I tell people that I believe in the Urban Project. And this is true enough. It is true enough for me to eternally delight in San Francisco. And, in fact, that delight has geographically expanded. It has had to. Enjoying the center of town is quite difficult. In fact, the very concept of center has shifted. Banking. High-tech corporate headquarters. Those things that used to center our center, well, they just aren’t there anymore. They aren’t there anymore than the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Yes, people have found other ways to exchange stocks. High-tech can be done from home…at least for the moment. But there is the rest of San Francisco and, much of the time, it remains enjoyable.

The problem is that as I drive around town, scenes from my neuromuscular past keep erupting. Can’t help it. We were driving down Stanyan Street this afternoon, fresh from an invigorating look at the Tudors at one of the city museums. Our friend Dano, a New Yorker, observed that we were approaching the Haight-Ashbury district…where in 1967 friends and I had driven, gawking like tourists, at whatever was supposed to be happening. I never really got it. Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair. My life was already centered in Berkeley. Classes were out. The next term was looming. Whatever. But I do recall the summer car drive, just the freedom of it.

And today, Jane driving us north on Laguna Street, I spotted restaurants coffee places, all sorts of signs of the waning of the pandemic and the city’s health. And I had to remember that stage of life when I went lurching about with a crutch. In those days I parked my 1968 Plymouth Valiant creatively, closed the door and hiked wherever I needed to. I knew how to get around. A poet/cabdriver friend from San Francisco State had showed me where to turn left from Broadway, quite legally, into a convenient alley and on to North Beach. That sort of thing.

And then there was the next phase of life…in which I had graduated to wheelchair/van excursions. And, it must be noted, that this phase was a welcome one. I had been in denial for years, trying to crutch my way across intersections in Palo Alto during lunch hours…and finding it slower and slower, and more and more dangerous…traffic lights wait for no one. And there were some good adventures. Until that phase ended. And now I don’t drive anymore.

And if I really want to try the cappuccino on Laguna Street, it’s going to take a Muni bus or two…which is fine. Well, actually it isn’t fine, but it’s real. And besides, there is that very much other thing that involves everyone I know….having to do with age and the grim reaper. So I need to get over myself. No, I really do. I’m not alone. It’s all slowing down. It’s not about me. And, no, I haven’t failed.

It was the San Gorgonio River that failed. And it failed quite spectacularly, as well as consistently. And it failed in the most essential way. It failed to be a river. I grew up near it. The rock quarry behind our house separated us from the so-called river. But there was another way to get there. And once I was old enough to hike places on my own, roughly 9 years old, I began exploring. And there it was, this immense wash. The San Bernardino Mountains, one of the transverse ranges of Southern California, follows in the Sierra tradition. Granite. And the riverbed was no exception. Gray, slightly tumbled river stone, roughly 50 m wide north of our house. 

Banning, the windswept desert place of my birth, had been flooded into near oblivion in 1939. That was the year of the big rains. A Google search reveals that about 28 inches fell in three days. It was that torrent that had most recently scoured out the bed of the San Gorgonio River. The banks on one side were a good 20 m high. Which, I believe, had something to do with the force of water pouring from the 4000 m mountains and being forced into a hard left turn. The water was trying to flow to Mexico. That is to say, it was trying to join the delta of the Colorado River. Which used to exist. No, which still exists.

And anyone who reads this blog knows that I wax imaginative now and then and conceive of doing what I could not do as a little boy. Actually going up the river canyon, just a little way into the mountains, to see how the waters made their way down the precipitous slopes. Because the river canyon tucks itself tantalizingly out of sight, as it turns up the mountains. All a little boy could see from the nearest paved road, was the river bending up and away.

And one enormous pine, probably a Jeffrey pine, grew in the stony wash, a tantalizing reminder that from that point, the desert was no more…all forest from there up to the timber line. And since I keep writing about this. And since there is some strange metaphor contained in the flood capacity of the mountains. Well, regardless of life phase, I had better check this out. Before I check out myself. Stay tuned.