Note: This essay originally appeared in the April 2021 issue of Marin Magazine.

There are places that happen to you and places you choose. For photographer Dorothea Lange, California was both. She was 23 years old when she left her native New Jersey and arrived in San Francisco. The year was 1918 and she thought she was just passing through — instead, she stayed for the rest of her life.

The city Lange found was just a decade old, having been almost totally destroyed in the earthquake and fires of 1906. Then, as now, it was a city on the edge of the continent, a place of beauty, promise, and tragedy. Then, as now, it had little use for memory.

In the three years I spent researching and writing The Bohemians, a novel about Dorothea Lange’s early years in San Francisco, I’d traced her footsteps in the City on several occasions. I visited the site of her portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street. For a while it was a hair salon — now it stands empty. I wandered around North Beach, the favorite haunt of artists and writers in Lange’s day. Most of all I wanted to see Montgomery Block, the four-story artist’s colony that had been the beating heart of Bohemian San Francisco, but the building disappeared decades ago, one of countless places lost to development. The Transamerica Pyramid stands there now. 

Every visit put more distance between my world and Lange’s. Her San Francisco was gone, and so was the feeling of that place. Not completely, but just about. 

I’d already turned in The Bohemians when I thought to drive out to Steep Ravine, where I knew she’d stayed at a small cabin near Stinson Beach. Turns out I’d been looking for Dorothea Lange in the wrong places; in the end I found her in Marin, where I grew up and where I live now.

It was the son of William Kent, the Marin landowner and congressman, who built the cabins at Steep Ravine in the 1930s. Kent leased them to San Franciscans seeking an escape. They were primitive then, and they are primitive now. The cabins belong to Mount Tamalpais State Park and can be reserved for up to a week for a hundred dollars a night. There are no showers, no electricity and no heating, save for an indoor wood stove and an outdoor barbecue. Campers bring their own bedding, food, and cooking stoves — just as Lange and her family did over fifty years ago.

Her time at Steep Ravine was a kind of homecoming. She’d spent time in Marin during her early years in the Bay Area, when she was married to painter Maynard Dixon. Dixon was a fixture of Bohemian San Francisco, but increasingly he felt the pull of wilder landscapes, which he felt embodied the “real California.” Dixon and Lange took trips out to Marin in the 1920s and 1930s, which was then a collection of small towns. Later they would take their children to visit friends in Mill Valley. 

Dixon and Lange divorced in 1935, but she never lost her feeling for this part of Northern California. Between 1957 and 1964, Lange and her husband Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor at U.C. Berkeley, rented one of the small, weathered cabins clustered on the edge of a rocky bluff overlooking the ocean. Sometimes their adult children came with their families; sometimes their grandchildren came out on their own.

Nineteen fifty-seven, the year she first stayed at Steep Ravine, was one year after Lange completed Death of a Valley, which documents the violent erasure of a Northern California community of Monticello. A wild horse streaking in terror across the valley, the upended earth, people uprooted and adrift — the images are an indelible act of witness. For Lange what happened at Monticello represented just one story in enormous change in the Bay Area and California. It was a disquieting reminder of the ravages brought on by modern industries. For her, the environmental damage, while searing, couldn’t be measured without accounting for the human cost, which was both a material and spiritual loss.

This is the background against which she and her family began to visit Steep Ravine. A polio survivor, she’d walked with a limp all her life. In her early sixties, she began to experience a spate of health crises. Her work had always required travel, and as her body grew more frail, it took a different turn. To photograph the “familiar,” she hung a camera on a hook in her kitchen and kept another in the living room so she’d always have one handy. 

When she came out to the beach, her cameras came with her. At Steep Ravine, she could fall into the embrace of both nature and her family. Her pictures of it pulsate with the loud, messy thrill of children let loose into a raw landscape. Though physically frail, Lange’s eye was a sharp as ever. She had a particularly keen eye for distilling human emotion through gestures of the body. It’s this quality that distinguished her famous Depression-era photographs, but now she turned that eye on what was close: her family, the cabin, the beach, the sea.

It was the son of William Kent, the Marin landowner and congressman, who built the cabins at Steep Ravine in the 1930s. Kent leased them to San Franciscans seeking an escape. They were primitive then, and they are primitive now. The cabins belong to Mount Tamalpais State Park and can be reserved for up to a week for a hundred dollars a night. There are no showers, no electricity and no heating, save for an indoor wood stove and an outdoor barbecue. Campers bring their own bedding, food, and cooking stoves — just as Lange and her family did over fifty years ago.

Her time at Steep Ravine was a kind of homecoming. She’d spent time in Marin during her early years in the Bay Area, when she was married to painter Maynard Dixon. Dixon was a fixture of Bohemian San Francisco, but increasingly he felt the pull of wilder landscapes, which he felt embodied the “real California.” Dixon and Lange took trips out to Marin in the 1920s and 1930s, which was then a collection of small towns. Later they would take their children to visit friends in Mill Valley. 

Dixon and Lange divorced in 1935, but she never lost her feeling for this part of Northern California. Between 1957 and 1964, Lange and her husband Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor at U.C. Berkeley, rented one of the small, weathered cabins clustered on the edge of a rocky bluff overlooking the ocean. Sometimes their adult children came with their families; sometimes their grandchildren came out on their own.

Nineteen fifty-seven, the year she first stayed at Steep Ravine, was one year after Lange completed Death of a Valley, which documents the violent erasure of a Northern California community of Monticello. A wild horse streaking in terror across the valley, the upended earth, people uprooted and adrift — the images are an indelible act of witness. For Lange what happened at Monticello represented just one story in enormous change in the Bay Area and California. It was a disquieting reminder of the ravages brought on by modern industries. For her, the environmental damage, while searing, couldn’t be measured without accounting for the human cost, which was both a material and spiritual loss.

This is the background against which she and her family began to visit Steep Ravine. A polio survivor, she’d walked with a limp all her life. In her early sixties, she began to experience a spate of health crises. Her work had always required travel, and as her body grew more frail, it took a different turn. To photograph the “familiar,” she hung a camera on a hook in her kitchen and kept another in the living room so she’d always have one handy. 

When she came out to the beach, her cameras came with her. At Steep Ravine, she could fall into the embrace of both nature and her family. Her pictures of it pulsate with the loud, messy thrill of children let loose into a raw landscape. Though physically frail, Lange’s eye was a sharp as ever. She had a particularly keen eye for distilling human emotion through gestures of the body. It’s this quality that distinguished her famous Depression-era photographs, but now she turned that eye on what was close: her family, the cabin, the beach, the sea.

One day this winter I drove out to Steep Ravine. I’ve been to Stinson Beach dozens of times, but this was my first trip to this part of the coast. The tide was high. Huge breakers thundered against the rocks. The fog had claimed the view, as it will do. What held me there was a sense of how far out on the edge of the world I stood. Except for the sound of the waves and wind, it was silent, and I was alone. 

“Freedom, the circumstances under which people, children and their parents, and their friends, feel unlocked and free.” These are the things she sought — and found in this place. 

In the stillness of a winter day, I thought about how a photograph can pull you back to a place and also back to your truest self. In that moment I could see Marin as it was a hundred years ago, when houses were few and far between. I could see it as it had been in 1964, the last year Lange had come here with her family. It was easy to image the sense of freedom she felt here. It was easy because it was the same freedom I felt. After years of searching, she’d brought me to a place as beautiful as it is timeless, a place where I could feel the shadow of something that was nearly lost but survived after all.