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Dude gave me his name, but I didn’t ask his permission to share, so I’ll tell you that dude’s name is “Noah.” Noah’s hitched rides from Shasta County to the San Mateo County coast. He has no specific destination. New Mexico, ultimately, then back home.
“Lightning Fields, New Mexico,” I suggested. Noah hadn’t heard about Lightning Fields. I told him about Just John, riding a tricycle, heading south a couple of years ago, and that his plan was to reach the southern end of the Coast Road, then turn east to New Mexico, bound for the Lightning Fields.
“An electrical dude,” observed Noah. “I’ve been reading about Tesla and his inventions.”
Noah’s traveling south, dependent on hitchhiking to reach the next destination. “Riding a bike would be better,” says Noah after I tell him about Just John riding his tricycle. “More independence, travel at one’s own pace, stop wherever and whenever, and, more room to pack more supplies.”
Noah’s belongings fit within a modest-sized backpack, larger than what we slung across our backs when in school, but smaller than an expedition backpack, which may be more suitable for Noah’s coastal trek. A black canvas shoulder bag holds items requiring frequent use, such as Noah’s bullet-shaped, stainless steel thermos.
Noah’s tanned skin from the past couple weeks of unseasonably warm temperatures contrast to this week’s winter weather of snow at 1,000 foot elevations and hail storms at sea level. After a long rainy hitch that brought him through Marin County and across the Golden Gate, and a complicated navigation through the drizzly city, Noah got a ride from San Francisco, through Pacifica, around Devil’s Slide, then down the coast and up to Apple Jacks in La Honda. “I’ve enjoyed two good woodstove fires and really good music in the past 24 hours.”
Atop Noah’s long, brown, sun-kissed curls, sits a green felt hat, with a stubby brim, adequate-enough to provide sun and rain protection. Noah’s summer-weight, black pin-striped suit is layered underneath by a red tee, and a green wool v-neck sweater, topped by two thick scarves. Birkenstocks on Noah’s sockless feet display signs of wear at the heels.
Next stop Santa Cruz, then maybe Monterey, unless Noah hitches straight into the Sur.
Keep an eye to the Coast Road for “Noah,” and, if you’re headed to the next town south, maybe offer him a lift.
A book read from cover to cover is a rare read. Front cover text, Publisher, Glorious Cover Image, Inside Flaps (About the Book and About the Author), the Copyright page, and the Acknowledgments. Included in this pleasure, an enjoyable Introduction, before, finally, settling upon the text.
The Place That Inhabits Us is that kind of rare read. The Place That Inhabits Us is a book of Poems of the San Francisco Watershed. “From the granite slopes of the Sierra to the Delta, through the Coastal Range to the bay and shores of the Pacific, one hundred poems map this improbable region, a cultural crossroads where East meets West.” The Place That Inhabits Us is a Sixteen Rivers Press book. Sixteen Rivers Press lists 24 other books of poetry published in the past 12 years of the publishing house’s existence.
The cover is a woodcut image, “Golden Gate (& Mt. Tamalpais) from Grizzly Peak” by Tom Killion. Regard that beautiful cover. Fine detail and a presence of fading daylight. The perennial fogbank waits patient at the Gate.
The Forward to The Place That Inhabits Us, written by Robert Hass, the United States’ Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, introduces the reader to this fine anthology with a plausible glimpse into California’s prehistory. “The first thing they (California’s earliest citizens) seem to have done is hunt to extinction the megafauna that brought them here, as they tracked herds across the Aleutian land bridge.” The second thing these ancestors did, according to Hass, “is make trails. Probably they followed along rivers and streams as they drained into lakes and wetlands and coastal beaches.”
Along the edges of water sources were paths. Water creates gullies, breaches in the sediment, yet, along the shoreline, within the mean tide line, is the space in which people traveled.
“These humans had already had speech for at least ten millennia. They arrived here just about the time when written languages were beginning to appear in Sumner and Egypt. And they came – in what must have been the successive waves of immigrants who peopled the Americas – speaking many languages, languages as distinct from one another as Hungarian and Chinese. For reasons that are still unclear, more different peoples speaking distinctly different languages settled in California than in all the rest of continental North America combined. Of the nearly 300 languages described by Europeans as they advanced across the continent, nearly eighty were spoken in the watersheds of Northern California.”
We do not know the names of our earliest authors who told the story of Coyote, Turtle, and Rattlesnake. We do know the names of those Calibornia boys who chorused, “I wish they all could be California girls.” After Robert Hass’ Introduction to The Place That Inhabits Us, we meet the 100 authors of the poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. I will share one here, I would like to share at least a dozen. Buy the book to enjoy the other fine poems published in this wonderful watershed anthology.
from An Atlas of the Difficult World
Adrienne Rich
Within two miles of the Pacific rounding
this long bay, sheening the light for miles
inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over
strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind
returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with
ever-changing words, always the same language
-there is where I live now. If you had known me
once, you’d still know me now though in a different
light and life. There is no place you ever knew me.
But it would not surprise you
to find me here, walking in the fog, the sweep of the great ocean
eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always
I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth. What I love here
is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks
small canyons running through pitched hillsides
liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading
to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle
on their blond hills. I drive inland over roads
closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons
roads that crawl down into darkness and wind into light
where trucks have crashed and riders of horses tangled
to death with lowstruck boughs. These are not roads
you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching
for life and death, is the same.
Well, I live on a ridgetop
And, Lord knows, I like it just fine
Where it’s windy and foggy
And quiet most all the time
Yeah, my lawn is pine needles
And my driveway is old funky dirt
And my front pathway markers
Are pieces of granite and chert
Now, my taxes are high
But I don’t believe it’s a sin
I’ve got hundred foot pine trees
That just love to dance in the wind
And a yard full of bushes
That turn into pies in July
Between blue jays and hoot owls
I’ve got twenty-four hour singing sky
Now, when I built my house
I cut six trees to clear out the land
But there’s thirty or more left
And you know that they’re gonna stand
It’s a squirrel sanctuary
They think this woods is their home
And as long as I’m here
I’ll make sure people leave us all alone
Yes, the hill that I live on is steep
And the road’s full of ruts
And the people who live in the flatlands
Think we folks are nuts
But the ruts in my road and the curves
Keep the tourists at bay
And it’s lonesome and peaceful
And you know I like it that way
Now, I work in the city
I think my job is a gas
And I know it’s good for me
To travel and get off my ass
The very best parts of each trip
Is the Golden Gate Bridge
And the road like a snake
That will lead me back home to my ridge
Ah, I live on a ridgetop
Yes, I live on a ridgetop
And I like it
And I like it . . .
I like this high life
Jesse’s website.
Louise Nelson Dyble‘s recently published Paying The Toll – Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge is a rich compendium of Golden Gate Bridge history.
So rich in the amount of information, that I’ve held off mentioning this book as a blog post because I figured all of you have been on summer vacation and are too busy reading your sci-fi and romance novels. Now that it’s Back-to-School time of year, it’s time to return to serious reading. Make room for this one in your book queue.
Published by the University of Pennsylvania press, “…this is the story of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, the government agency that grew into an empire in the shadow of the bridge.”
Louise writes in her introduction, “Agency Run Amok,” “Many San Francisco Bay Area residents expected that bridge tolls would finally be eliminated and the bridge incorporated into the state highway system, as campaign publicity promoting the bonds suggested in 1930.”
Today’s toll to cross southbound on the Golden Gate Bridge is $6 cash and $5 FasTrak. For comparison, the Bay Bridge toll is currently $4, whether that be cash or FasTrak. (The Bay Bridge carries 270,000 vehicles a day, on average, while the Golden Gate Bridge reports 110,000.)
May 27th is the Anniversary Date for our beloved Golden Gate Bridge. May 28th, 1937 was the first day for automobile traffic to drive across. Never, well, perhaps the Brooklyn Bridge, has a bridge so captured the hearts of a population. The Bridge is often a photography model, imprinted on endless amounts of tourist products, and it provides a launching pad into the next life.
The Golden Gate rivermouth span is the inspiration for San Francisco State University’s mascot, The Golden Gaters. Later changed to, The Gators, as in, alligators. (Note: There are no alligators in northern California.)
All text following has been copied off other, noted, sites:
from Wikipedia:
The bridge-opening celebration began on 27 May 1937 and lasted for one week. The day before vehicle traffic was allowed, 200,000 people crossed by foot and roller skate. On opening day, Mayor Angelo Rossi and other officials rode the ferry to Marin, then crossed the bridge in a motorcade past three ceremonial “barriers,” the last a blockade of beauty queens who required Joseph Strauss to present the bridge to the Highway District before allowing him to pass. An official song, “There’s a Silver Moon on the Golden Gate,” was chosen to commemorate the event. Strauss wrote a poem that is now on the Golden Gate Bridge entitled “The Mighty Task is Done.” The next day, President Roosevelt pushed a button in Washington, DC signaling the official start of vehicle traffic over the Bridge at noon. When the celebration got out of hand, the SFPD had a small riot in the uptown Polk Gulch area. Weeks of civil and cultural activities called “the Fiesta” followed. A statue of Strauss was moved in 1955 to a site near the bridge.
from GoldenGateBridge.org
WHY THE NAME GOLDEN GATE?
The Golden Gate Strait is the entrance to the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. The strait is approximately three-miles long by one-mile wide with currents ranging from 4.5 to 7.5 knots. It is generally accepted that the strait was named “Chrysopylae”, or Golden Gate, by John C. Fremont, Captain, topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army circa 1846. It reminded him of a harbor in Instanbul named Chrysoceras or Golden Horn.
from History of San Francisco State University:
1931 – Men’s sports, particularly football, become more popular at SF State. After SF State’s student newspaper, the “Bay Leaf,” calls for the school to adopt a mascot, a reader proposes the alligator — because “it is strong and we hope our teams have strength. It is well-built and is steadfast, steadily moving toward its goal.” The reader also proposes spelling the Golden Gaters with an “e” to typify our San Franciscan location to strangers. Students vote to adopt it. That August, however, the Bay Leaf begins inconsistently misspelling the name as “‘Gator,” and after the paper eventually changes its own name to the “Golden Gater,” the name and spelling sticks.
