It was a gray day at ocean beach. The tide was high. Seafoam and jellyfish returned only reluctantly to the sea, and sometimes not at all.

Tags: beach, photo

I biked today from our house to the beach on the Western edge of Golden Gate Park. San Francisco on a sunny weekday feels like an underemployed city. There are people in the street at all hours with apparently time on their hands. People don't seem to be in a rush to get anywhere.

Being on Spring Break, I joined those leisurely people today. Old habits die hard, though. I pedalled furiously until I got to the park, as though I had a deadline to meet. Of course by then I had a tight ache in my lower left back, and my backpack was starting to chafe on my bare shoulders.

Biking through the park was quiet, although about halfway through, the road took on a noticeable negative gradient, meaning I started to speed, and so the wind created this everpresent rumbling in my ear. As I approached the ocean, the air got cooler. Although the day was perfectly clear, it felt a lot like riding into fog. You know how when you bring cold clothes into a warm room, sometimes they feel wet, even though they're not? It was like that, except it was cool air on a warm day.

Without a map, I navigated with the sun. It wasn't hard. Avoid exiting the park, and try to head west.

Getting to the beach, I was surprised at how grey it looked. The sky, perhaps, was too blue for its own good, and the vegetation behind me too lushly green, making the water and sand seem dull in comparison. Sand, after all, should be white or golden.



There were the perfect number of people on the beach, but I stayed on the sidewalk, not wanting to get sand in my bike's gears. I then slowly performed my post-cycling ritual of relaxation, which I shall detail here:

First I got off the bike (immediately the relief of not having to balance). Then I carefully leaned it against the bench (the relief from controlling a heavy, dirty thing). Next, the helmet came off (self-evident relief). Then the underwear-adjustment (this step may be interchanged with the previous one, depending on temperature, humidity, layers, degree of crotch-discomfort). The removal of backpack comes next (exposing sweat-soaked back of tank-top to sun and wind for the first time this trip - what a feeling!). Finally, the sitting and stretching.

Without ritual, after all, it's not relaxation. It's just collapse.

I sat and watched the clouds and gulls. I ate a trail mix bar. I got asked by some stoner-types if I had a lighter (I did not). I got eyeballed by a ruddy-faced young man in a wetsuit, wet from the sea. His arm dripped water down the side of his surprisingly white surfboard (whiter than the sand, anyway). It was surf meets turf, sea-soaked meets sweat-damp, nature-rider meets bike-rider, cool-dude meets grad-student.



A young nuclear family (mommydaddytwogirls) took turns sitting next to me on the bench to put on their shoes before getting into their car. The parents helped the two girls ensure they did not have sand in their shoes or on their legs. They did not acknowledge my presence, and, by the time I thought about this, it was too late for me to acknowledge theirs. How would I do it, I wondered. It was impossible. "Oh, I didn't see you there for the last 5 minutes!" In retrospect, I could have waited for some minor unusual event (localized minor unusual events happen all the time. A bird calls, a child throws something, someone jogs past talking on a cellphone) and then made some kind of witty, friendly or ambiguously-passive-aggressive comment about it. ("It sounds lost"/"Ooh that went far"/"We all have cellphones, nowadays!").

I wonder if they thought I didn't speak English and were too embarrassed to say anything to me, in case that was so. There were a number of people speaking non-English languages at the beach that day. I heard, from my bench, French, Russian (or some other Eastern European language), Mandarin, and Spanish. There was also some kind of Southern U.S. accent. You see and hear a lot more people sitting still than walking. When you walk, you still encounter people coming the other way (although because of your increased relative velocities, and your urgent agenda of forward movement, you have much less time to pay attention to them), but all the people behind you going the same way are just completely unavailable to your senses.

Images (in order) are from:
1. cloudsoup
2. Chronochaser
3. Mikebaird

All images are of the Pacific ocean, as far as I could tell, though not of the beach at Golden Gate Park. The second one was taken near Pacifica.

Tags: beach, bike, california, environment, feelgood, photos, summer, weather