by Gary Kamiya
Simple and orderly—that had my English-major, 560-on-the-math-SAT name written all over it. I decided to take Wahrhaftig’s magical mystery tour.
One spring morning after dropping my daughter off at school, I headed over Twin Peaks and through Diamond Heights. I parked halfway down insanely steep 29th Street, about 100 feet below the 679-foot elevation of Gold Mine Hill. It was a warm, hazy May morning, and the foliage was as bright and electric as the Riviera—wild blue pride of Madera rising up like psychedelic spears, waving poppies, profuse mustard, and screaming orange hibiscus. An intricate network of hills and ridges rose up ahead of me, to the right, behind—every direction except east. It felt like the topography of this area was the most convoluted in the entire city. It was simultaneously open and exposed, with long vistas to the north and east, and closed, tucked away, as comfortably dug-in as a hobbit’s hollow. Later, when I looked up at Billy Goat Hill from the bottom of the valley on Church Street, I realized the landscape wasn’t really that intricate. If I were in the Sierra, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. It was just a spur of a hill. It was the grid, the famous San Francisco grid that imposes straight streets on uneven and precipitous ground, that made the terrain feel crazy.
I wandered through the streets for a while, then walked up 30th Street to the foot of Billy Goat Hill. I walked up a dirt trail to the flat spot by the eucalyptus trees, next to a rope swing, and looked back at the city. My jaw dropped. This might be the most beautifully framed view of downtown, from the most sublime viewing platform, in all of San Francisco. The sharp downhill slope of the hill, its irregular face, and its golden-grassed wildness set off the distant vista like a gem. Downtown, four miles away, looked like the Bottle City of Kandor—a discrete, sci-fi-like mass. The Bay Bridge aimed almost straight at me. Behind everything towered the lofty East Bayhills.
I looked around at the three-and-a-half-acre piece of hillside that offered this stupendous panorama. It was glorious and wild and free. It was surrounded by a charming, elegant, shaggy neighborhood. It was three blocks down to civilization. And no one knew about it.
Billy Goat Hill was once part of the vast open countryside that was Diamond Heights. For years it adjoined a quarry run by the notorious Gray brothers, George and Harry, who flagrantly defied city hall and their neighbors by continuing to set off illegal explosions at their two quarries, some of which hurled houses off Telegraph Hill and showered boulders upon schoolchildren. The Grays also had a habit of not paying their employees, which led to George’s untimely demise in 1914, when a disgruntled worker shot and killed him right near where I now was standing.
A longtime resident named Buck Tergis explained how the hill got its name and how it was saved from possible development. “In the 1930s, my grandmother, Esther Benezra, who lived on Beacon Street, began grazing goats on the hill,” Tergis told me. “That’s why they call it Billy Goat Hill. There were horses and corrals around here. My mother, Sara Tergis, used to walk her dog on the hill. She and another woman named Sandy, who had a fox that she walked there, led the fight to keep the hill from being developed.” Sara Tergis, the fox lady, and other neighbors—including Clyde Wahrhaftig, who wrote a paper about the hill’s geological significance—succeeded in having Billy Goat Hill designated as a protected open space, under a proposition that funded the city’s acquisition of such spaces. The city bought the land for $129,600 in 1977. In 1997, the hill was made part of the Recreation and Park Department’s Natural Areas Program, which is also responsible for Glen Canyon and 29 other sites.
That was the new history. But I wanted the old. It was time to climb into Wahrhaftig’s Wayback Machine. I opened A Streetcar to Subduction. The three kinds of rock in Billy Goat Hill, Wahrhaftig wrote, are pillow basalt, radiolarian chert, and graywacke. The oldest, pillow basalt, was found along 30th Street at the bottom of the hill. An outcropping of radiolarian chert stuck out near the two eucalyptus trees. And at the top of the hill, near Beacon Street, was exposed graywacke.
I walked down to check out what I thought were the basalt rocks, but they didn’t look like pillows to me, and I wasn’t sure if I had the right rocks. I found the chert, but I wasn’t sure about the graywacke, either. I needed help.
To get it, I called a woman named Doris Sloan, author of Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region, a book so clearly written even I could follow it. I asked her if she would spend a day showing me some of her favorite geological sites in San Francisco. She graciously agreed. When I mentioned Billy Goat Hill, and said I had gone there after reading A Streetcar to Subduction, she said that she had been Wahrhaftig’s student. “He was an amazing man. He’s the reason I became a geologist,” she said. Did she want to go to Billy Goat Hill? “Clyde lived near there,” she said. “But I’ve never been there.” We decided to put it on our list of places to visit.
I picked Sloan up at the Glen Park BART station. At 82, she was as sharp and vigorous as a woman half her age, and her passion for the natural world in general, and geology in particular, was undiminished by a bad knee. We started out in Glen Canyon, then drove through Diamond Heights to Billy Goat Hill.
As we drove, Sloan told me something about the three kinds of rocks we were going to look at. Pillow basalt, radiolarian chert, and graywacke are the holy trinity of San Francisco rocks, the big three in the world-famous geological formation found in and around San Francisco known as the Franciscan Complex. Geologists came from all over the world to look at the Franciscan Complex rocks, Sloan said. Each of these rocks was formed by a different type of tectonic activity, in a different location. Wahrhaftig had explained this too, but it hadn’t come alive for me. Sloan was a born teacher, and I began haltingly to understand. As she spoke, I realized that the way these rocks were created, and came to be here, is a more psychedelic tale than the most feverish acid trip in the addled annals of San Francisco.
We walked down 30th Street. Sloan quickly found the pillow basalt. This rock was formed by lava that erupted from the ocean floor 100 to 200 million years ago. It’s called pillow basalt because the lava formed into pillowlike shapes when it cooled in the ocean water. It had the longest journey to get here—from the center of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away. It rafted in on a now-subducted tectonic plate called the Farallones Plate—the same way the Farallon Islands, the world’s most patient hitchhikers, came up from Southern California.
We walked through European grasses and mustard and wild radish, up the dirt path to the shelf by the eucalyptus trees, and found the chert outcropping. This was the next oldest rock, the one that was deposited on top of the basalt.
Radiolarian chert, Sloan explained, is made of the skeletons of one-celled animals called radiolaria. These tiny animals died and drifted slowly down through the ocean in what Rachel Carson memorably called “the long snowfall,” finally landing on top of the basalt. For tens of millions of years, the silica skeletons of the radiolarians piled up. Pressure formed them into rock. The oceanic plate carried the basalt and chert to the east, where their fateful meeting with the westward-moving North American Plate took place 145 million years ago.
The subduction of the Farallones Plate under the continental plate was not a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am affair. It lasted a Tantric 100 million years. During this time, a trench formed at the edge of the subduction zone. This trench played a key role in the creation of the rock we were about to look at.
We walked up the trail toward Beacon Street at the top of Billy Goat Hill. Near the top we found an outcropping of the last rock on Wahrhaftig’s tour, graywacke. This rock is found all over San Francisco, particularly in its northeastern hills—Nob, Russian, and Telegraph. The dirt in my backyard probably contains pulverized graywacke. Graywacke is made up of sediments that eroded off the North American Plate and were carried into the aforementioned trench by massive underwater landslides called “turbidity flows.” When the tectonic plates collided, these rocks were either carried down with the heavy Pacific Plate into the hot mantle where th
ey metamorphosed, or they were scraped off onto the North American Plate.
Since much of that rock was 200 million years old, did that mean we were looking at an ancient landscape?
“No,” Sloan said. “That’s one of the hardest concepts to get across. The rock is old, but the landscape is very young. In geology, you have to have these two completely different time scales in your head at the same time. The underlying rock is old, but it has been through inconceivable changes over time, and the most recent changes, the ones that made the terrain appear the way it is today, are very recent—only a few million years old.”
San Francisco is composed of three Franciscan Complex terranes. A terrane is a packet of rocks formed by the same processes during subduction. These terranes run diagonally and in parallel from the southeast to the northwest, like diagonal stripes on a flag. The northeasternmost terrane, which was the first one scraped off onto the continent, is called the Alcatraz Terrane. Dominated by graywacke, it runs from South of Market to the Marina Green and includes Telegraph, Nob, and Russian Hills. The second packet, the Marin Headlands Terrane, runs from Visitacion Valley to Lands End and includes the great central hills—Twin Peaks, Mount Davidson, Diamond Heights, and Mount Sutro. Its primary rock is radiolarian chert. The third one is the San Bruno Mountain Terrane, which runs from San Bruno Mountain to Lands End and is made up of graywacke and shale.
In between these three terranes are two so-called mélange zones, mostly low-lying areas where rock that was crushed and mixed up during subduction (such rock is known as mélange) was eroded away by streams. The first, the Fort Point–Hunters Point mélange, is a narrow ribbon that runs between the Alcatraz Terrane and the Marin Headlands Terrane. It includes several large, hard blocks that were resistant to erosion: Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, Mint Hill, and Fort Point. The primary rock found here in this zone is California’s state rock, serpentine, a metamorphic rock (as the name suggests, metamorphic rocks are transformed by great heat or pressure, usually far below the earth’s crust). The second mélange zone, the City College mélange, runs from City College to Lands End and includes basalt, serpentine, and graywacke.
This might all seem as dry as, well, dust. But it ties the entire city together—and in a unique way. There is something strange and delightful about the fact that these diagonal zones, tangible evidence of the titanic forces that assembled San Francisco, join together completely disparate parts of the city. Someone living in the projects at Hunters Point shares the same terrane with the richest plutocrat in his Presidio Heights mansion. The wretched motels near the gaunt Cow Palace sit on the same kind of rock as the stunning sea cliffs at Lands End. The diagonal terranes are San Francisco’s original Rainbow Flag.
“I’m delighted to have finally seen this place!” Sloan exclaimed as we looked out over the city. It had rained the night before, and in the clean air the view was as clearly etched as a Canaletto. “Clyde lived right over there on Valley Street, but we never came over here.”
We descended three blocks to Church Street and civilization. Over sandwiches, Sloan told me how Wahrhaftig was responsible for her becoming a geologist—and his own extraordinary life odyssey.
“In 1970, at age 40, while I was working as a lobbyist for the Quakers in San Francisco, I took a weeklong U.C. Extension geology course in the Sierra’s Emigrant Wilderness,” Sloan said. “I took the class because I wanted to see more of the sky than I could in my basement office. Clyde was teaching it. He was a great environmentalist, and he had decided to teach the class because he wanted the feds to protect a six-mile stretch of road leading into the wilderness. He figured he’d get a dozen people to write letters.”
Sloan loved the week in the mountains so much she took the class again the next year. She discovered that she had a gift for explaining things and became Wahrhaftig’s de facto assistant. By the end of the class, she had decided she wanted to study geology at Berkeley—at a time when there were no women geologists at the school.
Like most of his peers, Wahrhaftig was opposed to women geologists. “He’d say, ‘I want to be able to pee where I want and say what I want,’ “Sloan said. “This was the typical attitude of geologists at that time. The field was all male and very macho.” But after Sloan told him she only wanted to get a master’s degree so she could work in the public information office in the Ferry Building, he wrote Sloan a letter of recommendation and she got in. Although Wahrhaftig’s sexual orientation was pretty obvious to Sloan, the chair of the department called her in and asked her, “Doris, are you really interested in geology, or are you interested in Clyde?” He simply couldn’t imagine that Wahrhaftig was gay.
A critical part of a geologist’s training, a rite of passage akin to a doctor’s residency, was and is the “summer field class,” an often arduous session during which the future scientists learn how to map, collect data, interpret geological structures—the nitty-gritty of the profession. “We went to the White Mountains. We had to hike down to Deep Springs every day and map it and then hike out. It was 100 degrees,” Sloan said. “There were 22 guys and six women, four of us from Berkeley. All six of us women were incredibly feisty. One, Gail Mahood, later became a dean at Stanford.
“All summer we women worked incredibly hard and never complained. The women, some of whom were older, handled it much better than the men, who reverted to teenage behavior, whining and complaining. The tradition was that the two best students were offered a job at the USGS [the U.S. Geological Survey office in Menlo Park]. Well, the person who did the best mapping was a 35-year-old woman with a 9-year-old son. The person who did the best verbal description was me.
“It was an absolute milestone for Clyde. It opened his eyes. It was years before he came out, but he came back from that trip, and he started a program at the USGS to encourage and recruit women and minority geologists. Until then, he was all in favor of keeping the field exclusively male. It was the first such program at the USGS.”
Sloan had never intended to make geology her career. But encouraged by Wahrhaftig, she went on to get her Ph.D. and get a job at Berkeley. “I’ve had an absolutely fabulous 20 years of teaching. An absolutely lovely time,” she said. “And Clyde was completely responsible.”
Sloan went on to talk about the final metamorphosis in Clyde Wahrhaftig’s life. It was spurred by a terrible tragedy, one that devastated both the geology community and Stanford University. “The most important person in Clyde’s life was a man named Allan Cox. They met in Alaska and Clyde convinced Allan to enter the field—Clyde was a few years older than Allan. They became lovers, and after that ended, they remained friends. Allan was a really brilliant, important geologist and a great teacher. But he had an eye for young boys, which Clyde never did. Clyde used to talk to him about it—this was long after they were lovers—and warn him that he would come to grief. I didn’t know Allan that well myself; he was very aloof. But one day everyone was shocked and horrified to learn that Allan had died. He was mountain biking without a helmet and flew off the road and hit a redwood tree.
“It was a suicide. Allan had learned that the police were investigating a sexual relationship he had with a teenage boy, which allegedly began when the boy was 14 years old. Allan would have been disgraced, ruined. So he killed himself. The news was devastating for Clyde and for Allan’s students. More than 1,000 people came to the memorial at Stanford Chapel.”
Wahrhaftig was still in the closet. “Clyde was still a very private person,” Sloan said. “Like many gay people of that day, he never really talked about his personal life.” But two years after Cox’s death, when the 70-year-old Wahrhaftig learned he was going to be given the Distinguished Career Award by the Geological Society of America, he decided to use the occasion to break through the last barrier. “I think it was a desire to make a difference,” Sloan said. “To change the profession. And to reflect on what had happened to Allan.”
In his speech, Wahrhaftig said, “Receiving this award for longevity has made me realiz
e that my time to do good is running out. So I have decided to use the opportunity you have given me, by gracing my career with the adjective ‘distinguished,’ to do a little good with the accolade.”
Wahrhaftig said that he had strived to nurture role models for black and Chicano geologists. Then he said, “I am now going to provide a role model for a minority that has been demanding a modicum of the civil rights the rest of the country possess—a minority that has managed to survive largely because it is invisible. It is a minority to which Allan Cox and I both belong. We are both homosexuals, and the force that caused us to do so much for each other, and because of each other, was homosexual love. The many of you who are familiar with the circumstances of Allan’s suicide would have gathered from those circumstances and our close association that this was the case.”
“I would not wish on anyone the life of repression, self-doubt, and dissimulation that Allan and I had to go through,” Wahrhaftig went on. “No, the group whose attitudes I wish to affect are those of you who are not homosexual, but who may find yourself with students, subordinates, or colleagues who are. I ask you to recognize that homosexuals can make as much of a contribution to science and humanity as anyone else.”
At the end of his speech, Wahrhaftig said that he hoped to encourage gay students who would like to be geoscientists but were afraid that being gay and being a geologist were incompatible. “I want my life, and Allan’s and my relationship, to tell them that this is not so,” he said. “If they are lucky, as we were, their love and their careers will sustain each other. And I hope that, by making this revelation here, I contribute in some small way to the creation of a society with a sufficiently intelligent, open, and compassionate attitude toward sexuality that suicides such as Allan Cox’s will be a thing of the past.”