Light bouncing off those trillion tiny molecules of water in the body of a fog: this is reading San Francisco in the original. Every place has its own way of expressing volume to its visitors, of showing us how to think about the act of containing and being contained. London has its parks, New York has its grid, and San Francisco has its weather. On my last of four nights in the city I'm glad to have had one that was not clear. Empty skies are the enemy of anyone who hopes to visit San Francisco; without fog it's just scenography.
Tall buildings caught in the volumetric light of a San Francisco night have me pondering whether it is the land that gives foundation to the towers, or the towers themselves that began with penthouses and shaped the topography by growing downward. Pushing and cracking the earth of the bay into hills and valleys in an act of hyper literal settling.
Twelve hours later, along the hollow center of an anonymous corporate campus: steady winds render the surface of an artificial lake into a conveyor belt moving fast and consistent against the shore. Water ends cleanly in land and perpetually keeps doing so with no margin or edge. The illusion is pulled off through a careful balance of sight lines, retaining walls, and a natural-looking distribution of "shore material" that erase any break of the waves.
Although efforts to lump San Francisco into some larger Bay Area are overzealous, these vignettes bracket my time in Northern California well: a pure beauty, a beautiful artifice, a careful contest.
Unexpected, but we seem to be getting back to the old sort of writing that used to be on this site.
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