A December Walk
It's been said San Francisco is stupefyingly beautiful and I reckon that's true. As any tourist knows, it is often enough to point and click from the top of your Big Bus tourbus and the city will do the rest of the work, convincing folks back in Akron that you are Ansel Adams. San Francisco can be so dauntingly sublime it nearly resolves that artistic urge to describe it well, to really hook it for fleeting seconds with an apt phrase or photo. “Just visit,” you say, gesturing randomly.
This is too bad. Many of the classic San Franciscan sights really are paradisiacal, and many of the mundane ones — a gently tossing acacia branch speckled with sunlight; the pockmarked, purple painted clapboard bay windows of the apartment across from you — get ignored because describing them seems useless.
Walking in the cold rain helps undo this this inebriation of laziness. The beauty is still there but you must work for it, forgetting pain, and this sharpens the senses even as it numbs them. Never mind if the weather is pneumonia-inducing. Maybe out of a desire to taste sublimity afresh I recently put on my L.L. Bean boots and stepped out into the drizzle, only to find the sidewalks rather full with folks in the same aimlessly eager look in their eyes. Sane San Franciscans are few and I think we all feel the call of a wet, winter’s day. Some go jogging in it, many go drinking in it. Even tourists cannot resist the strange urge, lining up to drive down Lombard’s crooked section across the breadth of Russian Hill and down the other side to Polk Street.
I hung on to the outer rails of a northbound Powell-Hyde cable car as rain poured around us and on us from the roof, feeling high as a kite — you are hanging dangerously from the side of public transportation, after all, and that is as close to freedom as any city government will let you go. Somehow being soaked, but only on one side, made it even better. Stepping off at the Powell-Hyde terminus, my right hemisphere and wallet thoroughly drenched, had all the giddiness of the beginning of a quest. I somehow got it into my head I would walk all the way to the Palace of Fine Arts, only a mile and a half away.
Rain quickly makes even the cable car’s lesser cousins, Muni buses, appealing. Walking into a squall near Fort Mason, I realized the foolishness of hoofing it entirely and stepped into one, drying a bit in the blast of electric heat as the driver eyed the puddle accumulating around me. Buses, at least the new ones, are not romantic, I admit, but they do have one special feature of interest to anyone wanting to write. It is a known truth that buses never take you where you intend to go, and this inconvenience, once looked at correctly, is the start of a lot of good things. Mine zipped happily by the Palace of Fine Arts and turned on to 101 north, into a dim, great horizon where the Golden Gate should have been.
With no comforting International Orange presence, the bus became sinister to me; it seemed possible it would barrel into the churning strait whose waves walloped the brown-and-green coast. The hulking green boughs of cypresses tossed crazily in the wind, as furiously as the bus’ windshield wipers, and I found it hard to believe there had ever been those warm idyl days in my memory, of a San Francisco with with a sapphire-blue sky and golden sunlight on the emerald leaves. I gripped tightly onto the overhead straps as we barreled into the void.
Suddenly, we took a right and into the parking lot of the welcome center and Round House, the latter’s red neon sign glowing cheerful in the rain. Hulking out of the fog like a kindly giant wading ashore, was the old bridge, steady as ever. Only, even walking closer, the towers seemed to go up forever, and the span goes on and on into the mists, a sullen Bifröst, around the world in a great circle, and as a result you felt giddy and drunk on your legs as any sense of proportion dissolved. The waves which churn at the tower’s based seem immense enough to drown a man ten times over, and you cling desperately to these herbaceous outcrop of rock. But this is really the wonder that you want, a feeling of uneasy awe, a sense of oh-yes-that’s-what-it’s-all-about. The Victorians knew all about it, as they escaped their steam engines and belching factories, and we seek it too as we flee the algorithms, the headless Waymo cars, the endlessly breeding AI.
I found another bus which purported to go to the zoo and it reliably took me to the Palace of Fine Arts, a place so mythic that even in cold rain does not reduce the sense that it is another world overlapping with ours and thus cannot be described sufficiently to justify the attempt. The Pan-American International Exhibition — really all the world fairs of that time — tend to be how we hallucinate the classical antiquity as being; but really, they are a glimpse at how our own American classical antiquity was during that heady period. Like the Golden Gate, they seem out of proportion to man, at least modern man; they bestride the Marina like a Colossus, while we petty men scurry about, et cetera, seeking for ourselves dishonorable IPOs.
Anyone who says intoxication is the point of beer has never ventured four miles in the cold rain. A revelrous bar with a lonely fireside is just the thing to dry out your body and soul, and after yet another bus ride (this one, a commuter bus: accurate signage but an egregious fare advertised only once on board), I ended up at Zeki’s off California, a place with two fireplaces to ward off the damp, cold night. As I wrung myself out, I found a renewed sense of contentment, somewhere between the overwhelming terror of the Golden Gate and the almost soporific beauty of summer memories. The tourists lining up on Lombard cannot help but say “wow!” at every vista, but those relying on that lover’s first glance find it quickly becoming a “huh” and then indifference. To live here is no mean state of awe. It is an orgiastic undercurrent of gratitude.
And if you forget it, you need only step out into the rain to find it again.
