Geekrant vs The Wharf that never sleeps.

Greetings Geekranters!

Welcome to another exciting installment of my peculiar sojourn through life in the United States of America, or The Colonies as we British say when we’re trying to be superior and spoiling for a fight. This is, of course, a wildly inaccurate description of the present day United States, as the vast majority of the modern day states were never Crown Colonies. 

There were, in fact, only thirteen original colonies who fought in the War of Independence against the British (a conflict now more often known as The American Revolution), they sat then, and still sit now, on the eastern seaboard of the continent. They, without a doubt, are some of the most famous states in the whole country: Pennsylvania, founded by Quakers out of a desire for religious tolerance, Virginia, founded by rich Episcopalians looking for a “fast buck” in the New World, New York, home to a soon bustling metropolis that shared its name.  

Still, so much of the land was initially claimed by the French or the Spanish; Wisconsin, where I live, falling roughly in the territory of “New France”. The state we spent the majority of our holiday/vacation in, was also never a British colony, it belonged to the empire of Spain. And they gave it a truly magical name. 

Each of the names of the individual states was chosen, either out of respect for the native American history of the land, or from the history of Europe that the settlers brought with them. Some are practical, like New York or New Jersey (merely the new version of an older place), others are practical names disguised as something posher (Pennsylvania, founded by a man named William Penn, means “the land of Penn’s Woods” in Latin.), others still are Native American names describing the nature of the state in question (Minnesota and Wisconsin’s seem to refer to Native American opinions about the quality of the water in said states.).

One state’s name though is truly mythical. California was named for an island in a medieval Spanish novel. From its very establishment, there has always been some otherworldly about California.  It is truly a fantastical place. A land full of the myths and legends of this modern world. A fairytale kingdom on the edge of reality and the American continent, that would take a lifetime to understand and a millennia to experience all that it has to offer. That’s very impressive for a state whose development didn’t really start until the San Francisco Gold Rush of 1849. 

California also felt to me like a state of two worlds, the northern portion, still, majestic, serene, defined by nature and the wild tides of the sea crashing on lonely communities which hug the coastline and face the winds alone. The Southern part is a different story, it may have been a quiet place once, but that was before the prospectors came and the Gold Rush started.

As I walked the streets of San Francisco, the day after Independence Day, all hot and bothered, in the middle of a crowd of people, I realised that this was a different sort of California to that which we had previously seen. I also found myself asking the question, “Did the Gold Rush ever truly end or did it just become a quest for something else?”

San Francisco was as busy as any place I had ever seen in my life. I think before visiting the city that I had some quaint romantic notion that it wasn’t that busy. That a place that had spawned the Summer of Love, Full House, Ironside and the West Coast offense in the NFL, couldn’t truly be that busy. I erroneously believed that everything would be chilled and laid back. It wasn’t.

The city does have a charm all of its own. Its hilly streets, while obviously using the American block layout in most places, feel tight and winding, like some medieval mountain city in Italy or Spain. Only urban and not so ruined. It is truly an iconic place to visit. It also seemed nearly impossible for us to find a parking space, to go to any of the landmarks without being mobbed by a gang of people and getting a seat for lunch took us 45 minutes… at a fast food restaurant. 

Now it has to be noted that we had arrived there on Independence Day and last year, July 4^th had fallen on a Wednesday, I believe, and so, many people were making the most of the national holiday and taking the end of the week off. We had probably come to the city on the worst possible day for traffic, of both the automobile and foot kinds. 

We did love our time in San Francisco and its interesting to be in a place that you’ve seen so much of on television and in movies and then finally visit to see its reality. Still, it was a shock, after nearly 4 days of driving through and experiencing Northern California’s peaceful greenery, to be confronted by San Francisco’s humming streets. This was definitely a different California to the one we’d previously seen. 

That afternoon, we headed to Fisherman’s Wharf, which has to be one of San Francisco’s most well known attractions both to tourists and apparently locals as well. I found it a strange place but I’ve found that much of the American cities that I’ve been to can seem strange to the non initiated. 

When I look at my life growing up in the UK and the places that I visited, every single town that I ever saw seemed to know exactly what it was, and what it had been and seemed to have a pretty good guess about what its going to be in the future. Maybe its the age of the country and the age of the towns, I’m not sure. America is different though, it almost seems like so much of the land is still trying to define who it is and what it is. 

Fisherman’s Wharf had this feeling in spades. On first glance it looked like what it had once been, an area originally used for fishing. Somewhat self explanatory, given its name, however as I looked closer, I realised it was so much more than that. The place was a tourist mecca, much of the old piers and wharfs filled with high end shops and restaurants galore. 








Parts of it didn’t look real somehow, the piers stretching out into the bay like an ever advancing frontline of concession stands and restaurants in a war against authenticity. Disney World by the Pacific. A world of fantasy. History coopted for the world of today. We bought chocolate and sweets in a massive sweetshop and saw a guy balance saws on fifteen tables in front of a passing crowd.

The real working port still appeared from time to time, there were still boats in the bay and the seafood sold there was indeed fresh. Still it seemed difficult to get to the heart of what this place once was, let alone what it was going to be.

We struggled that day in San Francisco, after days of winding our way through a place that is still, in many ways, a frontier kind of culture, it was a shock. Everywhere we went, it seemed, were crowds. The quiet serenity of the redwood forests and the untamed wildness of the Pacific Ocean crashing on the rocks, were replaced by a huge mass of people herding themselves from one place to another, desperate to get hold of a piece of this City of the Gold Rush. 

It was hot and sunny, which apparently was unusual for that time of year and after so much stillness, it was enough to make you run for the hills, literally. It might merely have been that it was so close to Independence Day but it seemed that the city piers would sink into the sea with the sheer weight of all the tourists.

We tried to take a trolley car ride, it was a two hour wait they said, as the queue stretched round and round the waiting area and down the street. So we had our caricature drawn by a street side artist and headed back to the car. In all, the only still place I found in the entire day was when we ducked into a museum dedicated to San Francisco’s maritime history, while looking for a bathroom. 

No-one was there, the endless hubbub of the torrent of tourists cutting off abruptly as it we stepped through the door. It was a pity we hadn’t found the place earlier because I would have liked to look around. Here, it turned out, was the history so obviously missing from the commercialised roadways outside. This was the San Francisco that Jack London would have known and Mark Twain also. This seemed to show the reality of the bay’s history but it seemed left behind and ignored, next to little key-rings of prisoners in stripes trying to escape from Alcatraz or bags with the California flag on them.

San Francisco was wonderful, but it left me feeling incomplete, asking unanswered questions, looking, at least in that area of the city for something or anything real and finding genuine experience to be in short supply.

California is a land of two parts, it seemed. One, sparsely populated and filled with nature’s giants, seemingly unconcerned with anyone’s opinion of it. The second, endlessly busy, endlessly on the go, but made of plastic and dreams. A land seemingly created just to please people who have fallen in love with California through music or films. Defined by everyone’s opinion of it. .

In the final analysis, the Gold Rush never seems to have gone away, it just became a quest for the perfect place to be. I’m not sure that there is such a place on Earth, however California lives up to the spirit of its name and seems  determined to prove me wrong.

Good Bye Geekranters!