Autumn in the Sunset.

Wed, October 12, 2005 - 11:12 PM
Autumn is falling down across the California Coastal region. This time of year it always nuzzles in from the wide open ocean. It is an unmoveable force flowing over the sea lions and whales and other briny sea mammals that inhabit that cold Pacific, and we humans out here in the Sunset can smell that summer is gone without a doubt of it reappearing, if even for one weekend. The Outer Lands of the Sunset are now in winter mode.

That creature Autumn comes on with a front of cold arctic fog that pulverizes any semblance of warmth the ground may have absorbed in the three or four weekends of sun that graced us between August and October.

It soaks us in chill and our summer is literally measured in weeks out here on the northern California coast.

This time of year, when I drive home from work on 280 from San Bruno, I'm usually hot and wearing sunglasses to deal with the sun that's moved lower on the horizon and is setting around 7:30 but is most obnoxious and orange around the time I'm driving home.

Driving home. I pass the National Cemetary and I note whether the huge U.S. flag is at full or half mast. It is usually at half mast these days, which sucks because I know not that many old veterans are dying and being planted in those perfectly manicured rows and rows of dead soldiers at the foot of those white headstones.

Continuing on home, the Large Red Truck curves downward in a big left then moves to the right at the Hickey Blvd exit and I see the cemetaries of Colma to the right, beneath a white flowing sheath of clouds being pulled like a tube towards the warm SF Bay. Then around that corner, precipitiously, 280 drops down around the Greenland and Woodland cemetaries towards Serramonte and the Big Red Truck drifts into a huge gray cavern of cloud churning off the Pacific and I have to take off my sunglasses to see as I drive into that tunnel of roaring overhead fog.

It is like driving into a frozen underground garage. Seriously.

That's what living on the coast is like in California.

The air is prematurely crisp and everything is dripping wet. You smell fires in fireplaces like you're tasting them and the dull salty ocean stomp of another season is moving in at us. The Sunset is wet and ready to return to the reason no one ever really wanted to live here in the first place. Lake Merced is enshrouded by more fog, so much that you can't even see the lake you could see a week ago.

Once around Lake Merced and off Sunset, there is a swirling miasma of Chinese or Thai food and Korean barbeque. The food mixes with the oncoming fog soup along Taraval.... and there is the heavy menthol Eucalyptus dripping down, mixing with the water as a salve around any open green space. There is the smell of last minute burning tar roof fixes against the oncoming rain. There are the people who move along, gray figures in the fog to make the L or hangout at the bars, to get a Quickly. There are all the people with dogs. And there are broken old people barely visible though that transparent carapace, moving like lonesome frozen ghosts, and there are people who are going into the warm, lit places to conjoin and energize themselves with others who have made it out of the house. Yoga, Arthur Murray Dance, young couples with sweaty chidren who have just finished Tai Kwon Do and who are moving them along the street to their minivans and SUVs.

And the surfers are waiting for the winter waves.

There is a constant noise out here. You can hear it any time and it is the sound of the ocean. In the summer it is easy to avoid that sound unless you are down on the beach, but as the Autumn moves in, the roar becomes more pronounced. By December, it is deafening if you realize it is all around you. The ocean becomes hungry for sand and it pounds and scrapes the beach relentlessly.

But this is just the beginning. In a couple months, the rain will fall down and soak everything and that ocean wind will come on relentless and chill us even more. that is when there will be wave reports at Mavericks. That will be when the surfers will take to the ocean in mad packs to ride those frozen 12 foot plus waves.

Coming home to the Puppyboy and the Bird on nights these warms me like I've got something real for my short moment of existence. I do have something real to come home too.

Tonight Bird is getting ready for Open Studio this weekend and I helped her move some paintings around. I streamed most of the first Burning Man webteam meeting on my laptop out back and was on IRC with catilin and nani and gutowski. There was talk af bacon and next webteam meeting I have to bring my coleman so I can make bacon for everyone throughout the meeting. It was another instance of being with my friends. My glorious friends who I am so grateful to be aquainted with in this age of such detachment.

Burning Man is an ending and a beginning each year, whether I like it or not. Halloween has become the first holiday of my new year. I always liked Halloween. This Burning Man gig has rearranged my perception and when I get back from the playa, I have a period of down time that is interrupted with Decompression, then the meetings begin again and we figure out how to keep the information flowing.

Back in the day, I think all that back to reality started after New year's eve. But then again, I've never been one for embracing "reality". I'm getting older and watching my time slip away, so precious, that time, and all I really want to do is leave a little bit of myself that will live on. Some words or something that'll survive the times. I am cursed in that I always feel like I've got so much time to do that.

I've got my Bird and my dog and my writing and my friends and my crazy family. And I've got this yearly fog that rolls in to start the Autumn of the world out here. And I've got that ever pounding powerful ocean that I can hear anytime. I've never lived more than 20 minutes from a coast since I was born. I love the salty swill of the ocean. And I continue to end up next to that ocean, whatever ocean it is.

Bring on the fog.

____________

4 Comments

shekky


Wed, October 12, 2005 - 11:39 PM
bring on old man winter
then the fog lady will crawl under the golden gate bridge again until next may.

sorry johnny, i don't like the fog. i long for the sun and summer heat, which don't often visit san francisco. when was the last time it was warm enough at ten o clock in the evening to sleep under just a thin sheet in the city?

i guess i'll never become a true san franciscan, even after living out here twenty two going on twenty three years, more than half my life.

maybe that's one of the reasons i keep going back to burning man, to celebrate and revel in the renewing energy of the desert sun.

bring on old man winter, and rain, mother nature, then i'll know your warm sun will visit our city come march, april and maybe the first half of may.

allison


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 4:31 AM
that was beautiful. thank you. i have always romanticised the fog. i am due for a trip to the sunset TO VISIT YER ASS and to maybe swing by the beach.

allison


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 8:37 AM
i quoted a portion of your blog in my blog, hope you don't mind.