City Views.178
These views of SF and the greater region are from the take-off ascent when we flew back to Amsterdam two weeks ago. The photos at top and bottom were selected as highlights for two reasons. First, because they both show the atmospheric effect of heat in the central valley (more than 100km east – right – of what you see here) pulling cool, moist air — aka fog — in from the vast, cold and wet Pacific directly through the Golden Gate (not the bridge, but the small gap in the coastal mountains which the bridge spans) and then inland, following the river that drains the valley then flows into the bay, in the process flowing over both the city of San Francisco, and some of the surrounding cities to the north and east. Second, because they both also show you the lovely north bay and – if I had that degree of resolution – they likely look right over Sonoma Mountain and the other coastal-range mountains to show Santa Rosa, in its little bowl about 65km north of the Golden Gate. FYI, the bridge you do see is the Bay Bridge, its two spans connecting SF with Oakland and the east bay, forming the western terminus of Interstate 80, just as the George Washington Bridge forms its eastern terminus at the Hudson between NYC & NJ. The Golden Gate Bridge, by that particular Monday afternoon, was already well-wrapped in the fog you see :-).
On & Around San Francisco Bay
…plus a few remnants from a series one might call ‘airports of the world.’ smw, slt has not gotten out and about with the camera much these past weeks, but I did realize there was a small cache of photos from some boat trips on the bay, and some hikes in Marin and Sonoma counties, that had not yet been posted. Since I get a bit homesick sometimes when I’m so far away, I’m putting these up so that I have an easy way to scan over them from time to time and remind myself what home looks like. Maybe some of you will enjoy it as well. All the photos have descriptive file names that show up if you hover over them or open them separately, I think. In the slide show below, you’ll see a panorama which goes from the Bay Bridge on the left (east), across the full waterfront of northern SF, to the Golden Gate Bridge & Marin Headlands on the right (west). Further down you’ll see some hiking shots from the trails in Tennessee Valley (Marin county), and Annadel State Park & Hood Mountain Regional Park (Sonoma County). In one of them you’ll see frost on the ground in the shadowy foreground: that was Christmas day last year – ah, how I long for frost on a hot afternoon here in Port au Prince! At the end are some photos of me and friends – at Wolf House in Jack London State Historic Park (Sonoma County) … and, well, me looking as lost as I felt, with some colleagues in Casablanca airport on my way home from Sierra Leone, last December. Our flight out of Freetown had been at some crazy hour like 2 am or 3 am or something, so we took the ferry over to the airport at 10pm or so, and snoozed in the waiting area and then flew for three hours to Casablanca to land at something like 8 in the morning. Oy, airports in which we have waited listlessly: might be a future series, what do you think?
Other Angles on SF
Between assignments, I’ve been a wanderer since I first filled up the storage space in January, 2005. People viewing my life from outside often express envy of how much I ‘get’ to travel: comments along the lines of “oh, it’s so exciting that you get to go to all these places and travel so much.” People who know me a bit better, or people for whom, like me, going to work = packing a bag with (one hopes) sufficient saline solution & undergarments for a year’s assignment in a remote location of which one has, so far, only indirect knowledge, understand that the travel is the part I hate the most. And that the rootedness that comes from identifying one solid piece of earth as one’s spiritual and physical home is what I envy everyone else the most. Be that as it may…the participant observer is an identified role in sociology and anthropology, and as someone who increasingly feels reasonably comfortable many places, but at home nearly nowhere (aside from a few places like SF Bay area and LA’s west side), I do have a certain distance from what I observe in most places. And what I observe in the US is always most fascinating and too often disturbing, since it’s the place o’ my birth and so on and so forth.
Some recent observations, for those outside the US who’ve missed it:
Our supreme court’s decided that companies (on whom most of us rely for our health insurance, crazy though that seems to anyone from a sane nation) have the same right to religious freedom that individuals do – and they get to express that right by dictating what forms of family-planning and possibly other health care choices their employees (and their employees’ family dependants) may make within the insurance plan. To illustrate the broader socio-political insanity this ruling might unleash unless the country gets to single-payer soon, I’ll take a short quote from Justice Bader Ginsburg’s strong dissent from the narrow majority’s decision: Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today’s decision.)
This follows by a few years the same court’s decision that companies have the same right to freedom of expression that individuals do – meaning they can buy all the elections they want now, pretty much, as in campaign donations and campaign advertising are pretty open game for whatever rich & greedy corporation wants to drive “public” policy its way.
So, to review: companies can (and do) buy as many politicians as they want; and companies can (and do, now) ensure that their employees receive only the health-care services that the companies’ owners approve of. (And oh btw, for those believing this is a ‘narrow’ ruling – check out the definition of closely held, and what % of Americans work for such a company. Not so narrow, eh?) Ah, ‘democracy.’ And lots of my American friends ask how I can stand to live & work in so many other countries where corruption and greed are so rife… 
But at least there’s always SF to go home to. Indeed, I guess the fact it’s such a successful, happy & healthy city because of its openness to heterogeneity and its willingness to embrace the importance of good, common-interest governance to the health & welfare of society & individual citizens (i.e. not just big companies & their majority owners) is precisely what’s always made it so very scary and threatening to the Koch-funded tea-party types. Oh well, their loss, unless they succeed in dragging the rest of us down with them. Enjoy the views, folks – I realized I’ve actually shown very little of SF in these pages over the years – not quite sure why, but here’s a bit finally.
(so much world, so little time....) 