Friday, April 11, 2003

I make the decision days

I make the decision days in advance: weather permitting, I will take a sunset ride on Tuesday.  On Tuesday, the weather is perfect.  I make sure to get home in time to stretch and change, to do a proper job of things.  I mount the bike and feel again the height and lightness; I pick a vigorous cadence climbing to Balboa and find once more the gratification of brute strength.  I ride through shadows on the west side of the street.  The houses opposite shimmer in shafts of citrus sunlight slanting through the pines. 

I arrive at the park and ride carefully through the Rose Gardens, where I technically am not allowed to be, where my bike rolls fecklessly over “no bicycles” signs set in the very pavement in white paint and bronze plaques.  The garden is lightly spangled with visitors, few of whom are even near the path.  I slip past one or two as the beams of sunlight pour through the rose petals, thousands of flowers in pink and orange and lavender, each with its own scent, and all the scents bathing me as I ride across the evening breeze that blows over plot after plot of fiery blooms.

I kick into a cruising gear on JFK.  I know the road well and let the meadows and groves slip behind me.  I accelerate uphill to the crest, then concentrate for the sprint down to the head of the horse trail.  I leave the pavement feeling sharp and I ride hard, skipping over roots and across sand, eyes fixed on where I will be in two more seconds.  The bike dips chatters bobs beneath me; details blur.  I arrive at the Murphy Windmill in excellent time.  The trail ends.  Ocean beach, six railstraight miles of sand, stretches out to either side, holding back the Pacific.  My breathing is deep and relaxed; my legs tingle.

The sky is a rich blue behind me, hinting darkly at the promise of night.  Overhead is orange shot with pink clouds, and just past that, a pink sky laced in tangerine.  A band of white spreads on the horizon from the sun as it reaches to kiss its reflection.  The sea is black, with all the colors of the heavens reflected on its choppy shoulders.  The dunes lounge, random tufts of long grass waving in the breeze.  The wide beach is the color of honey and live embers, pitted everywhere with scoops of shadow, some dark and blue, some grey, some colored just like sand. 

I face a choice: my usual route is to head back into the park, pick up the official concrete bike path, and go home.  This time, though, I don’t want to delve back into shadowy groves.  The gilded light draws me to the alternate route: north to the hill, up and then east to Geary.  On my right will pass the width of the huge park, juniper wilds and the Chalet and the Dutch Windmill, and then the condos and the sandstone cliffs.  To my left is the sea wall, four feet high and three wide, running straight, dropping sharply on the westward side to the sand a dozen or so feet below.  Every fifty feet, wide concrete steps descend to the beach, or perhaps emerge from it.  There are twenty-eight stairwells from here to the hill, twenty-eight portals to the edge of the continent.  This is what I see at each of them:

1.  Five teenage asian boys in chinos and white t-shirts, laughing and shouting as they run across the dunes, punching each other in the shoulders and flipping their extravagant hair. 

2.  A heavyset white man in his 60s, wearing a blue jacket and walking a tiny black dog.

3.  Nothing.

4.  An old black man in a flat-top hat and an old dark suit, sitting on a concrete pilaster at the top of the steps, watching the sunset and listening to a transistor radio.

5.  Two lanky young men with long hair, playing Frisbee, standing far apart near the water.

6.  Two white women in leather shoes and heavy sweaters, looking down and talking earnestly as they approach the steps; they are quite near and look up, startled, as I pass.

7.  A tall white woman with white hair in a bun, walking south along the beach, holding seven leashes on which seven dogs of different sizes and breeds pull intently in seven different directions.

8.  A couple in their thirties with dark hair, skin and clothes, sitting near each other on a red cloth with a bottle of white wine and two glasses, some crackers, cheese and fruit.

9.  Nothing.

10.  A white man in his fifties with bushy sideburns and a black Greek fisherman’s cap, his back to the sea and sunset, flying a box kite and laughing.

11.  A white teenage boy, shirtless in cutoffs, sitting in the sand with his knees up and playing a didgeridoo.

12.  Nothing.

13.  A white woman in her twenties wearing a spandex singlet, doing yoga (exalted warrior pose).

14.  At the pilaster, two very pale young white men sit drinking beer out of cans in paper bags; their black t-shirts are in faded tatters and they watch me with something like malevolence as I ride along.  I expect to be hit with a beer can once my back is to them, but nothing happens.

15.  Nothing.

16.  A family of seven blonde people, mom and dad in their thirties, children throwing handfuls of sand and comparing seashells, and one little girl standing still at the edge of the ocean, watching the sun as it merges with its image, her hair a burnished crown.

17.  A white man in a business suit with a large briefcase, from which he is removing sheets of paper that he crumples and throws one at a time with all his might into the pink foam of the surf.

18.  A stocky white woman in tight white pants, sunglasses on, stomping toward the steps and reaching back to clutch behind her the hand of a stumbling boy; two slightly older boys follow, staring at the shadows that stretch out before them.

19.  A young couple with olive skin, he in a blue t-shirt and jeans, she in black overalls, sitting on the sand with a six pack of canned beer and a bag of chips; she leans back against him as they both watch the sun flatten against the thread of the horizon. 

20.  A man in filthy tattered clothes, curled in a ball on the steps down near the sand, asleep, his face burned from the now-fading sunshine.

21.  Nothing.

22.  Nothing.

23.  A tall, thin old black man in a floppy hat and dungarees, walking along the water’s edge, listening intently to a little girl in a jumper with a pig tails who tightly grips his downstretched hand. 

24.  Nothing.

25.  A tall barrel-chested white man in white jacket, checked pants and a white chef’s hat, his back to the steps, a sharpening steel in one hand and a fifteen-inch chef’s knife in the other, methodically working the blade as he stares into the shrinking disk of the sunset.

26.  Nothing.

27.  An asian woman in her thirties or forties in a knit top and long skirt, standing near the steps, watching the sunset alone, her arms crossed over her chest, her hands on her shoulders.

28.  Two young people on a blanket, embracing, ignoring the splinter of coal-red sun slipping into the sea.

I’ve been riding slowly.  Now the sky is dusty red across the horizon, darkening fast.  The path climbs and swoops up the hill past the buttery smell of the Cliff House to the Seal Rock overlook and the ruins of the old baths dissolving far below into the sea and the fading light.  The push uphill warms me.  As the street opens up to the east I’m spinning smoothly; the road straightens and slopes gently back down to my neighborhood.  The Eastern Rite cathedral flashes past on the left; onion domes glint green as night bounces off gold tiles.  On high alert, I weave back home through the dazzling traffic of Russian Chinatown.  My ride is over and I dismount, climb reluctantly upstairs.  Without turning on the lights, from my front window I look out to the west, where indigo is fading to black and the silhouetted trees grow harder to distinguish.  I close my eyes and all the colors are still there.