Geekrant vs the Guardians of the Bay

Greetings, Geekranters!

When we're younger, life often seems simpler. Back then, everything existed in black and white rather than shades of grey, I don't think any of us imagined that life would be so full of compromise. Childhood and youth is full of the beautiful and innocent yet ultimately foolish passion of youth, we imagine that we can change the world just by wishing it. 

Then, however, the grown up world seems to crash in and our life becomes defined more by necessity than by our dreams. We seem in many cases to become creatures of compromise, a mass of contradictions. That isn't to say that our dreams can't still inspire us, drive us on or indeed come true in the end. Still we often have hard choices to make and all these things can define the landscape of our lifetimes.



San Francisco was a city that seemed to personify this observation of life's tendencies. Californian yet not endlessly sunny, eco friendly yet the second greatest area of population density in the United States. Modern yet somehow old fashioned. Monumental and instantly recognisable yet at the same time as unremarkable as a thousand city streets. A place utterly unique but in places in danger of drowning in conformity.

As I mentioned in my last blog, we had driven into San Francisco on Independence Day, coasting down out of the warm sun dappled hills and over the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge crosses the San Francisco Bay at its entrance like some modern day Colossus of Rhodes. On one side of it lies the protected bay area, sheltered by the surrounding hills from the winds, waves and other ravages the ocean can cause, on the other side, said ocean stretches ever onwards, disappearing into the hazy horizon, the endless Pacific.

After the isolated landscape of the Redwood country, a place that while very beautiful was suffused with a grand monotony, San Francisco itself was an assault on the senses. The city seemed to be everywhere at first glance, covering the hills in every direction. Here and there however patches of green poked through the concrete jungle but even then they seemed a mere accent as much a part of the city as the buildings themselves. 

Still it was beautiful, in a busy, breath-taking way, all multi coloured streets zig-zagging this way and that underneath the golden sun, the azure blue water forming a perfect backdrop to the scene shimmering like a sapphire, clear as crystal.

It looked different, of course, when the Spanish discovered it, back before great metal bridges and traffic filled streets when all was hills and sea, earth and water, land and sky. Maybe they saw beauty in it, maybe they just saw fertile land and a protected harbour, whatever the reason, they settled here and people have been drawn to this place ever since. Called by a hundred different reasons to these gently sparkling waters under the shadows of the surrounding hills. 

The prospectors came in 1849, following the steps of the Spanish and the luster of gold, carving a path across the rockies and into the history books. During the 1950s and the 1960s, the city birthed much of the counter culture that would come to define a generation within its steep streets. The city was busy, the roads chock-full of traffic, my wife, Kelly had wanted to stop on the north bank and look out at the city and its monumental gatekeeper, The Golden Gate.

Unfortunately we were onto the bridge seemingly before we knew it, swept along by the traffic towards the city that appeared out of nowhere. Its strange to think that something so famous and internationally known as the Golden Gate can in the end feel somehow ordinary. To drive over that bridge was just that, ordinary. It felt like a let-down somehow, for in the end, a bridge is still only a bridge, no matter how iconic.

On the other side of this seemingly ordinary bridge, we pulled in the Presidio, which is, it turns out, a great place to take pictures of said architectural wonder. In this modern tourists are blessed in ways that previous generations visiting this spot weren't. Until the early 1990s the Presidio was a U.S. Army base for well over a century. Now, I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure camera toting tourists were not a desirable feature of a functioning military installation and therefore probably discouraged.

Since then, however, the Presidio has become an important part of San Francisco's National Parks and Monuments. It is a National Historic Landmark, although as we saw, such hallowed status doesn't protect its buildings from the ravages of the odd graffiti tag. In that area of the Presidio we walked through the remains of underground bunkers, squat grey affairs, brutalistic mounds of concrete guarding the narrow entrance to the bay.

Here, although we could forget about the traffic, it was still busy, full of tourists and locals making the most of Independence Day, here amongst the concrete rabbit warrens that have protected the city for so long. Past the greyness however, lay a simple path and hilltop crested with trees like giant bonsai, shaped by the years of wind.

The whole place brought me back to thoughts of contradictions, the grey and the green, the man-made and the natural, peace and the machinery of war. Looking across towards the bridge, we saw seemingly the most profound contradiction of all. What had seemed so ordinary when driven across had now become something almost elemental when viewed from a short distance away.

The Golden Gate Bridge looked like a perfectly composed photograph, set against the backdrop of land and ocean, the late afternoon sun still bright and full, in that instance we had entered a singular moment of serenity and time seemed to stand still. If the first half of our journey had been defined by nature and the second half would be defined by man and his works then this was the place the two met and achieved an unlikely harmony. The perfect straight yet also sweeping lines of the bridge standing out against the hills, their outlines abstract and less distinct. A scene so artificial, a testament to man's ingenuity and power over nature, that it should have jarred the sight like one of those wind farms that my father loves to complain about, but it didn't. It fitted seamlessly into the landscape, as if it had been there since the dawn of creation. 

San Francisco, therefore greeted us as most of California had, a beautiful contradiction, complete in its opposites. A city swelled with buildings and people and yet a place many so readily associate with environmentalism and the hippies of the 1960s.

Sometimes, I think God likes to joke with us. Someone once said "Men make plans, God laughs" and I think I agree with that sentiment, for the Spanish who named this place could never imagined the delicious irony and contradiction in such a title. To name it all after Saint Francis, a rich man who gave all his money away and lived much as life as a friar in the midst of nature, was just asking for it. 

So there San Francisco sits, a city in the midst of a divine masterpiece and never looking out of place. We stood there and I wondered what St Francis would have made of the city and all its contradictions... on thinking about it, he probably would have told me just to lose myself in scene and not try to puzzle out the mystery of a perfect afternoon.

Until next time, Good bye Geekranters