Kensington and Ulloa, the day going
Day ??? (I'll get back to you on this)
Neighborhoods Covered: Outer Richmond, Outer Sunset, West Portal
Streets Completed: Dorchester, Allston, Granville, Kensington, Claremont
Oh, Walking San Francisco. How I've neglected you. I'll spare you the excuses, both because I'm not entirely sure what they might be (too busy attempting to decipher boys? buried in work? burned out on writing and, why not, while we're at it, walking?) and because they don't ultimately matter all that much. What matters is that, save for a few random smatterings of streets, I've been a lax Walking San Franciscan, and that's not right.
So yesterday I gambled that the fog oozing through the central parts of the city would burn off near the ocean--or at the very least not get any thicker--and decided to stroll a bit of the Great Highway. It wound up being closer to a sprint than a gambol, as I had plans to go hang out with Mary for a few hours and didn't have a lot of time to spare in the interim, but I did manage to cover Fulton to Lawton and back again. Not too shabby for half an hour or so, especially taking into account my initial pit stop at the Beach Chalet.
I was delighted to find that the vest I wore was definite overkill, and that even with the wind coming off the ocean, it was warm and dry. A perfect beach day--or as perfect as they get here, given that, unless you happen to be drunk on youth and beer and the exhilaration of riding a cable car on wheels, you're probably not going to go swimming around these parts.
After I left Mary's later in the afternoon, I decided to walk some more, because the day was still unbelievably nice, and, from 33rd Avenue, the beach seemed like no more than a few blocks away. (And, indeed, heading west--and downhill--on Kirkham, it felt pretty close; the return/eastbound/uphill trip on Lawton was a slightly different story.)
Here's how the Outer Sunset can conspire against you (which is to say, me) on days like yesterday: the sun is so bright and perfect that it actually seems like a gigantic dollop of lemon yogurt, and, as 5 o'clock creeps up on you, the sky deepens just the subtlest bit to the blue of an unvisited hyperlink. Without an iPod singing in your ears, you can hear the ocean well before you reach it, can hear the gulls forming their posses above the dunes, can hear the rhythmic hum of skateboard wheels as neighborhood boys ride in huge, swooping arcs down the middle of the street, pressed on by the slope down to the water.
And in this almost-fantastical proto-Golden Hour, as you pass little beach cottages with sand dollars lined up on their porches and driftwood perched in their windowsills, you feel a tug back to your beachy youth and think, I could live out here. You ignore for the moment the relative dearth of stores, restaurants, non-residential establishments of any sort and just daydream for a while about having a surfer boyfriend and waking out here at the edge of the world every day with the sound of the Pacific in your ears.
But then you remember that this sunny idyll never lasts, and that life out here can be cold and dark and damp for much of the year. Can be and is. And so the OSu becomes like New York: a place you love to visit, and one that seems to be crawling with attractive men (surfers in the former case, cute Brooklyn hipsters in the latter), but not somewhere you'd really be happy to live.
So I walked back uphill, shedding bits of faulty-logic daydreams along the way. Back to the car, then to West Portal to fetch Indian food for dinner. Having to wait 45 minutes for my order was actually a good thing, as it gave me the chance to finish a small handful of the little streets that weave uphill through, for lack of a better description, the Mt. Davidson foothills. At Ulloa and Kensington I stood in the middle of the street for a few minutes and watched the sun set, thinking heavily about how quickly the end of the day is starting to come now. By the time I wended my way back to the restaurant, the sky had gone dark.
Not long after, I stood on the Israeli's front steps in Noe Valley--miles from the ocean, near the crest of a hill--and brushed sand from my toes, then shook out my socks and closed the door behind me.
Neighborhoods Covered: Outer Richmond, Outer Sunset, West Portal
Streets Completed: Dorchester, Allston, Granville, Kensington, Claremont
Oh, Walking San Francisco. How I've neglected you. I'll spare you the excuses, both because I'm not entirely sure what they might be (too busy attempting to decipher boys? buried in work? burned out on writing and, why not, while we're at it, walking?) and because they don't ultimately matter all that much. What matters is that, save for a few random smatterings of streets, I've been a lax Walking San Franciscan, and that's not right.
So yesterday I gambled that the fog oozing through the central parts of the city would burn off near the ocean--or at the very least not get any thicker--and decided to stroll a bit of the Great Highway. It wound up being closer to a sprint than a gambol, as I had plans to go hang out with Mary for a few hours and didn't have a lot of time to spare in the interim, but I did manage to cover Fulton to Lawton and back again. Not too shabby for half an hour or so, especially taking into account my initial pit stop at the Beach Chalet.
I was delighted to find that the vest I wore was definite overkill, and that even with the wind coming off the ocean, it was warm and dry. A perfect beach day--or as perfect as they get here, given that, unless you happen to be drunk on youth and beer and the exhilaration of riding a cable car on wheels, you're probably not going to go swimming around these parts.
After I left Mary's later in the afternoon, I decided to walk some more, because the day was still unbelievably nice, and, from 33rd Avenue, the beach seemed like no more than a few blocks away. (And, indeed, heading west--and downhill--on Kirkham, it felt pretty close; the return/eastbound/uphill trip on Lawton was a slightly different story.)
Here's how the Outer Sunset can conspire against you (which is to say, me) on days like yesterday: the sun is so bright and perfect that it actually seems like a gigantic dollop of lemon yogurt, and, as 5 o'clock creeps up on you, the sky deepens just the subtlest bit to the blue of an unvisited hyperlink. Without an iPod singing in your ears, you can hear the ocean well before you reach it, can hear the gulls forming their posses above the dunes, can hear the rhythmic hum of skateboard wheels as neighborhood boys ride in huge, swooping arcs down the middle of the street, pressed on by the slope down to the water.
And in this almost-fantastical proto-Golden Hour, as you pass little beach cottages with sand dollars lined up on their porches and driftwood perched in their windowsills, you feel a tug back to your beachy youth and think, I could live out here. You ignore for the moment the relative dearth of stores, restaurants, non-residential establishments of any sort and just daydream for a while about having a surfer boyfriend and waking out here at the edge of the world every day with the sound of the Pacific in your ears.
But then you remember that this sunny idyll never lasts, and that life out here can be cold and dark and damp for much of the year. Can be and is. And so the OSu becomes like New York: a place you love to visit, and one that seems to be crawling with attractive men (surfers in the former case, cute Brooklyn hipsters in the latter), but not somewhere you'd really be happy to live.
So I walked back uphill, shedding bits of faulty-logic daydreams along the way. Back to the car, then to West Portal to fetch Indian food for dinner. Having to wait 45 minutes for my order was actually a good thing, as it gave me the chance to finish a small handful of the little streets that weave uphill through, for lack of a better description, the Mt. Davidson foothills. At Ulloa and Kensington I stood in the middle of the street for a few minutes and watched the sun set, thinking heavily about how quickly the end of the day is starting to come now. By the time I wended my way back to the restaurant, the sky had gone dark.
Not long after, I stood on the Israeli's front steps in Noe Valley--miles from the ocean, near the crest of a hill--and brushed sand from my toes, then shook out my socks and closed the door behind me.
