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CHAPTER 1
I do not believe in ghosts. I am generally skeptical of the immaterial, the spiritual, the otherworldly. And yet, when I am by myself in the house at night — most any house, if alone — I often look up half expecting my brother Kris to be there. Across the room, hanging, often hanging, though I do not know what that would look like precisely. It is a vague vision — what is seeing? — no doubt pulled from movies or photographs glimpsed and then mostly forgotten.
The world outside is dark beyond the windowpane. Inside, the lights are on. All of them.
I read a book, arranging myself on the couch so that my back is to the wall and I am facing the hallway to the stairs that lead to the basement. I hear the house shift as the temperature drops, a groan from the floorboards. A phantom walking up the stairs.
I look up from my book and scan the room.
When I get up for a glass of water, I make sure not to walk with my back exposed to — to what? I'm not sure. I reassure myself that Kris would never want to harm me. Would never want to scare me, even. Is it Kris, then, who I sense? Why does my mind insist on frightening me with things better left for a thirteen-year-old child? I am now almost twice as old as Kris ever was.
I return to my book. I hold it — physical, real — in my hands. I believe in dirt, skin, tears, rock, blood, sky. I know the cold of water when I step into a mountain stream. When I encounter granite, or basalt, or sandstone on a hike, I touch it and feel it rough against my skin. I hold the book in my hands and begin to read again.
A few years ago, I grew interested in sand. Why is there sand in deserts? Where does it come from? I thought ocean waves made sand on seashores: waves pounded continents' rock and shattered it to stone, gravel, and finally sand. This, I learned, is only slightly true.
The house continues to groan. The heat kicks on. I look up again. I scan the room.
Clay particles clump and lie low; sand grains part and blow about. Winds drop sand by weight, as one drops anything when it gets too heavy for one's strength.
At some point the night must end and I must put down the book. I brush my teeth in the bathroom, leaving the door open. When I have finished, I walk through the hall past the stairs and into the bedroom. I turn on the light by the bed. I walk back out into the hall, where I glance down the stairs, looking without looking, before turning off the overhead light and heading back into the illuminated bedroom. I shut the door.
When I lived with roommates, the house was rarely empty at night. And now, in the house I share with Julia, I do not think twice about the dark when she is here — with the possible exception of the basement — but when she is gone, at a conference or visiting her parents in D.C., I begin to see the things I know are not there.
I lie down, turn off the bedside light, and pull the blanket over my head until morning.
CHAPTER 2
For days the ship sailed into strong headwinds and across high seas. It had disembarked from Hong Kong, bound for San Francisco with a brief stopover in Honolulu. By the time it neared California, the ship was two days behind schedule. As it approached the coast, the crew and passengers of the SS City of Rio de Janeiro strained their eyes looking into the blue-gray haze with anticipation.
It was February 20, 1901. Everyone's thoughts that morning were occupied with a longing for land. They wanted first just to see it, to know that something solid outside of this frantic sea existed. Once they saw it — once they knew it to be real and not another mirage floating off in the distance — they would long to stand on it, to feel the world solid beneath their feet.
They stared into the haze all morning, into the gray of distance stretching forever out in front of them. Then, at midmorning, they could see it. Out beyond the haze was a thin strip of blue on the horizon. Land.
Their relief didn't last long. Just four miles off shore, a sea of fog engulfed the ship. The skipper ordered the anchor down. They would wait for clear weather. Again the passengers and crew stood looking out onto a blank canvas. One was a father-to-be who was hoping to discover that his child had been born. Another was the U.S. consul general to Hong Kong, along with his wife and son. Once the ship made landfall, they planned to catch a train across the continent to attend President McKinley's inauguration. All told, there were 211 on board. They waited together in the thick fog, swaying in the sea just a few miles from solid ground.
Captain William Ward paced the fog-filled deck. He had a fiancée who was waiting for him in San Francisco. He had not seen her in some time, and now the only thing that stood between him and her was this thick fog that he could not see past. The anchor chains creaked under strain. The ship's fog bell rang out every thirty seconds to warn nearby vessels of the Rio's presence. No others were nearby. The Rio was alone at anchor in the gray fog.
"Before every great shipwreck there is a single crucial moment when an immediate and final decision must be made," Harold Gilliam notes in his book San Francisco Bay. "Once that moment is passed, no further choice is possible."
Everything is in control. The boat is steady. Life is manageable. The future is a placid sea stretching into the distance. The sky is clear. The harbor just a couple of miles ahead. Then a final decision. A fog forms. Control slips away. The world is a wilderness once more.
In the late afternoon, a small pilot boat appeared from behind the fog. Unable to see, it had followed the ringing of the ship's fog bell. The Rio lowered a rope ladder and pilot Fred W. Jordan climbed aboard, ready to guide the ship into port. He brought with him a stack of newspapers. The passengers, isolated from the outside world, eagerly grabbed for one. They began to speak more quickly. Anticipation blossomed into excitement. They could almost feel the land beneath their feet as they read the day's news. The father-to-be flipped to the back of the paper. He had become the father of a baby boy. He passed around his last few cigars.
Soon enough, San Franciscans would be reading about the Rio's tragic end.
That evening, the fog began to thin, and the captain, tired of waiting, ordered the anchor up. The Rio once more headed east, slowly, tentatively, approaching the Golden Gate Strait. It did not make it far. Fog again appeared, an apparition that swallowed the ship. The anchor was lowered once more.
Captain Ward's frustration transformed into disgust. He stormed off the deck and into his cabin. He was to be summoned only once the fog lifted. Until then, he would sleep. The ship rocked through the night, alone in its own world, the anchor creaking, the fog bell ringing, the fog hanging heavy over the sleeping passengers.
Then, at four in the morning, the pilot saw a clearing in front of the ship. He rubbed sleep from his eyes and looked landward where he saw the flickering lights of the Fort Point and Point Bonita lighthouses. Captain Ward was awoken, as were the ship's engines.
The Rio cautiously approached the Golden Gate, moving slowly through the deep channel. Then, at once, it entered a patch of fog — the few who were awake held their breath — only to escape it within minutes. A false alarm; the crew let out a collective exhale. The ship passed Lands End and Mile Rock. They could almost feel the land within grasp. The lighthouse at Point Bonita slid behind the stern as the ship entered the strait, and the world of land in front of them opened up.
The passengers slept as the SS City of Rio de Janeiro approached the narrows, on the edge of San Francisco, in the year nineteen hundred and one, where it was engulfed one final time in a wall of fog.
CHAPTER 3
Nine hundred feet above the sea, atop Eureka Peak, the fog blows in. Ever changing, it hurries past, relentlessly at times, wave after wave.
It's a long walk up from Market Street, and a world away from the crowded bars in the Castro. Past the neon signs and Victorian houses, up steep streets and then hidden stairways, up, up, up the small footpaths that wind across the ridges, across Scenic Drive and then up another short stretch of trail: Twin Peaks. Noe and Eureka.
To the east, the city proper, beyond the fog's reach but framed by it. The procession of cars on Market Street cuts straight through downtown, ending only where the San Francisco Bay begins. North of Market: Russian Hill, Nob Hill, and the Financial District. South of Market: the Mission, Potrero Hill, and Bernal Heights. In the distance, the Bay Bridge reaches out to Oakland.
Across the crowded city, people come and go. Buses and trains trace their prescribed lines. On the highway, red taillights back up to the Bay Bridge. People are everywhere living their lives, a frantic mass of energy. I look out at all that movement, all those lives I will never know except for the blur of light I see from this peak, and pause.
Concentrate on just one life.
Up here, in the middle of San Francisco, only a few people are to be found. This city has many pockets of quiet amid the din of urban life. Solitude and space for contemplation.
A moment later, the wind changes, and the fog begins to move in on it all. The city and people and buses and cars — all of it down there — disappear in the fog. I am enveloped by it, left alone in the fog atop this peak.
I turn around. The wind and the fog both originate to the west, where the ocean meets the land. The fog is denser out there, the city sleepier. From Eureka Peak, at times you cannot see much to the west past where you stand. At your feet, elderberry, and arroyo willow, and reed grass, and rock. Beyond the fog, if you believe in what you cannot see, lies the Richmond District, Golden Gate Park, Ocean Beach, the Sunset District, and the Pacific Ocean stretching westward. The sun, out beyond the Sunset, is setting high in the sky above a bank of fog that swallows up the land.
* * *
I've been thinking about fog for some time now. How it appears outside my window in the morning while I'm lying in bed, the outside world neither dark nor light. How it moves along the streets like a thousand streams tracing the contours of the city. How it obscures the world, confusing the seen and unseen. And then, how it slowly disappears from sight until the world is once again visible.
Memory is like the fog. I remember feeling for the first time, as a teenager, what it was like to forget. How something so concrete could one day disappear. I remarked to a friend that I no longer knew the sound of a voice I once knew so well. The forgetting has stuck with me.
And yet, for all the forgetting, much remains. Sorting it out is like walking through the fog in search of some distant part of the city. At times the past is illuminated, burning, brilliant. Other times the fog is thick. Often, it is just silently slipping away.
Standing, as it were, amid the fog, I sketch the landscape. Sometimes I'm able to see things fairly clearly. Often, much of my view is obscured. At times I must rely on others when I cannot see past my own feet. Simple sketches are all I can manage. Thoreau and Dillard have their "meteorological journal of the mind." I have a fog sketchbook.
Memory is real, I've come to think, though it is living. The past mixes with the present — an endless churning. The fog swirls around so that this is visible, and then this is visible, and then this is visible.
* * *
I used to live in the heart of the fog, in the Sunset, off Irving Street, a couple of blocks from Golden Gate Park. The place was an old Edwardian, built two years after the 1906 quake, and the single-pane windows let the wind and fog right in. The building had made it through many earthquakes, but it hadn't seen much handiwork for a couple of decades. The linoleum floor in the kitchen was peeling off, as was the white paint in every room. My room was in the back of the house and my window faced west. On clear days I could almost see the ocean just a few miles away.
There weren't many clear days. The summer months were filled with fog. Wispy white fog. Thick gray fog. Fog that stood still and fog that blew sideways. I woke up to it in the mornings as it worked its way past the window frame. I would stand at a streetcar stop on Irving, waiting for the inbound N-Judah, and watch the fog flow toward me, an endless white river tumbling up the street. Downtown, after work, I would board the outbound N in sunshine, and, after passing through the Sunset Tunnel, the train would often emerge into a sea of fog.
I'm no expert when it comes to fog. I know it comes in from the west, from the ocean, and blows into the city. Summer, when temperatures just a hundred miles inland are in the nineties and above, is fog season here — cool and windy and sometimes downright cold. Some people I know run from the fog, leaving town each summer weekend to find sunshine in neighboring counties. And though I grew up in Colorado, where any resident will tell you about the state's three hundred days of sunshine a year, I've grown to like the fog.
When I moved in with Julia, I moved to Bernal Heights, to the east of Twin Peaks, on the edge of the fog. Many of our neighbors live here specifically to stay away from it. Bernal lies in something of a banana belt, as most of the fog never makes it past Twin Peaks. But even when it is sunny in this part of town, the fog is often still present. Just look up toward Twin Peaks, where it streams down the leeward side into the Castro like head overflowing a pint of beer.
I've kept an eye on it, up there, to the west, atop the peaks. In spring, I sometimes return from an after-work run up Bernal Hill and tell Julia about the formations gathering in the Golden Gate. She smiles a knowing smile, indulges me a little, as if clouds have some real significance. I might then head up Twin Peaks, where the air is refreshingly cool, for no better reason than to feel it moving in against my skin.
I've started taking walks across the city in search of fog. These walks sometimes turn into long hikes. Up the green grass hills and through the city streets. I've found out-of-the-way staircases that lead deeper into it. I bought a pocket guide to Bay Area weather and I carry it with me as I walk. I sometimes search for scientific studies about fog online and read them at work when things are slow.
I've been living with the fog for some time now, surrounded, without knowing much about it. It's time I take a look around.
CHAPTER 4
When I think of Kris, he is older than me still. In my mind I see brown hair, square shoulders, that he is tall. If asked to describe what he looked like, I would not be able to offer much more than that vague triad. I do not see details beyond that. When I see Kris, I sense someone older than me. The seeing and the sensing overlap. I do not know what the sensing is, simply that I feel it. As I grow older, Kris grows older too. He is my older brother still. We age together at a constant rate. Or, perhaps, when I think of him, I become younger.
* * *
The suburb we grew up in had a series of greenbelts: preserved land flowing like inlets between the thousands of tract homes that stretched ever south from Denver. Highlands Ranch had been a cattle ranch in the not-so-distant past, and cattle still grazed on some of the land in 1991 — a comfortingly pastoral sight for the seventeen thousand inhabitants of the ten-year-old suburban outpost.
When I was nine, a tall redheaded kid from the neighborhood and I would spend hours exploring our greenbelt. We spent most of our time down by the creek, protected from the hot summer sun by towering cottonwood trees. We would pack provisions and wander the great expanse just as Stephen Harriman Long had in July of 1820. His namesake peak (14,259 feet tall) looms over the Front Range, and under its watchful gaze we delighted in finding quicksand, and frogs, and the occasional owl. We shot at one with a BB gun once and it stoically stood its ground. We dreamed of finding swimming holes and stringing up rope swings that would propel us through the air and into the cool water below.
The greenbelt was true wilderness to us. We had no interest in definitions or boundaries — for us, the natural and the human flowed into each other. The houses on each side became cliffs towering above a gorge. We had no idea that suburban planners and marketers valued the greenbelt mostly as a "recreation area" to attract young families. A place where moms and dads could go for a run after a long day at the office. A place where they could turn their kids loose in summer without the fears of urban living. A place that reassured: development and conservation can live together — if at a ratio of one hundred to one.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Beautiful Unseen"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Kyle Boelte.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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