Hitch-hikers Descending a Staircase Widdershins

Echoes of a Distant Time

In the summer of '21, I woke up on Noe Street with the echo of a distant time ringing in my ears.

When I say I woke up, I don't mean that literally. You know how sometimes you can get caught up in surfing the net, a game, movie, book or hobby and lose a sense of your surroundings? Suddenly, something snaps your awareness back into your present environment; sometimes minutes have passed and sometimes hours. Time travel is like that for me occasionally. I'll be riding along in my body, completely immersed in the era I'm in. I'm not even particularly aware that that era isn't my home. Suddenly, Boom! I see or hear something which reawakens my "home sense" and I remember why I'm in whatever time I happen to be in at that moment.

This time it was like that. I think I started my trek at St. Mary's Park, but coming awake into my sense of my home time erased my memory of the exact beginning of the journey.

image source - wikimedia commons

I've seen a picture of what the area looked like in '25, but I honestly can't recall what it looked like in the summer of '21. If there was still a faint echo of the bells of St. Mary's College in the aura of the land, my hearing wasn't attuned enough to echoes of the past to hear them ringing in my mind. They'd been located in Oakland for a couple of decades by the time I visited the area.

Cloudy as my head was when I started out, something nonetheless stirred within me and started to climb towards the sound echoing back to me from my time. "I'll Noe what I'm seeking when I find it", I thought. I wasn't in a hurry, so I probably walked for about an hour before I arrived at 518 Noe, and bang! Suddenly, I began to recall the wheres and whys. It'd be nearly a century from now before someone would decide to etch the moldings of this beautiful house with the lyrics to Pink Floyd's Echoes, but the three cylindrical window areas were unmistakable even back in 1921. I knew now that I needed to get a bit of perspective and clear the clouds from my head.

Mount Olympus to Mount Diablo

From Noe St., I headed for the Triumph of Light atop Mount Olympus.

The last time I'd been up on Mount Olympus was in 1913, back when there were still a lot of horses on the streets of San Francisco. That trip, my focus was towards Mt. Tam, but that's another story for another time. Here, the last of the fire engine horse teams had been retired nearly a year ago, so the streets were already a fair bit less hazardous and fragrant than on my last visit. Below is a view eastward from Mount Olympus towards Mount Diablo taken a few decades after my visit. This was taken not long before the Triumph of Light statue was removed from its pedestal(contrary to Mr. Fuller's prediction of it still being in place in the year 2000)

Nonetheless, Fuller seems to have gotten enough of his predictions of the future correct in 1890 to impress a reviewer in 1927. "Perhaps Junius Cobb still slumbers inside the pedestal they left behind when they removed the statue?" I mused. Nah. I shook my head in amusement. The idea of time travel by suspended animation is totally farfetched and unrealistic.

Shortly after arriving at the peak, I could see the waxing gibbous moon rising out near Mount Diablo. While gathering and organizing my scattered thoughts up here on the heights, I took a swig of water from my canteen. Seems to me as though this statue was either misnamed or else removed prematurely, I mused. Light hadn't exactly triumphed by the 1950s. Unless, of course, one were a melanin deficient adult heterosexual male with no unconventional political persuasions, or signs of feeblemindedness who was legally married to a female who was similarly melanin deficient. That light didn't exactly need another statue.

"Okay first off, I need to connect with William here in SF and hire him to drive me around NorCal a bit." In my timeline, William would eventually marry one of Jackson's sisters; one of Jack's cousins. You may remember Jack and Jackson from Jack's account of the 1932 Saratoga gold rush, but I've only read Jack's account of that event, not actually lived through it yet in my timeline. What can I say, time travel is odd that way.

William is a few years older than Jack and his cousin Jackson, but because he was an ambulance driver (section 586) in the Great War and Jack skipped several half grades in school, they'd ended up having a few classes together this past year. I wanted to hire William because I wasn't about to attempt driving here and now, what with everything I had on my mind, the roads and vehicles, etc. I think one of William's sisters ended up marrying and living in Carmel for awhile, but that was most likely an event in the future. Nonetheless, I figured William could navigate our route from Berkeley to Carmel without too much difficulty.

Based on my observations of the dark side of the moon in its phase today, it looked like I still had a few days before I'd be hoping to meet Jack in Berkeley. In some timeline, I must have already met up with him, because I'd read in an old journal I'd found in the library that I'd met him in the summer of '21, which is why I was here now. I still don't know the whys or hows of that journal showing up in my future timeline from the timeline of this undrowned Jack, since in my timeline Jack drowned. Call it a cosmic mystery, I suppose.

Down from Berkeley to Carmel

A few days after my visit to Mount Olympus, William and I pulled up to the stairs below Mr. Torrey's house (home of Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 from 1913-19) at 1 Canyon Road about half an hour after the bell at Bacon Hall had struck noon. I'd neglected to reckon with today being enrollment day for new students and hoped that fact hadn't presented Jack with any challenges. Assuming he was alive here, that was.

I'd told William meet me by Sather Gate at noon and paid a dime to take the ferry over from San Francisco, since I wanted to check out Mr. Sommer's Sather Gate Book Shop. I knew that Mr. Breck used to sell Eastman Kodaks with the autographical feature back when he owned the store and thought perhaps Mr. Sommer might still carry them as well. If not, I figured I could shop around until I found one. If I found Jack waiting for me today, I wanted to take a picture of our meeting; and not just so that I could autograph it 12:35 8/13/21. I also wanted to check out the store, of course, even though I knew I was here before the Constance Mitchell/Quail Hawkins/Beverly Cleary era. I don't think Constance was even Mrs. Mitchell yet, and Beverly Bunn was still just a five year old girl in Yamhill.

As we pulled up, I saw a familiar figure and an older version of a less familiar one sitting on the stairs below the Torrey residence. The familiar one was wearing a large sombrero, but I recognized the crooked grin I could see below its rim. As they stood to come down to the road, I called up, "Hold it!" and snapped a picture of the two of them. That done, I called out "Looking to hook a lift?"

"Where're ya headed?"

"Carmel, ya comin'?"

Jack and Jackson shrugged and then started to hop in. Before they got in, I asked Jackson if he minded riding shotgun with William. He shrugged and nodded. I figured this would give him a chance to meet his future brother-in-law which he might otherwise never get. Also, I wanted to spend as much time as I could with my great uncle Jack, since when I'd last seen him he'd been a nine year old kid who'd lived his whole life in Portland. But, that's another story.

As they got in, I started singing Simon and Garfunkel's "Cloudy". Since my voice isn't the greatest even when I'm accompanying one of my favorite songs, I won't subject you to how it sounded in a car without a radio.

Possibly, the hitchhike a hundred miles line was slightly anachronistic. Perhaps not, though, since I'd seen an article about Delzie Damaree's hitchhiking adventures in the summer of 1923 and he didn't bother to define the term hitch hike. In any case, as a bit of an introduction to more modern music than Jackson was used to right now, I thought it was worth taking that chance. Jackson would be coming into the future with me soon, according to Jack's journal and Jack would be heading for Greece. That left only William to spread the word hitch-hike halfway across America to Arkansas before 1923. Assuming this use of the term was the original in this timeline, which I doubted. But considering that I'd just somehow managed to help my great uncle Jack survive drowning by warning him of that possibility nine years ago, altering this timeline by adding in an early reference to hitch-hiking was probably the least of my concerns. You can't be too careful with the law of unintended consequences, though.

The Ravelled Yarns of Brave Ulysses

"So, how'd you make it?" I asked, once we'd settled in and were headed for Carmel.

"Well, first I practiced that combat swimmer's stroke you taught me on land a whole bunch in the water."

"Yes?"

"After that, I tried the stroke out in the bay a bit. Then, based on those trials I decided that the only way I'd be able to survive for any significant length of time in the cold ocean water would be by "cheating". So, I researched the details of Paul Boyton's swim of the English Channel, made Jackson promise to follow the ship's progress by car and he picked me up a bit after dawn the next day. We took his father's car back and then caught the train down here in time to meet you here today. Couldn't you have picked a day when new students weren't registering? I had to wear this hat so it covered my face to get up here without being recognized.

I chuckled ruefully. "Sorry about that. I just wanted to meet you here on a Fibonnaci sequence day and time. I didn't think to check what else might be going on today when I made plans and my ciphered message."

"No matter. Why are we going to Carmel, anyway?"

"That guy Clarkson Crane I told you about? He's living there now. William served with him in the war. I'd like to encourage him to write The Western Shore in a few years. Without that book, I wouldn't have had much of a clue as to what today would be like here. Or known how close to an Athenian palæstra Strawberry Pool was. Irving Stone, you know him?"

Jack nodded. "Father likes his sax playing."

"He wrote a book about this era too, but I haven't read it. It's not easy to find an inexpensive copy in my time."

"So, that's why I'm going to Carmel. You, I'd like to see if I can get Jennie Cannon to introduce to a few of the characters down there. Jack London isn't with us anymore, but I think one or two of his characters in Valley of the Moon still live there." "Van Wyck Brooks, one of three men I've read has "little taste for humor" used to read to Clarkson on walks there. Ever since the earthquake, it's been quite the place for the arts, according to what I've read about it."

"Who are the other two men with little taste for humor?"

"Oh, some poet laureate of Britain named Alfred Austin and Ezra Pound."

"Oh, I've read a bit of Pound's poetry in The Little Review" said William. "Didn't he assist in getting Ulysses serialized? Too bad about the obscenity ruling, I wanted to find out what happened to Bloom."

"According to Jung, nothing." I muttered.

It hadn't happened yet in 1921, but soon T.S. Eliot would dedicate The Waste Land to Ezra Pound

who recommended the excision of most of the Death by Water section of the poem, which apparently alluded heavily to various renderings of Ulysses/Odysseus. Way to ravel that yarn, guys.

"What I'd like to know" said William, "is whether impatted was a typo or if Joyce meant it to read that way."

"Oh, I think that was probably just a typo" I replied, "though with Joyce it can be hard to tell sometimes."

Bob Dylan's grandmother

I had another more personal reason for wanting to make the pilgrimage from Berkeley to Carmel, though it wouldn't have made much sense to these boys here in 1921. Berkeley to Carmel was pretty close to Mount Tamalpais to Monterey. Everyone and their grandmother knows about Monterey, thanks to the arrival in the U.S. of Jimi Henpecked, Queen Bee and Bob Dylan's grandmother. Oh, and the performances of Janis, the woman who made Momma Cass say wow! and Otis Redding and... oh, you know you know about Monterey. Fewer people seem to know about the Fantasy Fair & Magic Mountain Music Festival, which took place a week before Monterey on Mount Tamalpais and kicked off the Summer of Love. The last time I'd been up on Mount Tam, the hills seemed alive with the echoes of the sound of music from a distant time. Maybe that was just the hermit's daughter singing or perhaps one of the plays produced at the mountain theater, though. Tagore, not Dylan, was the first musician to win the Nobel Prize for literature, despite what the NY Times reported. Jimi's favorite book was set in Berkeley.

"Dammit, focus!" I muttered to myself. I only had a limited amount of time to spend with Jack on this trip and wouldn't see him again for over a decade, according to what he'd written. I needed to give him sort of a greatest hits version of what he might need to know about his possible future while I had the chance. It was time to clear all the metaphorical advertising jingles and 80s musical snippets out of my cloudy thoughts and focus on what really mattered here and now.

Astrology and the Antikythera Mechanism

"Okay, Jack, you'll need to see if you can get in touch with Albert Rehm and read his unpublished notes on the Antikythera mechanism while you're in Europe" I told Jack.

"He was apparently the first person to hypothesize that the Antikythera mechanism was used to make calculations about the positions of the planets. He didn't have enough information to come up with a correct model of the mechanism and how it worked, but you should find his research notes of interest nonetheless."

"With enough advances in technology, we'll eventually be able to get a good idea of what the front of the Antikythera mechanism looked like, but that won't until be nearly a century from now. So, just do your best and don't worry about it too much. It's mostly just an exercise for you to gain insight into the minds of the people who created it at this point in time."

"The device may have been used to make astrological predictions, including the color of an upcoming eclipse. It seems likely that Nicias wouldn't have fared as poorly in Syracuse if he had had foreknowledge of an upcoming lunar eclipse and what that omen meant for him."

"Astrology should definitely be a part of your studies, even if only for historical perspective. Remember those four men I told you about who were born exactly two years before you?"

Jack nodded.

"Well, also add a young woman named Blythe Daly to the list. You may never bump into the others, but you just might run into her early one birthday morning in Grand Central Station. The sun just happens to align with Manhattan's street grid on your birthday, which lights up the ceiling of Grand Central Station at dawn. I've read that it's a pretty magical event to watch."

"Blythe is better known in my era for her friends and family than her career. But, given her birthday, where she lives and her family's eventual connection to Thornton Wilder's work I thought it was worth mentioning her in addition to those other names I gave you. Did you ever run across Thornton?"

"I think so, the first time I visited the Torrey house with my cousin to see the painting. He was more interested in the book he was reading than talking to us, so I didn't get his name. He matched your description, though, so I think it was him."

"It does sound like him."

"Now, as far as your birthday and your life path goes, the popular interpretation of astrology is going to evolve quite a bit between now and my time. I'll quote you a bit of text from a newspaper horoscope published on Blythe's 21st birthday so you can get a better sense of what people in this era might think is astrologically applicable to you, Blythe, Disney, Heisenberg, et al. There's much more to astrology than what's published in newspapers, either in my time or yours, but this is a little taste of your near future."

I consulted my notebook and read, "people born on this date and under this sign have minds that reach out far beyond the present, and so it comes to pass that a Sagittarius person is often accused of fabrication. These people always mean to tell the truth. All these people are of one thought and one idea at a time." Skipping ahead, I continued "These people are very apt to [be] misunderstood. They see so clearly, think so quickly and because of this natural intuition are so sure of being correct that they very often strike squarely against the opinions and prejudices of those about them."

Widdershins words

"Now, I'm going to give you a bit of a preview of some of Jung's thoughts on words."

I read, "The word created the world and came before the world. It lit up like a light in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. And thus the word should become what the darkness can comprehend, since what use is the light if the darkness does not comprehend it? But your darkness should grasp the light."

"There's a certain type of word in many different languages which over time come to something which can be taken for the opposite of what they initially meant, depending on context. Words like bill, dust and seed are a few simple examples in English. In English, there will eventually come to be a lot of different names for these types of words, which demonstrate Jung's principle of enantiodromia. However, in Arabic words of this type are called addad and the root word didd is itself one of these words, meaning both equal and opposite, depending on context. None of the English words for these words are nearly so elegant. That's why I personally call them widdershins words, because depending on whether one is in the northern or southern hemisphere widdershins can mean either clockwise or counterclockwise, since its literal meaning is contrary to the apparent motion of the sun."

"What was once common knowledge can become relatively unknown and vice versa. Until the eclipse of 1919, Albert Einstein didn't really become a household name, despite his annus mirabilis in 1905, you'll recall. The big trick in time travel is to figure out the common knowledge in one place or era which can save your bacon if you know it; whether that knowledge is relatively unknown in your own space/time or relatively unknown in the space/time you visit."

"Historically, people haven't slept clear through the night, but in the past instead had a period of wakefulness in between two periods of sleep. Knowing that information could save your life if you end up in a situation where not letting a fire burn out could mean the difference between life and death. What I'd like for you to do, Jack, is to spend several years in Greece figuring out the common knowledge of Classical Greece which will save our bacon. Keep your eyes peeled for good deals on silver mined from Lavrion, too."

Ascending and Descending

Speaking of everything and nothing, we headed south toward the sun, which appeared to us to head west toward the ocean. If there's a Penrose stair optical illusion in which people appear to be ascending to some observers and descending to others (analogous to the Tritone paradox in sounds) that's probably how we appeared, descending from Berkeley to Carmel. As we faded from view, some observers may have heard the ascending Shepard tone ending of Pink Floyd's Echoes.