Fog on the Bay

I have seen New York, and Paris, and Rome, and to my mind not a one of them can compare to San Francisco. Each of those others offered big culture, big history, or just big, and that's probably why I like the last so much. San Francisco is not a very large city, geography put some good limits to it - a thumb of land with a mountain to the south. Three sides moat, one side wall. There's not much place else to go, except across the bay. Had the land been more level it probably would have gotten much grander ideas, but then it would be Boston, or Philadelphia. Instead, being set on the hills leading up to Montara Mountain, the city sits as though the architects had sketched out the plan for a flatter town, then crumpled up the drawings, smoothed them out, and then crushed them up again. So now there is a city where crossing a street feels like mid-grade mountaineering.

Often I felt I was walking thru a garden where people lived. Each dip and rise of the land seemed to hold some strange spot of green that had perhaps at first been inaccessible, then overlooked, and finally preserved in palm and cypress. Twenty percent of the area of San Francisco is taken up by Golden Gate Park alone. That one patch is greater in size than Central Park, though addresses along it are not considered as desirable. But I prefer it. Manhattan likes to stay manicured, but Golden Gate is nature barely held. There are plenty of trees that have been left unpruned, creeping vines have slunk in, dark corners everywhere to explore, or avoid as you like. If Baron Von Hausman had gentrified Paris by consulting Maurice Sendak, this might have been the result. Wild things could live here, and do.

Mostly, I like the fog. Maybe it's because every region must take pride in something. No other city I know is so proximal to nature, it's finger on the pulse of day. A grey mist rises from the Pacific and drifts landward in a magic curtain, clothing the tops of broken trees, sinking the desperate and quiet corners both in a hush, softening smell. Things become calm not so much because of the dampening of sound, but because there is suddenly less imperative to make noise. Conversations become hushed, drivers less angry, perhaps not because they have suddenly become content or soothed, but only realized that whatever they had been worked up about was not really anything much. Not every day does this happen, but many. And it seems to me one of those daily acts of magic - like sunrise, like wind - that happens everywhere, is seen by everyone, and which consequently, nobody pays much attention to. Then something happens to shift the pull of air, and the whole cloud sluices out thru the Golden Gate and back out to sea, and there the city is once more, where from above there had been none. As secret as Avalon.

I've had the good fortune to always be able to travel either with friends or towards them. On my last day in the city, I called up a friend who had been living in Oakland for better than the past two years, and who, to my shame, I never visited. So, naturally I invited her to join my walk. She agreed, for a part of it. We met at the southern entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge. We spent the first quarter figuring out how we had lived so near each other yet always managed to miss meeting up, the middle half talking about the present goings on in our lives, and the last bit talking about where we were going. North is my easiest answer, but by no means most accurate. As for herself, she imagines she'll just be going back across the bay to Oakland. And I'll be looking forward to seeing her on my return. The 1.7 miles of the bridge was neither time, nor length enough to satisfy a friendship put on hold for more than 2 years. We stopped halfway across so I could look out at the bay, and the incredible fortune that allowed so many things to come together, land, sea, earth, sky, sunset, my friend, the bridge, and I. I don't find city views particularly scenic and don't see how a high rise apartment is really a deal since all windows still present grey and concrete, but this is a much better arrangement. Looking east over such a stretch of land, I can imagine why some folks might consider coming here to end their lives, but I wonder how, in looking at so nice a bay, they could not but change their mind. The fog was coming in and the sun going down, so my friend went the last bit with me, and walked me out of the city.

I went north, as has been the habit, up into the Headlands of Marin. From there if the fog is behaved, the whole bay becomes a pool of cloud, and it would seem that a rowboat would be craft enough to go across the surface, provided it were first inspected for leaks. On the slopes of Tamalpais I looked back at San Francisco, but it was gone now, sunk down in vapor, waiting to come out again some other time.