Los Altos

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Gates of Heaven, Santa Clara County

On film critic Roger Ebert’s list of the Ten Greatest Films of All Time, only one film is an American documentary (two out of ten films are documentaries).

This is the Errol Morris 1978 documentary Gates of Heaven. The film is about two California pet cemeteries, one in the Napa Valley and the other in Los Altos.

The film opens in Los Altos at Highway 280 and Foothill (I grew up two highway exits away). This is the site of the Foothill Pet Cemetery and Morris spends time interviewing the founder Floyd “Mac” McClure and other investors in the pet cemetery.

Some of the clients of the cemetery are also interviewed, including the woman with the “singing” pup and for comic relief, the manager of an animal rendering plant.

Mac has a lot of passion for his dream of opening a pet cemetery, he puts love above profit but one feels he isn’t the best businessman. The owner of the land, a Mr. Dutton, decides to sell the land to a real-estate developer and the pets, all 450, have to be exhumed and reburied in the another pet cemetery (Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park in Napa Valley).

The second part of the film interviews the Harberts family which runs the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park. But not before one of the best monologues in documentary history from a Los Altos elderly neighbor, Florence Rasmussen, who lives across the street from the cemetery.

The documentary was filmed in the summer of 1977 and I was in search of the location of the cemetery on a rainy late morning.

Looking at maps, I noticed a trail (Hammond-Snyder Loop Trail) up to a hill that would give me a view of area to the south of Highway 280 and east of Foothill.

I set off on the muddy trail past a red-tail hawk perched in an oak. There was a light drizzle. In about five minutes I found myself on a small hill partially fenced in with an interpretative sign.

Looking to the north I knew I was standing at the cameras location from the panning shot at the beginning of Gates of Heaven.

A screen capture of the first panning shot in the film. The green water tanks are still there. The bridge in the foreground right is Cristo Rey Drive over the Southern Pacific Permanente Cement Plant branch line. In the background is Highway 280.
This screen capture, from the same panning shot as above, comes to rest here: the location of the Foothill Pet Cemetery between Cristo Rey Drive and Highway 280.
Here is the same view of the cemetery today. The distance fades into drizzling skies. There are more houses and trees than there were in 1977. The roads are very much the same as 47 years ago.

I pulled my panoramic journal out of my pack and quickly began a pen brush sketch of the scene before me, my lines blurred and smudged in the drizzle. These “happy accidents” became part of the sketch.

Parts of the scene were still recognizable: the green waters tanks, the railroad, the Foothill Blvd entrance and exit ramps, Cristo Rey, and Highway 280.

Where the pet cemetery was located is now a housing development and the trees now seem much taller and more plentiful than when the panning shot was filmed here almost 47 years ago.

Do the residents of Serra Knoll Estates know their houses are built on the site of a pet cemetery?!
Oddly enough there is a Catholic Cemetery called “Gate of Heaven” just down the road from the former Foothill Pet Cemetery. Did Morris get the idea for his film’s title here? Maybe only he really knows.
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The Valley Part 3

  • 1971

That year was a year of two births in Santa Clara Valley. One was in  the wee hours of August 31st at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. And the other was on January 11th. The former was my birthdate and the latter was the first time Santa Clara Valley was rechristened Silicon Valley in print. A columnist named Don Hoefler wrote a column in Electronic News titled “Silicon Valley USA”, in reference to the growing number of companies producing microprocessor chips. And since then, the moniker has stuck.

Five years earlier a family moved from Mountain View to a 1952 single story ranch house that was built on the site of a former orchard in Los Altos. The house is owned by the Jobs family and the address of the rather plain house is 2066 Crist Drive.

When I pulled up opposite to the house on Crist Drive there were already three tech tourists in front of the house. A 20 something from Arizona taking  pictures of his girlfriend in front of the driveway and a bespectacled long-hair that looked like he was visiting a sacred shrine in Japan.

And in a sense, this is a shrine to those who worship at the alter of Apple Computers and is beatified co-founder, Steve Jobs.

The house at 2066 Crist Avenue and more specifically, it’s garage, was the birthing place of Apple Computer. It was here that Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and family and friends assembled the first 50 Apple I personal computers. The garage was also the birthing location of the even more successful Apple II. (My elementary school in Cupertino had three Apple II computers which were housed in the library.)

While sketching the house I reflected how much it resembled the house where I grew up, just 3.6 miles away, which was a two story track house in Sunnyvale, also on the land of an apricot orchard. I attended the rival high school to Homestead High, where the two Steve’s graduated. In a 1995 interview Jobs commented on growing up in the area:

Silicon Valley for the most part at the time was still orchards-and it was really a paradise. I remember the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other- It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up.

Anyone visiting Silicon Valley today would not include the word “paradise” in their description, unless there where referring to the fecundity of Starbucks and convenient  but anonymous mini malls that speckle the valley like feed to the chickens. And as for the crystal clear air of Jobs’ youth, now you can barely see the peak of Mt. Hamilton thought the permeant haze of the valley.

I sometimes ask myself, what was lost and what was gained, in the transition from Heart’s Delight to Silicon? Has the standard of life corroded for those children growing up in the valley today? Now, can the youth of Silicon Valley share the same experiences that Jobs and myself had? And as Jobs noted, is Silicon Valley still,”the most wonderful place in the world to grow up”?

In my youth there were open fields, orchards,  and empty lots to play in. No play structures, just a blank canvas for your imagination to wander. Where do the youth of Silicon Valley go to experience nature? Or are they too preoccupied with videos games, iPhones and iPads to notice what has disappeared?

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A 2011 sketch of the two story track house I grew up in, 3.6 miles from 2066 Crist Drive. My father moved out of this house shortly after I sketched this and it was sold to an Apple engineer for an unbelievable amount.