Urban Camping, Day 3: To the Sea

From a grassy terrace in Glen Park to the windswept dunes of Ocean Beach.

Alta Journal is pleased to present the third installment of a five-part original series by author and Alta contributor Gary Kamiya. Each week, we’ll publish online the next portion of “Urban Camping.” Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading, and sign up here for email notifications when each new installment is available.This Alta Serial is an adventure story with a wild twist: Kamiya is backpacking across San Francisco for four nights and five days, without sleeping in a hotel or at a campground. Day three begins with birdsong in a canyon and Kamiya needing a cup of joe.

Wednesday, May 31, Glen Park. I don’t know if the birds or the light wakes me up. The birdsong is amazing here. It’s incredibly loud, and mixed into the outpouring is a strange, metallic, high-pitched sound that seems to be generated by dozens of stainless steel vocal cords. It’s a little eerie and alien-sounding, but it’s only one part of the dawn chorus. I sleepily savor lying here alone in the woods and listening to the birds.

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I reach over and pull my phone out of my slipper, where I’d stashed it and my glasses during the night. 5:30 a.m. Under normal circumstances, I might try to catch another 40 winks. But these are not normal circumstances, so after a few minutes I unzip my sleeping bag and get up.

I look around from my little grassy terrace. The sky behind the trees is gray, and the Silver Tree Day Camp building stands guard below. No one is around. I do a mental fist pump: I’ve gotten through half of my nights! As soon as I saw this little flat grassy terrace, I knew night two was money in the bank, and I was right.

It’s time to get moving. People and dogs will start showing up any minute. I change my clothes, splash some water on my face, brush my teeth, pack everything, and start walking up Glen Canyon. I feel strong. I slept well.

A female jogger passes by as I go past the trickling tributary that once flowed into Islais Creek, which ran in a still-visible course between Bosworth and Chenery Streets. I start the gradual ascent along the west side of the canyon. This route won’t take me through the spectacular chert outcroppings in the center of Rock Canyon, as this deep gash in the heart of the city used to be called, but it’s easy. My legs are heavy from yesterday’s trek, which isn’t surprising: that was the longest I’ve walked in 20 years.

I emerge from the canyon onto busy Portola Drive and realize that I failed to research the morning-three coffee situation, an oversight tantamount to the military aide who carries the nuclear football around for the president forgetting the launch codes. “This was your one job,” a Gollum-like voice begins haranguing me, “and you blew it.”

Hapless, coffee-less, and abused by unpleasant inner voices, I find corporate-caffeine salvation in a nearby Starbucks. Forty-five minutes and a large latte later, I am striding down Portola. It is a bleak, gray day devoid of sun, and if I am hoping to find any, I am walking in the wrong direction. I’m in total get-there mode. I’m not even pretending to soak in this unique experience, see the city with new eyes, yada yada yada. Right now, I’m strictly a Point A to Point B guy. And Point B is the Sava Pool on 19th Avenue and Wawona, which has showers.

I get to the pool just before it opens for the adult swim hour. A bunch of elderly Asian people are walking in with little gym bags. I pay the $7 fee, stash my stuff in a locker, strip, and go into the showers. There’s a sign on the wall that says “Three Minute Showers Only,” but it does not seem to be universally obeyed. A stoic old Chinese guy with a flesh-colored bandage on his head sits on one of those shower stools the entire time I’m in the shower. I get my $7 worth.

Refreshed and rejuvenated, I walk into Stern Grove from the north side, wandering down to the old Trocadero Clubhouse, where corrupt city boss Abe Ruef once hid out before he got thrown in the slammer. I walk past the amphitheater, bemused that I have found myself in the two biggest canyons in the city within a few hours, and keep going west, past Laguna Puerca, a.k.a. Pine Lake. Despite being one of only three natural lakes in San Francisco, all of which I’m planning to hit, it feels a little depressing and Loch Ness–y, especially on a gloomy day like today.

The neighborhood around Crestlake Drive is another one I barely know. On my map, I see that it has only four named streets, and one of them is Country Club Drive. I decide to walk over there and look for the country club.

This place must drive taxi dispatchers, the fire department, and metaphysicians crazy.

Aside from its odd location, this nameless little set of streets is just another relentlessly middle-class Sunset District neighborhood. But it does have one claim to fame. Because its four streets form loops, the same street intersects with…itself. Which means I find myself standing at the corner of Country Club Drive and Country Club Drive. Equally weirdly, half a block to the north of that corner, there’s an intersection whose street signs read “Country Club Drive” and “Huntington Drive,” and half a block to the south, there’s another intersection whose street signs read “Country Club Drive” and “Huntington Drive.” The place must drive taxi dispatchers, the fire department, and metaphysicians crazy. And worst of all, there is no country club.

I make my way out of this Twilight Zone of Redundancy and cross Lake Merced Boulevard and walk along the edge of Lake Merced, the second of San Francisco’s three natural lakes. I make for the statue of Juan Bautista de Anza, the Spanish explorer who led the “California Mayflower” expedition in 1775. The great captain is mounted on a mighty steed with an indomitable expression, facing north, a stylish feather in his hat.

Anza deserves his statue. He led some 240 men, women, and children 1,200 miles through deserts and mountains from Mexico to California, riding 50 miles a day on a cup of hot chocolate. Every single person during the long and dangerous expedition survived except a woman who died in childbirth. When he said goodbye to the colonists in Monterey, they wept. It was one of the epic treks in American history.

The 50-miles-on-a-cup-of-chocolate thing isn’t working for me, so I head for the city-run TPC Harding Park Golf Course and eat lunch at the Cypress Grill, overlooking the links. Ah, so this was the country club whose patrician glories inspired that street name!

Next up: the city limits at the south end of Lake Merced, where one of the stranger historic sites in the city is located—the Broderick-Terry Duel Site. I’ve visited it a couple of times before, but when I arrive I’m surprised anew at how forlorn, obscure, and banal it is. It’s barely marked, and you walk in through a road that leads up to a down-market gated community. The duel site itself is a little meadow tucked away behind some cookie-cutter houses. Two stone obelisks, one marked “Terry” and one marked “Broderick,” stand where the combatants faced each other. They’re scarily close together.

Bidding a relieved farewell to this gloomy relic of a barbaric practice, I head west to Fort Funston. Hang gliders are leaping off the cliff, circling in the air like drawings from Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbook come to life. I walk north, past the omnipresent Fort Funston dog walkers, descend the dunes to the beach, and walk down to the Pacific Ocean. I don’t feel any grand sense of accomplishment: I’m not done yet. I walk north on the beach. When I get near the zoo, I’m dismayed to realize that they’ve dumped a massive amount of rocks along the shoreline to protect the coast from rising sea levels, and I can’t get through. I’m forced to scramble up a steep dune to the Great Highway.

In the late afternoon, I reach my destination, the sand dunes above the beach at the end of Taraval Street, just west of the Great Highway. I check out the various possible sleeping sites that I’ve already scouted—two or three semi-foxholes in the dunes that offer some protection from the westerly wind, which is blowing pretty hard right now. The best sleeping site, unfortunately, seems to have been claimed: there’s an old blanket on it and a broken fishing pole sticking out of the side of the sandy pit. I find another one 30 or 40 feet away. It’s closer to the first one than I’d like, but there aren’t any other easy options.

Each of my four sleeping sites is a universe unto itself, with its own qualities and challenges. This one, my night-three site, is the one I’m most excited and most nervous about. I’m delighted to be sleeping at the beach, but this is also going to be the most exposed of any of my sites. I’m essentially going to be spending the night in the open: anyone wandering along the dunes could literally stumble on me.

The good news is that tonight I have the easiest access to bars and restaurants of my four nights. The Riptide bar, a Sunset classic, is just a block away, at Taraval and 47th, and there’s a good Mexican restaurant, Underdogs Too, across the street.

I perch myself at an outside table at Underdogs Too. The sun, AWOL for the entire day, is finally trying to break through. Alta Journal’s photographer Chris Hardy shows up with his gear. The young bartender is curious about these two older guys, one with a backpack and one obviously a professional photographer, and asks, “What do you guys do?” I tell her I’m walking across San Francisco and sleeping out every night. It takes her a minute to wrap her mind around that. Then she asks, “Where are you going to sleep tonight?” When I tell her I’ll be sleeping in the sand dunes above the beach at the end of Taraval, her eyes widen and a look of fear mixed with total incomprehension crosses her face. When she wishes me luck later, I have the distinct impression she doesn’t think either she or anyone else will ever see me again.

I have a margarita at the Riptide, which seems to have been airlifted from the corner of Geary and Leavenworth by a genie of dive bars and dropped down a block from the beach. After dinner of crispy tacos at Underdogs Too, plus a couple of strong IPAs, I return to the beach. The Great Highway is eerie. It’s pitch-dark. No one is around. To my joy, the blanket is gone from my preferred foxhole. I walk around the dunes. No one else is sleeping in the area, at least not yet. I move my sleeping pad and bag to the four-star foxhole. My feet bump against the bottom edge, but everything else is perfect. I hear the waves crashing. When I sit up, a breeze rustles through my hair, but when I lie down, there’s almost no wind. In a few minutes, I fall asleep.

No cars, houses dark, windows unseeing eyes, nothing anywhere, the city in a coma. It’s not an experience I’ve ever had before or will ever have again.

I wake up at 3 a.m. to pee. I stand there looking out at a strange, still world at the end of the continent. Waves crash on the beach, but otherwise it’s completely silent. Through a gray-white luminous haze, the traffic lights on the Great Highway flash green and yellow and red, changing colors for nothing, no cars, houses dark, windows unseeing eyes, nothing anywhere, the city in a coma. It’s not an experience I’ve ever had before or will ever have again. I get back into my sleeping bag in the foxhole, but I can’t fall asleep. I lie there until it starts to get light.•

TO BE CONTINUED

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