The Mission pipe organ tuner who climbs inside a 1924 organ once a year, and is the only person who will

It is 4:18 in the morning on a Saturday in April and Father Ignacio Vargas, 79, is climbing inside a pipe organ.

The organ is at Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco, on the corner of Dolores and 16th. The organ was built in 1924 by the Aeolian-Skinner company of Boston. It has 1,247 pipes, ranging in size from a pencil to a six-foot stovepipe. The chamber that holds the pipes is reached by a wooden ladder behind the altar that goes up 22 feet, and then a horizontal crawl through a tunnel about the width of an adult body, and then a small square hole into a wooden room that smells of old leather and dust and the candles that have been lit on the altar below for two hundred and forty-nine years.

Father Ignacio is afraid of heights. He has been since he was eleven, since the day he fell from a second-story window in Tepic, Mexico, while reaching for an orange. He has tuned the organ at Mission Dolores every April since 1991. That is thirty-four times. He climbs the ladder thirty-four times. He has cried, briefly, on the ladder eleven of those times. He keeps climbing.

“A pipe organ does not have a tuner,” he says, in his slow, Mexican-Spanish-tinted English, in the basement of the Mission before he climbs up. “It has a confessor. You climb inside the body and you listen for what the body has been holding in for a year. Each pipe has been sitting in the dark, in the cold, while the city outside was making weather. The pipe has a story. You go in. You let the pipe tell it.”

He is the only person in Northern California who can tune the Aeolian by ear without a chromatic tuner. There are three other people who can tune it with electronics. None of them will climb inside. The wooden ladder is not rated. The horizontal crawl is not OSHA-compliant. The Diocese has, over the years, offered to install a structural retrofit that would make the ascent safer. Father Ignacio has declined three times. He says the organ does not want to be remodeled. The organ wants to be heard.

Father Ignacio retired from the priesthood in 2003 after thirty-eight years in active ministry, twenty-one in parishes across Mexico, seventeen at three different parishes in San Francisco. He served at Mission Dolores from 1989 to 1995 as the assistant pastor. He learned the organ from the parish’s previous tuner, a German Lutheran named Walter Heinrich, who taught him over four annual ascents and then died of a stroke in his sleep in November 1990.

A pipe organ tunes by adjusting the length of each pipe in tiny increments, the smallest a fraction of a millimeter, with a small steel tool called a tuning sleeve. To tune by ear, you listen to a known reference pitch (Father Ignacio uses a single tuning fork his teacher gave him in 1989) and adjust each pipe until it sings in harmony with the fork or with another pipe. The Aeolian at Mission Dolores has 1,247 pipes. A full annual tuning takes Father Ignacio, working roughly thirteen-hour days, between four and six days, depending on how the wood has settled.

On the Saturday I watched him climb, he had been awake since 3 a.m. He had a coffee at 3:30 a.m., a single rosary at 3:45, a sip of orange juice at 4:02. He went up the ladder at 4:14. He took four minutes to climb 22 vertical feet. He was breathing hard but not unusually so. He paused at the top to cross himself once. Then he went into the crawl.

In the organ chamber there is room to stand up. The lighting is a single yellow incandescent bulb on a bare wire. Father Ignacio sets down his canvas bag, takes out the tuning fork, taps it on his palm, and listens. The first pipe is the lowest C in the pedal bourdon. It has, by his own description, “drifted down a quarter step in the cold of February.”

He works slowly. He listens. He adjusts. He listens again. He is not a man who sweats easily, but his shirt is soaked through by 7 a.m. He breaks at 7:30 for a piece of bread and a small piece of cheese his housekeeper, Mrs. Ramirez, has packed for him in wax paper. He says a brief prayer over the bread. He continues.

I asked him what makes him keep doing this. He answered as if the answer should have been obvious. He said the organ is the voice of every funeral, every wedding, every baptism, every Christmas Mass, every Easter Vigil that has happened at Mission Dolores since 1924. When the organ is in tune, the voices of the people who sang at those services rise. When it is out of tune, the voices wait. He said: “I am keeping a promise to the dead. The dead were sung over by this organ. The organ is not allowed to forget them.”

In May 2022 a young engineer from a tech company in SoMa, who had been to a friend’s wedding at the Mission, contacted Father Ignacio offering to design a robotic tuning rig that would, in principle, eliminate the climb. Father Ignacio met the engineer for coffee on Valencia. They spoke for forty minutes. Father Ignacio asked the engineer one question at the end: “If the organ tunes itself, what dies?” The engineer thought about it. He paid for the coffee. He has not contacted Father Ignacio again.

On the Saturday I watched, Father Ignacio finished the bourdon by 9 a.m. and moved to the dulciana. He hummed, occasionally, while he worked. The hum was not a tune. It was a check. He was matching his voice to the pipes to see whether his voice, at seventy-nine, with reduced lung capacity from a bout of pneumonia in 2017, could still find the note. When the note found him back, he stopped humming.

At 9:46 a.m. the first parishioner of the morning arrived in the sanctuary below to set out flowers. She did not know Father Ignacio was inside the organ above her. She set out the flowers. She left. Father Ignacio worked for another four hours that day, then climbed down. He climbed down with both hands. He would climb back up on Monday at 4 a.m.

By Wednesday afternoon, the Aeolian was in tune. The Sunday choir would sing on Sunday at 10 a.m. The dead would rise. Father Ignacio would be in the back pew, with his eyes closed, listening.