High on a hill, it calls to me

Looking back almost 10 years later, I suppose what brought me to San Francisco was not terribly different from what has drawn so many people to California from the beginning: the promise of adventure, lure of wealth, ideal climate and rich natural setting, chance to start anew, impulsiveness, and a little naïveté. Without so much as a map of the city, I set off with two friends, our meager possessions piled in the trailer hitched to the Explorer, and headed West.

True, our path detoured from the historic westward trails a little as Bryan made his way across the miles from Ithaca to pick me up in Cheyenne and we proceeded to Ben's in Bozeman. But I could still feel the weight of the past across the expansive landscape, the layers of history piling up with the restless spirits of the Cheyenne and Crow, Shoshone and Nez Perce, Lewis and Clark, Jedidiah Smith and Jim Bridger, Sitting Bull, Bill Cody, wagon trains of fortune seekers and homesteaders, cowboys, railroad workers, miners, hitchhikers... all the while reading aloud the restive wanderings through another generation from Kerouac's On the Road.

We rejoined the trail traversing the vast Basin and Range of Nevada, crossing blinding salt flats and alkali alluvium shimmering in searing summer heat that proved the fiery furnaces of hell for emigrants of another era. And while our greatest hardship was the melting Skittles as we tried to conserve gas without air-conditioning, it was still a relief to come upon the sparkling waters of the Truckee River sinking into the sands at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. As we crested the great mountain range, I couldn't help but wonder what the doomed members of the Donner Party would think if they could see us 150 years later, traveling a 4-lane highway over the pass that sealed their fate and bears their name.

What was the scene of Sutter's claim to history but proved his ultimate undoing is now the palm-dotted avenues of the state capital, and beyond that the flat farmland and orchards where Okies worked their weary way out of the Dustbowl depression and armies of undocumented immigrants now toil in hope of something better. Through all that we finally crossed the Bay into Oz, coming to rest where the road ends and the rows of pastel shanties cascade over the hills, their laundry lines and rickety back stairs belying their frosted Victorian facades.

The rest, as they say, is history, as we found work and a place to live, moved on, moved up. I have seen gold nuggets in a Wells Fargo vault, worked where silver barons traded, bundled up against Mark Twain's coldest winter, hiked the trails John Muir preserved, thumbed through books where once Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg idled, gotten high in the haunts of hippies, kissed men in broad daylight, ridden out a modern cycle of boom and bust, and know that wherever I end up beyond San Francisco, I will have left my heart here indeed.