San Francisco

When you see a small portion of something, you don't get the whole picture. Simple enough.

San Francisco was a whirlwind kind of trip, not in that way where whirlwind implies fun and sun. Whirlwind in that within a few square blocks, everything changes. Drugs, crime, mental illness are all distant concepts until you try to walk down a gray canyon of concrete with several thousand dollars of camera equipment. It becomes more about avoiding becoming a story or statistic, just another person in the gray canyon, battered and broke.

For Rent signs are like tombstones that mark the graveyard of businesses buried by the economy and chased out by the walking, incoherent dead. The real public servants are the stationary icons that provide commentary on the world around them. San Franciscans have probably heard it all before, but to the newcomers, it's an distraction from the snippets of inane phone conversations spoken by the "suits". The lady in the wheelchair on the corner of Market and whatever who has her broken foot on the neck of San Fran:

"You're walking across the street wrong!!!"

"Hey stupid, it's your fault!!"

"What the hell is wrong with you??"

"Hey! Fucking tourists!! Go home!"

For this service, you're expected to drop a coin in the cup, as a sort of acknowledgment of their status and wisdom. Truly, value for money. Go home? Hmmm.

Our hotel on Cathedral Hill is an old hotel that spent good money on updating the lobby, probably because they figured that once you rented the room with the torn sheer curtains and stained carpet, you're so tired, you'll take anything. The dirty windows look out over an assortment of businesses and views. Tommy's on Geary with their neon sign that says "Hot Corned Beef Cocktails." Actually, it should read "Hot Corned Beef" and underneath it, "Cocktails." I think they alternate days so as not to confuse the canyon public. On Wednesdays, both signs are lit up. Probably to let the guy who walks around having a conversation with his wife on his cell phone that it's Wednesday, even though he doesn't have a cell phone or a bluetooth device.

"Honey! If you're married to me, you need to be a psychologist! I may have to divorce you for this!"

The one advantage to our pay for Internet hotel is the close proximity to a variety of foods. Gabe and I found the Wing Lum Chinese restaurant a few blocks from our Shangri-La on Van Ness, and though it's many blocks from Chinatown, the food is great. The difference with this little restaurant with its makeshift Koi tank, red lacquer paintings, aloe plants, a Christmas-land music box and bowl full of stacked oranges and limes is that here, the owners smile at you and greet you. Father into Chinatown, it was a different story. If you want good food and really cheap. Go to Wing Lum. Tell them the lady with the all the cameras sent you.

Anything you want to eat is there in those blocks surrounding Cathedral Hill, named for it's many churches that adorn the hilltop, as if to say, "Hey! See us?" Oddly enough, you can walk into these churches without being accosted by anyone. We were warned to stay away from the area near Cathedral Hill called "Tenderloin." I must not be a very good journalist; I complied.

I'm not saying SF is bad. I've lived in places like this before. Seattle is much like San Fran, but I was homeless in Seattle for a while after my grandmother's husband made us leave their 4,000 square foot, 3 floor, 6 bedroom house because my then 2-year old daughter was making too much noise. I remember my grandmother telling me in her yellow, high ceiling, linoleum floored kitchen that I needed to leave; I was her granddaughter, but he was her husband. She handed me $100 and told me to pack. I left, stepped onto a bus to downtown Seattle and stepped off the bus into homelessness. Lucky for me, the YMCA had rooms for $6 a night, but you couldn't leave your stuff in the rooms, you had to pack them around till the evening when you could go back and get a room. The two of us lived off donut holes from Winchell's and leftover burgers abandoned by cleaner looking patrons at the McDonalds at 2nd and Pine. But that's all I have to say about that.

I've been in the places like Cathedral Hill and it's OK to be there. Youthful enthusiasm meant all the writers and photographers got good stuff, and had a good time; for them it's a new world. For me, I would have liked a hotel away from the canyon and closer to the water, but I got to the point where I could walk through the streets and regained some of my skills at street survival. Like riding a bike, I guess.

San Fran wasn't all bad. The light will make you a better photographer. I can shoot Colorado and New Mexico Sun, Northern California clouds are a lesson all in their own. The architecture is beautiful, although I was afraid to look up much, the streets are crowded with people who tell you to get the hell out of the way.

My response? "Sir, this is hell."

You can walk almost anywhere without a problem. Well, problem is relative. Those hills are big, and the bigger ones have little steps to allow for more control while walking at a 20-degree angle. The view from the top is great, but I guess I'm used to views a little higher than 200 feet above sea level. Ten thousand feet, now that's a view.

Transportation is easy to use, but renting a car for one day let me get my bearings and a chance to drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, a compromise on my goal to walk the bridge. My one indulgence was a $5 ride on a cable car on the last day as I headed back to the hotel to pack for my Frontier flight home. It was fun, especially because you can put your camera at f22, shutter speed at 125, stick your feet straight out and take a picture of cars as they go by. Your feet are in focus, the distance is in future, and the cars are blurry. Good times. It made me wonder as I sat on the cable car photographing my feet as cars drove by if San Fran had started to get to me just a little bit. Hmmm. Perhaps the people on the cable car wondered about me, not seeing the whole picture. Photographer? Journalist? Mother of three?

Maybe I didn't get a chance to see the whole picture on San Fran. Cathedral Hill just wasn't high enough, I guess.