In Memory of John Olmsted (1938-2011)

 J. Perlman Photography 2010

             I first met John Olmsted at U.C. Davis, where I was enrolled in the Planning Certification Program and he came to speak at one of the seminars, and I was struck by this odd tall passionate man who seemed to channel John Muir and who closed his eyes as he talked of his vision.  Before he talked very long I could see his vision too, of his chain of jewels, of conserved precious lands stretching across California.  Before he’d finished his short presentation which involved an overhead projector and a bunch of photos and a lot of stories I was totally enrolled – how could I not be?  His vision was so clear, so tangible, so graspable, that it seemed the least I could do – in fact it felt an honor to be asked to help bringing it forth.

            How do I describe his utter unstoppability, his unreasonable indomitability?  No, I take it back, his indomitability was not unreasonable, it was beyond any notions of reasonable and unreasonable, he simply knew what was so, and what would be.  It was not a personal vision that drove him, and drove him to drive the rest of us, it was a vision much bigger than him, it was a vision, I came to understand, borne in a meeting of giants between lifetimes, a meeting where he sat at the table with his peers, the spirits of John Muir and Frederick Law Olmstead and discussed what was to be and how it would be made so.  I believed he returned to that table every time he closed his eyes and prepared to speak, and I understood what gift it was to be shown his vision of what was to be, and what an honor it was for all of us to be given the opportunity to share in the bringing forth of that vision into this world.

            And how to describe the gentle quality of his persistence?  He could, and he would, ask such unreasonable things of you.  And the natural response would be to push back, to say “don’t you understand, I’m busy, I don’t have the time, I don’t have the money” but then you’d see how profoundly less he was asking of you than he was asking of himself and how could you possibly say no? 

            Though he would be so sweet when you did say no. No matter what the crisis was, if you could not do that which was needed so badly this time, hey, it was no problem, he knew someone else who would take care of it and he knew you’d be there for him next time, and if not next time, then the time after that. 

            And there were those glorious disconcerting mad periods when he would be consumed by the movie he was making and he would call me up, from his home or perhaps his hospital room or the room at the Outside Inn and leave these enormous long messages telling me what he could see and how everything was coming together into this tremendous climax and how we were all each one of us at the very center of it and I could not help but see it too. And I cannot help but see it again now – how it is all coming together, right now, and how we are all, each one of us, at the very center of it.  I brought him boxes of my old Grateful Dead concert tapes to put into his shoebox-sized cassette player which was held together with duct tape and he filled dozens of them with his amazing brilliant streams of consciousness laid over the music, and his excited voice, describing all that he could see segueing seamlessly back and forth with Jerry’s guitar, was so perfect I could not erase those messages from my phone.  His vision was so complete and so simple it was funny and in his messages he would roar with laughter and he declared he had become a standup comedian, especially since because of his prostate problems he couldn’t sit down very well anyway.  The omniverse, the Obamaverse.  Time standing still, time going backwards.  The movie he was born to make revealing itself fully, with each camera angle determined and the narrative completely written and all we needed to do was assemble a camera crew and we could make it in a weekend and it would be the greatest movie of all time.  The first cosmic download in history.  All of it coming together, right there, right then, in him.   He would call the movie “Pain in the Butt” in honor of both himself and his condition.

            I remember descending with him into the tightly packed tiny rooms where he kept his collections, shelves and shelves of old books and old typewriters and Victrolas and rocks and taxidermied animals and maps and, my God, it was like the movie “Being John Malkovich” and I was descending down those narrow stairs into John Olmsted’s brain, and at first it looked like utter chaos but then I began to listen to John speak about this piece and that piece, each with its own story and the story of one piece leading seamlessly to the story of the next and the next and by the time we went back upstairs that crowded little basement had been transformed into a shrine where the perfect order and beauty of the universe had once again been, by John, revealed.

The last time we spoke he lay in his bed without the strength to raise his head, but he could still rattle off parcel numbers from memory as we spoke of some of his properties along the Yuba River, there in the middle of his necklace of land-jewels across California, and we talked of what was needed to pay the property taxes –for John, there were always property taxes to be paid – and rebuild the old house which had recently burned to the ground and taken many of John’s antiques with it.  And for John the loss of the house was only the briefest of blows – he had the house plans and he knew contractors and he would rebuild the house as it had originally been, it would be better than the patched-up remodeled shell that had burned.  And as we talked and shared ideas and thoughts of what should become of the properties John would close his eyes and say “Yes!  That makes me tingle, I can feel it, yes, I know that will happen!”  And I could see that John’s spirit-peers, John Muir and Frederick Law Olmstead, and, probably Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, were all there sitting at the table with him and when he felt the tingling it was his spirit trembling because he was in the presence of Truth, of what will be, and John knew what a sacred thing it was, what a blessing and honor and obligation it was to be gifted with that vision of Truth.  It was that vision which drove him, relentlessly, and which sustained him, and enriched him, and demanded his entire life, and gave him his entire life.

Thank you for sharing the gift of that vision with me, John.  I will carry it with me as I walk your trails and, together, we will walk your vision into this world.