Tidings: I left my heart…Where?
Recently Kit and I celebrated our 36th anniversary by treating ourselves to a couple of days in San Francisco.
Our visit included eating, drinking, walking around taking in the sights (Fisherman”s Wharf, the Ferry Building Marketplace etc.) riding the cable car and a visit to AT&T Park to pay homage to our beloved Giants.
As we pulled out of the driveway we simultaneously mouthed our travel mantra: “Off on another excellent adventure.”
Our peaceful and quite life in beautiful Lake County is periodically punctuated by crossing from the north side of Mount Saint Helena to the south, venturing westward to the Mendocino coast with our faithful friend and companion Flash the wonder dog, to the north and east for a stop in Williams and a meal at Granzellas Deli, a flight from the Sacramento airport, or the long haul down the endless 5 to Los Angeles. This time San Francisco was the chosen “excellent adventure.”
It is a little more than 90 miles from the Hartmann Road and Highway 29 (life saving if nobody oozes) full stop sign to the western end of the almost earthquake proof Bay Bridge.
Yet as soon as we stepped out of the parking garage (at only $45 per day) adjacent to our just off Market Street hotel (cost extra if you want a toilet and shower in your room ? in Europe that”s called en suite- we realized that this adventure was not only a pleasurable getaway, it was a leap into a setting more like a science fiction fantasy of the future where the entire world”s population is crammed into a tiny peninsula separating the estuary of the Sacramento River, sometimes referred to as a Bay, and the Pacific Ocean.
Let”s start by painting the picture of an amazingly unique and beautiful city, a place that ranks among our planet”s top tourist destinations, a place that the late San Francisco columnist and bard Herb Caen called “Baghdad By The Bay.” That was long before the real Baghdad became the target of our missiles and bombs and more recently the scene of violent sectarian conflict. For Caen “Bagdad” was a city that suggested the exotic, the mysterious, the extravagant far flung beauty of the past.
First of all, forget about the parking charges, the extra for a private bathroom, the five dollar bottle of mountain spring water, and the $60, if you want the cheap one, bottle of cabernet. The place is expensive. Compared to dinner at the Lower Lake Kentucky Fried Chicken, even if you order the 28-piece original recipe bucket for 12, or slurp down a premium imported draft or two at Noble”s Saloon in Middletown, or rent a romantic room at the Linger Longer Motel, or shoot a round of miniature golf in Clearlake, everything is expensive.
We, of course, knew this. San Francisco is not a place you go to and leave your credit card at home. We won”t even see the credit card bill for another few weeks so it is not a problem to let the cash flow extreme of the place get in the way of our “excellent adventure.” Expenses are out of sight and out of mind.
The weather was great. The sun shines. The temperature is much lower than the 112 degrees we are used to (but it”s dry heat!) The food is varied and magnificent. Tall buildings rise majestically above city streets. Tremendous futuristic America”s Cup sail boats, the toys of millionaire boys, glide gracefully across and even above the surface of the water.
Fog embraces the span of the Golden Gate Bridge but allows its towers to peak through to form the signature image of the city. Cable car drivers welcome you aboard as if you were a long-lost brother or sister and then joyfully ring bells that are music to your ears and at the same time warn pedestrians trying to get from one side of Powell Street to the other alive. It is no wonder that the place attracts visitors from all over the world. In some ways San Francisco seems like a Utopia.
So much for the travel plug. Let”s get to the science fiction fantasy. Futuristic fiction in the form of film or novels predicts elements of a Utopia that fail and result in the opposite, a dystopia. Orwell”s 1984, for example, tells of an orderly society ? that”s good. When all is said and done, however, Big Brother deprives everyone of privacy and liberty ? that”s bad. In contrast to straightforward fictional displays of the good the bad and the ugly, however, San Francisco cannot be understood as any of these in particular. The city is a complex mixture of Utopian promise blemished by scars of danger, discomfort, and hardship.
The traffic is right out of a scene from Steve McQueen”s wild drive down crooked Lombard Street in the movie “Bullit.” The difference is that McQueen”s car was by itself. Now there are thousands and thousands of cars, bumper-to-bumper racing up one hill and down the other, at times oblivious to other autos and the crowds of pedestrians trying to make their way from point A to point B.
The taxi driver who got us from the ballpark back to our hotel commented that some of these drivers will only correct their dangerous habits when we use violence. Kit advised him to be careful of road rage. The driver responded with “Yeah, road rage … It”s a good thing!”
As we walked along the streets, the density of humanity was extreme. It was wall to wall people moving shoulder-to-shoulder, toe to heel, in every direction. Now, I like people and do not balk at being part of a crowd, but this was a bit over the top. At times I thought that the purpose of the traffic chaotic untamed parade was to thin out, or at lest scatter, the crowd.
Finally, in the midst of expensive hotels, restaurants, parking garages, and men and women dressed in executive black proceeding to meetings where profit and wealth accumulation strategies will be developed there are the homeless silent sidewalk sitters who are symbols, if not demonstrations, of hopelessness submersed in an environment of affluence.
Now it was time to get in our car and punch the GPS “where to” prompt to indicate “go home.” Images of Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” clicking the heels of her magical red shoes crossed my mind.
We drove eastward and north, retracing our way back along the “yellow brick road” into the beautiful verdant valley of wine grapes.
We punctuated our journey with what has become mandatory transitional stops at the Napa Trader Joe”s and the St. Helena Model Bakery. Then it was home, for Kit to resume her passion for writing mystery novels, she has already published nine, and for me to pursue the chores and the joys of my dual-existence as a ranch inhabitant and an academic.
We were happy to be home and that is what makes every adventure an excellent one. Dorothy was right. There is indeed “No place like home.”
Stephen Sloane is a Lake County resident, a retired Naval Officer and a Professor at Saint Mary”s College of California. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and has earned a Ph.D at the University of California, Berkeley. Reach him at cowboy91671@gmail.com.
