Storming the Gates of Paradise (48 page)

In some ways, the tip of the San Francisco peninsula seems like an island waiting for its fourth side to be sawed loose from the North American continent. The city has, since its Gold Rush birth, been an anomaly and a sanctuary from the American way of pretty much everything except the pursuit of happiness and profit—and even the happiness is likely to take the form of religious and sexual practices and self-expressions that might not be so available in Ames, Iowa. It is its own place. After all, the Pacific gave the whole Bay Area a mediterranean climate and left San Francisco particularly prone to fog, and this has made the region to some extent, and the city far more so, an island ecology. As San Francisco developed, two of its endemic species of butterfly became extinct, and several species of plants are imperiled. Some days, I think our eclectic artists and activists demonstrate that the place’s talent for developing unique species didn’t stop when it was paved over: we do have, for example, more AIDS educators cross-dressing as nuns, more deployment of giant puppets in antiglobalization demonstrations.

But some of this eclecticism has been evident throughout all Northern California: if you look at a map of Native California, you see that the tribes and language groups were incredibly diverse—more languages were spoken in indigenous California than throughout the rest of the continent, and this diversity reflected the diversity of bioregions, from desert to mountain to several kinds of forest to grassland, with countless variations in between. Among those languages were ones in which men and women spoke different dialects, in which there were no words for right or left because you specified your body’s relation to the cardinal directions instead, or in which there were no cardinal directions because, in the twisty terrain,
upriver
and
downriver
were more useful terms. There’s more biotic change and biodiversity in a few miles uphill from the coast than in a thousand
miles of prairie, and somehow this seems to have lived on even in the Gold Rush city full of Chileans and Chinese and French and Missourians and New Englanders and in contemporary California, with its Hmong and Portuguese and Samoan communities. San Francisco became the nation’s first white-minority city decades ago, complicatedly enough as it stopped being a blue-collar port city, and whites will achieve the same status statewide in the next decade. To say that Latinos will be the new majority is to flatten out the complexity of Colombians and Salvadoreans and Mexicans and those old southwesterners who can say, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”

Speaking of that crossing, on a big hillside of grass and oak facing San Pablo Bay, not far north of the town where I grew up, thirty miles north of San Francisco, was Rancho Olompali. It had been a big Miwok village before the Spaniards came, then a Spanish-style rancho run by a Miwok guy named Camilo Ynitia, who had a knack for adaptation. In a precursor of drive-by shootings, a bunch of Yankees rode by one day in 1846 and shot up the place while the ranchers were having breakfast. The Yankees were part of the Bear Flag Revolt, which merged with the war that extracted Mexico’s northern half for the United States, but Ynitia survived annexation so nicely that his daughter married a Harvard man. By the turn of the century, the ranch belonged to a wealthy dentist, who surrounded his house with exotic plantings—a pomegranate hedge and some palms live on—and by the late 1960s, it was a hippie commune called The Family, where Grateful Dead lead singer Jerry Garcia, speaking of assimilated Latinos, had an acid trip awful enough to make him swear off it. The rancho buildings and the surrounding hillside became a state park not long ago, where I still hike for its shaded groves, gracefully cascading native grasses, and wildflowers.

Olompali’s evolution from indigenous hamlet to battlefield to dental estate to bad trip sometimes seems like an encapsulation of Northern California’s evolution to me, where things are always mutating, where erasure and replacement are the only constants. What’s erased, though, tends to reappear. Maybe it’s easier to imagine this part of the state as a deck of cards constantly being reshuffled into royal flushes and losing hands, where we play poker with memory and identity and meaning and possibility, which are not quite four of a kind. When I was
growing up, the Coast Miwoks of Olompali and elsewhere were supposed to have vanished. Now not only are they resurgent, as the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, whose attempts to build a casino in the next county north are contested by environmentalists, but the tribe’s chair is the brilliant novelist and screenplay writer Greg Sarris. Things are like that here: mixed-up, forever metamorphosing, but returning when you think they’re gone. We thought the dot-com invasion had eviscerated radical San Francisco, but during the first days of Gulf War II, activists by the thousands shut down downtown, the Federal Building, and traffic arteries in the most powerful demonstration of outrage in the country.

If the tip of the San Francisco peninsula seems like an island, the whole Bay Area seems like a laboratory where America invents itself—what comes out of here counts because it spreads. Some of it is pretty obvious: environmentalism from the Sierra Club, founded in downtown San Francisco in 1892, and from Global Exchange and Rainforest Action Network more recently; the Black Panthers from Oakland; California cuisine from Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and its vegetarian version from San Francisco’s Greens, itself an offshoot of San Francisco Zen Center, one of the major sites for the arrival of Buddhism in the West; mountain bikes from Marin County; the nation’s major wine supply and wine culture from Sonoma and Napa; silicon stuff, beginning with Hewlett-Packard through Oracle and Netscape and Apple to Google, from what used to be a big orchard land called the Valley of Heart’s Delight; the Free Speech Movement from the students of San Francisco State and UC Berkeley; inspiration for Native American activists nationwide from the late sixties occupation of Alcatraz Island; beat poetry from the Fillmore and North Beach. (And, if you go farther north, south, and east, you arrive at the vast factory farms—and more and more little organic ones—from which a huge percentage of the nation’s produce comes; fruit and nut jokes are antiquated fixtures here.)

Some of it is not so obvious, not movements but individuals—Jack London and Maxine Hong Kingston and Jello Biafra and Congresswoman Barbara Lee, ideas, scents on the wind, shifts in ideas about sexuality, about citizenship, about spectacle. Sometimes I think of the place as “amateur hour,” because so many people are committed to creative expression as a pleasure rather than a discipline, and
that involves more costumes and pop-culture ironies than, say, writing history. Consider, for example, the hundreds of thousands of revelers at Halloween in the queer Castro or Nevada’s Burning Man festival, born in and organized from the city.

The important thing about the Bay Area being a laboratory is that this is just an extension of its being a port city: we import people from Peru and Indiana and send them back educated or out of the closet, and our definitive figures are often, like Kerouac or Muybridge, people who are just passing through for a few years or decades, but who will be indelibly stamped and will stamp back. Or they are people like Gary Snyder, who came down from the Pacific Northwest to the Bay Area in the 1950s, studied and wrote poetry and hiked around the mountain on which mountain bikes would be invented, went to Japan, came back, and moved into the Sierra foothills. From there, with books like his Pulitzer-winning
Turtle Island
, he forecast the hybrid of Asian philosophy and indigenous place-sense and ecological ideas that would become how we think around these parts.

The factors that make it a good laboratory might include what another poet, Snyder’s forebear Kenneth Rexroth, once snarled: “It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward-spreading puritanism or by the Walter-Scott fake-cavalier tradition of the South. It had been settled mostly, in spite of all the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers, prostitutes, rascals, and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn. They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather.” Long the “Capital of the West” and the biggest city west of the Mississippi, San Francisco never faced Europe but was instead at the center of an unequal triangle of influences formed by the wild interior of the continent, Mexico, and Asia. These influences and the peculiar balance of the region between the provincial backstage in which experiments are safe and coterie-culture encouraging such flowering has made it peculiarly productive of ideas on all fronts.

The city achieved a European density that allowed it to function as a true city rather than the amorphous, suburban diffusion of almost every other Western city, and thus it has a lively street life, civic and cultural life, public institutions, and nightlife. I’ve always thought we were the most radical city in the nation not
because of our inherent virtue but because of our good fortune: who would demonstrate in a Chicago winter or Houston summer; where would you march to in Los Angeles or Phoenix, and who would notice? Whereas eternally room-temperature San Francisco is full of boulevards connecting parks and plazas, full of places where it’s possible to be a member of the public acting in concert with your fellow citizens, an opportunity absent elsewhere. This is the anti-America America draws from in its eternal reinvention.

Imagine traveling like a seabird in from the gray Pacific on a windy day, sailing across the sand of Ocean Beach, which marks the western boundary of Western civilization, and then following the long line of Fulton Street past Golden Gate Park, past St. Ignatius and its twin spires, past the poetically named New Stranger’s Home Baptist Church, angling downhill through the Western Addition. The first obstacle on Fulton is City Hall, but send that bird in the west door of City Hall and out the eastern one, across Civic Center Plaza, that nearly featureless plot of tired grass from which the mayor removed the benches a few years back, down the corridor where the Asian Art Museum and the library face each other, over the rearing bronze horse that a formidable bronze Simón Bolívar rides, into United Nations Plaza.

Land on the golden letters laid into the paving of the plaza, the part that tells you that you’re 122–24–45.1 degrees west of Greenwich and 37–46–48.3 degrees north of the equator. These inscriptions tell you that you’re not just standing in the city but on the earth. And now that you know exactly where you are in the world, look up into the huge mural the local artist Rigo ’03 dedicated a couple of years ago, the black, white, and silver one on the side of the Odd Fellows Hall that says, in the plainest possible letters, big enough to read from City Hall, TRUTH. Fulton Street lies across Market at a slight angle, like an arrow on a bowstring, ready to fire into the sunset; U.N. Plaza is the nock of the arrow. This is San Francisco’s plaza, and maybe Northern California’s, and perhaps even the West’s, the spiritual and geographical heart of a considerable territory. It’s not just
because it launches that long axis running from Rigo’s mural across the street from U.N. Plaza to the Pacific, though any place that can tie together truth and pacifism is already symbolically loaded. It’s because the human transactions there bear out the messages of the place.

I have been there on a day when a group of well-dressed South American men suddenly arrived with flowers to place at the statue of Bolívar, the liberator of much of South America. I remember the many years that an AIDS tent encampment stood there outside the Department of Health—part of the Federal Building, on the plaza’s north side—as a protest. Since the 1980s, I have been on myriad peace marches that started or ended there. I was there when Rigo dedicated his mural to the Angola Three, a trio of African American men put in solitary confinement in Louisiana for political work in the early 1970s (one of the three, a quietly intense man named Robert King Wilkerson, was freed and attended the dedication). For the past ten years or more, I have gone there on Wednesdays and Sundays, for the Heart of the City Farmers Market, and bought cherries in early summer and pomegranates in late autumn and fine organic produce all year, among the bustle of inner-city dwellers and farmers. And lately I’ve been joining San Francisco Zen Center there on one of the weekdays when they, or we, offer the homeless takeout cartons full of food we’ve just cooked.

When the Spanish laid out cities in the Americas, they began with the plaza. Every place had a center, and when a place has a center, you know where you are. What terrifies me about sprawl is the sense that there are no centers and no edges, just a random quilt of strip malls and subdivisions all the way to the horizon. Such places make me feel adrift, without a sense of meaning or direction. I’ve always thought that San Francisco’s livelier public life wasn’t about our virtue, just our geography, symbolic and practical. We’re full of centers and boulevards, starting points, destinations, and alluring routes between them. The place just seems to encourage marching and gathering and walking. This might be what people mean when they call San Francisco the country’s most European city, though it could also be called one of the most Latin American big towns.

“The importance of the main plaza in the history of the cities and towns of Hispanic America cannot be overemphasized,” says
Spanish City Planning in
North America
. “Its role as the center of civic life has endured ever since its creation as the pivotal space around which the entire town’s plan evolved. Indeed, from the early days of the Spanish conquest, the plaza was a center for secular, religious, political, social, and other ceremonial activities, so that it was not merely the point of convergence of main streets, but was also the point at which civic identity was expressed.” Some of these original Latin American central squares still exist. Probably the northernmost such square is in the town of Sonoma, though there it’s so vast and tree-shaded that it’s more like a New England village green or a town park than a plaza. Santa Fe has a beautiful public square, very much like the one in Antigua, Guatemala—down to the fact that it belongs mostly to tourists, meaning that gathering at the center may be largely a memory for locals. But centers are hardly outdated: Mexico City’s vast zócalo and, for that matter, Beijing’s even more vast Tiananmen Square are places where national politics are played out by citizens and where locals and visitors mingle every day.