San Francisco's dream landscape has never disappeared

T H I S+W E E K Forbidden island: Travel to Cuba By Don George, Editor Cuba libre! By Mark Schapiro A hot art scene brings the world to Havana's door -A gallery of images -Books on Cuba Irish idyll By Patric Kuh Savoring Ireland's greatest hotels D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Your own sitcom, with curry >Postmark San Francisco: The borrowed city By Gary Kamiya -Books on San Francisco Passages: "Paris in Pink" An affair in Paris By Katya Macklovich Readers' Tips and Tales Philadelphia: Weirdness Capital of America? A letter to the Editor An Uzbek responds - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Saturday, May 24 Praise the Titanic! By Doug Cruickshank Eighty-five years later, they're still going down with the ship A full list of all Wanderlust articles

BY GARY KAMIYA | i sometimes like to imagine, as I walk around San Francisco, what the land looked like before the city existed. There would have been a little grove of pine trees here, I think as I stroll up Clay Street. A few scattered boulders right there, an animal trail running worn and brown through the scraggly yellow foxtails. At the head of dead-end Priest Street, on the very top of Nob Hill, just a few years ago there was a small open space, an oasis in the desert of civilization. A luxury building now stands on the spot, but the earth under my feet is still smiling. Fifty feet down the hill, in a dell watered by an underground spring, there is a companionable group of coast redwoods standing next to the cable car barn; they stood there 300 years ago. Wind, muted potent light, drifting fingers of fog. And through this dream landscape move real people, all of them now long vanished: Ohlone men and women, calling to each other or walking in silence, climbing up this little hill from their summer camp by the cattail-fringed, wave-lapped waterfront for no reason at all, just to look, their eyes finally drawn north, like millions of eyes after theirs, to the narrow place in the hills where the bay runs into the ocean. The Golden Gate is lost in its own legend now, crowded with the worn-out dreams that pile up like driftwood at continent's end, and sometimes it's hard to see the place beneath the postcard. But geography has its own magic, and nothing that man can do can break its spell. There are places that eyes have caressed so many times they have become smooth, like the stone figure a thousand years of pilgrims have touched in the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. San Francisco is filled with them. Living here, you learn to look over your shoulder, because you might see something astounding, like a solid bank of snowy air falling in slow motion over a thousand-foot hill. The dream landscape of San Francisco, the land as it once was and no doubt will one day be again after our minor lovely human visitation is gone, has never really disappeared. That's because, more than any other city I know, San Francisco seems only to have been borrowed from the sea and the land, its teetering peninsula propped up deliciously, like a tower of champagne cocktails at a B-girl's birthday bash, on a cracked, second-best continental plate. As you drive into the city from Treasure Island, the soaring towers and the curving lights on the bridge give it a glorious, Valhalla-like aspect -- until the wind changes and the toy towers are eaten by fog blowing in from the unknown West, out there past the last houses where the sea goes on for 5,000 cold, slapping miles. This sense of a waiting primordial power, of bare bones half-visible in the earth, cuts through the city's prettiness and makes it beautiful. There is a wildness still hanging around the town that can no more be controlled than the swells rolling in at dawn off the Pacific, glinting the color of old green beach glass when the sun hits them. This natural wildness may have something to do with the historical nostalgia to which San Franciscans are addicted (and which seems to have begun almost before the annus mirabilis 1849 ended). For the power of place obliterates everything, including time: When the fog is in, or even when the sun hits the Ferry Building at the right angle, that endless, intricately plotted '40s movie starts again, men in fedoras eternally climbing into cabs in the neon-illuminated dusk. It's hard not to drift back into the past when the present keeps getting carried away by the view. It's a good thing we have those views, too, because every square inch of the city is rapidly becoming as thoroughly and minutely covered with hard, synthetic substances as Anytown, U.S.A. (a place of almost Biblical horror). I have always collected urban oases, forgotten little patches of dirt and rock in the heart of the city. For 35 years I have watched them disappear, one by one. My favorites are the most surreal ones: the twisted rocky outcropping behind a white fence right on the Powell Street cable car line, the wild seething bank of strange weeds 20 feet thick off the secret community garden behind the wooden wall on Mason Street, the weird house in Bernal Heights whose ground-floor "window" -- covered by a sheet of plastic siding -- doesn't quite conceal an enormous rock. I treasure these places because of their dissonance: They are a no-man's-land where artificiality and nature meet, and the outcome is as weirdly wonderful as a de Chirico painting. (Vacant lots are very heroic-modernist.) Just as Central Park would be nothing special without the glorious, vaguely terrifying towers of Manhattan that loom up over it (which I can never see without recalling that hero in a Balzac novel who vows "I'll suck the honey from you!" as he stares greedily down at the lights of Paris), so these domesticated pieces of nature are poignant only because of the old tires and bits of anonymous metal that surround them. There is precious little room for anonymous metal in San Francisco, where every million-dollar square inch is under the electronic control of the Trilateral Commission. But what can you do? Living in a city already beautifully half-overwhelmed by nature, by its ragged, glorious sense of place, it may be a bit too much to demand that the city also be blessed with its own second-order nature, i.e. junk. San Francisco is gradually becoming a schizophrenic place, a minutely worked-over, frilly, cute, absurdly expensive, artificial paradise set, like some weird Bottle City of Post-Yuppie Kandor, in a churning tide pool at the edge of an unpredictable sea. Some of this "progress" really is progress, of course -- like the long, elegantly-executed promenade that sweeps along past the Bay Bridge, opening up the eastern waterfront. But a lot of it isn't. The most egregious example is Pier 39, a tacky Olde Waterfronte Developmente sitting like a giant Bermuda shorts magnet at the end of Stockton Street. But Pier 39 (which really is getting olde) can be forgiven because it is a tourist trap, and tourist traps somehow acquire an instant kitsch that only the heartless would disparage. Worse are the franchises that have profaned the faded flesh and spirit temples of North Beach (Carl's Jr. smirking at City Lights), the relentless invasion of blonde-wood restaurants, the loutish leer of sports bars, with their formulaic patrons. They were going to die anyway, but it's still painful to observe the simultaneous demise of the old Italian holes-in-the-wall, the Portofino and the Caffe Italia. Money is everywhere, and with the big bucks comes a certain tedious sameness. At least the triumphalist stockbrokers who so nauseatingly invaded the city in the waning years of the Reagan presidency (wearing their ties utterly without shame in hipster bars) have been beaten back by our latest lemmings -- new-media nerds with their Auschwitz dos, single earrings, black turtlenecks and general air of aimless high-I.Q. spraying. This is good. New media central is South Park, once an elegant 19th century residential oval tucked in next to a hill that was lopped off to support the Bay Bridge. In the '70s, it was home to old bums who guzzled Night Train over fires in garbage cans. Today the boys and girls sit on the grass oval like cyberpigeons. As these butterflies flit about, the currents still make shadows in the bay and the sunset gilds Sutter Street like a warm-up for Judgment Day. The survival rituals of life here involve looking up in a certain way, so that you can see the city and the world at the same time. The tilting hills help. San Francisco's beloved poet George Sterling caught the prevailing feeling when he wrote the words that WPA artist Lucien Labaudt inscribed over his painted south portal in the old Beach Chalet: "At the end of our streets, the stars." It was under those stars that I last felt the ghosts of the Ohlone. It was the night after the '89 earthquake. The power was gone and Nob Hill and Russian Hill were blacked out. As I stood at the corner of Washington and Jones and looked down into the dark city, the tangy smell of wood smoke drifted up from the northern waterfront. The smoke was from the buildings that had burned in the Marina, from the fires that had destroyed lives and dreams. But all I could think of was campfires, and the people who had lived here so long ago, when the hills had no names. Staring into the unfamiliar darkness, for a moment it all went away, everything that we had done. And when the city came back it fit, it was right, like a pine tree on top of a little hill, or a good chord on an old guitar. June 3, 1997 Interested in visiting the city by the bay? Check out Wanderlust Marketplace's excellent coverage of the San Francisco Bay area.

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