I’ve taken my show on the road lately. The show, in this case, means my laptop, along with a stack of fliers advertising apartments for rent printed off craigslist. The road is San Francisco’s Great Highway. I depend on and disapprove of the Great Highway about equally. On the one hand, it creates a broad, ugly, treacherous barrier between the city and the ocean. On the other, it’s the sort of highway where you might reasonably expect to encounter a highwayman: windswept and fogswept, with ice plants draggling their way over the curbs and crows picking their way through the ice plants. The highway runs unbroken for sixteen blocks, but every two blocks is a pedestrian crossing and a traffic light with a seagull sitting on it. Commuters prefer 19th Ave, roaring two miles to the north, which leaves the Great Highway to dog walkers, surfers, funeral processions, Irish house-painters, and the guy with the refitted police car with the words “UFO Response Team” stenciled on the side. The highway is closed so often in winter and spring it has its own gate. Wind off the ocean blows the sand into drifts right down the middle of the road. If they didn’t plow it, the beach would bury the highway in a week. In two weeks, the beach would be at my door.
The Great Highway does have its own highwayman, of a sort. He’s an old man with bright white hair and pink cheeks and red flannel long underwear who sleeps in the dunes. He looks like a thin Santa Claus and I can tell you from experience he does not like dogs. I’m always scandalized when the weather turns hot and all these people pour off the train and flip-flop themselves across the highway to the beach. Don’t they know this is a cold beach? A dead bird and seal beach? A beach for pot-smokers and lonely rangers and washed up jelly fish? It is not a bikini beach, and a thousand times not a volleyball beach. I wonder if thin Santa sees me and Truckstop and thinks, Get out of my yard!
When I make my lists of life’s pros and cons, when I worry those old bones of Where should I live? and How should I live? and What if I miss all my chances? I realize I’m always assuming there is a better place to be. Not better because it would suit me better, as I am, but a place that would make me better. Here, where I live, amid the dead birds and the living birds and the broken bottles and the trash and the tourists and the heavy, encroaching sand and the vast gray ocean, this huge, imperfect place — this is just the place for me. This is just like me. Sometimes I can’t bear it.
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding–
Riding– riding–
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.
-From “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes, 1913
