Stories in Stone (10 page)

Sitting out of the wind near the Anvil Stone, Yoshinobu expanded on some of the finer points of Jeffers’s work on the house.
Jeffers collected stones in the afternoon and at night, to avoid the scrutiny of curious Carmelites.
Not all of the rock in
the structures is local.
Over the years the Jeffers family acquired material from their travels.
Friends also sent them rocks.
They include limestone from the Great Pyramid, lava from Vesuvius and Kilauea, stones from the homes of Lord Byron, George
Moore, and William Yeats, pebbles from King Arthur’s castle and the tomb of Cecil Rhodes, petrified wood and a meteorite from
Arizona, and marble from Greece, Ireland, and Italy.
( Jeffers did write once that he took stones from Carmel back to Ireland
on trips; he did so to keep the balance of the world.) The collection makes me rather jealous.
Yoshinobu also noted how Jeffers’s
use of stones changed.
In the main house, where he was only an apprentice, the pattern is straightforward.
There is more regularity
to the size of stones.
“In the tower, though, there’s a tendency toward big stones, things that look like they are enduring,”
said Yoshinobu.
“The tower’s just huge stones in all sorts of weird places.”

From Thuban the path continues along the western side of the original house where the rich smells of rosemary and lavender
mixed with a briny mist drifting in from the nearby ocean.
The path ended at a small wooden gate in a stone wall, behind which
opened a grassy yard.
In the corner Jeffers built a pedestal for a sundial that Una had acquired in Cornwall in 1912.
The
still cloudy day prevented us from seeing if the sundial worked.
Jeffers built both the wall, later raised for privacy, and
pedestal in 1920, the same year he began work on Hawk Tower.

Tor House and Hawk Tower,
built in 1919–1925 by Robinson Jeffers, Carmel, California.

Una was the driving force behind the tower.
She loved the ones she had seen in Ireland.
The only extant sketch of a tower,
drawn by Jeffers in early 1920, shows a simple round structure with a square door, two arched windows, and two porthole windows.
“To make a round tower would have been redundant.
He was done imitating.
Hawk Tower is like nothing else,” said Yoshinobu.
“It’s like taking all of those classical influences and bringing them to the furthest west that humanity is going to go.
To
the New World and then to the west coast of the New World.
He could look further west to the eye of the world.”

Jeffers worked with massive stones, some weighing up to four hundred pounds, to build Hawk Tower.
The lower walls are up to
six feet thick.
On the first two levels he rolled the stones up a long inclined ramp.
In one photo the narrow wood beam looks
barely able to hold the weight of a single person.
To reach the higher levels, Jeffers built a pulley and hoist system and
lifted the boulders to one corner.
He then rolled the stones along the highest wall to wherever he needed them.

Yoshinobu and I entered Hawk Tower through a doorway capped by a keystone chiseled with the letters
U R J.
Although Jeffers did not write in the tower, his desk and writing chair took up most of the room.
In the low-angle light Yoshinobu
pointed out a few letters and scribblings etched into the wood by the hard pencil Jeffers used to write his poems.
One set
of squiggles looked as though he crossed out a word or phrase.
To the left a doorway led to stairs down into “the dungeon,”
an area built for the twins.
“I am not sure if the arch in this doorway was supposed to be this way but it doesn’t look well
behaved.
It doesn’t look very pleasing,” said Yoshinobu.
“I always felt this room had a certain anger in it.”

Back from the dungeon and in the main room, Yoshinobu closed the main door, revealing a “secret stairway” just wide enough
for one person turned sideways to ascend.
Jeffers built this passageway for the twins and modeled it on ones from English
castles.
Their stairways were designed so that a person had to enter left shoulder first, which allowed the climber to wield
a sword in his or her stronger right hand, in case an attacker was following.
Creeping up to the second floor required taking
big steps and grabbing onto the granite walls; I was glad that I was followed only by a geologist.
A door that blended into
the room’s paneling opened into Una’s room with another fireplace, a small bed, an oak armchair, and a melodeon.
This level
also had an additional room, with an oriel window, where Una could sit and see the ocean and across the yard to where Jeffers
was writing in the loft of Tor House.
For a man with a reputation as a misanthrope, he seems to have been devoted at least
to his family.

A steep exterior flight of stairs accessed level three and a small room.
In another whimsical touch, Jeffers put two portholes
in the west wall.
Both came from ships that washed up on beaches near Carmel in the 1800s.
(It is often reported that one
of the portholes came from the ship Napoleon used to escape Elba.
It didn’t.)
²⁸
The portholes are the “eyes” that I saw from the road when I first viewed Tor House and Hawk Tower.
After crossing an inlaid,
white marble floor and ascending a final set of steep stairs, we reached the top of the tower.

Ocean waves pounded against Jeffers’s quarry of granite drums below.
Cars passed by and passengers periodically looked up
toward the house and tower.
Stretching around the Jeffers property were houses with multi-car garages squeezed together like
the sardines formerly canned in Monterey.
One particularly ugly modern mansion lurked above Tor House, like a bully planning
a hostile takeover.
I don’t think Jeffers would have liked how the new, oversized trophy homes intrude on his quiet property;
he sold his once-virgin, then tree-planted, lots only to pay taxes.

When Jeffers completed the tower in September 1925 and before he planted his groves of cypress and eucalyptus, the land around
was open and treeless.
Una once described the view as extending south beyond the Carmel River to Point Lobos and the Santa
Lucia Mountains, north to town and the Del Monte Forest, and east to the Carmel Valley.
Jeffers’s forest, along with the houses
that later replaced many of the trees, now block the view.

Yoshinobu and I also looked down on Tor House and the remaining structures—the east wing, two additional garages, and a family
room, which wraps around a courtyard.
Donnan had helped build these additions, all of which are off limits to the public.
Next to the window that had been the entrance to the garage grew a yew tree, under which are buried the ashes of Una and Robinson.
In a marble slab on the tower, Jeffers inscribed Psalm 68: “Why leap ye, ye high hills?
This is the hill which God desireth
to dwell in.”

The next day I walked along the coast to Jeffers’s main quarry, the beach below his house.
On a rounded, low wall of rock,
I watched as the waves, Jeffers’s “drunken quarrymen,” struck the land.
Water is an ideal stonemason.
It weathers and erodes
the rock, removing weak layers and leaving behind a sea-hardened building stone.
Jeffers wrote so beautifully of the permanence
of stone and yet here on the continent’s end, his granite is continuously beaten, battered, and broken.

The weathered granite that Jeffers used for Tor House and Hawk Tower looks like the fog and low clouds that I associate with
Carmel, although iron in areas has leached out and rusted, giving some stones an orange hue.
When the sun does come out, the
gray granite turns whitish to tan, with specks of shiny black mica twinkling in the sunlight.
The plain, subdued color results
from the rocks’ most abundant mineral— plagioclase—the feldspar absent from the Quincy rock.
A lack of hornblende and clearer,
less smoky quartz crystals further make Jeffers’s rock lighter colored than Willard’s stone of choice.

Jeffers’s building stones also contain alkali, or potassium, feldspar, the most abundant mineral in the Quincy rocks.
Here,
however, the mineral forms, tabular crystals, some up to four inches long, which indicates the magma cooled slowly and gave
the crystals time to grow.
They are clear to white and to some people look like the big-headed hobnails used to protect heavy
boots or shoes.
Being ignorant of the great lexicon of cobblers, I just think the crystals are distinctive looking.
Geologists
refer to this texture of large crystals set in a fine-grained groundmass as porphyritic.
Fruitcakes exemplify this texture.

The story of Jeffers’s granite began around 115 million years ago somewhere south of present-day Carmel.
I use
somewhere
because a faction of geologists still debate the exact point of origin of Jeffers’s granite.

Geologists agree that this southern birthplace of Jeffers’s granite was at the boundary between the North American Plate and
the Farallon Plate, which was covered by the Pacific Ocean.
It was a region of geologic activity, with the Farallon advancing
east and North America moving west.
Like all oceanic plates, the Farallon was primarily iron-and-manganese-rich basalt with
a thin coating of generally fine-grained sediments, which makes the oceanic plate, or crust, very dense, especially compared
with a typical continent, which consists of lighter aluminum and silicon-rich rocks.
When the two leviathans ran into each
other, the dense oceanic crust began to slide under, or subduct, beneath the continental crust, a process that occurs today
off Washington and Oregon, as well as in the Aleutian Islands, Japan, and the Andes.

Subduction zones produce three rock assemblages.
The first is known as the accretionary wedge, basically all of the sediments
that get scraped off the down-going plate, as well as a few slabs of basalt caught in the tectonic blender.
Because the sediments
are wet and squishy, they deform in a highly unpredictable way and produce chaotic folds and faults.
The Franciscan melange
of coastal California, best known as the star of John McPhee’s
Assembling California
, resulted from scraping off Farallon’s sediments.
In subduction zones, these rocks occur on the continent side of the deep
trench formed by the descending oceanic plate.

The second type of rock forms during the oceanic crust’s prolonged dive beneath the continent.
At depths of a hundred miles
or so, in the partially molten layer known as the mantle, volatiles such as water and carbon dioxide began to bleed out of
the oceanic crust.
The water lowers the melting temperature of the surrounding rock, which starts to melt and begins to rise.
When this magma reaches the surface it erupts through fissures and linked chains of volcanoes, known as arcs.
When the volcanoes
occur in an island, like they do in Sumatra or Japan, geologists call them island arcs.
When they occur on the edge of a continent,
such as the Cascades of my home state of Washington, they are continental arcs.

Not all of the magma, however, reaches the surface.
These reservoirs of molten stone, known generically as plutons, solidify
five to twenty-five miles underground.
One of the best known and largest is the Sierra Nevada batholith.
Like most subduction-generated
rock, the Sierra consists primarily of granite, with varying amounts of chemically similar rock such as granodiorite, diorite,
or tonalite, rock types collectively called granitoids.
The volcanoes that erupted at the same time as the batholith cooled
have long since eroded.
Jeffers’s building stones formed as a pluton in this manner, about 85 million years ago, and cooled
about ten miles underground.

The third important component found in subduction systems are the sedimentary rocks that form in the forearc.
The forearc
develops in the region between the accretionary wedge and the arc.
During subduction a variety of stresses pulls down on the
crust in the forearc, generating a basin that fills with thick accumulations of sediments.
The world’s best example of an
ancient forearc basin is the Central Valley of California, the four-hundred-mile-long lowland that runs from Bakersfield through
Fresno and Sacramento to Redding.