Around the city in 38 miles

WEEK 51

Here I am, the penultimate week of my year-long project, far from how I imagined this week to be. Far from how I imagined the last two months to be. But I am making lemonade with what I’ve got, and finding new experiences worthy of doing (safely) and writing about.

Number 51 comes from my wife and partner-in-fun — dug up from a deep well of creativity. What if we circumnavigate San Francisco, she asked? Huh, I thought. That could be cool.

San Francisco, the city, equals San Francisco, the county. While small(ish) compared to other metropolitan areas, I knew we would not be hiking the perimeter in one day (and ultra-running is so not me). Biking, while possible, is not advised, especially on our crusty beach cruisers. Automobile it will be, with Irena in the pilot seat and me playing tour guide while navigating. Plus, we have a great car — manual transmission I might add — and she misses us.

Even if you have never set foot in San Francisco, it is easy to picture water surrounding the city’s west, north and east outlooks. So, the first mystery for us to solve is where is the southern border, and is it passable? I will get to that in a minute.

The city enjoys a unique geography at the tip of what is called the San Francisco Peninsula, covering about 47 square miles of land and get this — 185 square miles of water plus Alcatraz, Treasure Island, Yerba Buena Island, Angel Island, a portion of Alameda Island and even the uninhabited Farallon Islands, which on a clear day, you can see about 30 miles offshore in the Pacific. As enticing as it sounds to charter a boat and fully circumnavigate the city’s defined legal boundary, we will leave that for another time (or never).

After consulting numerous flat maps and satellite images, I planned our approach. We would hug the edges, following the (drivable) roads closest to the water. The “Southern Traverse” proved more challenging. The city/county southern border is a perfectly straight line which sounds easy peasy to navigate until you realize there are no straight lines in nature (or urban planning). The way the southern border slices through neighborhoods — even housing lots and golf courses — became the most fun quirk of this adventure.

The East Flank. We began our first leg in South Beach, turning east on Harrison Street, then south on The Embarcadero. After passing landmarks we know well — Oracle ballpark, the new Chase Center, the straight stretch south on Illinois St. in Dogpatch to Caesar Chavez, our sometimes Saturday morning run turnaround — then it got interesting. We crossed Islais Creek and headed east on a potholed road — us and about 30 cement trucks going to and coming from places like Cemex and Central Concrete Supply. Ten-story conical mounds of sand and gravel filled empty lots behind fences and locked gates, only a handful of miles from our apartment. The coolest part of this wasteland (named India Basin) was seeing the massive Recycle Center on Pier 96, briefly upstaged by the SFPD training exercise we drove through accidentally.

From there we did our best to navigate Hunters Point, the easternmost edge of the city’s land portion, home to the now abandoned but once vital Navy base turned Superfund site. So, imagine our surprise as we drove directly into a newly-built Truman Show-esque community with hundreds of lived in condos and townhomes lining landscaped, hilly streets looking out to jaw-dropping views of downtown San Francisco and the entire Bay Area (and, yes, the still vacant and deteriorating shipyard hangars). Residential pioneers and then some.

The Southern Traverse. This, our most anticipated leg, began at Candlestick Park, the sports venue of my childhood — demolished about five years ago and now an ugly, fenced field awaiting re-development — and ended at Lake Merced, just steps from the Pacific Ocean. The completionists in us wanted so badly to travel the straight line demarcating the city border. But alas, the combination of winding, half-moon shaped residential streets in Crocker Amazon (romantically named after European city capitals by the way … Prague, Munich, Athens, Paris, Moscow, Vienna) and our unwillingness to get out of the car with a compass and walk the thing — well, let’s just agree we got close enough:

The Western Flank. From Lake Merced, we turned north along Ocean Beach, driving, ironically, in a mostly straight line following the grid of low-slung houses that define the Outer Sunset. At this point in our journey, high noon, the sun was at its full intensity, and this half of the city had come out to play. Not a lot of sheltering as bikers, joggers and walkers ruled the streets as we continued north through Lands End, Sea Cliff and the Presidio to catch our first glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge, marking the opposite corner from Candlestick Point, worlds away.

Our final stretch — we’ll call it the North Flank easing into a slight southeastern bend – is our workaday outdoor playground, and yet for so many, these eight or so miles of waterfront hold the heart of San Francisco: Fort Point and the bridge, Crissy Field, the Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf, views of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, the Ferry Building. And just about two hours after we pulled out of our parking garage, we ended on the familiar.

All this to say, it takes effort to know a place fully. Our circumnavigation surprised me. I have spent decades of my life inside these 48 square miles. I have crossed San Francisco east to west and back on foot numerous times. I have visited friends in any number of neighborhoods, far from the city center. And yet I have essentially flown over vast acreage, miles upon miles of streets I see only from elevated highways, where people live and hang out, work, eat and go to school. I found little of what we drove through charming or enticing – SF is one of those places where the natural beauty of its surroundings has allowed gross architectural injustices to go unpunished. But at a time when we have been forced to turn inward to our homes for safety and refuge, this journey woke me up to a city I hardly know, where people rise with the same sun I do and go about their day.