A Drive Down to The Bay

Waiting at a stoplight last Saturday on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, the road that runs in front of the piers along the bay, a man on roller skates caught my attention.  It wasn’t so much the skates themselves that were remarkable, but the fact that he was wearing nothing but them.  He pushed off from the curb, bobbing and flapping in the wind as he passed in front of my Honda, and I said, “Well, we must be in San Francisco.”  I couldn’t help but laugh.  I’d been on the road for far too long, and as repulsive as this sight in front of me was, I welcomed it as a bit of comic relief.  

Before our encounter with the nude skater, my friend Nathan and I had spent 11 hours driving from Portland to Berkeley the previous day.  We were in town for a concert – the first tour that Dispatch, one of my favorite bands, had made in nearly a decade.  It was late Friday night when we rolled into town, so we unwound at a quiet little bar in Berkeley, but only after first trying a rowdy college bar and passing scores of homeless people and two men who appeared to be gripped by serious drugs.  On our way back to our hostel, two young men asked if they could have one of Nathan’s cigarettes.  When he refused, they told us exactly what they thought of us, and continued to do so until we were a block away.

Even with the sight of scrotums on wheels, San Francisco was infinitely more appealing than Berkeley.  The concert wasn’t until late Saturday night, so we decided to make the short drive from Berkeley to San Francisco early in the afternoon.  Two hours later, after crawling through a traffic jam at the Oakland Bay Bridge toll booths and getting lost several times in downtown San Francisco, we were walking along Fisherman’s Wharf.  We stopped for lunch at a bakery/café and I ate clam chowder out of one of the tastiest sourdough bread bowls I’ve ever torn apart.  A furious wind dispersed our napkins across the wharf, but the food was almost good enough to keep this from frustrating me. 

We spent the afternoon wandering around Fisherman’s Wharf and then driving over to Haight Street to check out the legendary Amoeba Records.  On the way, I tested out my 5-speed driving skills on some of San Francisco’s famous hills.  I thought Seattle had some killer inclines, but one road near Fisherman’s Wharf was undoubtedly the steepest I’d ever climbed in my trusty Honda.  I felt like I needed chalk and a belay just to drive up this slope.  I managed to avoid drifting into the car behind me at stops, but still felt like I was ready to fall backward into the bay for the entire ride up. 

After a few photos at the Golden Gate Bridge, it was back to Berkeley for the concert.  The show was good enough to warrant the 14-hour drive home I would have the next day.  And seeing the campus –especially the stately Greek Theatre where the concert took place – improved my opinion of Berkeley slightly. 

On the drive home, a thought struck me that soured my opinion of long car trips and plane rides.  I don’t know why this thought hadn’t occurred to me before.  But somewhere between Medford and Portland, where I’d stop to drop Nathan off at his apartment, it hit me why I tend to get sweaty on long trips.  I wasn’t warm in the car, and I’m not usually hot in airplanes, but I typically get sweaty on these journeys.  As we drove through Oregon, I realized what I was feeling probably wasn’t sweat after all.  It was probably water vapor from my breath and the breath of those around me, settling on my skin.  In a closed space like a car or airplane, there aren’t many places for our breath to go.  When I got home and showered that night, I scrubbed deeply.