Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  Twenty-eight miles from the end of the continent, you would have come upon the most forbidding piece of real estate to be found within the borders of any major city in the world: the Farallon Islands.

  The face-off between Playland at the Beach and the Farallones is the ultimate San Francisco dissonance. For if Playland represents humanity’s invincible drive to conquer nature by deep-frying it and serving it on a stick, the Farallones are the exact opposite—they are absolutely resistant to domestication. This city specializes in such collisions.

  From the safety of the continent, the Farallones look dreamlike and mysterious, guardians of a distant West as mythical as Tolkien’s Grey Havens. But for the mariners who have come to grief on them, the only myth they conjure up is that of the Clashing Rocks, those ferociously mobile islands that specialized in destroying passing Greek ships.

  The Farallones have sent many ships to the bottom of the sea. The most potentially catastrophic incident took place one fog-shrouded morning in 1944, when a Liberty ship bearing 1,300 Navy men returning from the Pacific theater inadvertently entered the creepily named “silent zone,” a dead auditory area where the sound of the island’s foghorn was blocked by a massive granite peak. The ship smashed into a reef and quickly foundered. Men who had survived Guadalcanal and Midway bobbed in the turbulent seas, in danger of drowning just a few hours outside the Golden Gate. When the SOS came in, a motley fleet of vessels raced at top speed out of San Francisco harbor. It was the city’s biggest nautical rescue mission since the 1906 fire, when a flotilla of ships picked up thousands of people as flames raged toward them on the northern waterfront. All the sailors were saved.

  But not every Farallon shipwreck has had such a happy ending. The seas around the islands are treacherous. On April 14, 2012, five experienced crew-men on a racing yacht were killed when a huge wave swamped their boat, hurling them into the water and smashing their boat on the rocks.

  The ominousness of the Farallones may have inspired a myth even older than that of the Clashing Rocks. The central coast Indians who inhabited this part of California for thousands of years believed that when people died, their spirit would travel across the sea to a place called the Island of the Dead. Some of them thought that this was a happy place. But others had a less sanguine vision. The self-taught ethnographer Stephen Powers wrote of a Pomo tribe, “They say it is an island in the bitter, salt sea, an island naked, barren, and desolate, covered only with brine-splattered stones, and with glistening salt, which crunches under the tread, and swept with cursed winds and blinding acrid sea-spray. On this abhorred island bad Indians are condemned to live forever, spending an eternity in breaking stones one upon the other, with no food but broken stones and no drink but choking brine.”

  Whether this nightmarish myth was inspired by the Farallones is unknown. The tule boats used by the central coast Indians weren’t capable of sailing that far in the open ocean, so the vision couldn’t have been based on firsthand experience. Perhaps the myth originated in ancient stories told by the Bay Area’s first inhabitants, who lived here when it was possible to walk to the Farallones. If the Pomos did use the islands as a model for their hell, a later divine followed in their footsteps: A U.S. Navy chaplain said, “God has done less for it and with it than any other place.”

  But the Farallones are only barren and desolate from a human perspective. For the myriad other living things that swarm all over and around them, they’re like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

  First, there are the birds. There are enough birds on the Farallones to give Alfred Hitchcock nightmares. The islands are the largest seabird breeding colony in the contiguous United States. More than 300,000 birds of 13 species are found there, including the tufted puffin, the Cassin’s auklet, the ashy storm-petrel, and the pelagic cormorant.

  Then there are the mammals. The islands are a haul-out and breeding site for five species of seals and sea lions, including the jaw-droppingly huge northern elephant seal, whose males can weigh 5,500 pounds. Humpback, gray, and blue whales, the largest animals on the planet, feed in these krill-rich waters during the so-called upwelling season, when the California Current forces nutrient-rich cold water from the ocean floor to the surface. The upwelling makes the waters just outside the Golden Gate among the most productive marine habitats in the world.

  The Farallones’ most lethal visitors arrive in the fall: 30 to 100 great white sharks, killing machines that can weigh 5,000 pounds and that wreak havoc on the seals and sea lions (and, when the sharks venture near Stinson Beach or Tomales Bay, an occasional swimmer or surfer. There are more shark attacks along the central California coast than anywhere in the world). But these monsters are mere minnows compared with the killer whales, which can weigh up to 20,000 pounds, that drop in from time to time. In 1997, a killer whale killed a great white shark off the Farallones, the Super Bowl of species conflict on planet Earth.

  The islands are a Federal Wilderness and National Wildlife Refuge, which means visitors are forbidden. The only inhabited island is Southeast Farallon Island, where, since 1968, a few intrepid scientists and naturalists from the Point Reyes Bird Observatory have been monitoring and studying the wildlife.

  However, their remarkable wildlife is not the only noteworthy thing about the Farallones. In a region marked by extraordinary geology, they may be the most bizarre anomaly of all. For they are just passing through.

  Eighty to 110 million years ago, during the Mesozoic era—the age of dinosaurs—the granite rocks that compose the islands were formed when two of the planet’s seven major tectonic plates, the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, collided with each other. This collision took place 300 miles south of where the islands are now, in the southern part of the Sierra Nevada range. They and the other rocks that make up what’s known as the Salinian Complex, including Point Reyes and Montara Mountain, were separated from the rest of the Sierra, which sits on the North American Plate, by the motion of the San Andreas Fault, then taken for a ride on the neighboring Pacific Plate, which is inexorably moving north at the dizzying rate of 1.6 inches a year. It took perhaps 20 million years for the Farallones to travel to their current location. In another 10 million years they will have migrated to somewhere off the coast of Oregon, giving the denizens of that sensitive state another excuse to whine about being overrun by vulgar arrivistes from California.

  So, rather than the Clashing Rocks, it would be more apt to compare the Farallones with the subject of another Greek myth, the Wandering Rocks. Rootless cosmopolitans that have installed themselves temporarily on the horizon, they are the perfect outer limit—a moving one—for this city of runaways.

  Actually, until recently, the Farallones were not islands at all. During the last glacial period, which ended 12,500 years ago, sea levels were much lower than they are today, and the Farallones were a ridge of peaks just east of the continental shelf. The first San Franciscans, who arrived some 13,000 years ago, could have walked out there.

  After the waters rose, Spanish explorers used the Farallones as landmarks. Boston traders hunted seals on the islands in the early 19th century, followed by a colony of Russians. But it was the Gold Rush that gave the Farallones their strange, short moment in the sun. Some of the men who poured into San Francisco realized that the profits to be made from mining for gold were puny in comparison with those that could be made by “mining the miners.” Any scarce commodity, including food, could be sold for obscene profits. In San Francisco, eggs were rare and pricey. In 1849, there were an estimated 300,000 common murres nesting on the Farallones. The murre lays eggs almost twice as big as a chicken egg, and equally tasty. Some shrewd entrepreneurs quickly realized that there was gold in them thar guano-befouled cliffs.

  In 1851, six men landed on the Farallones, declared themselves owners by right of possession, formed a stock company, and began gathering eggs and selling them in San Francisco. Their success inspired others who paid no attention to their claims of ownership. The enmity betw
een rival eggers grew to staggering proportions, culminating in the heartbreaking “Egg War” of 1863, during which two men were shot dead. Eventually the U.S. government, which ran the lighthouse on the main island, banned egging altogether.

  The Farallones have been inhabited off and on ever since the Gold Rush. In 1897, they even briefly had their own public school, whose first and only principal, the wonderfully named Miss Daisy Doud, brought a flock of homing pigeons with her so that she could communicate with the mainland. The school lasted only two years but the islands still belong to San Francisco.

  I had wanted to visit the Farallones ever since I set eyes on them, and I finally took a boat tour out there one May morning with my sister. Our boat headed up the spectacular Marin coast to near Bolinas, then turned southwest for the 20-mile haul to the islands.

  As the land disappeared behind us, I realized that in almost half a century of living in the Bay Area, I had never been this far outside the Golden Gate. A flock of surf scoters appeared next to the boat, blasting from the top of one wave to the next, at once ungainly and graceful, like self-propelled rocks barreling through the waves. I had never seen these birds before.

  The Pacific was a whole different animal from the bay. There was nothing human-size about it. It was green and moving and dangerous, and it was going to stay like that all the way to Japan.

  The sea was choppy, and I began to feel a little woozy. The boat barreled on through mile after mile of churning water. Finally the captain announced that we were approaching the Farallones.

  They rose up out of the ocean like a hallucination in shit-covered granite. Even though I knew they were there, there was still something shocking, almost obscene, about that first sight. They were not like the islands in the Aegean, which feel like stepping-stones strewn by friendly gods. These were more like mines. Early visitors called the Farallones “the Devil’s Teeth,” and the name is a calumny on Satan’s dentist. The hills were massive: Tower Hill on Southeast Farallon Island is 348 feet high, only 28 feet lower than Nob Hill. The island looked like a rubble-strewn quarry in the middle of the ocean: jagged cliffs running down to a brown, dirty, talus-strewn tableland, with a few old buildings scattered around. I don’t know what I thought the Farallones would look like, but it wasn’t like the spine of Baja California.

  But the next moment the brown talus was forgotten. As we approached Fisherman’s Bay on the island’s northeast side, three gray whales suddenly appeared a few hundred yards ahead of us, blowing white plumes in the air. The naturalist on the boat told us they had been hanging around for a while, which was unusual: Most of the whales in the vicinity were transients. We had only a few brief glimpses of parts of their long, sinuous bodies slicing through the water, but to see one of these great beings in its home was a benediction, as if it had extended its fluke in fellowship.

  After the whales moved off, I looked up at Tower Hill. It took me a moment to realize that the black dots covering that massive brown monolith were common murres. It was more birds than I had ever seen in one place. When we sailed downwind of the island, the smell of the guano was intense.

  Great Arch Rock came into view, a stunning formation so huge it can be seen on clear days from Point Reyes. Its monumental scale made it look like a magic portal into the Jurassic: You half expected to see a tyrannosaurus stalk through it. Now that we had left the scarred brown hillside behind, the island’s savage beauty emerged. The waves surged and crashed on the rocks. Sea lions and seals were hauled out. The salt air was clean and cool.

  Before heading back, we followed three humpbacks as they relentlessly fed and surfaced and dived to feed again, their mighty flukes waving in the air as they went down. When we turned for home, a brown albatross—another bird I had never seen before—suddenly whipped across our bow.

  It was a warm, hazy day, and it took a long time for the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge to appear. As we drew nearer, the complex topography of the peninsula and the city announced itself, unfolding south to north: Point San Pedro, Montara Mountain, Mount San Bruno, Mount Davidson, Mount Sutro. The long expanse of Ocean Beach stretched out in the foreground.

  It was oddly unimpressive, this approach from the west. It had none of the drama that greets you when you come over the Bay Bridge at dusk and see the city rising up against its hills like an electric Atlantis, all turrets and pennants and twinkling lights, a Joseph Stella vision of a stained-glass city. This was a flat and exposed and sandy coast with some lumpy hills behind it. It was not San Francisco’s good profile.

  But as soon as we passed the mighty cliffs at Lands End, the dumpy matron became flashing-eyed Cleopatra again. We were back in the land of high geographical cheekbones. We sailed past Mile Rock, then under the impossibly high bridge and past Fort Point. Now that we were in the bay, it felt like we had come back from outer space. Sailboats sailed cheerfully past, the Marina Green sparkled, bicyclists wheeled along, Coit Tower smiled at us. Everything was as colorful and gay as a Raoul Dufy painting. We pulled into a slip on the west side of Fort Mason and walked off the boat onto solid ground.

  Maybe it was the lingering seasickness, maybe it was the endlessness of the ocean, but I felt quite happy to be walking east. Away from the ocean. Toward downtown.

  Before I had visited the Farallones, I had pictured them as the essential San Francisco. I imagined that they were the city stripped of superfluity, the city with its clothes off. But at this moment they didn’t feel as much to me like the city with its clothes off as like the city with its skin off. They were skeletal, the granite embodiment of King Lear howling in the storm—naked, terrifying, crazy.

  San Francisco grew up around the bay, not the ocean. Its nucleus was a shallow curved cove in what is now the Financial District. Its most famous hills and neighborhoods—North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, Russian Hill—look out over the bay, not the Pacific. There are practical reasons for this. There was no reason for the city to start at the ocean. The best anchorage was at Yerba Buena, on the bay. The famous hills were close to that anchorage. And the west was a desert of sand dunes, whipped by the northwesterly wind that blows constantly down the California coast. This city ended up concentrated in the east simply because it followed the lay of the land.

  San Franciscans are drawn to the sea—at least to its edge. We are not like the Balinese, who live on an island but turn inward because they are afraid of the ocean. To picnic at Baker Beach or surf at Ocean Beach or walk at Fort Funston, to look out toward the horizon from Larsen Peak or the Cliff House, is an essential part of life here.

  Yet that trip to the Farallones, 28 miles out into the Pacific, made me realize just how enormous the ocean is, and what an infinitesimally small fraction of it we experience here. Even someone who lives on 48th Avenue, the last street before the beach, is still only looking at the ocean from terra firma. And if we could take in more of the ocean, would we even want to?

  In Moby-Dick, Melville describes how the little cabin boy Pip, abandoned in the open ocean, is driven mad by its “heartless immensity.” That heartless immensity had shaken me, too. But as I walked toward North Beach, my Gothic mood began to lift, like a finger of fog on the bay burning off in the morning sun. I remembered the lazy whale, at peace in its vast swimming pool, and the sea lions sunning themselves on rocks made of the same granite as my beloved Sierra. The ocean was vast, but it was not infinite. And hadn’t Melville himself opened his book by describing how all human beings are drawn to water—and especially drawn to the ocean, where life began? We are all forever running away to sea.

  And so, as I wander through my city, I am glad that the Farallones are part of it. I am glad that they stand on the horizon, mighty stone doors at the beginning of the long, long west. Warm sun caressing them in summer. Majestic sharks cruising through their waters in fall. Icy winds blowing through their crags in winter. Flocks of crying seabirds returning to them in spring. While we flit through the corridors of this fragile palace we have built to keep
out the cold, it is good to know that they are out there, in darkness and in light, facing the unknowable world.

  Chapter 2

  Adventures in the Skin Trade

  Turk and Taylor Streets

  In the universe of San Francisco, the Tenderloin is the black hole, the six-block-by-six-block area where the city’s urban matter is most intensely concentrated. It is the only part of San Francisco that remains untamed, its last human wilderness. Without the Tenderloin and its radioactive core of junkies, drunks, transvestites, dealers, thugs, madmen, hustlers, derelicts, prostitutes, and lowlifes, this overpriced, increasingly homogenous burg would feel like one of those motel bathrooms that are “sani-sealed for your protection.”

  The Tenderloin is the creepy Mr. Hyde (which happens to be the name of a street running through it) to the rest of San Francisco’s respectable Dr. Jekyll (who, appropriately, goes unhonored). And this evil twin isn’t hidden away in some asylum on the outskirts of town. The Tenderloin is surrounded by Union Square, Nob Hill, the Civic Center, and the gentrifying mid-Market district. It’s about as central as you can get.

  This is weird. Many cities used to have “bad” neighborhoods in the heart of downtown, zones of misrule where the primal human urges—to get laid, to get high, and to get money—were allowed to bloom furtively in the night. But most of them are gone now, victims of gentrification. New York’s Times Square feels like Disneyland, Vancouver’s Gastown has been tamed, Boston’s Combat Zone was rendered hors de combat years ago. And of those that remain, none take up 36 square blocks of prime real estate in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in the world.