Nowtopian

It’s August in San Francisco and the fog has been unrelenting. If you live in the westernmost neighborhoods I doubt if you’ve seen sunshine for weeks. Here in the banana belt (the Mission) we have been socked in most of the past two weeks too, though late afternoons often give us a few hours of sweet sunshine before the howling, bitter cold fog wind comes roaring back over the hills, eventually swallowing even our bucolic urban tropicalia… It’s the best thing about San Francisco, and maybe the worst thing too… Fog, beautiful cool fog, the best built-in air conditioner one could hope for… but the same frigid grayness also makes the city’s streets weirdly desolate and cold most evenings during the summer.

A lot of us have to get away each summer, to soak up some real heat, to remember how to sweat in the humidity, and to feel like it was really summer! We went off to Montreal and the New England in late June, so that was enough for me to come home and feel deeply gratified by the fog. And it’s been intensely beautiful to watch it spill over Twin Peaks every afternoon and slowly meander towards us as the sun sets–every so often actually peaking through the layers of fog to illuminate a bright orange or purple streak of sunset above and behind it all (I suppose the East Bay hill dwellers are enjoying the beautiful sunsets over the cotton-covered San Francisco).

Fog envelopes us and it cools and calms. It also blocks the warmth and sunshine. I’ve been pondering for a while the role of air conditioning in destroying street life, the kind of daily existence where you had to go on to your front stairs to get respite from the stifling heat… but here in SF where it’s cool most of the time, it’s usually too cold to have anything like a real street life anyway. But I’ll be working that up into a more thoughtful essay one of these days.

Meanwhile, a less natural form of envelopment is all around us, and a whole new augmentation of it might be forthcoming soon. I speak of the tangled web of electronic waves engulfing our shared urban spaces. Yesterday’s interesting announcement came from the Mayor’s office, a plan being floated to provide free, citywide WiFi connectivity with free internet access.

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