Over twenty-five crossings in the last year and a half, made the San Francisco Bay itself crucial to the Flaneur's beat.
Until the Bay bridge opened for business in the 1930s most land journeys to San Francisco went only as far as Oakland. From there you took the Ferry to the City.
The crossing has become something profound, primal, perhaps archetypal for me. It forms an analogy in my mind with memories of the first half of my life spent in a city in Massachusetts on the Narragansett bay.
In the hypnagogic passage toward sleep when the multiple levels of association existing in the unconscious begin to be discernible, I have long connected the lay of Berkeley where I lived with Fall River where I grew up. Both had an extensive bay at bottom of the long hill of my street.
Today I see the Bay skies and Mount Tamalpais at the end of Eighth street.
In the same time period that people were obliged to take the Ferry from Oakland to reach San Francisco, many people traveling from New York to Boston took a boat to southeastern Mass and continued on by train. The boat was named after the city which grew famous as a result; it was called "The Old Fall River Line." A popular song was written with the boat's name as title--we used to sing it at our high school basketball games with great joy:
On the old Fall River Line
On the old Fall River Line
How I wish O Lord
I fell over-board
On the old Fall River Line
Over board with too much fun. A portal in the same way that the Oakland ferry can be.
Remember the the dad at the start of this post? What becomes of the baby?
The Oakland Ferry landing at dusk
View of the Oakland marina from the Ferry landing
Approaching the landing
A Ferry departs for the ball park in San Francisco
another full boat went together in tandem with it
This is the Ferry landing building
I spend time here contemplating the water and the sky
No very many people pass by really
It's my de facto neighborhood park
The far side of it
A live re-enactment theater group
Miming along to" The Wizard of Oz"
On this lawn when I landed one evening
Off we go,
A clear mild day in Winter
Recent posts showed the sea breeze and choppy Bay in summertime
It was strangely dead calm most of the time last Winter
A groovy pedestrian pier
I sometimes while away an hour or two there
with lunch or a smuggled bottle of beer
The Port of San Francisco justly renowned Ferry building
Site of perpetual arrival and departure
A sleek new style sailing yacht from the America's Cup races
Brand names and personal fortunes
attempt to prevail over sportsmanship
Three cheers for the beauty of the utilitarian
and the communitarian
The fetching topography of Telegraph hill
Note the America's Cup pier in the foreground
a huge hornswoggle by billionaires,
They promised the City mounds of tourist lucre
but instead the City got to underwrite their vanity sport
It is to enter a domain of airy uplift
Smiles abound here
There's a music to nautical traffic
The manifest buoyancy of life
It's an existential realm out there
and then the Ferry turns in to the pier
Chubby mammals gather to stare at other chubby mammals
Here's where the Ferry docks,
Pier 41 coming up on the right
Now they tell me...
Life during wartime, baby
Awaiting departure time under the sheltering sky
Finite civilization, world without end
amen
amen
Leaving Pier 41
The arch on the defunct pier an elegant tombstone
A solitary Flaneur on the outside deck
One man's private island
with a mad skein of starlings
Feeling outside of time
Another stop at the Ferry building
before cruising back to the other side,
late sunlight catches the bridge
Fairy lights on the Bay bridge
An art installation with a sunset clause
Best night shot I managed to get of the vertical light show
a bridge with changing lights from a moving boat at night
Said to be in constant mutation it is never the same twice
"Way over, far over,"
Sang Burning Spear for us
in that yonder city years ago
The charm of returning to solid earth,
may the circuit be unbroken
Last thoughts
Rain or shine the Ferry's there to take you across every day
(except holidays and weekends in the winter half of the year)
Leave your troubles in the doorway,
today we going to sail
to the sunny side of the Bay
2013-2014
