Almost gone.

Wander down to Fishermen’s Wharf in Monterey and you will be inundated with plaques, street names and quotes from seemingly the only famous person ever to have lived there, John Steinbeck. However, once you reach the fabled Fishermen’s Wharf of which he wrote so passionately, you are confronted with the very worst of modern taste. T shirt vendors, popcorn sellers and awful mass market restaurants so devoid of originality that you want to run for cover.

Yet, creep down a narrow alleyway or two and you can still get a feel for what Steinbeck was writing about.

Steinbeck’s dove. G1, 33mm, f/6.3, 1/2000, ISO 100

Wharf’s edge. G1, 41mm, f/6.3, 1/2000, ISO 100

Gull. G1, 45mm, f/6.3, 1/1000, ISO 100

A reality check.

I have a passionate aversion to vacations, regarding them as a time when you look into the distance and do nothing useful. So when chance found me on the Monterey peninsula at the start of the week I wasn’t about to let the opportunity go to waste by sitting idly on the beach.

Instead, I did something I last tried some ten years earlier, plonking down $9.25 at the gate to take the 17 Mile Drive around Pebble Beach, of golf and classic car show fame. It’s seventeen miles of the most beautiful views and coastline on earth, true, but I couldn’t but help thinking about the insane economics of living there. The nuttiness of the whole thing is perhaps best exemplified by what is possibly the most photographed object in the world, the Lone Cypress on 17 Mile Drive, near the Carmel Gate.

Obligatory snap of The Lone Cypress.
5D, 200mm, ISO 250

Now you should know that the 17 Mile Drive is home to some of the priciest real estate on earth, never more so than for the three or four estates which actually have a view of the tree. I would guess that the cost of these is $20mm each, one even going so far as to post a plaque grandly stating ‘Lone Cypress View’ at its gate. Now with opportunity cost at a modest 5% and property taxes and maintenance added, annual cost of this little abode is in the region of $1.5mm after tax, what with all the gardeners and servants required. Or $3mm pre-tax.

It gets worse. You see, 17 Mile Drive is socked in with heavy fog for three months in the summer, being on a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific, and for three more months in the winter it’s raining and awful. But catch it on a spring day or, as I did, a late autumn one and, truly, it is heaven on earth. That’s if you can get around the tour buses and crowds. So for your $3mm, you get to enjoy the Lone Cypress for 6 months of the year. Which, without a doubt, makes it the Costliest Tree in the World.

Some other views along the Drive:

Bird Rock, replete with seals, sea lions, pelicans and cormorants.
5D, 200mm, ISO 250

Spyglass golf course, with deer.
5D, 400mm, monopod, ISO 250

A firm vision.

Depending on your view of the world, this is either nirvana or hell. I tend to the latter, but it still makes for a jolly display. I would imagine the clerks in this store go bonkers every now and then and start thinking homicidal thoughts. You can have too much order ….

Belt store display. G1, 33mm, f/5.6, 1/60, ISO 800

The modern Leica at work.

On the Bart. G1, 30mm, f/5.3, 1/20, ISO 800

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (San Francisco subway/tube/metro) was rocking and rolling mightily when this was snapped, suggesting that Panasonic is onto something with its OIS anti-shake technology – check the shutter speed, above. Don’t be expecting this feature in a Leica until the M14 comes out three decades hence, at which time the economy will have recovered and some dumb ass banker will lend you $100k to buy the thing.

By the way, the auto white balance in the G1 is every bit as good as that in the Canon 5D, which is to say it’s awful. I had to mess with the color sliders in Lightroom 2 to get a semblance of accurate skin tone in this snap.

Doubtless Walker Evans would have killed for this sort of technology, not to mention color, when he snapped this one back in 1938 as part of his subway series:

Evans used a camera concealed in his coat triggered with a remote control. No such subterfuge was called for in my picture.