Life, with the park
Location: San Francisco, California, USA • • • Visit: June and July 2012
Prologue
Take a breath.
As always, I’m too ambitious with things. Finally, I’ve finished the retelling of Hanna’s and my road trip. That was over a month ago. Now, I’ve already started the other one, with my mom. We are doing fine, driving down Highway 1 in a bright yellow Chevrolet. Right now, spending the night at a hostel in Monterey.
Leaving San Francisco, though, felt awful. Saying it felt like leaving the love of my life would be wrong, because that will always be Stockholm. But San Francisco might be the one that got away, the place where, in another life, I really was meant to be.
So, you see, that’s why I want to do this properly. San Francisco deserves everything I’ve got. And so does Duckworth Farm, this wonderful oasis of tranquility where I finally got rid of my last tensions and worries from the last three years of studying. Now I am ready for reality again.
That’s why, dear friends, I’ve decided to not write anything about them until I get home. There, I will have the time. As for now, I might write a few updates, but that’s all. The rest will have to wait.
June 2012
Arriving in San Francisco: We were met at the car rental place, after dropping off the Camry, by Eric. The California Viking (as he called himself), tall, red-haired and loud. I met him when I was stranded at a hostel in Cusco, Peru, during a bus-driver’s-strike in 2009. A true backpacker-spirit, when I messaged him about coming to San Francisco, he offered for me and Hanna to stay on his couch.
The first thing he did, after dropping off our bags, was to take us to Dolores Park with a blanket and a case of San Francisco beer to enjoy the evening sun and watch all the dogs. After that, he took us to eat the best tacos in San Francisco (really, THE BEST), and then to have drinks at the bar where he works, a fancy place called Beretta. And that was only the first night. It was obvious that Eric loved San Francisco and that he wanted to show all its best and coolest sides to us. Hanna and I had a great time, and it was partly due to Eric’s excellent efforts as a host.
Seriously, sleeping on people’s couches is the best way to travel.
Since Eric and most of his friends worked in bars and restaurants, their hours mostly meant being up all night and sleeping all day. However, Hanna and I wanted to see San Francisco by daylight too. So, we ignored our sleep deprivation and went out into the city to explore.
In Hanna I had found a likeminded tourist. Travelling with a friend is more complicated than it might seem at first – something that I’ve realized during my North America travels. Not that I’ve had any negative experiences, I’ve just had to adapt to situations I didn’t expect.
I’ve learned that my kind of travelling is intense and time consuming. I’m like a long-distance runner, who can walk around in a new city, visit museums and watch houses and people for hours at an end. I usually try to start before ten, and I rarely return to wherever it is I’m sleeping before dark. I even forget to eat sometimes. I just get so absorbed by all the new things around me, and I want to see everything. It’s touristing at its most intense.
I think I have it from travelling with my dad growing up. For most of my childhood, he was the travel editor of one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden. I went all over the planet with him, trying out hotels and beaches and desserts for the readers back home. What this journalistic traveling taught me, was to be well prepared, read a lot, and how to try out everything. Travelling with dad was no holiday, he was working and had to do all the things that might interest the Swedish readers. So even now, when I’ve been here and there by myself, I still have this feeling that I need to know, that I need to see. I can’t just skip. And I like being well prepared, and having these intensely long days while visiting a new city or mountain or island. I’ve just had to realize that not everyone can or feels like keeping up with my speed.
But Hanna is like a long-distance runner too. She needs to eat more often than me, but in most other aspects we’re compatible. I like trees and hiking more than her, and she likes shopping more than me – but by travelling together we both got the chance to do and see things that we probably wouldn’t’ve if we had been travelling separately. And she has no problem handling my long days, as long as she gets a good night’s sleep once in a while – exactly like me! I’ve known Hanna since I was seven, but I’ve never really travelled with her. And I might have been slightly nervous about how our road trip would turn out, back in February when we decided that she would come and join me in Seattle for three weeks in June, but that wouldn’t’ve been necessary. Our weeks together turned out to be a great success, and our days in San Francisco became the crowning of our journey together.
San Francisco is a beautiful city, and being a tourist there is a joy and a privilege. But to be honest, it was not the sights that made the city so special. What made the deepest impression on me were the things we did and saw away from the tourist crowds. That’s where the San Francisco treasures were, and luckily, I had Hanna with me who was willing to explore them with me.
After a crazy, eventful night out dancing in the Mission district, we didn’t have the energy to walk any further than the couple of blocks to Dolores Park, where we enjoyed some hard cider in the Sunday sun and mist, paper bags around our bottles. It’s illegal to drink alcohol in public places in San Francisco, but the police doesn’t have the right to search your bag. So, as long as you carry the bottle in a paper bag, and say you’re drinking juice if asked, you can have whatever you want in that bottle. Ah, the laws to protect people’s integrities. Americans are funny.
July 2012
After saying goodbye to Duckworth Farm and returning to San Francisco, I stayed with Sarah, who I had met at the farm, and her boyfriend Derek for a couple of days.
San Francisco is full of parks. The biggest is the Golden Gate Park. I took Sarah and Derek with me for a Sunday walk among the ponds and trees.
Sarah, Derek and I had to force a thicket before finding the perfect picnic spot. I had beef jerky. It was OK.
The next day, Monday afternoon, my mom arrived in the Golden City – to start the second leg of my west coast road trip. But first, we biked the Golden Gate Bridge. Wandered around Haight-Ashbury. Traveled on a cable car. Marveled at all the incredible street art and murals. Enjoyed my last days in this magical city.
For most of us, the only things that remains after we’re gone are the memories that we’ve left behind. Whatever we left with the people we met in our lives. The memories are our legacies.
This was a thought that grew big in me during my last days in San Francisco. Leaving a place that you’ve grown fond of and the people you met there behind, not knowing if you’ll ever return again, is a strange thing. And I felt that I needed to do something, give something back to this place that had given me so much. And the easiest target was my San Francisco hosts.
Eric got a cold the last couple of days of my stay in San Francisco. So, even though I didn’t really have the time (mom had just arrived, we were supposed to see the entire city in two days), I went to his apartment one evening and made him soup. Fresh ginger and garlic for the cold, vegetables for nutrition and a whole bunch of cilantro because I knew he loves that. When I left, with the soup simmering on the stove, Eric coughed and called me an angel.
As for Sarah, she had seen me knitting a hat for my cousin’s baby girl (who hasn’t been born yet) and she thought it was adorable. When I said that I was planning to make baby hats for all my friends’ future babies, she said that she would have a baby, like, right now, just to get one of my hats. So, just on a whim and some late-night knitting, I managed to finish it and, on the morning when I left Bernal Heights with all my bags, I gave her the blue baby hat. Sarah started crying. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a more sincere person.
These were two tiny gestures to two wonderful individuals, but for me they also became symbols. Sarah and Eric got to embody the entire city of San Francisco and the wonderful times I had there. My parting gifts were a way of thanking not only them, but also the time and the place itself. And I can only hope that the memories that I left behind are as good and warm and exciting as the memories I took with me back home.
Leaving San Francisco might be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done as a traveler. And I don’t really know why. It’s not as if I haven’t liked other places I’ve been to. La Paz will always have a special place in my heart. So will the Namib Desert, Iceland, Vancouver Island and Seattle. But for some reason, I left San Francisco with the feeling that I wasn’t done.
There’s something with the life, the rhythm, the energy. I felt like I fit, which rarely happens with me. I felt welcomed.
I think I wrote it before. San Francisco is like the one that got away. The place that in another life would have been the perfect fit for me. Now, I can only listen to Annika Norlin’s lyrics in the Hello Saferide song “San Francisco” and agree: “San Francisco! We’re going. Don’t you know you’ll never ever want to turn back.”
Katja Malmborg 