SF Bay Notes

I keep meaning to write this down properly. Twelve years of living here and I still set an alarm for a weekday boat as if I were a visitor who might never come back. Last March I walked to Pier 33 in a wind that made my eyes water. The city behind me was only a rumor: a few cornices, a traffic light, then fog the color of wet concrete. Gulls argued over a paper bag. Someone in a yellow jacket photographed the boarding ramp as if it were a cathedral door.

The crossing is short and never quite comfortable. You stand because sitting feels like missing it. The water is the green-gray of old glass. Spray finds the gap at your collar. I have taken this ride in July wearing a fleece I was mocked for at breakfast, and I have taken it in January when the cabin windows wept. The island arrives as a dark shoulder, then as brick, then as the dock that always smells faintly of diesel and kelp.

I walk the same uphill path every time, slower than the groups who treat it as a race. The cellhouse audio is the part I come for: former inmates and guards talking over one another across decades, the headphones a little too tight, the voice in your ear suddenly closer than the person beside you. It is history, not theater, and it is better for that. The wind on the yard is the honest part. It does not care that you dressed for a postcard.

Here is my small gripe, because a real notebook has those: the uphill walk to the cellhouse is no joke in the wind, and the gift shop on the way back has a heroic idea of what a mug should cost. I buy a coffee in the city instead. The rest of the morning stays with me — the gulls, the audio, the cold coming off the water — and that is why I keep the notes.