Tag: San Mateo county

Categories
Living Walking

The Heron at Sharon Park

The heron did not fly.

Herons stand in water every morning of the world. Most don’t fly when a man walks past on a gravel path. But this one was close — close enough to see the yellow ring around its eye like a struck coin, the black cap combed back into two sharp feathers, a heron dressed for church. It considered me, or the water, or nothing at all, holding a stillness that costs a heron nothing and would cost me everything.

Sharon Park keeps a rotating cast of herons the way other places keep pigeons — gray, ill-tempered looking, small monks set down among the ducks. Usually they see me first and go up off the water in that ungainly unfolding, all elbows, and I’m left with the consolation of having glimpsed something before it left. This one let me stay. Let me get close enough to think the word friendly, though I know better — what I was seeing was a fish, or the absence of one, some interior calculus that had nothing to do with me. I was not a guest. I was weather.

It stood on one leg in green water, a green wall of reflected trees behind it, the low light turning that whole ceiling of water the color of a bottle. Its double stood beneath it, upside down, exact, patient as the original. Two herons for the price of one — one of feather, one of light, and I couldn’t have told you which was more real. The one in the water bent its neck into a shape the standing bird hadn’t made yet. It knew something the standing bird didn’t know, or had already forgotten.

Bubbles rose between them, a seam breaking the skin of the pond in a line, as though something down there were breathing, or as though the pond had decided, just this once, to show its work. Gas, probably, some decaying business at the bottom. But it looked like punctuation — the pond trying to say something and getting only as far as a string of commas before losing the thought.

I stood there longer than the moment required. This is what a heron does, if it lets you close and doesn’t leave: it makes you overstay. I thought about how little the bird was doing and how much I was doing to it — assigning it moods, welcoming it into my morning, when the truth was likely that it was simply waiting, the way I wait for coffee to cool, without company, without me. And yet it let me stay. Whatever arithmetic decided that, I was on the right side of it, for once, on an ordinary morning, my shoes going damp at the toe from standing too close to the edge.

Eventually I walked on, the way the heron surely expected I would, since staying is not a thing men do at ponds. I looked back once. It hadn’t moved. Its reflection hadn’t moved. The bubbles were still rising in their careful, aimless line — saying nothing, saying everything, the pond continuing to be a pond after I’d stopped watching it be one.

Categories
Pescadero

The Other Side of the Street

This is the coast south of Half Moon Bay, which is to say this is the part of California that people who live here do not talk about at dinner parties. The road runs through artichoke fields. The fog comes in the morning and does not always leave. Twenty minutes south of anything you’d call a town, there is a place called Pescadero, and if you have never stopped there you should stop.

Everyone goes to Duarte’s. This is correct. The soup is what they say it is.

But there is a gas station across the street, and this is where I want to take you.

The building is burnt orange. There are strings of lights along the front that were probably Christmas lights once. Inside, past the motor oil, there is a counter, and behind the counter someone is making carnitas that certain people — the kind who pay attention to such things — will tell you are the best in the Bay Area. The place is called Mercado & Taqueria De Amigos. It is cash only. There is a white sauce at the salsa bar that I have not been able to identify or replicate or stop thinking about.

There is a man who comes in at lunch — work boots, a particular kind of flannel — who does not look at the menu. The woman at the counter is already writing when he speaks. He sits outside. Eight minutes, start to finish.

California is full of places that exist entirely for the people who live in them. We drive past most of them. We are always on the way to the lighthouse, the next town, the thing someone told us not to miss. The gas station in Pescadero is not on the way to anything.

I keep going back.

Here’s a revised and extended version:

The Other Side of the Street

This is the coast south of Half Moon Bay, which is to say this is the part of California that people who live here do not talk about at dinner parties. The road runs through artichoke fields. The fog comes in the morning and does not always leave. It hangs in the cypress trees and in the low places between the hills, and some days it is still there at three in the afternoon, the light going gray and cold, the ocean invisible a quarter mile west.

Twenty minutes south of anything you’d call a town, there is a place called Pescadero. Population 643. A post office. A feed store. A bar that has been a bar since before your grandfather was born.

Everyone goes to Duarte’s. This is correct. You should go to Duarte’s.

But there is a gas station across the street, and this is where I want to take you first.

The building is burnt orange. There are strings of lights along the front — Christmas lights, probably, once, now just lights, strung there so long they’ve become part of the architecture, the same way certain things in certain places stop being decorations and start being load-bearing. Inside, past the motor oil and the WD-40, there is a counter. Behind it, someone is making carnitas. The place is called Mercado & Taqueria De Amigos. Cash only. At the salsa bar there is a white sauce that I have spent three years failing to identify and cannot stop thinking about.

There is a man who comes in at lunch. Work boots with the kind of dried mud that doesn’t come off, a flannel shirt the color of something faded, a straw hat with a cord that keeps it on in the coastal wind. He does not look at the menu because there is no version of this transaction in which he needs the menu. The woman behind the counter is already writing before he finishes speaking. He carries his food out back, where there are picnic tables under whatever sky the fog has left behind. His truck is parked along the side — an old Ford, the kind that has stopped being a vehicle and become a tool. Eight minutes inside. He stays longer out back.

If you walk up around the corner — it is a short walk, less than you think — there is an auto shop. The walls have been painted so many times in so many colors that the paint itself has become the material, layers of blue and cream and rust bleeding into each other like a tide chart, the wood beneath showing through in long vertical streaks. The doors are not garage doors. They are paneled, ornate, the kind of doors that belonged to something else in another century, pressed into service here and painted over until they forgot what they were. Above them, a small Ford dealer badge, neat and official, as if someone wanted to make sure you knew this was still a place of business.

Keep going. Cross the street. Further on, there is Saint Anthony’s — a white Catholic church with a steeple that rises into whatever the sky is doing that day, a rose window above dark red doors, a hand-carved wooden sign out front that someone made carefully, with time. It has been here long enough that the people buried in the surrounding hills were baptized here, married here, carried out those red doors for the last time. The man with the cord on his hat has probably sat in those pews. His parents almost certainly did.

If you keep walking — past the church, out along Pescadero Road where the land opens back up — you will find Harley Farms. They make goat cheese there, small rounds of it, sometimes rolled in herbs or edible flowers, the kind of thing that sounds precious until you taste it and understand that it came out of this specific soil and this specific fog and couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

California is full of places that exist entirely for the people who live in them. We drive past most of them. We are always on the way to the lighthouse, the next town, the thing someone told us not to miss.

The gas station in Pescadero is not on the way to anything. Neither is the church. Neither is the auto shop, or the farm at the end of the road with the goat cheese that tastes like the fog smells.

I keep going back. I’m still not sure I have earned it.

Categories
Half Moon Bay History

There Used to Be a Pier

There used to be a pier with a shack on top jutting out into Princeton Harbor in Half Moon Bay.

The fog still comes in low most mornings, softening the breakwater until the boats in the slips are only darker shapes. You hear the harbor before you see it—the wet cough of diesel, the slap of water against fiberglass and steel, the occasional metallic ring of a line pulled tight.

When the marine layer lifts, the place shows its modern face: rip-rap stone, poured concrete, the long gray L of Johnson Pier running into water that no longer knows how to rise up and test a wooden structure. The air carries salt and exhaust. Gulls work the edges. Trucks idle in the lot. It is orderly now, built to stay.

But the order has removed a sound. The old pilings no longer work against one another with that slow, heavy creak. The deck no longer gives a little underfoot after it was soaked with a firehose once a week. There is no longer the low groan of a chain hoist swinging a load of salmon or crab up from a boat in the dark, or the close, briny steam inside the shack where Vera kept coffee going and put food on whatever table or crate was free. The lights that once burned at the outer end—small and steady against the black water—are gone. Before the breakwater was finished, winter storms still reached that far end. Men braced the doors and listened to the ocean hammer while the whole structure trembled on its pilings like something that might, on any given night, decide to let go.

Joe Romeo drove those pilings in 1942. The shack he raised was built to be lived in as much as worked in. It smelled of diesel from the fuel tanks on the deck, of wet creosote warming in the sun, of fish blood drying on the planks, and of whatever Vera had on the stove. Fishermen came in with scales still stuck to their forearms. The wood stayed dark and heavy because it was never allowed to dry out completely. After the breakwater went in, the water inside grew calmer and the work changed with it, but the pier still took its beating every season. It held because the men who used it treated it like something that had to be argued with rather than replaced.

By the time the county harbor district took it over, the pilings had begun to rot and shed pieces into the channel. What had once been a place where men ate and slept and unloaded fish became, in the new language of the harbor, a navigational hazard. The district saw liability where others still saw memory.

In 2018 the cranes came and the pilings were cut and hauled away. The shack that had held the life of a fleet inside its four walls was dismantled and carted off like any other piece of condemned wood.

What remains is the absence of that sound and that light, and the particular way a working harbor can be made safe enough to forget what it once required of the men who kept it alive.

Categories
Bing Image Creator Interstate 280 San Francisco/California San Jose

The World’s Most Beautiful Imaginary Freeway

One of the most viewed posts on my blog is this article about Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula: The World’s Most Beautiful Freeway. It’s about the beauty of this freeway which runs from San Francisco south to San Jose.

For whatever reason, the site selection for this freeway was masterful as it routes through a truly beautiful section of the Peninsula passing by Crystal Springs Reservoir and a lot of rolling land that will never be further developed.

Perhaps the most complex interchange on this highway is where California Highway 92 crosses Interstate 280 in San Mateo County. Highway 92 comes southwest up the hill from the bay side as it heads up to Skyline Drive and then down into Half Moon Bay. The interchange itself has both overpasses as well as a tunnel connecting the various roadways.

This interchange is well designed and rarely a problem – except on those beautiful beach days when the weather in Half Moon Bay is warm and the usual foggy skies have rolled back. Then the traffic heading west on 92 can back up as that section is only single lane in each direction going over Skyline.

This morning I went looking for an image of the interchange and found this one on WikiMedia:

Unfortunately, the image is blurry and while it shows the overall design just fine the details are not really discernable. So I decided to try making up the design using one of the AI image generators. This one – from Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator – was my favorite:

Beautiful sweeping design with a few roads to nowhere! Looking closely at the image, it reminds me of the kinds of errors that these AI image creators often seem to make with hands and fingers. If you don’t examine them closely, they look just fine – until you do! So consider this a dreamy version of that interchange at Interstate 280 and Highway 92 in San Mateo County, California!

Categories
Books ChatGPT Interstate 280 San Francisco/California San Jose

The World’s Most Beautiful Freeway

A few years ago when I stopped working full time I got interested in exploring the history of “the world’s most beautiful freeway” – I-280 that runs up and down the central portion of the San Francisco Peninsula.

At one point, a friend of mine and I were walking in San Francisco where we went into the main library which has a great history department. I spoke to one of the librarians in the history department who was quite encouraging about the resources they might have available that might assist in pulling together more of that history. But life intervened and I dropped the idea, not pursuing it any further. But it’s always been lingering in the back of my mind as something that might be “fun”.

A few weeks back, when I was exploring ChatGPT, I wondered how it might be helpful to me in thinking about writing such a history. So I asked it the following:

I’m writing a book on the history of the development of interstate 280 on the San Francisco peninsula. I would like an initial outline for the book including special emphasis on any especially interesting stories about people who were involved in its development or in fighting to prevent its development.


ChatGPT responded:

Certainly, here is an initial outline for your book on the history of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco peninsula:

I. Introduction

  • A. Brief history of the San Francisco peninsula
  • B. Importance of transportation infrastructure
  • C. Overview of the development of Interstate 280

II. Early Planning and Development of Interstate 280

  • A. Planning and proposals for the freeway
  • B. Design and construction challenges
  • C. Environmental and community concerns

III. The People Involved in the Development of Interstate 280

  • A. Key players in the development of the freeway
  • B. Their backgrounds and motivations
  • C. Challenges they faced and how they overcame them

IV. The Impact of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula

  • A. Economic impact on the region
  • B. Changes in land use and development patterns
  • C. Impact on local communities

V. Opposition to Interstate 280

  • A. Environmental and community groups
  • B. Their concerns and arguments against the freeway
  • C. Strategies for opposing the development of the freeway

VI. Interesting Stories of the Development of Interstate 280

  • A. Personal stories of those involved in the development or opposition of the freeway
  • B. Unique challenges faced during the construction and development of the freeway
  • C. Anecdotes and interesting facts related to the development of the freeway

VII. Conclusion

  • A. Summary of key points
  • B. Reflection on the legacy of Interstate 280
  • C. Future of transportation infrastructure on the San Francisco peninsula

This outline should provide a good foundation for your book, with a focus on the people involved in the development of Interstate 280 and their stories. You can expand on each section and add more details as you conduct research and gather information. Good luck with your book!

Wow! ChatGPT just gave me a wonderful outline to just stimulate my further thinking about compiling such a history. Curious to learn more, I asked ChatGPT:

Tell me more about the key players involved in the development of interstate 280.

ChatGPT replied:

Certainly! Here’s some information about some of the key players involved in the development of Interstate 280 on the San Francisco peninsula:

  1. Othmar H. Ammann: A Swiss-American civil engineer who designed many notable bridges and highways in the United States, including the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bayonne Bridge in New Jersey. Ammann was a key player in the design and engineering of Interstate 280.
  2. Robert Moses: An urban planner and political figure in New York who also worked on infrastructure projects in other parts of the country, including California. Moses was an advocate for highways and was instrumental in the development of the Interstate Highway System, including Interstate 280.
  3. James Rolph Jr.: A former mayor of San Francisco who later served as Governor of California. Rolph was a strong supporter of infrastructure projects, including the construction of Interstate 280.
  4. William E. Kent: An environmentalist and politician who opposed the development of Interstate 280. Kent was instrumental in creating the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and worked to protect the natural areas on the San Francisco peninsula from development.
  5. Dorothy Erskine: A journalist and environmentalist who founded the grassroots organization Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks. Erskine was a vocal opponent of the development of Interstate 280 and worked to raise awareness of its potential impact on the environment and communities on the peninsula.

These are just a few of the key players involved in the development of Interstate 280, but there were many others, including politicians, engineers, and community leaders who played important roles in the planning, design, and construction of the freeway.

I pushed onward – asking:

Who was responsible for the selection of the route for interstate 280?

ChatGPT replied:

The selection of the route for Interstate 280 was a collaborative effort involving multiple parties, including federal and state transportation agencies, local governments, and community organizations.

The planning for Interstate 280 began in the 1950s, when the California Division of Highways (now Caltrans) began studying potential freeway routes in the San Francisco peninsula region. The San Francisco County Transportation Authority and San Mateo County Transit District were also involved in the planning process.

A number of route options were considered, including one that would have followed El Camino Real, a historic road that runs through the heart of the peninsula. However, this option was ultimately rejected due to concerns about traffic congestion and the impact on local businesses.

Instead, the final route for Interstate 280 was selected in 1956 and ran parallel to, but west of, El Camino Real. The route was chosen based on a number of factors, including the availability of right-of-way, terrain and geological considerations, and traffic patterns. It was also designed to connect with other freeways in the region, such as Interstate 880 and State Route 92.

Overall, the selection of the route for Interstate 280 was a complex process that involved multiple stakeholders and took into account a variety of factors related to transportation and community impact.

Then I asked:

Interstate 280 has been called the world’s most beautiful freeway. who suggested that?

ChatGPT told me:

The phrase “the world’s most beautiful freeway” is often used to describe Interstate 280 on the San Francisco peninsula, and it is attributed to several sources.

One of the earliest known uses of the phrase was in a 1967 article in Sunset Magazine, a popular lifestyle publication that covers the western United States. In the article, the author, who is not identified, referred to Interstate 280 as “a modern and scenic boulevard, perhaps the world’s most beautiful freeway.”

The phrase has since been used by numerous journalists, authors, and travel writers to describe the freeway’s winding curves, stunning views of the San Francisco Bay, and scenic landscapes of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It is unclear who first coined the phrase “the world’s most beautiful freeway,” as it has been used in various contexts and by multiple sources over the years. However, it is widely recognized as a descriptor for Interstate 280 and has helped to promote the freeway as a tourist attraction in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The world’s most beautiful freeway indeed! There used to be a sign in the median of I-280 as it climbs out of the flat land of Cupertino into the foothills of the Peninsula. It’s no longer there – having been removed sometime in the last few years. You can find a photo of it here in this blog post from 2011.

Another one of my favorite photographs of I-280 is titled 280 Sunrise by Montara-based photographer Robert Buelteman – “an image of the emerging sun with the Interstate freeway in the foreground.” You can find that image in this article profiling Buelteman and his wonderful book The Unseen Peninsula. Buelteman grew up in Woodside and his book explores the Peninsula Watershed, a large piece of property that is owned by the San Francisco Water Department and not open to the public.

As for the book about this history of I-280, it’s still floating around in the back of my mind. It’s something that I continue to explore from time to time, looking for a story or three that might provide some interesting ways into telling the story of this beautiful freeway.

If you know of any good stories about this freeway and its construction, I’d love to hear about them! You can reach me via this contact link. And for more about this freeway, see my post: The World’s Most Beautiful Imaginary Freeway.