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Fog bumps
into the San Francisco Bay Bridge while the sun
lights up the sails of a boat.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Day after
summer day. Week upon summer week. 90s. 100s. Smog. Glare.
With a gritty topping of forest fire smoke thrown in.
My little inland Orange
County bungalow felt like an oven when I came home. My
welcome was a blast of heat as I opened the front door and
sweated through the haze to find my family reading or
napping in the one room with an air conditioner. This was
our July, August and September.
I had to escape.
Northeasterners gone stir crazy from the cold become
"snow birds," flying off to warmer climates. I
wanted to be a "sun bird," winging away to
someplace where an open window at midday didn't feel like
the screen door to hell.
I was dead serious. Serious
enough to contact the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
"Get me out of
here," I fairly moaned. "I want to be
cold."
Well, a friendly researcher
said, there was Barrow, Alaska, where the average summer
high temperature was a hair over 43 degrees.
Too far.
How about the top of Mount
Washington, N.H.? The mercury tops out at an average high
of 53 degrees. One problem, the guy at NOAA pointed out.
Mount Washington is also where the highest recorded wind
speed in the U.S. — 231 mph — was clocked in 1934.
Try again, I asked.
After a few more
mountaintops and remote Alaskan villages, I snapped. Just
tell me the lowest average high temperature of an urban
area in the lower 48 United States.
A long silence. I figured
Maine, northern Minnesota, maybe some Washington state
town near the Canadian border.
"That would be western
San Francisco," came the reply.
Of course, the fog.
My brother had gone to San
Francisco State while I went to UC Berkeley, and I
remembered many a summer day where it was 10, sometimes 20
degrees cooler at his place near the ocean than mine
across the bay.
I packed my bags. I would
go to San Francisco and hunt for fog. Cool, thick fog that
would blot out the sun and blow away the dirty air.
After an hour in the air
and another driving from San Francisco airport to the
southwest corner of "the City," I had traded hot
brown for cold gray.
Heading up the coastal
route through Daly City, I could see that the fog doesn't
creep in on cats paws, as in the Carl Sandburg poem. It
flows in as magnificent tidal waves of billowing white, up
to 1,000 feet high, then breaks upon the land and flows
like foaming fingers over and under the Golden Gate, up
through the valleys, dimming the sun and blowing the sweat
off a million brows.
The fog can reach nearly
any part of San Francisco — plowing in over Alcatraz,
wrapping around the pointed pinnacle of the Transamerica
Building and parking outside the right-field fence of Pac
Bell ... uh ... SBC ... no, wait ... AT&T Park.
It visits other areas of
the city, but it seems to live in the west-side
neighborhoods of Outer Richmond and Outer Sunset. There's
an old joke that the perpetually foggy Sunset District got
its name because one day the sun set and it never came
back.
The guy at NOAA was right.
As my car glided into the fog bank, the sun became a dull
spot on my mirror. I rolled down the window and enjoyed
the bracing wet air.
Mark Twain never said,
"The coldest winter of my life was a summer in San
Francisco." The original wag is lost to history, but
Twain probably would wish he had said it.
On a week when temperatures
on my Orange County front porch topped 90 degrees and the
attic fan pushed hot air out of the rafters until after
dark, the thermometer listing for "outside" on
my rental car registered 62 degrees. While the rest of the
nation steamed and sweltered, I was wonderfully cold.
Colder than if I had been in Seattle or Portland or
Minneapolis. Nearly 30 degrees colder than in inland
Orange County.
The west side of San
Francisco is a place apart from the tourist world of San
Francisco. Most of it was developed in the years after the
1906 earthquake, when residents pitched tents and built
shacks on the sand dunes south of Golden Gate Park.
With the exception of the
Cliff House restaurant and the Legion of Honor art museum
to the far north and the somewhat aged zoo at the far
south, the area known as "the Avenues" for its
grid pattern of streets is largely residential. A part of
San Francisco low on famous attractions, or for that
matter, hotels or top-end restaurants.
There's a Russian enclave
with churches and bakeries, along with a few good small
Chinese restaurants along the stretch of Geary Boulevard
west of 15th Street. The San Francisco Chronicle once
referred to solidly suburban-style Outer Sunset as
"Planet Eisenhower" for its 1950s homes and
shopping strips. Irving Street and Taraval are the
shopping and eating districts for the area. But if there
is a hub for the fog belt, it would be West Portal, the
neighborhood nestled next to the spot where the MUNI line
tunnel cuts through the hills to the sunnier downtown side
of the city.
I checked into the Ocean
Park Motel, the city's first "motor court,"
built in 1937. I fell asleep, under a pile of blankets, to
the sound of bells from the nearby trolley cars and
distant fog horns.
The next morning was
blissfully gray again. After breakfast at a diner in the
Parkside neighborhood, I drove down to the fog belt's
great attraction: the wide, four-mile stretch of Ocean
Beach. It's a wild, raw place, about as far as can be from
a Beach Boys song vision of California summer on the sand.
The sand is hard and
asphalt-colored, the water a battleship gray that scares
off most swimmers with frigid temperatures and strong
currents. It's best experienced wrapped in a sweater,
strolling along to watch the kite flyers who take
advantage of the blustery breezes.
Bonnie Brill came down to
surf from the sunnier Twin Peaks area. She was decked out
in a wetsuit with booties and head gear to ward off the
cold.
"You know you are
alive when you are out surfing in the cold," she
joked.
Terry Weinberg lives in the
fog-bound Richmond district and also came down to surf —
wearing a wetsuit including head covering and booties.
"There's a whole group
of us who come down here," Weinberg said. "We
look out for each other and have fun together. There's
none of the attitude you get at a more ideal surf
spot."
I've enjoyed my respite
from the heat and smog, but wonder if I could live here in
the perpetual summer gloom in a place where the winterlike
seasonal affect disorder hits in July and August. Even
Carl Nolte, the Chronicle's veteran columnist who is in
love with the city, describes long stretches of foggy days
as "soul-destroying."
Weinberg's a cheery guy. He
explains that he's 60 years old and has lived with the
gray canopy overhead for most of his life. "Fog and
cold?" he said. "That's just summer where I
live."
———
IF YOU GO:
MORE INFO: San Francisco
Visitor Information Center, www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com or
415-391-2000. The Web site combines the Outer Richmond and
Outer Sunset into a section called "Golden Gate
Park/Sunset."
The San Francisco Chronicle
has a guide to the neighborhoods, though some of the
information is out of date. www.sfgate.com/travel
———
Gary A. Warner: gettingaway@ocregister.com
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