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Mountain View Cemetery is home to some large egos. Very large egos. Big Sam Merritt, mayor, cemetery founder and dammer of Lake Merritt. Frank “Borax” Smith, biggest landowner of the Oakland Hills. Charles Crocker, the railroad magnate and banker who left nothing to charity. They and a score of others populate Millionaires’ Row with their opulent mausoleums. The Crocker monument has benches that face it rather than offer visitors the world-class Bay view.

But the largest ego doubtless belonged to Henry D. Cogswell, a Gold Rush dentist who became one of San Francisco’s first millionaires when the word really meant something. With the daft idea that Americans would drink less alcohol if they had access to cool, clear water, he had public drinking fountains of his own design installed in dozens of cities across the country. They were not always well sited or maintained. Citizens tended to view them as ugly bits of condescension and virtue signaling, and most are long gone. (To be fair, Dr. Cogswell also founded a university.)

Cogswell’s final statement was the colossal tomb/monument he designed for himself, in a large plot on its own hilltop.

Its mass of 400 tons centers on a thirty-foot spire of polished granite with statues of four virtues (including Temperance) and a crystal star on top. Even the incidental sculptures around it are monumental.

Its four faces include a bronze portrait, the family coat of arms (“Granted to Lord Humphry Cogswell, A.D. 1447”), and quotes expressing his solidarity with all human goodness.

But the only evidence I need is the stone as Cogswell ordained it: fine-grained white granite from the Sierra in the largest slabs I’ve ever seen. Stonemasons beveled, chamfered, carved, finished and polished its pilasters and escutcheons, neglecting no detail of quality. The viewer is surely impressed, stunned perhaps, maybe even in need of a drink.

Look at This

The new building that will house Samuel Merritt University on 11th Street is complete on the outside. (I featured the hole for the foundation back in November.) The exterior has some elegant texturing and a flowing band of colors that caught my eye the other day.

When I got home and looked at the photo instead of the building, I realized the color treatment has a meaning: it depicts Oakland before it was Oakland. The blue field represents the arm of the Bay originally named San Antonio Creek, now known as the Estuary and Lake Merritt. Compare it to this excerpt from the US Coast Survey map of 1857.

Please welcome this handsome addition to downtown―and fine monument to Dr. Merritt.

Events

The walk to Castle Canyon on May 3 for the Friends of Sausal Creek was a sellout event. I hope I inspired the activists in the group to move in and make something of the city’s property there. Although the geology is interesting, the habitat calls for human care.

And on May 24, a lucky thirteen folks enjoyed cool breezes for our walk through the old mining lands, the active trace of the Hayward fault, and the serpentine rock in Leona/Redwood Heights.

I’ll have two events in June. On the 21st I’ll visit the upper part of Claremont Canyon through the Claremont Canyon Conservancy. That will be a morning event, between 10 and noonish. That one’s full already, but you can join the waitlist. And the next Lake Merritt walk will take place on Saturday the 28th. Get tickets now. Now in my third year of giving this tour, I think of it as an Oakland tradition.

The Northern California Geological Society’s June meeting on the 25th will feature a talk on geothermal energy in Utah by the University of Utah’s Joseph Moore. Geothermal power is coming into its own these days, particularly in the western states. That’s in Orinda, just a short walk from the BART station (especially if you shortcut through the Pine Grove Business Center). The NCGS then takes its regular “field season” break until September.

Although I don’t own a bicycle (or a car), Bike East Bay is on the right side of me because they work to open the streets to everyone, not just cars. And on Sunday June 22, in partnership with the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center, they’ll be leading a group ride around Lake Merritt ending with a picnic. Sign up here.

May’s Blog Posts

In “A Short Three-Hour Tour of Geologic Oakland,” I turned the field trip I led for a class of college students into a blog post so that any group can take it themselves without getting lost. And in “Snow Park Remembers the Land” I celebrated the subtle significance of this piece of city property overlooking Lake Merritt.

I welcome your tokens of support for Deeper Oakland through my Buy Me A Coffee account

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Reading

I spent much of May nibbling through An Immense World a chapter at a time. Ed Yong’s bestseller is a nimble survey of the animal kingdom, from parasitic worms to whales, done through their senses―how they experience the physical signals around them. What do honeybees perceive? A bunch of ultraviolet colors, for one thing. Every species inhabits its own sensory world, which Yong labels with the German term Umwelt. This is a strange and wonderful subject, and the book is also full of the ingenious people who study other species and wonder at their strangeness. Ed Yong is a fellow Oaklander who loves our birds (always featured in his newsletter), and I look forward to more from him.

For no reason other than why not, I’m grabbed by the latest issue of BSSA, the Seismological Society of America Bulletin. There’s a creative ferment in earthquake science around the notion of stress drop, a sort of crack-the-whip behavior that rupturing faults exhibit to differing degrees. The larger topic that stress drop is related to is perpetual, a central question: how can we see the underworld in better focus? This issue of BSSA has a bunch of the debate, some thirty papers, in one compact, state-of-the-art place. My math is not strong, so I hope I can just get a sense of the gist. Earthquakes are sounds, and seismology feels to me like trying to extract visual pictures from aural sensations. Not sure how well my Umwelt maps to the average seismologist’s, but this journal issue seems like a good place to dive in.

Finally, maybe you’ve seen the extraordinary video from the major 28 March earthquake in Myanmar that shows the ground shifting along the Sagaing fault. A long Substack post this week by Kyle Bradley and Judith Hubbard in their invaluable Earthquake Insights site dives into the details the recording is yielding to the experts, and where they fit in the leading edge of earthquake science.

Book News

I’ve been selling copies of both the hardback and softbound editions of Deep Oakland on my walks. In my limited experience so far, people seem to smile at the hardback and go whoa at the paperback.

A reminder: the hardbound edition is sold out, though bookstores may have copies still on their shelves, and of course used copies are available. I have a stash for sale by mail; details on the donations page at deepoakland.com.

I’ve donated a hardbound copy to Oakland’s wonderful Cat Town as part of their annual Yard Sale auction, which I think will happen in August as it did last year.

As always, thanks for reading.

Andrew