Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  Yoshinobu and I exited west outside through a normal-sized door to Thuban, the great rock Jeffers describes in “To the Rock that will be a Cornerstone of the House.” Nearby was the group of rocks known as the Standing Stones, one of which the family called the Anvil Stone. When asked whether Jeffers mixed honey and milk on Thuban,Yoshi-nobu responded: “I think he really did it. Pouring wine and honey was another way for him to honor the stone.”

  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.

  In most subduction zones, if you travel from the ocean to the arc in order you would pass across the accretionary wedge, then the forearc basin, and finally reach the arc, usually covering a distance of about a hundred miles. This sequence can be seen in California traveling from the coastal Franciscan melange and its rich stew of dark sandstones and cherts through the black shale and tan sandstone of the Central Valley and up into the gray granite of the Sierra Nevada batholith. Geologists refer to this zone as the arc-trench gap, the distance from the folded and faulted ocean-derived sediments to the volcanoes, or the rocks that cooled under them.

  “What makes Salinia really interesting is that it screws up that pattern of wedge-forearc-arc” said Dave Barbeau, a geologist at the University of South Carolina.29 “We’ve got accretionary wedge rocks, the Franciscan melange, right next to or very close to arc rocks, the Cretaceous granitoids. Within five kilometers [three miles], some of the forearc rocks are also present. So the order is wrong and the distances are really wrong.”

  The term “Salinia” refers to an accumulation of rocks that makes up the central coastline of California. Geologically bounded on the east and west by the San Andreas and Sur-Nacimiento faults, respectively, and on the south by the Big Pine fault, Salinia comprises the rocks of the low mountain ranges (Santa Lucia, La Panza, and Gabilan ranges) that run north-south from about Santa Barbara inland of the coast to Santa Cruz. The rocks of Salinia include young sediments, older metamorphic rocks, and medium-age granites, which are Barbeau’s Cretaceous granitoids and include the rocks used by Jeffers. Salinia has long troubled geologists, who have called it an “orphan,” because for years no one knew exactly where the rocks originated.

  In 2005 Barbeau coauthored a seminal paper addressing the origin of Salinia. His work was part of a long-term study based out of the University of Arizona, where he received his Ph.D. in 2003. The Arizona team hopes to put together a picture of plate tectonics in western North America. Barbeau’s paper focused on two related models to explain the odd juxtaposition of Salinia and the surrounding rocks.

  Model one proposed that Salinia formed between fifteen hundred and thirty-five hundred miles south, in southern Mexico, and then traveled north and wedged itself into the arc-trench rocks. Evidence for this long-distance movement came from what is known as paleomagnetism. When magma solidifies, iron-rich magnetite crystals within the molten rock align themselves relative to Earth’s magnetic poles. By reading these minerals, geologists can determine the rock’s latitude at the time of crystallization.

  Barbeau and his co-workers favored a modified version of this model. Salinia moved north and injected itself into the arc-trench material, but instead of traveling thousands of miles, Salinia only moved about two hundred miles north, carried along by the San Andreas fault from around the Mojave desert.30 Specifically, Barbeau hypothesized that Salinia once filled a gap between the Sierra Nevadas and the Peninsular Range, both made of granites of similar age and chemistry. The main line of evidence for the Mojave-Salinia connection came from the mineral zircon.

  “You know there’s the saying that diamonds are forever, but to geologists it’s zircons that are forever,” said Barbeau. “They are really resistant to heat and sedimentary processes. They basically never go away.” The oldest known object on Earth is a 4.4-billion-year-old zircon crystal, about two human hairs wide, found in rocks from Australia. Zircon generally forms in igneous rocks, particularly in granites in sub-duction zones. When these granites weather and erode, wind, water, and/or ice redistribute the zircons and they end up in sedimentary rocks. By analyzing the various zircons in a sediment, geologists can reconstruct long periods of time, particularly because most sedimentary rocks contain zircons of diverse ages.

  “Nearly all of the zircons we see in the Salinian sediments point to a North American origin as opposed to a southern Mexico one,” said Barbeau. The zircon grains ranged in age from 80 million to 3 billion years old, with six periods of peak accumulation. Barbeau’s research indicated that for five of the six peaks the western United States could be the only source of the zircons. Combined with other data, the zircons showed that after its initial formation Salinia remained in the south for about 40 million years until the San Andreas propelled the rock on its travels north.

  In addition to the overwhelming zircon data, new research has shown that the original interpretation of paleomagnet
ism erred in the point of origin for Salinia. Only a handful of recalcitrant geologists still subscribe to the southern Mexico model. “This change in perception of how far Salinia has traveled is ideal for understanding the evolution of thought on accreted terranes,” said Barbeau.

  Like the Avalon terrane, which carried the Quincy Granite to the eastern edge of North America, Salinia is also a terrane, though with some differences. Avalon is an accreted terrane, meaning that it collided with its new home. It is also sometimes referred to as “allochthonous” or “exotic,” which indicates Avalon traveled to reach its present spot. By definition an accreted terrane is also an allochthonous or exotic terrane. A suspect terrane, such as Salinia, is one whose origin is unclear. The terms are somewhat fluid and reflect personal choice more than rigid definition.

  Geologists first began to focus on terranes after a landmark paper published in Nature on November 27, 1980. In “Cordilleran Suspect Terranes,” Peter Coney, David Jones, and James Monger wrote that 70 percent of the land from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean—the Cordillera—was a vast mosaic or collage of landmasses, which the geologists called “suspect terranes.” More than fifty distinct terranes had collided with North America, including nearly all of Oregon,Washington, and Alaska, and most of California,Nevada, and Idaho. The paper did not indicate where the landmasses, which included island arcs, continental bits, and oceanic crust, originated, but hypothesized that scraps of land littered the Pacific from around 200 to 50 million years ago. The geologists’ proposed mechanism of transport was eastward movement of the Pacific, Farallon, and Kula plates, as they progressively sub-ducted North America.