A while back San Francisco artist David Gremard Romero emailed me:
I was reading your postings about [the “outlaw” Indian] Pomponio and was very sad that it didn’t have an end – or rather, it ended “to be continued,” but that was in 1996. I was wondering where you found his story, and if there is a book you can recommend where I can pick up where you left off? I would very much appreciate it. I am an artist, and my work lately is dealing more and more with local and California based history (I live in San Francisco).
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Of course, I pointed him in the right direction–and then, when, recently I asked him if he had completed his work, and, if so, could I post it—I received the most fascinating email and photos of his work to be shown, beginning with an opening on Friday, July 27, 7-10PM, at Bucheon Gallery, 389 Grove Street, San Francisco (415.863.2891; email: [email protected])
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June, I am getting my show together – it opens next week, and I have been super busy.
I did finish the painting.
(“La Caida,” 2008. Pastel and Gold Leaf on Paper. 56×38 inches)
I would like to do more on the Pomponio theme, though. He is a background figure, so I am sending you a picture of the whole painting and also a detail of just the Pomponio figure. It’s a large pastel. The figures are almost life size. It is called “La Caida.’ It is a self-portrait.
I am the figure in the middle, bending over with the red cape. I am wearing the mask of St. Thomas Moor Killer, or Matamoros, who was believed to help the Spanish when they fought the Indians, and on my leg is painted Father Junipero Serra carrying Carmel Mission in his arms, with the rest of the missions scattered as Tattoos across my body. I mean to suggest that I am embodying the idea or spirit of both Junipero Serra, a man I believe tried genuinely to do good but who had an ambivalent effect on California history to say the least, and the malign idea of a Saint who kills Indians, both of which were brought to California and are integral to our history.
The man on the floor is a figure who appears in many of my paintings. It is unclear if he has been knocked out by the Serra/St Thomas figure, while also being aided by him.
The woman is the Aztec goddess of Mercy, Tlazolteotl. Her symbol was her black mouth. Her name literally means “Filth Eater.” In Aztec culture, you had one opportunity to confess your sins in your life, and when you did so, Tlazolteotl ate them and released you from their burden. I was thinking of her as being sort of the referee.
And in the background, to the far right, you see Pomponio, another ambivalent figure, but one whom I prefer to think of as a resistance fighter.
I read in another source that at the end of his life, Pomponio was brought in chains to the Presidio, and at night he cut off his heels to escape his shackles. They caught him by following the trail of his blood. I have also read that this is probably a later myth, but it is a powerful image, and since in much of my work I think of history as being a sort of myth, it applies well; on his shorts you can see him squatting down and cutting off his heels.
From the wound spring both blood and water, symbols of life, death, and also renewal. His boots are crocodiles–in Mesoamerican myth, the crocodile was thought to be the base of the world. This thus transforms him into an axis mundi, the world tree and the center of existence, which he is, as our ancestor (whether, in some genetic sense, if one were Native American, or Spiritually, as a forebear in this same land we now inhabit).
In the middle, on his legs, is painted a skull from which Pomponio emerges again, and again cutting his heel. From the mouth also emerges a world tree, which is also a path marked by his bloody footprints, leading to Chicomizoc, the Aztec place of birth and beginnings, and which is often thought to have been a place somewhere in the United States.
I often equate the bloody acts of our ancestors as a sort of sacrifice, however unwilling on the part of the victims, from which sprang the world we now inhabit, and which would have been impossible without that initial bloody scene. Along the path are scenes of conquistadors and massacre.
The last figure is Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of Change through Violent Conflict. The whole piece has been inspired by Mexican Lucha Libre. In my paintings contemporary individuals wear wrestlers costumes inspired by Pre-Colombian Gods, and by the historical figures so important to Mexican and California history, and they wrestle and act out these struggles which still have ramifications in our own day.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the painting. I hope you like it, and I would love to hear your thoughts.
Here’s a common experience for folks that dine out regularly. By accident you discover that special unknown little restaurant with outrageously good food. You soon return to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, are delighted again, and then full of pride at your discovery, you excitedly relate its gastronomic wonders to a few special friends The word spreads like wildfire and you soon have the circumstance captured so perfectly by the Yogi-ism that, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
Well, it was while working on my “101 Tires” artplay project that I encountered a reverse sort of situation. The project, where I ended up photographing 101 tires on our beautiful beaches, then removing them for disposal, was proceeding along nicely. I was finding them in the most beautiful places on our coast and getting some great pictures and lots of exercise toting and trucking them to the nearest disposal site.
Then I discovered Tunitas Beach was the Mother Lode of stranded tires.
I got some great photos of tires scarring the foreground with the spacious sandy beach and awesome, sheer cliffs looming in the background. Since I didn’t want to take too many of my photos from one place, I stopped photographing them there, but ended up gathering over fifty more tires anyway, hauling them above the reach of the tide. While this added success to one aspect of the project, that being to remove these eyesores from our beaches, it unfortunately, cut off the flow of tires down the coast to the spots where it isn’t necessary to climb a long, steep hill to gather them.
Worse yet, my main stash is still there and barbarians are rolling them out onto the beach to sit on around smouldering garbage fires while they get drunk, then leave them there, and this has required me to re-gather a number of them on several occasions.
Well, a few days ago Meg, informed me that for one day, on June 21st, the Pescadero Landfill, will give a $7 fee amnesty to anyone bringing in tires. With that kind of incentive, this next week, I’m going to see how many I can carry up the hill in a few hours. I’ve always wondered if I look like what I feel like when I reach the top of that monstrous slope carrying a couple of tires. With Meg’s help I hope to share that.
I’ve attached pictures of my last addition to my photo collection that was spit out at Neptune’s Vomitorium, way back on April 6th. Enjoy. John
P.S. I don’t have a proprietary interest in the tires left at Tunitas, so if anyone wants to raid my stash, feel free. Especially, that 100-pound truck tire.
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In the 1970s my boyfriend and I often visited the South Coast and Ano Nuevo. On this occasion we caught the reaction of a boy wearing a red sock hat as he realizes the beach is covered with dead sea elephants.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/1184165[/vimeo]
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Richard Ledford answer to my question: Will we hear from you soon?
“Yes I am going to write a lot soon, starting at the begining —
my spring ’68 long weekend trip hitchhiking from Pasadena to SF and back, when I fell in love with the Highway 1 Monterey area and the SF peninsula coast–
my plan to leave Caltech and spend some time driving up and down the coast just picking up hitchhikers–
my visit to the Hog Farm in late October 1969 in a VW van outfitted with a full performance high power 12Volt stereo-stereo system (unheard of at that time) and a complete bootleg copy of the Beatles White Album a full month before it was officially released –-
completing Stewart Brand’s Liferaft Earth, a week long outdoor public fast, just after we landed on the moon, an event which merciless rains forced to be relocated up the hill to the Skyline Blvd Rancho Diablo mansion —
how the mansion ended up rather trashed as the event wound down and the Hog Farm’s feasting fast breakers wiped out the kitchen —
how I hung around helping to restore the place back to pre-event normalcy and was then offered the caretaker position —
the harvest of pot grown under lights in the attic —
Thaddeus the dog, who was so smart he knew to grab a tree branch in his teeth and shake it to get his thrown stick when it got stuck up in the tree —
driving the VW van with 50 people clinging desperately to it so they could avoid walking the last six miles to the Altamont festival from where they parked, and then driving away in the morning because I knew there was some wierd vibe in the air …
So, as I gather my memories,
Richard
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Orril Fluharty: Blueprint for Living was written by Mary Barbour Schumacher and originally appeared in the 1977 book, Transitions: Montara to Pescadero, an oral history, a project edited by Canada teacher Aida Hinajosa.
Photo of Orril Fluharty by Mary Barbour Schumacher, the author of the article.
“I am responsible and you are responsible for what happens in the world: nobody else is. I think that right now the world is on the verge of one of the greatest revivals that ever was. There’s no time in the world I’d rather live than right now. Look at the accumulative knowledge we have to work with. Look at communications the world over that has never been known before. This means that we’ve got to learn to get along together or annihilate ourselves!”
Orril Fluharty talked as he scrambled a meal of sheepherder’s stew over the campstove at the millsite on Lemon Hill where he and his crew were clearing away a parcel of land and milling logs into rough, cut boards. Besides logging and the operating of his own portable sawmill, a trade that he learned as a boy, Orril is also a part-time minister at the Congregational Church in Pescadero.
He was born July 2, 1912 on a homestead and timber claim in Eureka, Montana, which is five miles from the Canadian border in the heart of the Rockies.
“Early life was an experience of primitive existence,” he reflected. “Kerosene lamps and lanterns were our night lights, wood stoves were the only source of heat and household water was carried in buckets from a spring about 200 yards from the house. Swamp land prevented us from hauling our water in barrels by team. Wild game was plentiful and was a primary source of our food supply. This was supplemented by a large ‘dry land’ garden. Our transportation was either by horse-drawn vehicles, by horseback or by walking which meant that our world was limited to approximately fifteen miles in radius.”
The aroma from the campfire and the cooking stew was diverting our attention from the interview. We were invited to share the pastoral feast with his logging crew of three. Spoons and plates were fashioned for us, by one of his crew, out of whittled wood and big logs served as our chairs.
“Was this mean cooked especially for us?” we asked.
“Oh, no, we do this every day. A hot meal is important for a logging crew,” Orril replied with a grin.
Orril Fluharty’s father made a living sawing and hauling wood with a team of horses.
“The only way we had to make a living was to live off the land. Dad would go out and hack railroad ties with a broad ax.
“Yeah,” he continued, “we cleared a lot of land. That was quite a tough job in those days, only way to get the stumps out was with a horse, dynamite or dig around ’em. There’s a fella came in there (I was a pretty young lad), this fella brought in a horse stump[puller. All it was was a wench. Horse and a wench. The horse would walk around and tighten this cable up around the stump and just pull the stump out. I remember I thought it was an amazing thing.”
He then peered over this glasses and tipped his head to the side and said, “That stump-puller wouldn’t pull out these Redwood stumps, though. Redwoods have taproots. Any tree that you look at, they say, there is just as much under the ground as above the ground.
“I have strong feels of a kinship with nature. I worked in the woods before World War II. Worked as a timber bucker–sawed logs with an old handsaw. Worked in Montana, Idaho and Washington. I never worked in the big timber in Washington, though, only in the small timber in the eastern part of the state. Rock Mountain timber is smaller. The big trees there are about five feet in diameter; most of the timber there runs an average of about two-and-a-half to three feet in diameter.
By now the meal was ready and we all sat down to eat. A brisk breeze commenced to blow so we all moved to the leeward side of the fire, occasionally changing our positions as the breeze was shifting.
“We’ve had this particular mill about two years,” Orril continued. “One of my reasons for getting this mill–I saw one about twenty years ago–was because I think that it is a waste to do this kind of work with a big operation. A big operation would come in here and cut up through there,” he gestured widely as he spoke. “They wouldn’t be careful about fallin’ the trees in between the other trees and they’d just leave a big mess with big piles of brush all over the countryside. That hillside over there will be all cleaned off when we get through. You won’t even be able to tell that we were here. This is my reason for having the mill, and besides,” he chuckled, “I like it, it’s interesting work and I keep my body in shape physically.”
Orril Fluharty calls himself a happy-go-lucky guy in his earlier years, he just let things go as they go until he finally took up the calling of the ministry after many people kept telling him over the years, “You’ve got to preach, Orril.”
We asked him when he finally realized he would become a minister.
“I was out in the woods working with my friend. I was working way back up on the job, over a little knoll, and my friend was working back near the camp. As I worked my way up to the top of the knoll, the sun was shining, this beautiful sun and the sunset. I felt so near to the spirit. I felt God’s voice in the heavens. I just took off my hat and kneeled down and prayed to the sunset. I even preached a sermon later about God’s voice in the heavens and the feeling of closeness to the spirit.”
He related to us that his mother was a very strong spiritual influence on his early life. She was the daughter of a Baptist minister from West Virginia and she took time from her busy daily schedule to read to her family from any available material that she could find both secular and religious.
“I wish that smoke would blow in another direction,” he referred to the smoke from our bucket fire. By this time in our conversation, the air was becoming quite chilly, the sun was moving behind Lemon Hill and the breeze had increased into a pretty strong wind. We were all clinging to the fire as closely as possible, moving about to keep free of the smoke and rubbing our hands together for warmth.
Reverend Fluharty continued, “I was always concerned about this one incident, the one about the sunset. I knew I was going to preach. I thought I was going to receive a letter in the mail telling me what I was supposed to do with my life,” he chuckled and shook his head. “So when I was working out in the woods near Loon Lake, Washington, I went to church services down there. One day while I was visiting in the minister’s home, his wife–she didn’t know anything about this other thing you know (his revelation experience) and we talked a little bit. Of course, these people were fundamentalist people, praying. She said, ‘You know, you’re called to preach.’
“Well, I just kind a took this as the answer to the impression I was gonna get an answer from that sunset situation. So that’s where it started.”
Shortly after that, Orril went into the service, married his lovely wife, Clara, and was stationed at Fort Reno, Oklahoma. Reverend Grant of the First Methodist Church in El Reno approached him and invited him to preach in his church.
“I started in the Methodist Church in El Reno, Oklahoma. I got my first local preacher’s license and I started preaching on a local preacher’s license in 1943.”
After Reverend Fluharty was released from the service, he became a timber bucker again.
“My wife was from Spokane, Washington, so I moved with three other guys to the town of Farmington to work the timber. Farmington is about 40 miles south of Spokane. So, the four of us moved down there in the woods just batchin’ and started sawin’ logs.
“Woody Anderson, the guy I was workin’ with, a little short-legged guy, he was always mouthin’ off–talking out-of-turn anyway, so he went down to this little store in town. Somebody said something about needing a preacher in the church, so Shorty says, ‘Oh, we got a preacher up in the woods.’
“So I went down to the store in Farmington. I wore my hair short and I had about three weeks growth of whiskers on my face. I’d been running a chain saw and I was just one big blob of sawdust.
“I went into the store and started talking with this lady and said to her, ‘My partner up there in the woods tells me you folks need a preacher down here.’
“Yes, he said he knew of somebody up there, do you know him?
“Yes, I know him. He’s a kinda character. I guess he’s all right!” (soft laughter). “I went on about 15 or 20 minutes like that, describing this guy,” (more laughter, “then I says. ‘I’m him.’ She was a very sophisticated person, and that just about got through her shell.”
Then he said as an afterthought, “She must have thought, ‘That dirty looking thing, he couldn’t be a preacher.'”
By this time in his tale, Reverend Fluharty was really enjoying his joke and so were we. So we all shared together in his hearty laugh.
He proceeded in a more serious tone.
“So, I went to work in the Methodist Church in Farmington. I worked there with a local preacher’s license for three years.”
“You’ve been preaching ten to fifteen years?”
“I have an accumulation of twenty years as a licensed minister and I feel that my strongest asset as a preacher is in counseling. I feel I have been 100 percent successful with the people I’ve worked with.
“I think you yourself know the best way to counsel is to just be a sounding board, just to reflect back into them. I listen carefully with an interested mind. Not listening and thinking about something else, but listening to what they are really saying, and then, if I see a place or an opening where I think I might help them, I might make a suggestion.
“I don’t say, ‘You do this; you do that.’ No (emphatically) No, that won’t work! God, the Christian Religion has done this all right, but it’s a mistake to say that God is sittin’ up on a cloud with a big stick and he’s going to pound you on the head. It doesn’t work that way.
“And here is my main transcendence from fundamentalism to liberal view.
“I came out of the Northwest up there, very closed so far as knowledge and meeting of people was concerned. I’d just gone to high school when I went into the service. I met people everywhere in the service.One of the most amazing things to me was when I talked to a German soldier and found (because I thought Germans were animals) that they thought and felt exactly as I did. They did and didn’t like the same things as I.
“We are all created alike. We are a little part of God, not all god. Anytime I say, ‘You’re wrong, you’re going to hell,’ then I’m being God. You see, you can turn. And I’ve got a lot of ‘boiling out’ to do yet as far as looking at a person.
“Everybody wants to be a big wheel all the time. What’s there in being a big wheel? You see, you don’t amount to anything. You know, the little peas in the pod that you and I are. Collectively, we are the pods.
“I don’t have all the answers. Neither does anybody else. We’d be quite egotistical if we say we’ve got a corner on God. But I’m a democrat from the word ‘go’ as far as growth is concerned. I think that all of our ideas put together and hashed back and forth and talked over will result in the ultimate truth.
“I can’t rule out any philosophy–anything. I believe that–Why would I be afraid of any philosophy? why wold i be afraid to talk with anyone? I feel that a change in society comes through evolution, not revolution. I don’t believe in revolution myseslf.”
In a very positive tone of voice he continued, “Changes will come about consciously and continuously. I think this is the way it’s going to come about. I don’t think there are going to be big revivals and flamboyant meetings. I think that through conversations and through knowledge and education there will be an evolution of these different ideas coming together.
“I don’t know much about prophecy in the Bible; I can’t make any statements about it that I think are correct. In the Bible it says that the end of the world is coming. ‘End of the world,” what does that mean? End of the world could mean seven trillion years from now or however long.
“What I’m interested in is what’s happening right now!” he said with strong emphasis.
“Now is the time of salvation. We can’t go to the future and live in the future or live in the past. We must live right now! I think we are right on the bridge. It’sw going to change,” he nods hi head in a positive manner, ” where we’ll all be living in peace with one another.
“My purpose isn’t to be a big wheel. It is to enjoy living and enjoy people and to help us all find peace–it’s right here within us. It’s the only place you can find it. There is no other place to look.”
Story by Maqry Barbour Schumacher
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In the lumber mill business, in the 19th century, fires were extremely common, in a single day wiping away buildings and trees and stacks of shingles and railroad ties. A typical example was the burning sawdust pile that destroyed Henry Wurr’s shingle mill on Pescadero Creek.
Wurr rebuilt, only to have another fire, this one undetected for hours as it smoldered on the roof, sweep everything away. This didn’t stop the determined Henry Wurr who started all over again and this time there were no more fires. He also helped rebuild the wrecked chute at Pigeon Point.
The hotel business was hit hard as the fancy Sulphur Springs Hotel, owned by San Francisco businessmen, burned to the ground. Then the Pescadero House was sold. And then Sarah Swanton’s husband, Charles, was determined to have something like Alzheimer’s, and he was moved to the well known sanitarium in Napa. Sarah continued to operate the famous Swanton House on her own but everybody said, with Charles gone, it just wasn’t the same anymore.
In 1885 the county surveyor rode out to the South Coast to lay out a new road near Pigeon Point. (On November 17, 1885, a severe southeast gale blew away the chute and warehouse at Pigeon Point.)
And despite the blinking presence of the new lighthouse, the slim white finger in the sky, there were more shipwrecks. In April 1887 the barque J.W. Seavey went ashore and her shipwrecked sailors passed through Pescadero on their way to San Francisco.
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Thanks for calling my attention to your video from the 1970s. We had just begun (in 1968) a long-term study of northern elephants in the area. One of the first studies was to determine the relationship between fighting and mating in males and which females successfully raised pups and why. This involved marking individuals to follow the game. We used a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and Lady Clairol Ultra Blue; the hair simply bleached in the sun and was non-invasive. My graduate students went a little crazy with the names. There were several males named after me – BJL, Burney, Le Boeuf – none of them fared too well. The best fighter and lover was Adrian, named after a female anthropologist friend at the time. Ah well.
best of luck with your history sites.
Burney
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Burney J. Le Boeuf
Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and
Research Professor of Biology
29 Clark Kerr Hall
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
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Ah Gee was a Chinese servant employed by the Coburns, and other Asian men worked at the nearby lumber mills, in the Gazos, for example. On the South Coast they felt the sting of discrimination less than they did in San Francisco where feeling taunted was a part of daily life. They could not testify in court against a white man and they could not vote.
Asians were sighted on the South Coast as early as the 1870s. Colonel Albert S. Evans, author of A La California , observed Chinese working with Indians digging up potatoes in the fields surrounding Pescadero.
Many Chinese found their niche in the laundry business, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act aimed its poison arrow at their success. They didn’t deliver folded, clean clothes by horse and carriage. Instead laundry baskets were suspended on a pole that was balanced on their shoulders.
Lawmakers came up with a most unusual, new licensing tax that punished the Chinese for their delivery method. It became a misdemeanor to carry baskets as I described.
This led to more Chinese seeking safety in Pescadero. When an angry anti-Chinese organizer from San Jose came to the village to try to rally the locals, he was sent away disillusioned. Some 20 Pescaderans listened to what the man had to say at the Union Hall, but nobody acted on his words.
The new Chinese residents opened laundries, with the hotels their biggest customers. No one had the patience to learn the foreign language so they gave the businesses phonetic names like “Gee Chong Sing Wash House” and “Ah Yick’s Wash House.” The “Tuck Lung and Co.” was located behind the Swanton House.
Their work was so appreciated that when the laundries closed for a day or a week, the locals complained bitterly.
The laundry owners wanted to please their clients in Pescadero. On one occasion when the locals returned from celebrating the Fourth of July at Pebble Beach in the 1880s, they were treated to an encore by the employees of the Gee Chong Sing Wash House.
South of town some 150 Chinese workers did grading work for the Gazos Creek “railroad.” They were on scene when two bulky prairie schooner wagons drawn by 16 mules (brought in from a Nevada quartz mine) arrived to haul lumber and railroad ties from the mill to Pigeon Point. The big wagons were too clumsy for the narrow coastal mountain trails and finally rolled away, out of control, down a steep hill.
Most of the names given the Chinese tell you how well they were regarded. The boss at the Gazos Mill, at one point empowered to hire 600 men, was called “Goo Luck.” The Gazos Gulch was actually a stopover, a stage stop on the Pescadero-Santa Cruz route. There was a post office, store and “whiskey mill.”
The mill was producing pickets and railroad ties for the Southern Pacific–as well as 55,000 feet of shingles, all of it to be shipped from Pigeon Point to San Francisco. In the end the old-fashioned chute at Pigeon Point couldn’t handle the volume and the mill lost a lot of money on the deal, at the same time striking a blow at Pescadero’s fragile economy. Then, in 1885 a terrific southeast gale destroyed the chute and warehouse belonging to Loren Coburn.
Life was not getting easier for the South Coast Chinese. A year before bad weather swept away the Pigeon Point chute, the Chinese laundry behind the Swanton House burned to the ground. The village didn’t have an organized fire department and the three fire extinguishers were not much help. It was said that all that remained of the Tuck Lung laundry was a statute of Buddha, “and it was ruthlessly torn from his perch by young ruffians.”
As fast as the Chinese had come to Pescadero, they were gone again, all except Ah Gee, the servant who worked for Loren Coburn.
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