Cool Gray City of Love [antikvár]

PREFACE This book begins and ends with walking. Its spirit is ambulatory—the product of the countless explorations I have made across San Francisco on foot. I began those wanderings more than 40 years ago, but only in the past 2 years have they assumed the obsessive form that has led my friends to hide when I come calling, chirpily announcing another thrill-packed excursion to the Outer Mission. Blame it on titanium. For most of the past two decades, my knees were so shot that I could not walk without pain. You learn to work around chronic pain, but you lose certain things you are not even aware of One of them is whims. A whimless city is a diminished city, a city whose mysteries are kept under lock and key, a city that repeats itself like a scratched record. After I had my knees replaced, San Francisco became endless and enticing. Like an iron-jointed butterfly, I began flitting around town—at first aimlessly, then systematically. And so it was that one fall day, after dropping off my daughter at her high school a block from that endearingly city-soaked rectangle of green called the Panhandle, I decided to finally learn Golden Gate Park. I should have known the great park better. I'd been going there forever. But every time I got off the beaten trail, I got lost. The problem was that I'd never tried to learn it in a systematic way. Golden Gate Park is so big—at 1,017 acres, it's 20 percent larger than Central Park, and much more overgrown and opaque—that if you don't approach it methodically, you'll just keep forgetting whatever you learned. So I divided it up into rough grids and started exploring. It took about 20 days, walking an hour or two a day with my dog, to cover just about every part of the park. It was glorious and addictive, making new discoveries every day. I savored the mingled pleasure of the map-maker and the outlaw. I was Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn—one part of me greedily storing up information, the other blissfully absorbing experiences