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.

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.