SF: Unlikely Geography

Bay, bridge, and Pacific fog

The first thing you notice is the weather. If you land in Oakland you see it before you feel it: the great Pacific fog hanging over the city ready to engulf it. In August, it is chill, fogs, and wind, of different degrees and variety depending on where you are, but always there.

The Chronicle, in its weather boxes, absurdly lists the day's high temperatures as between 62 and 90 degrees. Every day.

Given the unlikely geography of San Francisco it is amazing there is a city there at all. At Mission Delores, the first Spanish settlement in the area, there are prints of what the land looked like when Europeans first appeared. The peninsula was all hills and dunes and weird strange weather. And no one even found until hilariously late because the Golden Gate was hidden by fog so often. Most of the local Native Americans shunned the place, preferring to spend their time in any number of friendlier locations around the Bay.

It takes a lot of collective enterprise to pull of a city in a place like that, perhaps not on the scale of Venice or Amsterdam or St. Petersburg, but the same idea. That's why the Golden Gate Bridge is such an apt symbol for the city. It is a thing of astonishing scale — about 1.7 miles long, with towers that soar to 746 feet. It was designed and built in the very teeth of the Depression, when the global economy had completely cratered, almost as a deliberate act of will. And even more so, why was it built? It connects the city to... Marin County? Was a crowded ferry to Sausalito really such a burden? If you think about it, it is hard to imagine a national project that was less necessary.

But when you see it, you forget about all that. It's like the space program in a sense. One of those things societies do just to remind themselves of their potential as a species.