Footoloose and Fancy-Free

During my first year in the City, just out of college and unsuccessfully looking for a real job in the real world, I held down a temporary position at a career center, successfully helping other people find real jobs. It was a pretty good gig, ironies aside, and the fact that it was only 4 days a week was, in retrospect, one of the best things about it. Instead of spending that extra day delving deeper into my own jobsearch or volunteering for some great cause, I often used that Friday to explore my new home.

I was operating under the long-held assumption that I was just a temporary resident of San Francisco, one of the many transients stopping off for a wonderful while before getting on the road for the rest of my journey, so I set out to discover everything I could before moving on. I would pack a lunch, a bottle of water, and my bus map into my backpack and set off, exploring the neighborhoods on foot, climbing up hills to the myriad wind-blown parks, poking my head into obscure public spaces like rooftop gardens and cavernous churches, visiting museums and mausoleums, walking the length of all the public beaches, riding hotel elevators to the tops floors, clambering over dangerous cliffs and eroding bluffs to hidden coves.

Somewhere along the line I stopped doing all that, whether because I began taking my surroundings for granted as I finally came to see myself as a long-term resident, or because steady employment brought about a less-spontaneous routine of working for the weekends, only to have the weekends filled with chores. Anymore, six months or worse can go by without me traveling the 7 miles across town to Ocean Beach or setting foot in Golden Gate Park.

Recalling those adventurous days and feeling the need to combat the aggro knot of asperity that's been twisting tighter lately, I decided this morning that it was high time I throw a sandwich and bottle of water in my backpack and head west to see where I ended up.

Where I ended up was as far west as you can get in San Francisco: the Cliff House, overlooking Ocean Beach and the steel grey Pacific. Once an elegant Victorian masterpiece (before burning down several times) it's now a blocky concrete gift shop and restaurant piled atop the bluffs above the Seal Rocks. Dropping down on the north side, I spent some time poking around the ruins of the Sutro Baths, another feat of Victorian hubris that was once the world's largest indoor swimming facility. Before burning to the ground it contained 7 pools of varying temperatures and salinity, an ice rink, a concert hall and had a capacity for 25,000.

I continued around the perimeter of the City, walking the trails that cut through Land's End, hugging the slumping slopes and precarious windswept bluffs beneath the Legion of Honor and ending in the upscale Sea Cliff neighborhood. I kept walking past Baker Beach and onto new trails (my donations put to excellent use by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy) that now lead down to Marshall's Beach. Once only accessible at low tide from Baker Beach, or via a perilous scramble down slippery serpentine boulders weathering into green clay, this scenic stretch of sand sits in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge and, despite its new accessibility and the incessant frigid gale, still seems to be favored by naked people.

I ate my sandwich on a rock facing the surf and lingered for a while, marveling at the fact that some 3/4 million people were buzzing about just beyond the cliffs at my back while I enjoyed near perfect solitude. After a time, I resumed my walk cresting the bluffs and rounding the bend to the Bridge and the whir of transport and tourist activity. I admired the view, as I always do, before following the calla lily and nasturtium-flanked trail dropping down to Chrissy Field with its familiar joggers, tidal lagoon, and exhausted canines.

Eventually I made it back to the apartment, having successfully ignored the naked people and tourists while indulging my nostalgia and regaining a hint of that old wonder and joy at a place that, 11 years on, still hasn't grown old.

My aching feet aside (10-ish miles!), I feel much more relaxed now.