I begin with the assertion that my early mornings are, on the whole, trauma-free. My morning schedule is well established, the usual regimen of bathroom-shower-dress-breakfast. On workdays (MWF) I get up early enough to ensure that I’m not rushed.
Nor is there anything particularly traumatic about my morning commute, although it takes a while. I live in Brentwood, a sparkling suburb on the very eastern edge of the Bay Area. Brentwood is not served directly by a BART line, but nearby Antioch hosts the terminal for the ‘yellow’ line. I drive to that station, a trip of about 10 miles westwards on Highway 4 to the Hillcrest Avenue exit. Traffic is usually light, as one might expect at 5:30 AM in suburbia.
The ride begins on the eBART cars, diesel-electric jobbers that shuttle for about 10 miles between Antioch and a transfer platform just east of the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station. (Tidbit: those eBART cars are the most pleasant vehicles in the entire BART system.) The transfer to the main BART train is typically without incident. Since BART has retired all of the old cars, the new trains are clean and bright, and even better, they’re not stinky inside. Big win.
It’s about an hour on BART from there to Embarcadero station in San Francisco, where I transfer to the MUNI Metro subway. The trip from Embarcadero to Van Ness station is also typically uneventful.
So where’s the trauma? Well, it has just arrived. It arises once I exit Van Ness Station, via an escalator that that lifts me up to street level, at the northwest corner of Van Ness and Market.
The northwest goddamn corner of Van Ness and Market. Apart from the Tenderloin, there may be no grislier or more off-putting corner in all of grimy, gritty, gruesome San Francisco. The first thing you see when riding up the escalator is a half-dead oak tree that resembles one of those twiggy misshapen specters in Caspar David Friedrich’s allegories. Immediately underneath it, these days, is a grubby tent. Drug-addled junkies and festering vagrants litter the filthy, greasy, sticky, grotesquely unpleasant sidewalk and cluster around the filthy, greasy, sticky, grotesquely unpleasant “All Star Café” on the corner. (In any properly-governed city, that thing would have been bulldozed ages ago.) To get to my destination half a block up Oak Street, I have to walk around the front of the All-Star Café while sidestepping drugged-out zombies (yesterday there were three, one of whom was in the U-shaped posture of the hopelessly addicted), and turn left just past the café onto Oak Street.
Oak Street is kinda dead. There are three parking lots along the single block between Van Ness and Franklin — this in a city with some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. How on earth has this block not been developed? One answer can be found in the large condominium mid-block that was completed several years ago but stands empty, apparently done in by legal issues. The city’s horrendous planning process has probably sunk any chance of anything else being built along the block.
Oak Street’s post-apocalyptic aura is intensified by thick encrustations on the sidewalk that render the paving barely visible. It’s not a good idea to walk on those sidewalks unless getting a dose of typhoid is on your bucket list. The Conservatory is on the north side of the street, immediately past a vaguely Italianesque building on the corner. That building features a number of inset niches that provide huddling places for druggies and vagrants and bums. Streams of various liquids run from those niches across the sidewalk to the curb. One shouldn’t step on those.
So I don’t walk on the sidewalk. I walk on Oak Street instead. Dirty tire rubber on my shoes is preferable to whatever’s on those sidewalks. Fortunately it’s a one-way street and almost a cul-de-sac, so I’m in no danger of being run over provided I stay close to the cars that are parked diagonally nose-in at the curb. Once I’m in front of the Conservatory the sidewalk is, as a rule, clean and vagrant-free.
I should add that the sky is invariably leaden gray. And it’s cold.
All in all, the morning trauma lasts about a minute. But it packs a lot into that minute. It’s depressing. It’s distressing. It’s disgusting. It’s dismaying. It’s disturbing. As soon as I duck into the Conservatory building I stay inside until it’s time to go home.
I return to a lovely and well-governed small city where the sidewalks are clean, where the sun shines and the trees flourish, where druggies are conspicuously absent, where I enjoy going for long walks, where I feel happy and safe and at ease. I don’t expect San Francisco to become a suburban jewel like Brentwood, but I’d sure appreciate it if the damn place didn’t go out of its way to be so damn unpleasant.
PS: I do not allow my San Francisco shoes in the house unless they’ve had a good scrubbing with disinfectant.