Asilomar--A Derivation on Bay Area Design

A visit to Asilomar provides a chance to walk on the beach at sunset, hear the tale of the FishWife, see the work of Julia Morgan and get to know oneself better.

To visit Asilomar is to step back in time, as the primary buildings are key works of Julia Morgan, one of the first female architects. Arts and Crafts and influences by Frank Lloyd Wright, Maybeck and others that later defined the Bay Area school of design, the buildings sit reverently perched just above the horizon overlooking the dunes and the ocean beyond.  One of the buildings is a chapel, which may explain why it sits reverently, and this night it was being used by a women’s group from a large Baptist church near Sacramento. I stumbled on the meeting, but as a guy I suppose I would’ve been out of place.

Asilomar also provides introspective or eternal time in a place where limited cell and internet connectivity is rapidly disappearing, given the proximity of the golf courses encroaching on the land which now belongs to the state (it had originally been a YWCA camp, hence the chapel).

So who was Julia Morgan? She was one of the first women architects. Born in San Francisco and reared in Oakland, she received an undergraduate degree in civil engineering at the University of California in 1894, as the only woman to complete the program that year.

One of her instructors, architect Bernard Maybeck who would continue to influence her life’s work, suggested she study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. No women had ever been admitted to study there, and she was initially refused admission. During the two years she waited to be admitted, she entered many prestigious European architecture competitions – and won most of them. Morgan was eventually admitted to the school – and the field of architecture.

The rest, as they say, is history.

To London, By Cab, By George!

Sam Mays gets his kicks on Rte A140, or perhaps a surface street in London, heading to the Imperial War Museum.

This has been a crazy trip: up to Chicago on Saturday via car – a 12 hour marathon drive – and then back to Lexington on Tuesday night / Wednesday morning to catch a flight to London for another trade show. We’re here til Sunday morning, after which we’ll come back stateside and I’ll go to San Francisco whilst Sam goes back to TRI.

Sam and I are both missing friends back home, and looking forward to seeing them soon after our respective returns, but the more pressing issue at the moment is to find the Imperial War Museum to visit a poster exhibit chock full of propaganda posters from The Great War, the inter-war years, World War II and Vietnam. Posters are split evenly between British, American and others (Russian, German, Spanish from the Franco era). 

Two favorites from 1916: “Daddy, What Did You Do During the Great War?” and “Gee, I Wish I Were a Man . . . “  Can’t say the appeal on various levels of humiliation and tease (as well as others using honor or the “see the world” approach) weren’t in full force even in World War I.

Reserva de la Familia: Do Not Touch!

A place of respite and music at the Jose Cuervo family estate in Tequila.

As part of our meetings in Guadalajara, the food was first rate. And the settings for two of the meals was also a travel experience to remember.

The first, in Tlaquepaque, was a dinner with the mayor and his wife, a chance to spend time up close with a mariachi band and shopping along the historic streets. The second, preceded by a bus ride of some magnitude, hosted by Senorita Tequila International, was in the small town of Tequila. The town, for the most part, is untouched and continues the way of most small towns in Jalisco; but it is also dominated by tequila production, with the most famous being Jose Cuervo (but not the best, according to several Mexican delegates). Reminds me, in an odd way, of our own small town in Tennessee, namely Lynchburg and its dominant industry, Jack Daniels Distillery.

While Lynchburg boasts Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House, a family style restaurant, it has nothing on the Jose Cuervo homestead, which offered a fabulous meal, a fashion show and lots of time to talk and eat. Then a tour of the distillery, culminating in a viewing of the family casks in the “dungeon” area. Just don’t touch, as one of our tour found out!

White Out, White Point, Nova Scotia

Blizzard conditions elongated a long drive to White Point, Nova Scotia, with arrival in this fishing village pushed late into the night. Sunshine and morning, though, provided needed incentive to brave snowdrifts and icy wind to see what I’d come for.

Sometimes a place takes you by such surprise that you want to see it again, under any conditions.

That’s the only explanation I have for turning a five-hour drive into an eight-hour crawl through a remote part of Cape Breton, the remotest part of Nova Scotia. By the time I reached the fishing village of White Point, near Land’s End, it was well past midnight; I had already spun out five times, nearly wrecked twice, had no cell battery and very limited gas (I found out later that the gas stations close at 8pm). Upon arriving at White Point, the sign for the bed and breakfast wasn’t hanging on its hook and the lights were off across the village. Fearing I’d run off the road and into the bay, I backtracked to the top of the bluff – and found a snow plow operator about to turn back down the winding road to scrape more ice and throw more salt.

“Do you know where the Two Tittles is?” I shouted above the din, after having placed my rental car in the path of the plow. Yes, it is grammatically incorrect, since I left “B&B” off the name, but in this kind of weather, on this kind of night, every breath counts.

“Sure, follow me”, he said, and led me right back down to the house by the ocean that I thought might be the bed and breakfast. He pulled up along side the boats, spun the plow around and was gone, leaving me with silence, a roiling ocean and stars, as the storm began to abate.

“We didn’t think you were coming” said the startled owner, as I opened the side door that had thankfully been unlocked, after pounding on the door several times. “We turned the heat off in the guest room at 9, since we knew no one would be foolish enough to drive through that blizzard.”

He was still wondering the next day, recounting the story to his daughter and her husband as they came to bring by fish and chips from a local fish fry. Then he told them about how I’d set out early the next morning to visit the spot I came to see – a cemetery on the tip of the land that bore a tombstone to the unknown sailor, a cemetery I’d seen several years prior.

I didn’t know at the time, when we stumbled on the village during a summer detour off the Cabot Trail, that this was his family’s cemetery. We’d spied a tall white cross as we descended along the bay, then guessed at the road, drove until it stopped and then carried my son in a backpack out across the barren spit to the tall white cross and the cemetery that held Irish immigrants who settled in this part of New Scotland.

On this trip, I learned that the immigrants had hauled their boats up the cliff every night to keep the waves from dashing them against the tittles or the cliff, and that the families eventually moved a bit further inland as motorized boats allowed for maneuvering into a man-made harbor. One thing that hadn’t changed, though, was grinding sounds I’d heard on the cliff during that first visit, and which stayed with me during the interceding years, dragging me back to hear it again.

As the ocean flung boulders against the cliff and dragged them back again, relentlessly, on this bitterly cold winter day, I appreciated even more the tenuous grasp on life those early immigrant families faced as they tried to make a new life for themselves. White Point’s not a place of external wealth, by any means, but it’s a place where you see the continuum of life unabated for hundreds of years.

I hear they may even get cell service next summer. Maybe it’ll keep the idiot tourists from getting lost or stranded . . .