Amusement Arcade, San Francisco, 1984

In the spring of 1984, I rebuilt the top half of the engine in my Chevrolet van (buying parts and getting tips from Heinrich Motors down the street from my Vancouver home) and set out with two friends toward sunny California.

Compared to Vancouver, California is an exotic place, with its palm trees and heavily-armed police. We hit the beaches and swam in the warm ocean, as natives dressed in winter jackets looked on in bewilderment. Still, it showed signs of civilization: Happy Hour, San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, amusement arcades, music, and more photographic galleries than you can shake a stick at. I remember thinking, I could live here.

We got kicked out of Golden Gate Park in the middle of the night by a very nice, albeit heavily-armed policeman. Evidently, you can’t camp there. But he was kind enough to direct us to a beachfront spot where we could park unmolested. “It’s still not legal,” the friendly cop added. “But we don’t enforce the ban in that area.”

At the end of the trip, as we drove back north to visit the gallery he founded in Carmel, Ansel Adams passed away. When we arrived there, the scheduled show had been cancelled to mount one in Adams’ honour. However, the show would open the following week. I had to be back in Vancouver. I explained this to the curator and he let me in for a private viewing. The show was mostly hung. The prints, hand-picked by the photographer’s wife, were unlike the style he produced in his later life — less bombast, more subtle detail.

In the middle of the gallery sat Adams’ grand piano, the instrument he likened to part of the photographic process. The negative, he said, is like a musical score which the “musician” must “conduct” to produce great art. Here, the maestro’s instrument was silent, surrounded by the great works he had produced with another instrument, the camera.

This product of a spring fling in the sun is no masterpiece; it’s a holiday snapshot imbued with memories of adventure and that time I overcame my aversion to greasy hands and car mechanics.