The fog was like gray cotton, suffocating. I knew the sunlight was up there somewhere and the dark ocean somewhere below, but all around me everything was gray. I could see the ground around me, of course, and the nearby trees, but the light was muted, and the sound was dimmed; it was all a hash. I forced myself to breathe deeply, but the heavy moist air was suffocating, dizzying.
At long intervals, a lonely wail came through the fog, muffled, wet like everything here. I looked toward it, seemingly to where the sound had come from, but saw nothing. It was pitched high, though, girlish and giggly. Bleating, it came back a little dimmer as it bounced on the cliffs far away across the invisible channel, where I knew the narrows of the Golden Gate to be, unseen. Golden Gate, such false heavenly promise, it was but a gash that bled the ocean into the bay, and back; the bridge itself, a red suture on a geological wound that would never heal.
Then, at slightly longer intervals, came the deep lowing of another foghorn, a bit to the south, more masculine in tone, as though from far down below, primordial, boggy, pleading. I looked down and to the left, thinking again that I might see it: the rocky lighthouse from which it emanated. Nothing; it might even be behind me. Its reflected sound did not come back this time, swallowed by the fog. I lingered there near the edge, reflecting on this blind new world. It seemed perfectly normal to be here, several days’ ride by train across the continent, then the ferry from Oakland, across the bay, finally the #2 Clement Street bus with the placard that read, LAND’S END, across the city. It was the end of the line. There was a cosmic, if not comic, finality to it.
Last week, the principal, the sweet and round Sister Rosemary, had introduced me to my eighth grade classroom, and all the girls there, in their regulation uniforms, squealed about whether I had “pegged” pants or not. On my way home on the bus that afternoon, I looked around and, for the first time, looked to see what people were wearing. Ah yes, the boys my age were wearing tight, tubular, close-fitting “pegged” pants, over white socks. But not the boy about my age that I had met later in the week who lived a few houses down the street. His name was Gary and he wore regular dark jeans and a dark brown canvas bomber jacket. Old school.
Beneath the echoing clamor of the foghorns, the surf laid down a continuous treble counterpoint, a scratchingly chaotic static, unshakable, always on. The sound was formless a few steps inland from the edge, but when I moved to the dull edge of the precipice, the sound suddenly took shape as muscular ocean waves crashing onto the rocks far below, invisible in the fog. I stood there, slouched and stoop-shouldered, seeing nothing. The sea here ate into the cliffs, the waves biting down into the rock, relentlessly scouring the brown land. Oddly, the land here was not all impregnable rock. Farther up from the water’s own edge, it mixes soil and rock together into a loose unstable mixture, that often slid silently into the sea, as though feeding it, obligingly, reward for a job well done. Still, it was slow work for such a mighty ocean, the Pacific, anything but pacific here.
It was a curious thing to stand at the edge of this land’s end, observing the angry confrontation between these two forms of the planet. I had an almost blissful, gut-urge to pass from one form to the other, in a moment of sullen surrender: to take one more step, and give gravity its role. In this heavenless landscape, hell was cold and wet and invisible.
I turned suddenly, raced across the broken road into the woods where the wind-lashed trunks of the Monterey cypresses provided some cover. Cradling the rifle in my arms, I quickly nestled behind one agonizingly twisted hunchback of a tree, my own body bent against it, and waited, crouched low. It was quieter here; the soft ground was covered by wet pine needles, turning down the buzzing drone of the surf. I looked right and left, trying to capture the erratic movement of the sounds. Letting go of that effort, I stopped paying attention for a bit, taking in what I could feel of my surroundings and letting it take me down, down to the sea with the rocky mud, as in slow motion. It was familiar, comfortable, this letting go. But, no, I must focus now. We had separated over an hour ago, each agreeing to enter the woods from opposite sides. Now we were into the hunt in earnest, Gary and I. I had decided on his strategy: I would select a suitable hiding place near my end that afforded a good view all around, and simply wait. Let Gary move through the woods and make the noise. But I hadn’t counted on the fog and the concentration of sounds that it creates.
Unexpectedly, I caught the blast of Gary’s air rifle. I quickly pulled my arms together and buried my face in them, shutting my eyes down tight, waiting for the pop-thud of the BB pellet hitting the tree trunk beside me. There would be just enough time before the BB got to me. Nothing came. That or I couldn’t hear it for all the noises. Instantly, hiding my face, I ran from my cover uphill to the next, a tree bent almost horizontal along the ground, where I might get a better view of Gary making a move of his own. Breathless, I crashed to the ground behind the tree and looked out immediately, just like in the movies. There, some fifty yards away, I caught a glimpse of Gary’s own move into cover. Now I could wait, catch my breath, and prepare my shot. Come on, Sister Rosemary.
I had small advantage now, being above Gary on a slight rise in the woods, and I knew where he was. The mist hadn’t lifted after all, but the woods filtered it enough so that I could see down to Gary’s hiding place. As my heartbeat slowed, I became aware of another sound in the background. It was the social chattering of the sea lions on the rocks offshore. Christ, the racket in this place. The wind must be picking up now, for their sound came and went, first from one side and then the other, as though coming at you between the winds. The fog might lift soon. He raised his rifle, nestling it silently in a crook of the tree’s trunk, and aimed at the spot where Gary was hiding. They had agreed not to shoot at each other’s faces. What an utterly absurd arrangement. I recalled how this particular rifle tended to shoot the pellet in a lazy arc, down and slightly left. A breeze might make the trajectory unreliable. Wait.
Now coastal birds took up the refrain, but they don’t sound like normal birds, they don’t sing or chirp or caw. Mostly gulls, they have little to be happy about here; the fog has shut them down. They need to fly and search, to scavenge like the sea upon the rock, to allay their constant hunger. When the weather clears with the on-shore winds, they take flight and whistle angrily. Fog doesn’t just burn off here, it is chased away by the winds. The gulls can take flight then, hovering above the edge, looking for food. As I watched the place where Gary was hiding, I noticed the rounded bump on the log. It didn’t seem to belong somehow; it was smooth. Some part Gary’s body was not covered by the tree’s trunk, he realized. He aimed, trying to account for the breeze and the rifle’s quirks; then took a long, slow breath and held it. Steady. He squeezed the trigger, and fired. The gun jolted, and it was a long couple of seconds before, “Aye, shit!” With that, Gary jumped out of his hiding place, and around the tree, rubbing the sting out of his butt. Bull’s eye. “Stop, stop!” I left my hiding place and stopped, looking at Gary looking at me, both puzzled. Gary must have thought he should be angry, or something. He lost, that’s all. What a stupid game.
I heard a woman’s voice behind me calling Gary, who started for the houses whose back yards abutted the edge of the woods. It was his mother, calling him for dinner. They ate early around here. It was still daylight, after all. The fog had gone, and I could see the flat backs below the flat roofs of the attached row houses. We lived five or six houses apart, on the same side of the street that sloped steeply down into the edge of the woods. Gary moved past me and disappeared behind the wooden gate in the tall fence that sealed off their back yard. Every house was the same: little back yard, wooden fence, gate, home.
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When I started on these ruminations about the past, and the short time that I spent in San Francisco, I found it hard not to write of this place in geological terms. The large masses of nature are all around you, the sea, the land and the sky of course, but also the unseen and unimaginable tectonic plates that undergird this formidable landscape. It appears that the fault line separating the two plates on which the city rests moved some six feet or so in 1906, causing a vast destructive earthquake up and down the coast. Well, that was something to think about.
Watch them adverbs…
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