The Clue to San Francisco

Travelogue: Clues to the Streets of San Francisco

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" - Mark Twain.

San Francisco, CA, stands out for me as one of a handful of America's truly distinct cities. I always wondered what combination of factors could produce both both the hippie counter culture and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Thanks to some native guides, Nancy Gilbert and her family, I got some clues.

The most important thing to understand about San Francisco is the climate, or, as the locals say, the microclimates. On leaving the house, they say it is best to take a sweater. Within the city temperatures may change from sunny warm to cold grey without warning.  It can also vary by as much as 20 degrees if you move ten miles away from the Pacific Ocean or the Bay.  The fog may clear as you climb its mountains or even ride a cable car. But it is the City's year-round microclimate consistency that creates its unique character. It is seldom below 40 or above 80 degrees any time of year. Mark Twain is supposed to have said "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco". He might have said the warmest winter as well, but it is all exaggeration to make a point. I will make my point later.

Haydee and I were there primarily for a business trip with PIANC, an international navigation group. We, along with many of our European visitors, were taken aback to see so many homeless people on the streets. At first I tried to assure them that this was not typical of America, that we didn't have this "problem" in Pittsburgh.

Of course some people were taking advantage of the situation. We saw a man walk away from his wheel chair with his tin can. On a previous trip we were even approached by "aggressive" panhandlers in a deserted area and felt lucky to get away. But this time we saw something different.

We had to make a stop at the local Social Security office. Around the room we saw a lot of people dealing with addictive, abusive, physical- and psycho-limitation issues. We held the hand of a lady starting to shake because it was taking too long for her to see her advisor.  We listened to the man behind us berate the counselor in window #3 as "an illiterate, a high school drop-out" apparently unhappy with whatever counselor #3 said. This was a part of America that I did not want to see and used to want to just sweep under the table.

Then, it struck me how many of these street people were my age, leaving me to wonder if they were victims of some post-Vietnam traumatic injury or of some drug epidemic of my generation. Or were they people released from mental institutions because we closed them all down or released from prisons because of overcrowding. it occurred to me that there really wasn't any place better for them to go.

We arrived the week after the Gay Pride parade and the rainbow flags were still flying. On the bus tour that Haydee took, someone asked why it was San Francisco that became the center of so much Gay Pride. The Guide answered that with the 1849 gold rush, when so many men seeking their fortune arrived greatly outnumbering women, they long ago developed a tolerance to same sex activities. I had never thought of it in that context.

The sun came out a few days later, when Nancy and our son Sean arrived. She drove us around town and up the mountain. Nancy is from San Francisco and we had never before had the opportunity to meet her family. This started to become fun. We had already walked the Golden Gate Bridge and ate breakfast at Dottie's True Blue Cafe, one of Nancy's favorites, where the eggs are still orange and they can tell you the farm they came from. Now we were ready for more.

In addition to seeing where Nancy grew up and went to school (which was really interesting), we did a lot of tourist things too. We walked from Chinatown to the harbor. We took the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf and had the best Irish coffee ever at the Buena Vista Cafe. We went up the mountaintop to see the marvelous view and I was nearly knocked over by the powerful wind. We visited the Jesuit Mission and saw how the Spanish/Mexican/Indian cultures were strong in California in 1776, just as their eastern future-compatriots were signing the Declaration of Independence.

When we drove through Haight Ashbury, I asked why this particular location became the center of both the free speech movement and the hippie counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, before each movement turned into a caricature of itself.  Nancy's answer combined the idea of low cost of housing in that particular area at the time and the climate. Social rebels and misfits of all causes could arrive without a plan and live outdoors until they could find friends or move into inexpensive housing. Something like the tradition of the 49ers whose only plan was to arrive with the shirt on there backs and strike it rich. She called it a "tolerant" community.

I found myself thinking differently about some of those homeless people I saw. Some people thrive, I guess according to their standards, on living on their own by their wits with only the smallest acknowledgement to traditional society.  All of a sudden I could see the climate as a common thread tying together the 49ers, the homeless, the free-speechers, the nerds, hippies and entrepreneurs, each combining self-reliance, innovation and social re-invention. This was also America, and I had closed my eyes to it before.

The highlight of the trip was yet to come. It was lunch with Nancy's family. Although Nancy has long been part of our family, we never had the opportunity to meet anyone else in hers. We were greeted by Nancy's sister Cathy who anyone would recognize immediately as a sister, and Cathy's husband Robert and daughters Sierra and Claire. Claire, the older one, just graduated from High School. They both were very gracious at dinner while the rest of us explored olden times. Nancy's aunt Barbara, cousins George and Annette, Annette's husband Jodi and a friend of the family Jackie, sometimes called Nancy's adopted aunt because she had been so close to Nancy's mother and remained closely connected to the family, were all there for lunch. It was a real welcoming party. We found so much to talk about. In a couple of hours we felt we knew them forever.

We topped it off with Cathy and George and what I thought was a singularly bad idea, sipping wine on a very cold San Francisco beach blanket. Apparently, judging by all the others on the beach, this is something of a local tradition. I am happy to report how wrong I was as the wine and conversation quickly compensated for any lack of temperature.

We now have lots of new friends in San Francisco and hope some day to host them in Pittsburgh.