One of my earliest recollections is that of driving with my father, as the sun was coming up, across the Golden Gate Bridge. We were going to Marine Shipyard, where my father worked as a pipe fitter, to watch the launching of a ship. It was on my birthday in the fall of 1943. I was four.

When we arrived, the black, blue, and orange steel-plated tanker was in way, balanced up on a perch. It was disproportionately horizontal, and to a four-year-old it was like a skyscraper on its side. I remember walking the arc of the hull with my father, looking at the huge brass propeller, peering through the stays. Then, in a sudden flurry of activity, the shoring props, beams, planks, poles, bars, keel blocks, all the dunnage was removed, the cables released, shackles dismantled, the come-alongs unlocked. There was a total incongruity between the displacement of this enormous tonnage and the quickness and agility with which it was carried out. As the scaffolding was torn apart, the ship moved down the chute towards the sea; there were the accompanying sounds of celebration, screams, foghorns, shouts, whistles. Freed from its stays, the logs rolling, the ship slid off its cradle with an ever-increasing motion. It was a moment of tremendous anxiety as the oiler en route rattled, swayed, tipped, and bounced into the sea, half submerged, to then raise and lift itself and find its balance. Not only had the tanker collected itself, but so did the witnessing crowd as the ship went through a transformation from an enormous obdurate weight to a buoyant structure, free, afloat, and adrift. My awe and wonder of that moment remain. All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory. *

*Excerpted from "Questions, Contradictions, Solutions: Early Work" (January 2004) in Richard Serra: The Matter of Time (Bilbao, Spain: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 2005), p. 47.