Ocean Beach: a routine.

Ocean beach and back 9.8 miles 45 mins avg speed 14.4 mph

I started doing this route the first day I received the Trek mountain bike my parents generously shipped from Vermont April last year. Since then I've made the trip through Golden Gate Park at least a couple dozen times. I've spend a solitary year here, both in number and in companionship. It is really nothing new, I've always had cycles, dry spells. And so I'd make the trip to get out of the city noise and into the cleansing "crash" of the vast lines of waves. Completely worth the hour/hour-and-a-half out of my life.

Tonight I left the house at 5:30 and it was already dusk. The roads that make up my route through Gold Gate park run the gamut from smooth and well maintained to "Maine-tained" my little adjective for shittly paved roads. Next time I do this route at night I will take my high-powered headlight. Road bikes are too fragile for that degree of jostling.

It is essentially all down hill to Ocean beach through the park. Toward the west-end of the park the street lights thin out to nothing. There is an interesting little gem too: a buffalo paddock. Honest-to-god buffalo grazing and living out their lives in the middle of a city. The nights I ride through the air is unfailingly rich with the scent of Eucalyptus trees. The air is cool most nights too, as this time of year it dips into the 40's.

My arrival at the ocean is always a heart-lifting experience. My failure to apply to medical school with gusto, my lack of money and money management skills, my romance dry spell, all that melts into the miles behind me to the East as I face the fading, red western sky. The waves at night take on an inverse image from the waves in the day, or at lease they seemed to then and there. The bases would reflect the street lights (Highway, a four-lane affair, is about 100 yards from the breakers), like a parabolic mirror. The caps, on the other hand, were dark.

On the horizon ships crawled slowly on the ends of the earth, their lights like orderly constellations. The moon is almost full and was very bright, otherwise I would have seen more actual constellations. But I was content to take this artificial substitute. To my right--north--the Marin Headlands shaped darker mounts against a darkening sky.

When I look around California, where ever I am, I try to envision it as it was before the finger of modern man scratched the landscape, leaving it bleeding with box stores and track homes. The grasslands between the Bay Area and Sacramento: where they always there? Where were the red wood forests? Muir Woods in Marin is the last vestige of a system of forests that ran along the coast. And what did San Francisco look like? Just a peninsula of rolling grassy hills, topped with dry grass 9 months out of the year. Fires and earthquakes burnt and shook the land; no one knew, on one cared.

From the East I am pulled back to my life on concrete. I don't mind. I've stopped wishing to share this with someone, stopped wishing I could experience it forever, stopped wanting days filled with doing only what I wish.

With a long exhale I don my helmet, situated myself in the saddle and start back East through the woody, fragrant park; I'm going home.