On the Trail

Rust and nostalgia


 

 



Long ago, when I dwelt in a Northeastern burg with a climate and setting not conducive to outdoor fun, I worked for Christie’s, an international fine arts auction house. This afforded me many opportunities to eyeball up close items ultimately bound for major museum collections. Nowadays you can’t get me inside a museum or art gallery unless the weather is so awful I can’t possibly hike, bike or garden.


But I’m still interested in quaint musty old things — though not exactly the kind found in pricey antique shops in cutesy-pie country towns. Instead, while out hiking I study the earth after rain to see what’s been shaken loose from a long entombment. From my bicycle I scan roadsides after mandatory brush clearance to see if any old farming implements have been unearthed.


All in all, it’s a free, fresh-air jaunt through local mountains in search of bits of history and mystery.


Along Agoura Road I discovered half of a heavy dinner plate with a detailed blue and white Oriental motif protruding from a muddy slope. Embedded nearby was an unscathed glass flask, amber-colored with ornate raised scrollwork, from an apothecary — or tavern. After several major storms a few years back, a cycling buddy and I unearthed a child-size amusement park ride airplane in the floodplain of a creek below Mulholland Highway, coated in rust flakes and damp sycamore leaves.


But the most intriguing find was last year’s "Mulholland Midden" as I dubbed it.


It appeared that a road crew clearing storm debris along Mulholland needed to make a tight U-turn in a small canyon with a big bulldozer. This resulted in some major upheaval to the long undisturbed landform, revealing a wide swath of partially buried glass, china and other items. While it was doubtful any of my old colleagues at Christie’s would have found anything, there suitable for salvaging let alone cataloguing, I waded in for a closer look.


This wasn’t a recent dump, but decades old refuse, possibly from one of the old eateries that existed along Mulholland Highway in days gone by. (Some, like The Old Place and the Rock Store are still in business). There had been a restaurant at the Seminole Hot Springs resort; the site is now a parking lot. The former Lake Enchanto (present-day site of the National Park Service-managed Strauss Ranch) would have had food venues for hungry visitors to the amusement park-like facility.


Although an old friend once suggested that I stop equating rust with antiquity, she didn’t discount nostalgic value.


This odd collection from the Mulholland Midden definitely heralds from a different era. Not all of us are at ease with the pace and gadgetry of the modern world, so there’s a comfort in discovering something — even a sliver of fine china — crafted with high art. Among the treasures picked out of the debris:


A battered alarm clock; a porcelain faucet handle; a rainbow array of iridescent shards of glass jars and bottles the likes of which are no longer manufactured; a rusted half-crumpled can of Acme Beer with colorfully painted medallions of a demure Rhine maiden offering up some steins — on the label the line, "Internal revenue tax paid"; the molded rubber head of a sinister-eyed cat, aged to a coppery-green, and pieces of a green plastic toy car resembling a model out of a 1950s Life magazine ad.


And finally, many fragments of china of substance in a variety of the most elegant patterns: blue and white Oriental motif similar to the plate discovered on Agoura Road, cups with gilt edged rims and handles, plates with gorgeously rendered peonies, chrysanthemums and mixed floral wreaths, and a bowl fragment with a stylized pink tulip and blue forget-me-not hand-painted in bold colors.


There are "makers’ marks" (manufacturers’ dated inscriptions crucial to establishing value of items of porcelain and silver at auction) on the back of some of these fragments, but these are largely illegible. Not one, however, says "microwave safe."


At Christie’s our porcelain department offered for sale place settings by Spode, Wedgwood, Royal Doulton; our Oriental Art department put glazed bowls from ancient dynasties on the block. With Elmer’s glue I manage to connect a few matching bits and pieces from the Mulholland Midden into what appears to be a sugar bowl’s lid. As I examine it, a lost voice says softly,


"Let’s use the good china tonight, dear heart."




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