Do certain people leave behind a little of their aura in places that mean a lot to them? I don’t know. I have no idea. But recently, when walking across the grassy Crissy Field, a one-time airfield in San Francisco, on a clear blue day with the Golden Gate Bridge sitting all orangey between the deep blue of the bay and milky blue of the sky, the thought came into my mind that Amelia Earhart had walked there. I could see, in my mind’s eye, an image of her kicking out the chocks from underneath her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra on the very same grass on which I was walking.
Some Googling later in the day proved my hunch correct. Earhart did indeed fly out Crissy Field in the early 1930s, in the days before she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California, and before the construction of the Golden Gate, twined with the Bay’s propensity to be shrouded in a thick fog, made Oakland Municipal Airport a more attractive alternative launch pad for some dare devil flying.
San Francisco is like that. It’s full of ghosts, be they real of fictional. When you see the undulating ski-slope streets of the city, it’s impossible not to see Steve McQueen speeding over them in his Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT during the car chase at the end of Bullitt. Or Ryan O’ Neil and Barbara Streisand doing the same but on a bicycle in What’s Up Doc, before careering into a jingly-jangly parade in Chinatown and getting trapped in a multicoloured paper mâché dragon. And then you think of Captain Kirk and Spock looking for a humpback whale in The Voyage Home, or Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak looking for each other in Vertigo, or Amelia Earhart standing by her plane on Crissy Field.
Such were the visions I was having as I wandered San Francisco and they were exacerbated by the fact that the city appeared, to me at least, to be a bit of a ghost town itself. Parts of the central business district, a one-time home to countless tech companies, are still to spring back into life after the pandemic, while in the down-at-heel Tenderloin district which borders it, homelessness, fentanyl addiction and petty crime make for a worrying hallmark.
The hotel workers union, during my visit, were on strike, with bored employees sat outside empty lobbies banging on upturned paint tins, the noise echoing through the empty streets like the soundtrack to impending action in some dystopian sci-fi film. I should say at this point that I was in the city at Thanksgiving, which may have been a reason for its emptiness. In fact, one union had laid on a thanksgiving dinner on a sidewalk near Union Square for its striking workers and had set a long table with a white cloth with fifty or more folding chairs pulled to it. The expectant table made for quite an edifying scene, belying the fact, if just for the morning, that this was a city with some problems.
On my first afternoon, still spaced out form the jet lag, I climbed up the steep Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower, a monument to the be-shrubbed mind of Lillie Hitchcock Coit and immortalised by the writer and founder of San Francisco’s City Lights book shop, Laurence Ferlinghetti, in his poem Dog.
The dog trots freely in the street
and sees reality
and the things he sees
are bigger than himself
and the things he sees
are his reality
And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory
and past Coit’s Tower
and past Congressman Doyle
He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower
but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle
I was slightly perplexed by Coit Tower, if a little afraid. It seemed slightly ominous sticking up out of Telegraph Hill like an Art-Deco ivory finger. It was even more eery because nobody seemed to be around, except for electric cars, empty electric cars, which would seemingly float down the street towards the Pacific every now and again.
These were the famous driverless cars belonging to Waymo, an even more futuristic version of Uber, which are being trialled in the city. After some hesitation, both of the political and cowardly kind, I decided to try a ride and found it, after the initial thrill of watching the wheel spin autonomously on sharp corners, to be quite an empty experience. It seemed to me to be just another removal of a simple human interaction from everyday life, like the disappearance of the person working the checkout in a supermarket, they’ve all been beamed up to be with Kirk, Spock and the humpback whales, only to be replaced with silence.
In contrast, on one sun-streaked afternoon later in my trip, when I had walked the length of Golden Gate Park to the ocean, legs exhausted, I opted for an Uber over a Waymo and was quickly rewarded with a gas-bagging alternative. The driver, an elderly man, seemed new in town and asked me if I knew where I was going and could offer up a better route than the sat-nav. Naturally, despite being clueless, I was charmed by this request and the thought that I might be so easily assimilated into a place 12,000 miles away from home as to be taken for a local after just two days.
I apologised and said I’d only been around for a few hours, which prompted a long conversation about roots. He was from Hawaii and he seemed to think that given I had come so far, from London to the edge of the Pacific, not going on to see the islands was a bit of a dunderheaded choice.
Did I know, he asked, that it was the Royal Navy’s Captain Cook that discovered Hawaii and that he had named them the Sandwich Islands after the Earl famed for putting cooked meat between pieces of bread? I did not, I said. Did I know, he added, that the union flag still makes up part of Hawaii’s state flag? I did not know that either. Now, this was the kind of high-quality conversation that I couldn’t get from a Waymo, which only seemed to get vocal to scream at me when I didn’t have my seat belt on.
No, the Hawaiian didn’t care about seatbelts, he was more interested in debating the make-up of the English breakfast, and reminiscing about the time he saw Harvey Milk and Dianne Feinstein talking on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. He said he knew then that they would both go far. She went on to become the longest serving female senator in US history. He got shot in the head. Oh, America!
With the likes of Waymo coming to a city near you, one can only imagine that the notion of having a freewheeling conversation with a taxi driver is heading to the same place as Feinstein and Milk: a museum. But I suppose error could still set the technology back a bit. Just the sight of pedestrians waving manically when they walk out in front of the moving vehicles at crossings suggested that the public’s faith is not yet high in the new technology. To begin with I thought they were waving at me, then I realised they were waving manically to ensure that the car’s internal gizmos clocked them and didn’t mow them down.
And what’s to stop these cars going all dystopian, sealing the doors, locking you in and taking off at full pelt over the humps and bumps of San Francisco. Before you know it you’d be racing off into the Pacific and not stopping until you got to the Sandwich Islands to spend the rest of your life eating BLTs.
See, I let my imagination run riot there, while I still can, before I’m replaced by something that can write much more levelled prose than I can, more normal prose, and hopefully, something much more readable.
Robert Leeming 