My latest social networking epiphany came in a primitive wooden cabin perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. No cell service, Wi-Fi, electricity, running water or even Facebook.

Talk about roughing it.

But there was a book -- an honest to God book, with a hard cover and beautiful photographs, left there with a note that said we were to enjoy it and leave it for the next visitors. And why not? Why not find inspiration in a book? And not just inspiration, but a conduit to people I would never have known otherwise?

The book was filled with photographs of what was clearly Steep Ravine, the gem of a spot on the Marin coast where the cabin was located. But it was Steep Ravine years ago, in the 1960s and early 1970s, before it was part of a state park, back when Bay Area families held leases on the cabins and made them homes away from homes. Homes away from everything.

Some of the photos were by Dorothea Lange, famous for her searing photos of the Great Depression. My family had visited the place a half dozen times, but I had no idea. Dorothea Lange? At Steep Ravine? Other photographs were by Margaretta Mitchell, who wrote that she worked to complete and publish the book after Lange died. Lange would have wanted someone to finish it, Mitchell explained. She often talked of producing just such a book, but in the end she ran out of time.

There I was in one of the

most beautiful spots on earth and I couldn't take my eyes off the book. Who were these people in the pictures? Children frolicking on the beach and trying to fly through the air with capes made of beach towels? A man smoking a pipe, a man washing dishes and another playing checkers. A woman drinking down a cup of coffee or tea. What were their stories?

It was like a tangible news feed, a post from the past. I felt that Facebook feeling of connecting with people, sometimes strangers or all-but strangers, who clearly shared something in common with me -- something important. And it all made me determined to find Margaretta Mitchell.

"It's a wonderful book and I loved doing it," Mitchell, a freelance photographer, told me when I reached her by phone at her home in the Berkeley hills. "It was back in the days when I didn't have to make a living."

She invited me up for a visit and we sat in the living room of her beautiful, nearly 90-year-old Raymond Yelland house with sweeping views of Oakland and the bay. Come on in, she said, and call me Gretta, by the way. Then she started to tell me how as a young photographer she sought out Lange, who she knew lived in Berkeley.

"There were not many known women photographers in that era," she says. And for a time Mitchell helped Lange around her office and would sometimes join the famed photographer for tea in her garden. And yes they would occasionally see each other at Steep Ravine, where Lange leased a cabin and where Mitchell and her family eventually came to share a lease on one. When Lange was dying of cancer, she said that not finishing the Steep Ravine book was one of her great regrets. In fact, Lange wrote to her publisher in 1964, "Of all the unfinished business which I now face, this item hurts me the most."

So Mitchell worked with the publisher and Lange's now late husband and other family members and the Oakland Museum of California, which owns much of Lange's work. The result was "To a Cabin," the 1973 book, now out of print, that I found in our cabin. But mostly Mitchell and I talked about Steep Ravine itself and the power of the place and the reason it is worthy of such a fine book.

"You go there and you drop everything from your life," says Mitchell, who still visits occasionally. "The business. The phone calls."

The ten wooden cabins are perched on a bluff far down a twisting road from Highway 1. The drive is like leaving one world for another. At the bottom of the hill is the un-Silicon Valley, a place where you have no choice but to unplug. A place where kids learn and adults remember what tides, winds, fog, pelicans, porpoises, sand and surf are all about.

"Freedom," Mitchell's oldest of three daughters says when she joins us in the living room with the view. That's the feeling Anne Mitchell remembers from Steep Ravine decades ago. "You just ran around wherever you wanted to run."

You ran and crawled on boulders and made ice plant soup and ran a bakery in which rocks served as loaves of bread and biscuits.

"I think my parents were unencumbered out there, too," says Anne, whose father, Frederick Mitchell, died in 1996.

It is a place to become unencumbered; the sort of place that people say they flee to in order to get away from it all. But finding the book in our cabin was a reminder. Sure, it's a human urge to seek peace and tranquility. But as much as we want to get away, we still yearn to connect. It's one reason social networking has become such a powerful business and cultural force in the age of Facebook.

But when I look at the book of photographs and consider it as a catalyst for connections, it is also a reminder that it's people who power the social network.

And for that I'm grateful.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.