ONCE UPON a        TIME
                                                                                          ezine at l'atelier bonita
                                                     established since december 2002

A Walk In Four Parts                             by  Heather M. Borstel             Clement and 8th Avenue, San Francisco for every mile the feet go the heart goes nine - e.e. cummings Walking Several years ago, on a documentary television show shot in Jamaica, reggae producer Lee “Scratch” Perry was discussing the manner in which certain instrumental passages affect the body. Striding around his burnt-out studio, which he himself had burned during a dispute with his record label, Perry, in the midst of a generally--for him--lucid conversation, suddenly grabbed his head and shouted in patois, “dem talking bassline is the mind but dem walking bassline, it is the heart! Dat's it.” Then as should have been expected, befitting his longtime reputation as a difficult interview, he stalked off, leaving camera crew and interviewer holding their equipment, gamely scratching their heads and hoping that the hotel bar was still open. Now, it is a bold person who thinks he or she can figure out what a legendary nut like Lee Perry means when he says something, but watching the scene I had a glimmer of recognition. Far from describing the differing types of bass guitar figures used in his music, I think that the old “Upsetter” was delineating the varying ways in which motion affects us. Well, come to think of it, probably not, but I’d like to think that Mr. Perry and I, perhaps over drinks, could come to an understanding. Walking basslines are all well and good, but it is the walking part that’s important. Music be damned, just give me the motion. For I am guessing that we both spend a lot of time walking around. It is rumored that Perry doesn’t have a car, and me, I just like walking. Traveling on foot has always been a part of my life. Of course that doesn’t have the cachet of stating that mass murder, world travel or serial prostitution are a part of my life, but in life you play the cards you‘ve been dealt. Until recently, I never owned a car and I live in one of the greatest walking areas in the world, California. One of my earliest memories involves walking along a dirt road in rural Almaden, where my family owned a farm, one night and looking up and seeing the Milky Way rolling out in the black country night sky above my head like an actual white carpet and not that sickly dull haze one sees in the city (And then I was taken to the drive-in theater to see a double feature of The Shaggy Dog and Disney’s Three Bear Cabin. Oh, the excitement of my young life!). The procession of stars flowed along like a mirror image of the road I was standing on, or an upside-down river, and went for miles until it disappeared into the distant hillsides. I looked up, much impressed, for so long that I, failing to see the inevitable dip in the road, tripped and fell into a prickly pear cactus. Thus, did I learn one of the cardinal rules of walking: always look where you’re going. Now, that might seem as obvious as pointing out that the Ocean currently to my left is wet, but starting out at the beginning sometimes encompasses the nose on your face as well as your more interesting parts. Dimitte nobis rhapsodia nostra. It’s a good rule to remember, no matter what you are doing, and don’t forget to thank me for pointing it out. While looking where you’re going, walking as a mode of transportation is so slow that it affords a person a whole lot of time to look around themselves and their environment. On any given walk, in any given place, you might see something you’d never have noticed while flying by in cab, car or bike. One day, several years ago, while walking from the Hellhaven (the name on the sign might be Hillhaven, but believe me, putting the “e” in place of the “i” is much more illustrative) Convalescent Center, where my grandmother was recuperating from a broken leg, down to Ghirardelli Square, I passed the San Francisco Second Korean Southern Baptist Church. The word Second, would indicate that somewhere there is a First Korean Southern Baptist Church, and the discovery that there are two buildings in San Francisco roiling with figurative Pentecostal tongues of fire every Sunday, all day, in Korean, is the type of thing that can gladden a cynic’s heart. For what cynic doesn’t love to say, French cigarette in hand, “you can’t make this stuff up”? Walking also exposes one to mysteries both great and small, missed by otherwise occupied souls. Walls are covered with graffiti or posters, some detourned into something their author’s hadn’t intended, some standing solitarily alone, and all the more interesting for their managing to have remained untouched by vandals. Faye you are free reads one extremely large slogan that I see on my way to work every morning. This begs the question of what Faye is free of. I’ll never know, but I like wondering about it as I pass. Then there is the torn poster on the light pole, a disembodied face and the words not a video people, real still remaining after the rest has long disappeared, as well as a dangling bit of audio tape, sans casing, fluttering just below it. A brown cardboard box blows scraping past, the phrase open me last written on it’s flap in black marker, and continues on down the block. Out of a nearby open window drifts a song. Some poor girl has one foot on the platform and one foot on the train and she’s going back to New Orleans to wear her ball and chain. A few blocks farther on, from the door of a coffee shop, comes the song of a gruff-voiced minstrel man, backed by guitar, hiss, pop and great age, telling his lady that if she won’t love him she won’t love nobody else, yes ma’am. Detergent is on sale for $9.99 at the supermarket, the beers of the central Brabant are being highlighted at the liquor store, and there is the usual riot of lies at the news-stand. Walking, you notice all this, the everyday vaudeville entertainment (something for everyone) of City life. The riot of small things and the visual music of chance all laid out before you, if you take the time to look. You can observe and take it all in or you can make fun of it, but you still have to notice it when passing by. It may not be at all important in the traditional sense of ground-shaking events of war and politic, but it is impossible to avoid when you are on the ground, so to speak. Perhaps it isn’t much to be noticing after all, but to paraphrase Robert Benchley, you can’t burlesque a burlesque, sugar. It just is. Corbett Avenue, San Francisco The Route For several years when I was much younger, a large group of my friends and I would take marathon walks around our neighborhood. These became so elaborate that we’d actually draw up non-scale maps and pack lunches before leaving for our trips. In this childhood version of the Holy Mysteries, it was of paramount importance that we’d always take the same route unvaried. Starting out from my grandmother’s house, we would make our way over the Market Street traffic by way of a corkscrew overpass, the sun always making black shadow bars on it’s pavement. Continuing the length of Corbett and Graystone Streets (named after the 19th century boxer famously felled by a solar plexus punch and some forgotten real-estate speculator, respectively), we’d take a left and turn down Villa Street. Being young San Franciscans and already knowing the value of real estate, we’d look at the houses lining the road and imagine how much they’d cost. One of them was a huge red Tudor style monstrosity with mirrored windows which was nicknamed “Heather’s House” because I’d called it as ‘mine’. Someone else called the faux-adobe, painted so white you needed sunglasses to even look at it, that hung for three stories down off the edge of the hill, it’s narrow staircases disappearing into the dark below. On the theory that it looked like something you might end up in South of the border if you‘d had too much to drink, we nicknamed that house “Tijuana Hospital”. Traveling laterally, we’d then cross Carmel Street, climb over Tank Hill and slip into Sutro Forest. (I remember being incredibly amazed that there was a forest right in the middle of my ever-loving town. It’s existence raised so many unanswered questions. Why weren’t houses built on it? Did hoboes live there? Did bears?) Walking past the jumble of teenage flotsam and jetsam, crushed beer cans and empty condom boxes, littering the entrance, we’d drift across the perimeter of the wood, never brave enough to continue down into it’s Pelagian green and misty bowl, sometimes stopping for lunch on a large flat slate outcropping. I never once saw a single soul other than us in the forest, whereas when we’d walk through Glen Canyon, just a couple of miles to the South, we’d see numerous hikers and dogs, leading me to believe that no-one but us knew about it. We’d then emerge from the trees behind the University of California-San Francisco campus and go off down Clarendon Street. Passing the Cuesta , a gigantic, block long, ramshackle Spanish style mansion built in the teens but by then a decaying semi-habitable wreck, we’d take a sneaking look through it’s wrought iron gates and try to imagine what went on inside. The building had both an air of rotting grandeur and a tower and chapel, which I was certain would all come in handy if you were lucky enough to own such a house. Finally, we’d go up the hill below the Sutro Radio Tower (the famous Thing That Isn’t There in photos of the City taken for the tourism trade), and back down Twin Peaks Boulevard and then home. That was The Walk. We’d take other routes on other walks, but that particular was The Walk. Market and 7th Streets, San Francisco Sam Brannan Takes A Walk The Roman author Fabulinus once interrupted the telling of a tale in which his hero was engaged in cracking open a giant egg in order to fry it up in a huge frying pan with the words: “It now becomes necessary to pause and recount to you a history of the world up to this point.” And so, we have reached the point in this essay where I must pause and tell you a little something about Sam Brannan. Most of San Francisco’s non-numbered streets are named after long forgotten pioneers, robber barons and politicians, in the manner of city streets everywhere. Rarely is any thought given to remembrance of Bernal or Vallejo or Hopkins or Macallister or Lick, except maybe in rehashings of their period villainy. They stole from the Indians. They pushed poor tragic Mr. Judah off that East-bound train and stole his idea for the trans-continental railroad. They decided to lay out Market Street on an angle, thus causing generations of tourists to get lost downtown. They had silly Anglo-Saxon names like Lick or unpronounceable Basque one’s like Portola. They made a whole lot of coin at the expense of poor people. The objections are endless, and as a counterweight we today have an Emil Aguinaldo Street as well as a Lech Walesa Street, although, if one looks hard enough and thumbs through enough books, one can find an objection or two to even these most sainted street namesakes. Thus, we come to Sam Brannan, most definitely not a saint. Brannan’s street runs straight through the business and advertising district near the waterfront. I would walk it’s length when making my way to work from the Embarcadero to Ghirardelli Square. Passing from urban canyons to smaller brick complexes, ugly public art, and Krishna Copy centers, I’d sometimes reflect on the man whom the street was named after. Having been required to take a class in California history, I was well versed in matters 1849, and so knew that Brannan would have certainly appreciated all the advertising agencies and financial service companies which line his street. He was a man who appreciated the making of a dollar out of fifty cents. Along Brannan stands the unnoticed small factory building in which, reads the greened bronze plaque affixed halfway up the wall: On this site in 1922, Philo T. Farnsworth invented the first television. It is said that when Farnsworth’s financial backers complained that they had yet to see any money from his invention, the young engineer made sure to have the very first image broadcast on his prototype to be a picture of a large dollar sign. This bit of cheek would probably have been much appreciated by Sam Brannan. Brannan was born on the East coast and grew up in Ohio. Converting to the new sect of Mormonism, he quickly rose through the ranks and became on of the early leaders of the Later Day Saints. Driven out of their Midwestern base, the Mormons were looking for somewhere to live free of the perceived and real persecution of government and mob, and Brannan took a boatload of women (to liberally seed to new Jerusalem with new Mormon babies) around the Horn to what was then the Spanish outpost of Yerba Buena in 1846. Boat travel being romantic but torturously slow, in the days prior to the building of the Panama Canal, by the time Brannan and his ladies arrived the city had become part of the US territory of California. Looking up at the dock to see the thirteen red and white stripes of Old Glory fluttering above his head, Brannan muttered, “there’s that damn old rag again” (Mormons not being big fans of the US government at that point), but still disembarked for what was now called San Francisco and promptly decided to cast off the shackles of piety and slip into something more comfortable. Quickly launching into the capital spirit of the age, Brannan almost immediately began making money any way he could. He opened a dry goods business and within a few months found himself excommunicated from his adopted faith, on grounds that he wasn’t kicking back the required tithe. “I’ll give the Lord his money,” he said, “when I get a receipt signed by the Lord.” Moving North to Johan Sutter’s New Helvetica colony near Sacramento, Brannan opened another dry goods store there to cater to the numerous Swedish immigrants and adventure seekers crowding it’s acreage. One day, as the story goes, Sutter’s partner John Marshall confided in his pal Sam that he’d found some gold whilst panning the river at his mill outside the colony, but please don’t tell anyone, Sammy old boy. Brannan’s mother did not raise a fool, and he quickly endeavored to buy up all the mining and camping equipment within a hundred mile radius, borrowed a vial of gold dust and took a stagecoach back down to San Francisco. On that sunny day in 1848, Sam Brannan walked along the wooden slat sidewalks of downtown San Francisco, his boots making hollow echoes in the summertime air. He passed the well-dressed ladies but paid them no heed. Waiting for a large crowd of mid-day shoppers and workers to gather in the main square, his hand might have disappeared into his pocket from time to time, nervously touching the vial of Sutter‘s gold, in the manner of men everywhere who have something big in their pocket that they cannot wait to show off. When a group sufficient for his designs had appeared, Brannan stood on a wooden crate, cleared his throat and informed all and sundry in a loud voice that gold, the dream of every man woman and child, the monarch of precious metals and the hope of nations, had been found but a few dozen miles North at Sutter’s Mill. Anyone who wanted to partake in this festival of free wealth (for it would be as easy as digging for potatoes to get all that gold out of the ground) should stop at Brannan’s dry goods shop and purchase the requisite equipment. Well, if you’ve lived on this earth more than a few months, you of course know what happened. Within a few months Brannan had become a millionaire, published a short-lived newspaper, speculated in the fantasy real estate still covered by the Bay waters, organized Vigilance Committee lynchings, loved and leaved many women who were not his wife and drank up gallons of whiskey. He died a few years later in San Diego, penniless, suffering from delerium tremens and striding about the halls of his flophouse shouting about gold. San Francisco experienced boom and bust and earthquake on the foundation built by such characters, and grew into the teeming tourist trap it is today. And Sam Brannan? He was simply the living embodiment of mid-19th century capitalism and Barnum-esque American hullaballo, traveling from rex justus to rex mundi to rex iniquitus in a few short years, leaving only his street behind to be walked on by his inheritors and celebrators. Or at least that is the story as I like to remember it. Caveat lector. Riot-A-Go-Go Tank Hill So we finish with Mr. Brannan and move on to hills. Kite Hill. Twin Peaks. Corona Heights. Diamond Heights. Telegraph Hill and Nob Hill. Mt. Sutro and Panorama Ridge. Goat Hill. Potrero Hill. Tank Hill. Take five-hundred and sixty steps up to the top of Tank Hill, slipping and sliding on the loose shale and red rock. Suffer not the sounds of the traffic on Clarendon Street or Carmel Boulevard and take in the views from all sides. Spreading out to your left are the high looming shadows of Twin Peaks and to your right the water and Golden Gate Bridge, with the Renaissance revival spires of the white church just before them. At night, the City rolls out below you like a glittering golden horn and above you hundreds of stars shine. In this impressive setting, you might run into others taking in the view. Children sometimes fly kites off the top of the hill and professionals take wedding photos with the City as a free backdrop. You might see a pair of lovers sitting on a rock outcropping. Maybe her hand is brushing the short hairs on the back of his neck or resting on the wet spot at the small of his back. There is sweat behind her knees from the climb and he whispers to her oh my love we have both time and world enough to make that old evening sun fly. Or some such silliness that sounds good at the time, but makes no sense later on. Or maybe he doesn’t say anything. Then they get up and continue off down the hill to home. Maybe on your walk you might see nothing but a few stray dogs, birds and black flies. You never do know what the future holds when you start out your door. Life is, in a way, a minstrel show. We black up and commence to singing a song that someone else has written and play within the rigid performing format we are born into. Taking a walk, if for only a short time and distance, breaks up that rigidity and places us within a new and random format of chance. Who knows what you’ll see or do? Behind every curve, up every hill and behind every door there is something new, and we need only to go in order to meet it. Put one foot in front of the other. You never know what might happen. Take a chance. Take a walk. Photographs by Heather M. Borstel ©2003 Heather M. Borstel _____________ Heather M. Borstel was born in San Francisco, California, at the dawn of the 1970s. She lives in the shadow of Twin Peaks, went to Catholic school and San Francisco State University, and is of average height, build and appearance. She enjoys contract bridge, falconry, Gandhian nonviolence and whipping up a nice pot of Vegetable Medley. Her favorite song is "Superstar" by the Carpenters, which she sings without shame at karaoke bars, and her favorite book is Anna Karenina. Heather was once said to have a wit which rivals that of Bennett Serf by her third grade teacher, but she has yet to find any evidence that Bennett Serf was witty. She has never had the stigmata, curses like a stevedore, and makes a mean White Russian. Heather would like the phrase "I told you I was sick!" chiseled on her tombstone.

                                                   ONCE UPON      a TIME
                                                                                          ezine at l'atelier bonita
                                                     established since december 2002