Sitting together above the Sunset
We sat on top of the hill last night, looking West out over the Sunset District. The Sunset is huge — geographically, if not demographically. It stretches out toward the ocean, a grid of rectangular blocks and two or three story duplexes and apartment buildings. Restaurants, shops, oil change places, fabric stores, gas stations, supermarkets, parks, schools, churches. There are even a couple big windmills if you know where to look. I know where to look for lots of things out here.
We can see the lights from the cars on 19th Ave as they cross into the park and disappear around the curve through the trees. This is the quiet side of the city.
The Sunset District is peach colored at night. The buildings have distinct colors during the day, but now everything is just uniformly peach. It’s the streetlights. Sodium-something-or-other lamps, I try to explain. I think they use those lamps to limit light pollution. I think I remember learning that when I was a kid. There’s a metropolitan area of something like seven million people stretching behind us; the light pollution isn’t being stopped at all.
“It’s like being home,” she said. I think we both felt like we were wandering for a long time until we found this place.
I’d been on top of this hill before. I can’t remember when, but it was hazy, daytime and I had climbed up the hill and collected a little bit of the rock at the top. That piece of rock sat on my bookshelf for years.
“It’s Greywacke.” Darryl, the geology professor at City College, had told us that all of the rock making up the hills of San Francisco is Greywacke.
I left the Sunset more than five years ago. I was on my way down then. When I first arrived I was full of excitement and potential. Just a kid, new to the big city, ready to make my dreams come true. When I left the Sunset, I had been holed up alone in the back of an apartment for years. I had long since thrown out all of my furniture, boarded up the front windows and ceased to exist on the inside.
I’ve lived on the other side of the city for years now, alive and existing on the inside, alive and existing on the outside, too. And I just sort of forgot about the Sunset until I started coming out to her neighborhood. My old neighborhood.
It started slowly and built up, memories leading to feelings. At first it was just nice to see the old places, the restaurants, the streetcars rumbling down Judah, the way the sky looks really blue when it’s not foggy. Riding to work on the N-Judah has been making me smile, even when it’s crowded and I have to stand all the way to Montgomery.
Last night I went to a meeting at 19th Ave and Judah before we met up, and the memories of the past started coming in, in huge waves. The way the streetlights bathe the concrete below in muted light, the sound of the streetcars rumbling up and down the hills and the way the dusk settles over the neighborhood made me think of the fog and the haze of my past, the cloudy memories and the self-destructive behavior. Of the smoke. And the escape. Thank God for the escape.
I hadn’t been past 19th Ave more than a handful of times in the last five years. Two days ago I had some time for myself so I rode to the end of the N line, walked the trail along beach, watched the sunset and laughed at the dogs playing at Fort Funston. I had to switch buses at the mall to get back. Past the college and the bookstores, the big parking lots and the students horsing around on the Muni platform.
It’s strange to see the old places where things were bad and to be back again when things are good. The good is sustainable now. I’m whole now. I’m present now. I’m here now.
“It is like being home,” I replied, with a smile.