No, I’m not referring to the tv show. I can’t remember if my brother brought me here first, or it was my uncle who was living here at the time in the 90’s… Either way, it’s been over two decades since I first breathed in the fairly fresh mountain air (or as mountain as one can get in the city.) This is just one of the things about San Francisco I love. Important things like this don’t (seem to) change, and nothing paves the way for a shiny and new viewing point with a fancy gondola and a twenty dollar price tag, because the natural landscape is preserved. Okay, if it sounds like I’m being bitter about the other place I live, I will neither confirm nor deny that. However, one has to concede that while change is inevitable and necessary, there is a big portion of unnecessary construction in order to improve a country’s GDP, or attract more, more, more of everything. Either way, this little detour off a shopping trip to Trader Joe’s is always worth it. My friend and I raced (carefully) up both the Noe and Eureka peaks huffing and puffing, enjoyed the views and caught a breather, fully intending to make the walk up and down (and up and down) both peaks again to get back to the car, but decided to test out walking around the little mounds instead, which took less than ten minutes. We were howling at our idiocy for thinking it was potentially faster to ‘cut through’ the peaks (including an intense dialogue on graph theory (shortest path problem), but y’know the views were worth it.
What was crazy was catching the glare off the pacific ocean, or to possibly be more specific, catching the glare off the gulf of the Farallones (ugh, don’t get me started on the preservation and study of the Farallon Islands aka The Devil’s Teeth because I am enamoured on so many fronts – story for another time), but there is no way to know this since our eyes aren’t capable of seeing that far. It’s a pretty incredible idea to look, yet see nothing but the vast ocean. Now I’m really not a lens flare sort of person (says every slightly more seasoned amateur photographer, haha), but I just wanted to remember the awe I felt as my friend and I were blinded by both the sun and its reflection in the horizon.
Denise Taw 