Dear friends and family,
We come now to the final destination of what I consider to be “Leg 1” of my road trip across the country. When I was planning out my trip (and I had been planning this for close to 3 years), I broadly conceived of the journey as having four legs:
- Cross-Country: cutting across the continent from DC to the Pacific Ocean (the exact point at which I’d reach the coast was not decided when I started the trip)
- PNWC: wandering around the Pacific Northwest and ultimately into Canada.
- The All-Mountain Route: meandering through the many, many ranges and fronts of the Rockies.
- All Roads Never Traveled: slowly making my way back east through the North Country.
And while I finally reached the Pacific on June 3rd after 9400 miles, it didn’t really feel like the end of Leg 1, because there was still one more headland to cross, one more strait to reach, one more hill to climb over (actually, many hills to climb over) at the end of this continent-spanning hike: San Francisco.
I love San Francisco; it is a city that speaks for itself, in a way that many cities don’t. DC is filled with self-assured importance that leads to quiet reserve, and manifests itself with how residents ask “what do you do?” when they meet you, rather than “where are you from?” Chicago is the opposite: she is reserved about her broad shoulders and wide cultural cache out of Midwestern politeness, not pride. Detroit resists summarization and New York outright refuses it: you can’t talk about either of them in generalities, and they reflect and deflect your experiences there depending on how you approach each of them. All of these cities make you put in work to understand how they work, what they are about, what ethos they add to the American fabric. But not San Francisco; this city doesn’t ask you to understand it, you just do.
But maybe the ease I felt in moving through this city I’ve only ever heard about is colored by my own instincts. For one thing, I felt right at home in the Castro:
@Spence: peak twinks.
You can probably guess this, but I, a gay boy, found it very easy to move through the gayest blocks of the gayest neighborhood of the gayest city in North America. You can be easily lulled into believing “ah yes, so this is where being gay way invented” in the same way you could say of DC “ah, yes, so this is where the Government was invented”; it just feels intuitive (please note that this is a metaphorical point only: supposing that the preeminent city of the Left Coast invented Being Gay™️ has been used to malign queer people in the national discourse for a long time. Queer people have always existed and will always exist, which is something that SF really understands as a part of its own history better than anywhere else I’ve been).
Most importantly for my visit, The Castro is home to the GLBT Historical Society Museum, which I think is the closest thing the nation has to a Queer National History Museum.
The GLBT Museum has a really impressive collection of photos, memoirs, and historical pieces about all kinds of queer people in the west and in America at large. I particularly loved the drag queens and kings from back in the day, when they were known as “male and female impersonators”:
The slay here is fucking UNREAL.
LOOK AT THIS SWAGGER!!!
But the Mac Daddy of all the exhibits is this, the very first Pride Flag:
Not everyone knows that the original rainbow flag designed by Gilbert Baker was 8 colors: pink was removed due to a lack of flag material in that color, and light blue was removed after that to give the flag and even number of stripes (if the flag had remained 7 stripes, green would have been in the middle and would have been hard to see when the flag was hung vertically from streetlamps and other poles). Seeing this flag, the 6-color descendant of which is literally tattooed on my shoulder, is the closest I have ever felt to making a pilgrimage.
Well, I thought that was the best exhibit until I saw the display on Harvey Milk. And then I felt the same kind of awe, but in reverance and mourning, not elation:
Harvey Milk was one of the first openly gay politicians elected to public office in the United States when he joined the San Francisco board of supervisors in 1977. He worked tirelessly to improve the city and to pass one of the first municipal ordinances anywhere in the USA banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, for which a comparable law has still not been passed today at the federal level. In 1978 he lead the fight against Proposition 6, a law that would have immediately fired all homosexual teachers in California (and which miserable politicians like Ron DeSantis and Kay Ivey have successfully reanimated in their own miserable states), and won. He was one of the greatest heroes of the gay rights movement and is a hero to many more people today, including myself.
He was assassinated on November 27th, 1978, by Dan White. This is the suit he was murdered in:
Like many things in San Francisco, this exhibit speaks for itself.
Another thing about San Francisco, perhaps just this time of year in San Francisco, is that it is covered in flowers:
I don’t know what these mosaic-colored flowers are, but they’re beautiful and they’re positively everywhere in the city, in planters and pavilions and parks:
Parks, which the city has in spades! I was extremely impressed by the size and frequency of parks throughout the city, and just how many things the city has set up for people to do in them. Sure there were folks doing the normal park stuff, picnicing and loafing and shooting the breeze, but there were also people doing this:
Biking in the half-mile velodrome,
Birdwatching and Paddleboating in a man-made pond,
Lawn bowling, which is to pickleball as pickleball is to tennis: a good indicator of community age. Expect health clinics and chiropractors to be popping up in your community soon when the pickleball nets go up, as well as a sharp increase in church attendance and zumba classes.
SF really feels like it is working to have something for everyone here!
Also, while walking Golden Gate Park end-to-end, I kept noticing these trash cans:
These have the same type of anti-bear handles as I saw on the food lockers and dumpsters in Yosemite National Park, and elsewhere. I think the implications of seeing them in the park are startlingly clear.
Oh nooooooo these are some seriously dexterous bears we’re dealing with here!!!
I didn’t see any of these bears on the walk down to the beach, but remember, that’s just what the bears want you to think in the depths of bear country:
No bears? Again, just what they want you to think!
I loved the wide strip of beach that the city had incorporated into the end Golden Gate Park; it reminded me a lot of Chicago’s expensive waterfront, and I suspect that both cities did a lot of work to create these wonderful spaces for their residents and visitors. Even nicer, you can take the streetcar directly from the end of the beach all the way back to downtown! What a handy little thing! That streetcar was a modern one, but SF also maintains a fleet of historic streetcars on some city corridors:
Honestly between the BART, Buses, and Streetcars, the city is extremely accessible all over.
And what’s San Francisco without a ride on the cable car?
I’ll tell you what it is: a lot cheaper to visit! The streetcar is $8 for a one-way ride and has an hour-long wait, even on a weekday:
Needless to say, I didn’t ride. The mechanics on the waiting cable cars were pretty cool though:
Lastly, one of the nicest parts of visiting San Francisco was getting to visit my cousin Mickelean and have a little birthday dinner celebration:
The best parts of this trip really are when you get to hang out and share your experiences with your friends and family.
Thanks so much for hanging out with me cousin, I really appreciated getting to catch up with you and spend some time in your wonderful city 💙 I hope your new couch is more comfortable than the last!
Those lovely days walking the city, taking in the peoples and the parks and the pasts and the presents and the futures, I enjoyed it all so much. What a milestone, what a goal line, what a weighty crown is this city at the end of the peninsula, at the end of the continent, at the end of this wild and rambling traipse westward! I am enjoying this trip so much, and I hope my photos and my anecdotes speak for themselves, here from the city that speaks for itself.
And so it was time to move on. I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on 8 June, bound for Sacramento:
It’s hard to think that Drake completely missed the Golden Gates when he was sailing up the coast in the 16th century. @Everyone I am referring to the 16th century privateer Sir Francis Drake; @Sarah Babbage, I am referring to your favorite rapper.
As noted in the “About” page of this website, my writing drifts between Mark Twain-rippoff Yankee Travelogue™️ and Henry David Thoreau-lookalike foppish romanticism (with both modes, of course, lensed by insensible Midwestern yammering and a poor grasp of grammar). These last photos will drift towards sappy, hopeless, foppish romanticism (which gets ALL the cute boys thank you very much), so let’s dive in:
I absolutely love these types of places where couples snap shut engraved locks and toss the keys into the wild blue yonder. This area is above the main overlook for the Golden Gate Bridge:
What a sweet and precious thing, to feel how all of us have lived and loved together in the world!
Stay well everyone,
Evan 💙
P.S.: okay so I saw these classic SF row houses on some random street and:
I just feel like, instinctually, that these houses are all somehow in a throuple together? Idk man sometimes a vibe is just to strong to ignore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
Okay that’s all for now byeeeeeeeee!
