“America this is quite serious.” – Allen Ginsberg
SAN FRANCISCO – O what a sheltered life I lead.
I’ve been in San Francisco for two days and, bumpkin that I am, have spent much of the time gawking:
- At driverless cars
- At locked cabinets designed to protect Target’s precious laundry soap collection from master thieves
- At automobile traffic that moves at roughly the speed of crystallized honey from the spout of a plastic squeeze bottle
- At the truly wretched souls who live on the streets of our fair cities.
In a nice bit of symmetry, I am here to help my son move to California 30 years after we moved him, as a 1-year-old, from California to Pennsylvania. In a further bit of symmetry, Ethan is moving to San Francisco as a single guy with a new job 45 years after I moved to San Francisco as a single guy with a new job.
On the one hand, it’s lovely to see that nothing has changed here: same warm sun and fog-cooled air, same preposterous hills, same bay views from the tops of those hills, same streets named after Spanish explorers and Gold Rush-era rapscallions.
On the other hand, it’s terrible to see that nothing has changed because all the problems have gotten worse: more traffic, more desperadoes on the streets, soaring housing costs, greater fire danger from more extreme droughts.
The housing situation is out of control. Ethan’s rent for a room is almost six times what I paid for an apartment in the 1980s. I don’t recall how much money I was making as staff folklorist at the Maritime Humanities Center, but I’m quite sure E (as I call him) isn’t earning six times as much.
Obviously, the high rents contribute to both the homelessness problem and the need to keep ordinary household products under lock and key at big box stores. I don’t know what we should do about homelessness in America other than feel very ashamed of ourselves, though taxing the bejeebers out of the super-rich would be an excellent start.
My itinerary called for me to fly to Salt Lake City and help E load the U-Haul trailer, drive to San Francisco and then transfer the contents of the trailer to his new digs.
Our plan was to do the drive in one long day — Salt Lake City to Reno — and one short day — Reno to SF.
I did my due diligence for our overnight in Reno: I looked at the reviews, the cost, the pet-friendliness (Dash the cat was also moving to San Francisco). You never know, though. As we got within a few blocks of our chain hotel, we saw more and more people who looked like they were barely hanging on.
This being Nevada, the hotel was attached to a casino, and casinos being the saddest places on Earth, we saw more desperadoes milling around the entrance, perhaps hoping to catch a lucky gambler in a generous mood.
Both of us spent the night convinced that the desperadoes would laugh at the flimsy locks on our trailer, snip them with bolt cutters and make off with all of Ethan’s worldly goods. O ye of little faith.
The next day, after an all-too-brief passage through the High Sierra, we arrived in the Outer Bay Area, where a greeting committee of automobiles had congregated to welcome us.
Among them were the driverless Waymos, now famous for having been summoned to the scene of the anti-ICE protests in LA so they could be set ablaze and thereby discredit the protests. Perhaps if I spent more time here, I would have stopped doing double takes every time I saw one.
After unloading the trailer and dining on Malaysian food on Clement Street, we went to Target. There, phone chargers and ibuprofen, too, were in locked cabinets, which necessitated summoning and then waiting for a clerk to arrive with the key. Bafflingly, the wine was on open shelves.
I don’t want to give you the impression that President Trump is right when he characterizes all “Democrat-run” cities as hellholes. In addition to the traffic jams, the driverless cars, the strung-out folks living on the street and the anti-shoplifting measures in the stores, I saw these shocking sights for which national news media coverage had not prepared me:
- Young couples pushing infants in strollers
- Bike riders
- Dog walkers
- Sun bathers
San Francisco is as lovely as ever. I was vicariously thrilled that Ethan will get to experience all the good things Northern California has to offer. At the same time, I return from this little journey convinced that our country is broken, but possibly not beyond repair.
Postscript for you cat lovers: Dash the Cat, slightly drugged, survived the journey.
PPS for you baseball fans: We got to see Spencer Bivens, the State College kid who pitches for the Giants. One inning, one run allowed.
