January 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Dec   Feb


Blog-Parents

RaptorMagic

Orcinus

Blog-Brothers

Callimachus
(Done with Mirrors)

Gelmo
(Statistical blah blah blah)

Other Blogs I Read
Regularly Often

Athletics Nation

Andrew Sullivan
(Daily Dish)

Kevin Drum
(Political Animal)

Hilzoy
(Obsidian Wings)

 Sunday, January 18, 2009
Travelblogging: San Francisco

[I wrote most of this last month on my trip. Tonight I'm resuscitating it and filling in some gaps.]

As most of you know, every December I drive from Seattle down to the SF Bay Area to rejoin a Christmas caroling agency I've been working with since I was a bohemian living in Oakland. On this year's trip down, I realized that my three favorite rest stops along I-5 all feature rivers. They are the Santiam stop in northern Oregon (a bit run-down now, compared to past years, but it still charms me), the Rogue River one in southern Oregon, and of course the fabulous Jack E Collier stop, somewhere near the Oregon-California border. The latter, on the Klamath River, is extravagant. By highway rest stop standards it's huge, and it's beautifully manicured like a golf course. I could happily spend all day there. If you're ever traveling on I-5 and you know you're going to want to take a long rest stop somewhere, it's worth planning it to coincide with the Collier.

One of the big differences between the Puget Sound area and the San Francisco Bay area is that the former has lots of rivers and creeks while the latter is noticeably deficient. On the flip side, the Bay Area abounds in places where you can drive up into the hills and look down over the city. On this trip I've already been on Grizzly Peak Road in the Berkeley/Oakland hills and up Twin Peaks in San Francisco (which has the rather large disadvantage of being heavily populated, offset by the advantage of having a public toilet). I keep meaning to go up Mt Diablo, but every time I've been nearby (one of our regular gigs is a country club right near the entrance) it's been covered with clouds. If the Seattle area has any such hill overlook spots, I'm not aware of them.

[I did manage a brief visit to Mt Diablo between gigs on the day before I left, but I didn't make it all the way to the top due to an ice-related road closure.]

I'm writing this at a picnic table in Huddart Park, a surprisingly large and well-equipped county park (pleasant enough that I was inspired to pay the unenforced $5 self-entry fee just to sit here for about a half an hour) in the hills east of Palo Alto. Off to my right I can see for several miles across a forested valley and to the next row of hills about five miles distant. I think there's a creek down there, but I didn't hike far enough to see it.

My agent has been pretty successful in filling my days with bookings. For most of this week I've had one in the morning and one in the evening, leaving me with a few hours in the middle of the day, more than enough time to get to the next gig but not enough time to warrant going "home" between. Yesterday and today I've been down on the Peninsula, so I drive out to explore winding back roads in the hills out here. It's lovely here, with lots of greenery and yes, even some creeks. If all of the Bay Area were like this, and if it were like this year round, I might have stayed in the Bay Area rather than moving north. But it isn't and it isn't, so I didn't.

Many friends have remarked on the irony that the part of the Bay Area I feel the greatest personal connection to is Oakland, and yet the part of the Bay Area which is more pleasing to my topographical and meteorological tastes is here on the west side of the Bay. Geographically, the Pacific Northwest is what I love, and if some segments of the Bay Area do resemble the Pacific Northwest, it's still not the real thing. My real connection to the Bay Area is the people and the community, so I naturally feel more attached to the area which I think of as my home community, and that is Oakland. I think I like the aura of being the neglected second city. The arrogant pomposity and worldly pretention of San Francisco's central culture irks me. The dense urban living is charming to observe but I wouldn't want to live in it. (I am, in fact, living in it right now. And while my host is charmingly gracious and his home is an excellent place to stay, driving back into the city and finding somewhere to park every night is, well, distasteful.)

San Francisco was listed as number 91 in the famous-for-15-minutes blog Stuff White People Like. When they reached 100, I surveyed the complete list and made note of how many things on the list I liked. For good measure, I took my best guess at a similar list for my wife. Of course I know that the "white people" in the title isn't to be taken too literally, but it was still amusing, given that I'm half white and she isn't white at all. I was surprised by how few things on the list we like. For myself I came up with only six, including two that I emphatically like (64, 55, 43, 8; and 7 and 99). For her, I came up with 11 with three emphatics, but she might score it differently.

The blog's short post on #7, diversity, focuses mostly on restaurants. I don't much care about restaurants, but I do love ethnic diversity. I love it for just the sort of reasons that SWPL would parody (and indeed, which I myself intend to poke a little fun at tomorrow in the racial identity post that was embargoed for Martin Luther King Day). It just gives me joy to look around and see people in lots of different shapes and colors.

I was reminded of this early in my visit to San Francisco last month, particularly in contrast to my October road trip to Idaho and Montana. During the California trip I stayed in two different homes in San Francisco. For the first few days I was in a neighborhood called Bernal Heights. Although there was a little corner market practically next door, I preferred to visit the Safeway that was just a short walk down the hill. (In San Francisco, many things are only a short walk away, and usually up or down a hill.) This particular walk takes you into the adjacent neighborhood, which is the Upper Mission — or perhaps it's the Lower Mission, I'm not sure. I mean the one that's further south, but I think it's opposite of the location on a map where north is up and south is down, sort of like the Upper and Lower Nile.

That Safeway, in that neighborhood, provided the most astounding array of ethnic diversity I've ever experienced. We typically think of races as white, black, Asian, and Hispanic, but here there was every subvariation imaginable: whites ranging from pale white to rosy pink; every shade of black; copious variety of Asians and Hispanics, including many unrecognizable; and all sorts of hybrids to boot — all wearing their various mysterious costumes and speaking their various mysterious languages. I visited that Safeway three times during my stay, and in spite of the fact that it was a scruffy, crowded, and inconvenient little store, I must say I always reveled in the diversity.

Postscript: You may have noticed the change in temporal perspective. Right after all the Stuff White People Like links is where I stopped at Huddart Park. I knew where I was going with it, though, so I finished it up now.

Of course I'm aware of the paradox: I don't love the city, but I do love its diversity. I wonder if perhaps my real problem with San Francisco is not its alleged smug attitude (which perhaps I exaggerate) but simply the urban density. The older I get, the more I realize I'm just not a city person. I don't require the country, or even the suburbs. I'm fine with the sort of outer-city residential zone like I had in Rockridge (Oakland) or here in Shoreline. But the city center, where the buildings are right up against each other and the streets and sidewalks are both constantly full. That's just yuck.

Up above, where I noted that the daily ordeal of driving back to San Francisco every night was "distasteful", I was being diplomatic. In fact, it drove me absolutely crazy. It's a big part of reason I was in such a hurry to get the hell out of town immediately after my last gig (which in turn may have caused me to be less cautious about my sputtering car than I should have been, and thus led me to drive it to death rather than immediately stop at the first sign of overheating). I hate the density, hate the tiny streets, hate the billions of pedestrians, hate the big bildings and no trees.

Bernal Heights wasn't too bad, though it's still much too crowded for my taste. The second place I stayed was in the Castro, which was just was awful. The location, I mean, not the house. The house was fine, and my host was a sweetheart. As long as I was inside I was content, but getting in and out was hellish. If I had been visiting as tourist, if I had flown in, had no car, and was relying on public transportation for my recreational touring, it might have been fine. But for working every day and needing to live out of my car it was the worst. Especially the parking: 15 minutes of searching every night, trying to keep track of all the signs and rules about street sweeping and construction zones, and then schlepping my full day's worth of gear back and forth over however many blocks away I ended up that night. What a horrible horrible way to set your mood at the end of the day.

But it's not just parking. Just living in the city drains the life out of me. I only stayed in the Castro for six days, but by the end of it I could barely take it any longer. Next year if that's my only option as a place to stay, that may be enough to make me finally call it quits on my caroling gig. I'll be happy to go downtown once or twice if a gig takes me there, or to pay a friendly visit to D, but I don't think I could bear to stay there.

Postscript 2: This post began with a discussion of rivers. On my drive back home, which was delayed first by snow and then by potential flooding from the snowmelt, all the rivers I saw were the fullest I've ever seen them. Since I came back by way of Arcata, I missed the Rogue River and Klamath River stops on I-5. I did cross the Klamath near its mouth just north of Arcata, but you can't get a good look at it from the bridge and I didn't stop to explore any further.

That route takes me along Hwy 199 from Crescent City, Calif, to Grants Pass, Oregon. That highway follows the Smith River up its middle fork. If I had to guess I'd say that my favorite river in California is the Klamath, even though I don't often get to see much of it. If there's a rival for that distinction, it would have to be the Smith. The Smith River is beautiful in any season, but in full flood last month it was magnificent. That morning I took a brief stop at the Jedediah State Park campground and sat there for a few minutes staring at the river (complete will little waterfalls cascading down the mountains on the opposite bank). It was so beautiful, I would have loved to stay for hours, but I knew I didn't have the time to spare if I was to get home that night, so I had to go on.

Later that afternoon I stopped at the Santiam rest stop and ate my sandwich. The Santiam was also looking very handsome, in its strong and silent way. The little road that crosses under the freeway to the rest stop on the southbound side was closed to auto traffic, presumably as a precaution against flooding, but I took a short walk down there and stood by the bank under the bridge for a few minutes. The Santiam is a deceptive river there. Normally it looks like a placid little country stream. The ground seems level and there's no real rapids to be seen, but it's deeper than it looks and it moves very fast. This time it was filled to the brim, and though you wouldn't know it from a quick glance, it was moving in full force.

The Umpqua and Willamette were full, too, but they just looked fat, muddy and brown to me. The sun went down as I was stuck in rush hour in Portland suburbs, so I didn't see any more rivers after that.

11:20:01 PM  [permalink]  comment []