Homeward 10 December 2023

Off to a slow start after a very quiet night. Already a line at Mom’s, so we started toward the ferry, knowing we’d find breakfast somewhere. Another lovely day: light high clouds, a brisk nor’westerly breeze. The sidewalks of the Barbary Coast are devoid of Santas, but their evidence persists: the refuse from last night’s party skitters about: messy people.

Shared eggs benny at Cafe Brioche and our own cappuccini, where we saw a man with two cellphones in his left hand, talking on both? Through what used to be called ‘the International Settlement’, and between highrises that make the wind feel colder. I’m having sentimental echoes of the City I have known all my life: I worked up Davis street at Y&R, over there as a Harvard failure at the SP building; my dad used to work in that squat brick and sandstone building, the Ag Building. The City still has ‘it’ but she’s become a little tawdry. Past Davis and through Walton square, surrounded by a lovely bit of high-end workforce warehousing, and Rochelle said ‘this wouldn’t be so bad.’ 

Easy walk to the Embarcadero and along to the bustling Marketplace in the Ferry Building.

Took too long getting up and breakfasting to catch the first ferry, so a long wait in the plaza behind the Ferry Building. Great people watching.

We’re now on the 12:30 SMART train heading north. The only real glitch in the transit from north of Santa Rosa (and congestion) and the Ferry Building (and intense urban development) is the 20-minute plus or minus walk between the ferry and train, where urban planners had wheeled but Oh! so sadly legless parents, and completely fumbled the best human pathway. Yesterday we followed the signs; today we headed straight across the huge parking lot and saved ourselves half a mile.

At least here in the western US, all public transport is dehumanizing – it’s intended principally for the lower, carless classes, and so unintentional, ill-conceived insults abound. We know from other countries that transit can be perfect, yet it is difficult to image how we can fix our present misconceptions. Waiting for the ferry, I remember the rails down the center of the chaotic Embarcadero, the rail ferry landing where shipments bound for Eureka and the north coast offloaded onto freight cars and ferried across to Sausalito to yard onto the Northwestern Pacific train. Before my time, but in human memory when I arrived on the north coast in 1968: City bound folk would entrain in the evening on a sleeping car at Fort Bragg station, and awake the next morning parked on a siding in front of the Ferry Building. Also, from there a ferry ride and train from Sausalito took riders to Point Reyes Station in west Marin, or a train south to Monterey. How much civilization we have given up as we surrendered to enslavement by auto!

All along the way, people still wave at the train  In our deep heart’s core, we recognize its communal good sense, and the SMART train proposes a workable reclamation of its people-moving function for US users. Gliding along, on some stretches faster than the cars on nearby Highway 101, we are at once able to appreciate the the openness and early winter emergent greenness while avoiding the annoyance of dueling traffic, stoplights, and parking. Right now, the lowlands and sloughs of the Petaluma River delta  (and the huge Marin County landfill) and low rolling hills punctuated with oak trees roll by. An occasional Egret or a flutter of wild ducks flap away from the hooting train.

Petaluma. Time spent on a train moves at a different pace. Surprisingly, lots of waste unused land just beginning to green up. A homeless encampment – tents, tarps, cardboard boxes, trash, but no people in evidence – then the pastel cracker-boxes of workforce warehousing stacked three deep, cookie-cutter buildings distinguished by cosmetic touches. And then farmland again, complete with Angus, Hereford, sheep, beehives . . . and solar arrays.

No Penngrive station; guess the ranchette dwellers hear-abouts didn’t want it. PVs on roofs. Derelict vehicles and farm equipment shoved up against the right-of-way fence on some lots, next to little Edenic backyards with swimming pools and gazebos. None of this visible from the highway. 

Cotati. From here there’s a bike- and walk-way alongside the rails, a humane amenity developed along with the railway upgrade. A different breed of human gets on and off: Sonoma State College is near. Orange trees, play structures, kitchen gardens, tarped barbecues, storage structures in backyards; here a natty hardscape, nextdoor a tangle of untended greenery. Rohnert Park. Note the crockery in the pushout window.

A golf course with scarcely a golfer, bare winter trees with mistletoe. One golfer. More triple decker workforce warehousing. The bikeway is replaced by industrial backyards with their least valuable detritus in view of the train. Acres of unsold cars. A lumberyard. A mobile home park, then low one-story 1950s homes. More pastel cracker boxes. Vintage Santa Rosa: dressed rock buildings, a Sunday afternoon horsecart driven by a bearded Santa, a hard-bitten smoker taking on his cell. Parking lots. Repurposed agricultural supply buildings with bright murals in the arches. Abundant tagging, some of it quite artful. North Santa Rosa.

Then the end of the line; our car right where we left it, and we're again autonomous. Did I miss 'vehicular autonomy' during the time away? Not even slightly! San Francisco downtown driving is not for the elderly country bumpkin nor the faint of heart, and I be both.

Easy ride north, an expensive but gratifying stop at Oliver's in Windsor for some niceties not to be found near home, and the usual great service and delicious food at Catelli's – awesome arancini! 

Then the windy road over the Coast Range . . . made windier by flooding at the low end of the Navarro River and the detour through Comptche . . . and home at last, after dark. Ah! Home sweet home.