Lands End

And by Lands End, I don't mean the outerwear company. I mean the lovely San Francisco park that is the last remnants of the wild west coast terrain left within city limits. I hiked there the other day, and took some pictures. Here's what I saw:
It was a little foggy (big surprise, considering where I am!), so the pics are a little gray, but you get the idea. There were a lot of people in the area next to the parking lot, but it was pretty empty in other parts. The scenery was amazing, so I continued exploring. And of course, pretty soon after I thought, "Hmm...it's kind of lonely here. Maybe I should head back to where there are other people, just to be on the safe side," I turned a corner in the trail and a guy was sitting next to the trail, dressed completely in red, exposed and fondling himself. He said, "Oh, hey, sorry!"

Give me a break.

I just got out of there quickly, moving fast until I was near some other people--and I've been brainstorming verbal lashings for him ever since. Isn't that the way things go?

So the landscape was gorgeous --but next time I'm taking along a buddy!

Climing the stairway to heaven...(OK, so that might be a stretch)

San Francisco has a lot of stairways. Anywhere a hill gets so steep that you would fall down it if you tried to walk on a slanted sidewalk, the sidewalk turns into steps. I've started building these stairways into my workouts. They're good exercise (my favorites total around 300 steps), and when you climb a stairway, you're sure to end up with a good view at the end, as long as there's no San Francisco Fog (TM). The best set of stairways I've found so far are the Filbert St and Greenwich St steps. For those who know San Francisco, at the top of those staircases is Coit Tower, one of the best vantage points in the city. From Coit Tower, you can see the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Angel Island, the hills of Marin County, and the Bay Bridge. It's just beautiful.

In fact, beyond climing stairways and hills for exercise, I've developed a growing urge to get to the top of things, to see what's in the distance. I suppose I'm looking for a reminder that there's a world out there.

See, I've been working from home this summer, and while I think it would be a lot easier in a city where I was better settled, telecommuting from the study/guest room has been a bit isolating. TCH is pretty busy with his resident schedule, so finishing work and heading out to explore the city solo, rather than staying home and feeling lonely, has taken some discipline. I enjoy this place so much more, though, when I put on my sneakers and head out to find a new peak with a new view. The other day I climbed a stairway, then hiked up the rest of the way, to the top of Twin Peaks. The stairway (Pemberton Place) was very well-maintained, and featured a water fountain that would allow me and my dog, if I had one, to get a simultaneous sip. Like this:

Which reminds me: does anybody but me remember the 'Love Toilet' spoof from Saturday Night Live? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBmvlvZQIcM

But I digress.

Anyway, after the staircase ended, it turned out the sidewalk didn't go all the way up the hill, so for a while I practiced Defensive Walking (people coming down the winding road were way too psyched about taking the hairpin curves fast and wide), and then I ended up bushwacking my way up the hillside on a sort-of path. When I got to the top, I was rewarded by a 360-degree view of San Francisco and the Bay Area. Beautiful!!! It was windy, and at one point I glanced down and saw a hawk below me, floating in mid-air and held aloft by the breeze. I would have a picture to show you, but the camera ran out of batteries. [Note: the camera being out of batteries was the end of a bigger oops involving a dropped (and broken!) camera, new camera purchase, trying out new camera, forgetting to charge batteries - so by that point I was done complaining.]

I climbed steps (yes, more steps) to the tops of both of the twin peaks, then headed down, bushwacking my way down the hill on loose red soil. It turns out that when you slip and fall, the red soil melds almost completely with your clothing, and for the next several hours, people give you and your rear end funny looks. I suggest wearing rust-colored pants for this expedition, or perhaps just trying to be more coordinated than I am!

The really interesting part of all this is that even within the city, there are a lot of sort-of-natural places you can get to. The stairs up to Coit Tower wander around terraced gardens with gorgeous flowers (yes, I stop to smell them sometimes!), and many of the little adventures I've gone on count as bonafide "urban hikes." Sometimes I feel a little wistful that my own apartment is a bit far from many of these places, so that in my day-to-day life I don't see a great deal of greenspace. However, there are green areas all around the city, and it just takes a little time to get to them. The other place I've visited that had such an intertwined relationship with nature even in the urban environment was Norway, which I visited several years ago for work. Even in the biggest cities in Norway, there are dedicated urban forests and hiking areas, because the Norwegians believe that people need contact with unplanned, unharnessed nature on a regular basis.

Anyway, is it any surprise that it's taking me a little while to feel at home here, given that the city reminds me most of a foreign country 6,000 miles away?

Googled myself...

I was curious to see what would turn up if I googled myself. (Would my blog turn out to be findable? Are pictures from my wedding still up online?)

It turns out there are quite a few things floating around out there with my name on them. One of them was kind of a nice, if wistful, surprise. My paternal grandmother passed away in 2001, and my father wrote a wonderful, lengthy obituary about her life. It's not San Francisco-related, but I've pasted it here in case you have any interest -- kind of a neat history.

MARTHA [last name ]GRANBY, Conn. / WILLIMANTIC, Conn. / [my hometown] –Martha [LAST NAME], 91, of Granby, Conn., died July 7, 2001, at the homeof her son, [MY DAD] and his wife, [MY MOM], in [MY HOMETOWN]. She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on April 11, 1910, the daughter of William John andCatherine (Shannon) Moran, whose families had fled Ireland to escape the potato famine and partisan strife. The family immigrated to Quebec in April 1912 amidst the furor immediately following the sinking of the Titanic. Not long after their arrival in Canada, the family settled in Barnston West, a rural Eastern Townships community within a mile of the Vermont border. Having never farmed or experienced the rigors of a Canadian winter, they scrambled to eke out a living. Born to a gifted mother, Martha learned earlythe value of proper diet and balanced nutrition. She had great knowledge ofwild edibles and looked forward every spring to a feast of dandelions, milkweed shoots and cowslips. On the farm, during the hard years, she learned all the ways to prepare snared rabbit and young woodchuck for the table. Years later, when her squeamish children expressed disbelief at the idea of woodchuck edibility, she said, “”There isn’t much that can beat woodchuck stew.” Her recipes consisted of basic steps and direct guidance. “First kill, skin, and gut a woodchuck. Then cut it into two pieces,slicing it through just behind the shoulder blades. Discard the front part and boil the rest,” and so on. Contemplating woodchucks, she said, “They are best early in the season. If you’ve ever had woodchuck pie you’d know it was good. Why wouldn’t it be? They eat fresh green grass all the time. And woodchucks are plentiful. Hell, every decent hayfield has ten of them. How anyone around these parts can suffer from malnourishment is beyond me. All it takes is a little work to make a meal you’d be proud to feed to company.” At age 10, Martha was given a Sharpe’s .57 caliber Civil War rifle by an aged veteran of that war. She and her brothers learned to pour their own lead bullets in drilled hardwood blocks, split the blocks and shave the lead slugs to fit both their weapon barrels and the cartridge casings, which they then loaded. At the age of 16, she and her 10-year-old brother, Frank, ran the family farm when her older brothers chose to follow the Canadian wheat harvest west. Martha grew to be an accomplished teamster, log skidder and woodlot estimator, out-finagling Yankee males at their own game. She was also an expert horsewoman. Her children remember the pride and fear they felt at seeing her, years later, standing atop the bare back of a cantering horse. As a young woman, Martha played the violin with the Stanstead College/Community Orchestra and then, years later, with the Manchester, (Conn.) Symphony. She became an accomplished watercolorist despite a late start, beginning art lessons at age 60. Her work has been displayed in the Emily LeBaron Gallery of North Hatley, Quebec, the Chaffee Gallery of Rutland, Vt., and the Ellsworth Gallery of Simsbury, Conn. Martha’s paintings are presently held in private collections in the United States, Canada and France. She produced several hundred landscapes in her 25 years as a watercolorist. Her other interests included hiking, skiing Mount Mansfield in the pre-lift days, raising Dobermans, gardening and berry cultivation, driftwood lamp making, sewing and quilt making. She always looked forward to the annual expedition north to the family farm in Canada. Steeped from birth in Irish wit, humor and fatalism, and gifted at observation and brevity, she had a consummate ability to drive home a verbal nail. Martha always was a keen observer of nature and a lover of animals. As a young child, she had the responsibility for several hundred baby chicks which, grown into egg producers, were a major source of family income. “I learned not to help chicks escape the shell no matter how hard they struggled,” she said. “”Those I helped died anyway. I left them alone after I figured that out. They developed the strength they needed for life from the struggle to be born. I guess having it easy isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.” Never having had it all that easy herself, Martha believed in persistence, frugality and compound interest, values she imparted to her offspring with varying degrees of success. Her love of art, music and literature they all absorbed at an early age. Martha was predeceased by her parents, her husband, Frank, and all of her siblings: a sister, Cecelia Ellis, and four brothers, John, William, Daniel, and Frank Moran. Survivors include her three children, [names removed], Nine grandchildren, [names, including mine, removed];14 great-grandchildren, [names removed]; and several nieces and nephews. The family wishes to thank the staff of the Hospice Program of the Franklin County Home Health Agency, 3 Home Health Circle, Suite 1, St. Albans, Vt. 05478, for their incomparable support during Martha’s last days. Those so inclined may make a donation to Franklin County Hospice in Martha’s memory. A memorial celebration of Martha’s life will be held in Connecticut in the fall at the convenience of the family.

This is a weird place.

The other day I slept in really late--like REALLY late, so late I'm not going to say when I actually got up, because it's a little embarrassing--partly because I was tired, and partly because I was feeling a little homesick. Not homesick, since this is my home at this point, but feeling a little wistful for a place where I knew what the heck was going on. I lived in Boston for so long that I'd gotten used to, and become comforted by, its predictability.

Now that I've been here for a few weeks, I think I can see why California types tend to stay in the east for a few years and head back west...and also why everyone I know from Boston who moves to SF ends up moving back east eventually! The Californa types find Boston boring, and the Boston types find SF to be too much of a moving target. Things are constantly changing. Those of you who work with me know that I've spent the past five years working for an organization that values change very highly, and I do, too--in my work life. The sense of daily uprooting is a little less enticing, but I suppose you get used to it, and even like it, eventually.

So anyway, when I woke up late (let's just say it was sometime in the early afternoon), TCH and I were talking for a little while. During our conversation, we heard a skateboard go by outside, 15 floors down. And then we heard another one, and another one...and then it sounded like 1,000 skateboards. So (for some reason) I said, "Oh, it's the skateboarders," as if The Skateboarders are a known entity, and we went to the window to look out. And you know what? it really was about a thousand skateboarders, rolling down the street in the middle of the day on the 4th of July. Hilarious. [What makes this even more hilarious is that we saw basically the same thing earlier in the week, but with bicycles and about 5 times as many participants. With the bikes, as well as the skateboards, I was struck by the fact that although there were many cars stuck behind the skateboards or bikes as they clogged the roadway, nobody honked. Not a single horn! I'm trying to imagine which mode of transportation will be next: horses? ski-skates? hamster wheels?]

And then things got funnier. See, I've learned that nighttime public transportation in San Francisco doesn't exactly have all the wrinkles ironed out, especially for the train line that goes past my house, because it opened recently and they are still "studying the ramifications" of its route and schedule. Basically, sometimes it shows up right away and sometimes it takes 40 minutes. Since July 5th was TCH's first day in the OR during residency, we figured it probably didn't make sense to stay out really late on the 4th and then take forever to get home. Instead, we would watch the fireworks in Berkeley, which I thought we probably could see from our front windows.

As it turns out, Berkeley has NOTHING on my noberhood. At 9pm the street along the waterfront lined up with cars, and then a big group of SUVs pulled up and a crowd of thugs in long, baggy shorts got out...and proceeded to put on a fireworks show worthy of a small city for the next 90 minutes. By the time the first baggy pants group finished, another group of people with even bigger fireworks showed up, this time rattling the building for another 45 minutes. There were whistling fireworks, multi-colored fireworks, small ones with a big bang, large ones with several phases -- any variation you can imagine. Who needs city fireworks display when you have thugs?