, load by load, and run up into the air 50 to 100 feet– hauled to shore and landed on top of the bluff.

The process reversed itself when lumber, bales of hay, fruit, potatoes, vegetables and dairy products on the bluff were strung up on the cable and the shipment slid across the wire onto an awaiting schooner. All went well unless a southwest wind kicked up.

Then the vessel slipped her anchor and ran out to sea until the wind blew itself out.

[Hope I got that right."]

***The Portuguese whalers practiced the ancient form of whaling, chasing humpback and gray whales in long boats, shooting at them with homemade poison filled harpoons, towing the carcasses back to the beach where they processed the blubber into oil.

The whalers held equal shares in the business and in the early years the work was profitable–but as time passed, whaling didn’t yield a steady income. Ideally, they needed calm weather and a good supply of whales; they had neither at Pigeon Point.

The unpredictable weather, fewer whales and the high cost of shipping the oil to market turned it into a very risky business.

Read the rest of this entry »

 Story/Photos by John Vonderlin (email John: benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

Hi June,
As I mentioned previously, before hitting Ano Nuevo Beach and Bradley Beach last week I stopped by the Acid Beach area to check it out. I’m thinking of trying to reach it one more time by land and wanted to survey the last stretch beyond “Chicken’s Roost” again. I did some bushwhacking and got to a better angle to photograph the Warm Water Lagoon double arch. I still had the sun working against me, but these photos give a hint at what I think I can capture when I get up close. Enjoy. John

Story by John Vonderlin (email John: benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

Hi June,

My first expedition to photograph as many of the Sea Arches of San Mateo’s coast as possible didn’t turn out in the way I had hoped. Having shot pictures of an embryonic arch on the north end of New Years Creek’s Beach some time ago, I did a virtual exploration of that area using the large file photos on the California Coastal Records Project website.

I thought I could see six or seven arches stretching north from the one I had photographed out to where the Elephant Seal rookeries begin on Ano Nuevo Point. So I decided to start there. With a nice minus .8 tide, I thought I’d be able to get around a couple of the promontories and get some nice sea level shots.

Parking along Highway 1, a half mile south of the Park Entrance, I used the “Johnny Don’t Pay,” route along the old road, over the bridge and down the moderately steep path to the beach. You can see this perfectly legal access route in Picture #200506697 on the CCRP website.

Turning north on the beach, I saw right away there was going to be problems. There were a handful of Elephant Seals

sprawled on the beach. Because they were high up the beach, I was forced to walk along the surfline, trying to keep my distance. I’ve seen the video of these two- ton males blobbing along the sand, faster then most people can run and had no desire to provide a sequel to the Tiger incident recently in the news. Noticing that several of them were mature, heavily scarred behemoths, I assumed they were probably losers in the fight for harems that’s going on in the rookeries now, and not in a good mood.

With these thoughts beginning to deflate my arch-documenting ambitions, I continued north until I approached the point where I was going to have to pass through a gauntlet of Elephant Seals, with one lying at the edge of the surf and another higher up on the beach. That’s when I decided I should turn around and explore south of the Park along Bradley Beach.

This way, too, is dangerous. Except at low tide, the first half- mile of the beach is hemmed in by unclimbable cliffs

against which powerful waves challenge the supremacy of our continent. And for more then a half mile after that, there’s no legal escape up the cliffs until you reach Alligator Rock at the foot of Waddell Bluffs, just beyond the border of San Mateo County.

In this “No Man’s Land,” I found the Monster: this Frankensteinian blasphemy, lay on the beach entangled in Bull Kelp, waiting for the next high tide to restore its Freddy Kreuger-like skills, so that it could once again torture, maim and kill the unwary. Pardon my melodrama, but let me introduce you to my most recent addition to one of my more relevant marine debris collections, “The Ghost Net of Bradley Beach.”

Here’s Wikipedia’s almost perfunctory description of what a Ghost Net is:

“Ghost nets are fishing nets that have been lost by fishermen. These nets are left to drift the oceans of Earth entangling sea life and causing varying degrees of damage throughout Earth’s oceanic ecosystem. A vast array of sealife is harmed by these lost nets, harming both vertebrates and invertebrates, including many different species of marine mammals.

“Many commercial fishing nets operate as ‘gillnets’. These are deployed as a ‘wall’, creating a vertical plane, often up to half a kilometre across, through which any fish within a certain size bracket will become caught and die. Normally, after a certain period, these nets will be collected by fisherman and the catch removed. However if this is not done (the nets become lost to storms, forgotten, etc.) the net will continue to catch fish until the total weight of the catch becomes larger than the buoyancy of the floats. The net will thus sink, and the fish devoured by bottom-dwelling crustaceans and other fish. Soon, with the weight on the net reduced, the floats will pull the net up again. This repeats itself until the net is destroyed or entangled on the sea floor. Given the high-quality synthetics that are used by commercial fishing operations throughout the modern world, such destruction can take decades.”

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so let me show you the effect these nets can have. This photo is of a Guadalupe Fur Seal pup I found on Invisible Beach,

a few years ago. It had probably been cavorting in the kelp forest with the joyful exuberance I’ve often seen in underwater photography when it became entangled in a piece of netting. Based on when I found it and the season its species are born in, it must have slowly starved to death over a period of months as the relentless piece of net tightened its grip. This pup may have been the first born of its species in this area.

The Guadalupe Fur Seal was hunted to assumed extinction only to recover from a hidden population on its home island off the Mexican coast. Protected from exploitation, its numbers have since recovered and its range has expanded, first to the Channel Islands and recently to the Farallones.

The famous Ray Bandar came to collect the corpse, performed the autopsy and made the identification. I was watching a DVD about him and his unparalleled collection of marine mammal skulls this evening. At one point he was discussing a sub-collection of his skulls of marine mammals, those killed by humans.

I was almost nauseated when he discussed several that had strange gashes in them. He had originally thought they were caused by the propellers of boats, but forensic investigation revealed that the line of nets the marine mammals had become entangled in, had slowly sawed through fur, and skin and finally bone, to leave the gashes in their skulls. The one where the skull had partially regrown to seal the line inside the skull of the still-living animal particularly assaulted my imagination.

The last picture is of the net resting on my lawn after cleaning, its terror spree finally stopped.

That is until my neighbor’s young cat, attracted by my untangling efforts, got its head stuck in the web and totally freaked.

Life without fingers can be a harrowing existence. Those of us that have them must be careful how we use them, lest we loose Monsters on the innocents. John Vonderlin

To: Everybody

From Leah Lubin (email Leah: <leah_lubin@att.net

In the art world, sometimes it takes a long time for the right door to open. Last Saturday, I finally got to meet the owner and curator of the Beat Museum, click here , Jerry Cimino, in San Francisco, where my photo collage of Ken Kesey’s 1999 visit to La Honda has lived since April, 2007. Happily, I can tell you that he is open, knowledgeable, and interested in the two DVDs filmed at the Menlo Park Library events celebrating Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia in 2005 and 2006.

I am working on an idea for an event at the Beat Museum called “Celebrating Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia”. It would include a screening of the DVDs, and hopefully an encore performance of the spoken word and music of our local literary talent (Terry Adams) and musicians (Gary Gates & Friends, Mystic Cowboy), that performed at the library event.

I’m hoping that the event could be scheduled in the Spring, but of course this would need to be approved by Jerry Cimino before plans can be firmed up. I think that it will bring out the fans, and it will rock the big city.

Best wishes,

Leah

PS: The Beat Museum is having a party to celebrate Neal Cassady’s birthday on February 9 & 10, from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM. I plan to be there. All are welcome to attend.