Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Private Drive

It was bizarre, driving home last night.  I have driven that road countless times, in sunlight and fog, in good spirits and bad, alone and in the company of friends and family…. The road had no surprises to offer me, so much so that, on autopilot, I chose my favorite lane heading over the bridge and then, a few minutes later, changed lanes for a few seconds to avoid a heavy metal plate in the roadway that might have disrupted the baby we had sleeping in the back – a lane change that anticipated an obstacle I’d hit so many times that I knew now to dodge it before it was even visible ahead of me.  I really knew my way around those five blacktop lanes, all right.  Sometimes you have to take solace in the little things, and this was one of those. 

Then we got into the city and it all went to hell.

There was a fork in the road – a big one.  I didn’t recognize it.  Fifth street offramp?  Here?  I guessed that I didn’t want to take it, barreling past the turn-off and into a long stretch of clean, new freeway surfaces.  This was all new construction, part of the huge transbay terminal and transit rebuild. They’d taken off the K-bars and barriers that had formed the edge of the freeway for years during this project, rendering the road suddenly naked and unfamiliar.  I just tried to focus on the new lines on the new road as they shunted me along an unfamiliar path on a familiar route.  The view was subtly different, too – the angles had changed just enough to shift the vista and distract me.  I was glad that there was so little traffic because there was a lot to keep me visually busy. 

Before I knew it I’d raced through the new zone and was coming up on my offramp.  The freeway used to end up at Fell Street and I’d been able to drive right off I-80 onto a three-lane one-way street that was pretty much a straight shot to my house.  That was a fast, efficient route, but it ended when the ’89 quake rendered that whole end of the freeway unsafe and, piece by piece, it came down – first the Franklin-Gough ramps, which I never got to use, and then, a few years ago, amidst great civic uproar and vituperation, the Oak and Fell ramps were destroyed as well. 

This left me rather inconvenienced and I took it personally.  Instead of racing along the freeway to its natural end and then seamlessly merging into fastmoving street traffic right through to the park, I now had to leave the freeway early, at 9th street, and drive along a dingy industrial block of Harrison before turning at the Stud Bar (hotbed of transvestitism and double parking) and then driving past the furniture shops and outlet stores to the Bill Graham auditorium at the civic center, where I could finally cross market street and make a sharp left to take Hayes past Van Ness to Gough, where a left and then a right one block later would finally bring me to Fell street and my easy drive home…. What a travesty.  What a mess.  How terribly inconvenient for me, having all those signal lights and ugly buildings and miles of traffic with which to contend when all I wanted was to get home quickly and easily.  It was about me, and I had been served.  And not in a nice way. 

Over the past few months I’ve been seeing signs of the next phase of my reality coming into place.  Octavia Street was widened and beautified.  A new offramp was built at the end of the freeway.  A tortilla bearing the image of the virgin driving a skiploader full of rebar appeared at a local taqueria.  I could smell the changes in the air.  I could especially smell them last night, as I drove through the new sections of freeway that had been built just off the bridge at downtown.  That whiff of “new freeway smell” gave me the courage to drive right past the 9th street offramp and spurn my inconvenient and ugly route home altogether.  I had faith in a new tomorrow.

Tomorrow did not stand me up.  The freeway bore some new signage now – Octavia Street/101 North.  After years of inconvenience, the new world was ready for me and the road to it was wide open and empty.  The roadbed curved smoothly and descended at Market, an intersection I knew well but not from this angle, with the old pancake place and the gay-lesbian center creating a new skyline in new directions for me.  The light changed quickly and I drove across Market and up Octavia, a broad multiply-divided boulevard with parks and a pagoda pavilion, terminating in double left-only lanes that fed me onto Fell street and directly home again.  Very few lights, and they were timed.  Handsome buildings to either side, seen from a new perspective. New public parkspace.  A straight shot to Fell, along the panhandle, into the park and down JFK to the exit on 8th avenue.  It doesn’t get much easier, and when you get right down to it I’m all about the efficiency. 

But it was more than the efficiency that had me giggling and giddy when I got out of the car last night.  We’d saved time and effort, yes, and that was a good thing – but I’d also been given new views of this old city, and new ways to see it altogether.  It had been remade again, and this time, to my benefit.  They’d finally built me a nice route back home from points east.  Since I live three miles from the pacific, “points east” is most of the country, so I was, and remain, truly appreciative.  Once they finish painting me up my own personal VIP lane, I may even write a letter thanking them personally.