Fogset on San Francisco
I think there is something fantastic — a literal fantasy — about a city which pulls up fog around its head like a great, cottony comforter each evening.
A city where you can stand on one sun-drenched hill, looking out across a valley of buildings serried like colorful chocolates at another hill hidden in dark greens and gray, is a city of no mean possibility. Most evenings, it repeats the same unfailingly new drama of the fogset, creating new hills, new valleys, new islands from its buildings and inlets and right-angle rivers of streets. Make no mistake on account of the forty-nine square miles it occupies: San Francisco is vast. It is novel permanency. It is endless.
If I were given perhaps ten miles left to live, I think I would walk most of them in San Francisco on a foggy afternoon. You can be basking in the warmth of an August sky and, in a few blocks think you are on a cold, autumnal day somewhere back East: but it is only Outer Richmond. On a good day, this can happen at 3PM, a sort of localized gloaming that decides, block by block, where it will take place. Even in late March, the miracle repeats; you can be a mile from the ocean but feel you are at the edge of a strange and lonesome forest when it is only the Golden Gate Park. The city is like a Pangea of constantly moving neighborhood tectonic plates that sound like (and are) continents unto themselves: the Panhandle, Cow Hollow, Forest Hill, Sunset, the Castro. You know that if you take Clay from Chinatown and wester for a few hours, you will end up Presidio Heights, but how you will get there and what you will see is different each time, the fog makes it so. You may chance upon the edge of Fillmore, or you may not. The view from Alta Plaza Park may suggest strange forms of other lands, or the comforting sentinel of Sutro Tower on its perch over the city against a clear sky, or nothing beyond the limit of the homes down below, as if you are on an island in a vast ocean. Miles below the city, the continental plates churn against each other ominously and it is a movement gently echoed up above.
This is a phenomenon that exists elsewhere — New York in a rainstorm, Dubai in a sandstorm, Chicago in a snowstorm — but few other places, to my knowledge, does it happen so regularly and peacefully. In this way, though the restaurants and townhouses, churches and bars, parks and street signs grow familiar to the long-term resident, they remain constantly new. There is a Zeki’s Bar in Nob Hill, yet I am never thoroughly certain it is the same one as I approach it. Only when inside, by the fireplace, am I certain my walk went right and I made it across the shifting neighborhoods. Those moving to the city do not become owners of merely one town, but many.
This is enhanced by the fact that most of the city is still stubbornly three and four stories tall, so that the whole town can see itself no matter where you walk, assuming the fog lets it. Developers and Californian politicians have threatened to undo this low-density magic for years, but I think San Franciscans get one thing city planners do not: there is no use building affordable housing if the result is a city no one wants to move to. You must build densely — that is what makes cities great — but you must not build too densely, so that the city is more building than man.
All of this serves to make those you encounter on walks more interesting and sympathetic, fellow strangers on a strange journey. You have to be mad, slightly, to live here, for reasons obvious in the news. But there are artists here still, and writers and souls simply wanting a home no amount of money can buy. Semel insanivimus omnes — we have all at one time been mad, unsure of our path, and the first few times we walked across the city, we did not know if we would arrive. In San Franciso, you hope for the other man’s success; like most desperate men, you are eager to do so in hopes of it happening to you, too.
