There is a kind of comfort that can be found in places that stay the same as you change. They hold memories better. They are the sort of places that hold you in the palm of their hand, and you visit again and again to trace the constant curves of the lines etched into the skin. San Francisco is one of these places. It may have been a major U.S economic and cultural center for over a century, but everything there is just build on the ruins of something else, and time heals all wounds.
The city is ancient by Californian standards, and set in its ways. If you walk west down Jefferson street through Fisherman’s Wharf with your high school friends, doing the things that people are supposed to do, because that’s what high school friends do, you pass Boudin’s Bakery Café, which has been there since 1849, but you also pass an In-n-Out. Most likely, unless you want to wait in a line and spend too much money- you won’t eat at either. If you keep walking you can visit Ghirardelli’s Chocolate Marketplace, and you can walk out on Municipal Pier and look at the Golden Gate Bridge. You might not see it if it’s foggy, but that’s the true San Francisco experience. If you really like walking and want to hit all the hot spots, you can keep walking, you can see Fort Mason, and remember that San Francisco is really one big colonizer settlement on indigenous (Ramaytush) land, and then you can walk more, and pass a Safeway that does happen to be open at 3 a.m., if that was something you were needing to know. Go further any you will come across the Palace of Fine Arts, which you can wander about in, watch various birds in ponds, and wonder about its purpose. Most likely at this point you will come to no satisfactory conclusion; however you should also note that you can visit here at any day at any time and it will always look pretty much the same, though at night it may be dark.
Now if you want to you could keep walking and go through the Presidio and Golden Gate Park, but quite frankly that’s a lot of walking and I’ve never done that, so I won’t talk about it. You could also walk (again, long), or uber, or drive (if you can park) up to Twin Peaks to see the city from above. It’ll probably be very windy, and it might be too foggy to see far, you may find yourself huddling in a little concave in the side of the mountain, and if it is night it will most likely be dark, but it’s always fun to stand on top of a tall thing and look down. After that, you might be hungry, so you can head down Market Street, or literally any other street, and get something to eat that is most likely fusion something and over-priced but also good.
If you prefer to do a little less sight-seeing and a little more aimless wandering (particularly if you happen to start this journey near the bus station) you can wander around near Oracle Park and Mission Bay in the very early morning when it’s foggy and no one is around. It should be noted that is an unusual state for San Francisco, and it’s far more likely you end up visiting a busy farmers market in the Tenderloin, and then leaving the Tenderloin because there isn’t much else to do except watch people do heroin. For a bit of juxtaposition, you can then visit Lower Nob Hill (or almost any other shopping area), and wander past very wealthy people and through fancy department stores that sell exactly the same thing as every other department store, except these ones happen to be in San Francisco, which makes them Cool.
If it’s getting late in the day, and you are getting kind of tired, you can wander through SF MOMA, and then grab Ben and Jerry’s, carrots, and hummus from a Target nearby and sit on a bench at the top of Yerba Buena Park and watch the reflection of the evening sun on the San Francisco skyline from below. You can do this several times a year all through high school, whenever the dusty goings on of sprawling flat capital cities starts to wear on the soul a little, and a 6 am bus ticket is only 10 dollars. It’s a tame little adventure. The next day, people ask you what you did with your weekend. You tell them you went to San Francisco. They don’t ask what you did- you did San Francisco things. What more is there to say?
There’s nothing quite like San Francisco to remind you that the more things change, the more things stay the same. It’s always different, every time I go, under construction, or renovation, or hazy with the dust kicked up by a million feet that are only passing through, and yours and mine are among them. But it’s always that way. So you can wander the streets aimlessly, when you are younger, and older, and older still, and you can stand in the places where everyone does, and see the same things that everyone sees, but through your own eyes- which maybe makes it special. Then maybe later, you come back, and go to the same places and look at the same things, and they look a little different, but then again so do you, though they don’t look so different that you can’t remember what it was like to look at them back then. These things don’t remember you, and soon they might sink into the sea, or rather the sea will rise to cover them, and it won’t be anything at all but swirling eddies you can see from some new coast, where you look out and remember the harsh ocean wind that scoured sand against your sun burnt skin on Ocean Beach that one day you were much younger than you will be then, and went to San Francisco for the day, and splurged on a clipper card, and took the train to the beach, drank ice coffee in an over-crowded café, and spent too long in the sun.
