We all have our imprints. The contours of a landscape, the light at a certain hour, the smell in the air as the breeze picks up, they can create deep connections to a place, imprinted upon us — or rather within us, often from childhood. They make us who we are.
My friend Barry Owen taught me about imprints many years ago. He loved to talk about these connections. He had many, not because he couldn’t settle or select among them, but because he had uncommon perception and sensitivity to everything around him: the contours of oak-studded hills, the light filtering across rooftops or through redwood canopies, the smells of ocean salt or kitchen collaborations.
Barry grew up in Atwater, a small town in California’s Central Valley, with two brothers, one his twin. His father was in the Air Force, which had a base nearby. Other than a stint as an editor in New York City, Barry was Northern Californian through and through.
He was a hiker, a forest firefighter, a writer, an editor and voluble raconteur, a gay man in a rapidly changing gay city, a mentor and friend, and a partner and husband. He died last week, one year after doctors delivered an out-of-the-blue diagnosis of advanced pancreatic cancer. He was 67.
Barry was The Frisc’s outdoors editor. When we began discussing a new publication about San Francisco and its major civic issues some years ago, Barry was adamant that it would not be complete without exploration and celebration of the outside. In SF, the second densest city in America, we have a staggering bounty and variety of outdoor spaces to share, and share them we must. We are a city of neighborhoods, it’s often said, but we insist that everyone should be welcome everywhere.
Barry was devoted to sharing his beloved city and his life; his enthusiasms went out into the world like pulses of light, energizing the people they reached. His gospel was the outdoors, and he served as the high priest of high spring — those few weeks of wildflowers and final rainstorms, before rising temperatures would start to turn green hillsides tawny.
The hours with him, whether they involved climbing a steep gardened stairway in the city or an epic ramble up hills and through watersheds in the farthest corners of the Bay Area, were threaded with Latinate liturgies of botanica (recalled from his college classes at UC Davis), buoyed by repartée and debate, and spiked with cries of rapture.
In 2018 he began writing posts for The Frisc about his close observations of the city’s less heralded corners, like the AIDS Memorial Grove and Tank Hill, but not long after, he received his diagnosis. He handed off the baton, but the course was set. (We paused the section in deference to shelter-in-place rules but will start it up again soon.)
Like the chill in the air of a sunny day that signals incoming fog, Barry was my imprint. He was San Francisco. His perch above Alamo Square, just off Divisadero — a longitude that the summer fog often doesn’t breach until the late afternoon — encouraged us to contemplate two different cities.
Coming home after college, I was looking to write, and Barry gave me my first paying journalism gig. He was in charge of a new magazine dedicated to a whizbang technology: CD-ROMs. (Hello, 1991.) He laughed off my attempts to call him “Mr. Owen,” then taught me to write wisely and sharply. He also tried to instill time-tested rules for great headlines. Even with the internet, most of those rules still apply (and sorry, Barry, I’m still a lousy headline writer).
He practiced what he preached. His writing could crackle with ecstasy, swoop and curl then alight upon a playful phrase, yet always remain clear. Details shone through. In writing about a place, Barry was transported, and so was the reader. He was wired not only to share, but also to embrace what others had to share. Here are two passages from his celebration of the National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park that we published in 2018:
By design, however, the Grove is as much a destination for inspiration, pleasure, and joy as for remembrance and solemn reflection. As its creators understood, these are not opposites. Some come to the Grove to recall, mourn, and celebrate lost lives. But its orchestrated beauty also welcomes weddings, elaborate sit-down feasts, and the regular convening of exuberant flaggers, those West Coast whirling dervishes who gather to spread, twirl, and flutter gaily colored silk wings to pulsing dance music …
Two sets of rustic stone steps lead up and out of the Memorial Grove. Exiting this secret garden is a little startling, like waking from a wonder-filled dream: It’s not that the real world lacks beauty, only that its familiarity, routines, and urgencies tend to jam our innate sense of wonder.
Barry died last week in Grass Valley, where he and his husband Dan went after it was clear chemotherapy could do no more, to live his final stretch among close friends in an old house on a hill, a historic Victorian bed and breakfast that many years ago was Barry’s home. He was surrounded by love, by familiar old wood, and windows and views. He went as he lived, in his imprint, just before the hot California summer could overtake high spring.
Alex Lash is the editor in chief of The Frisc.