Chapter 23: San Francisco en Passant
© 1987 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
Mountain View, California (1,652 miles)
February 12, 1987
It was a crisp morning, foggy enough to romantically mute the distant
San Francisco skyline, cool enough to make the ride exhilarating, early
enough to eliminate any sense of hurry. Perfect conditions for a float
across the bay and the long trek to Silicon Valley. We arrived at the
Sausalito ferry terminal in the thick of the commuting throng, and
wrestled our machines up the ramp and onto this small pedestrians-only
boat. Ah... made it, just in time. I nodded pleasantly around at the
startled crowd and reached over to switch off the bike’s control
system.
“Park over there,” ordered a brusque crewman. “This is the passenger area.” He pointed down a
narrow aisle.
“Will we be disembarking through that same door?”
“No, you get off from the upper deck. The stairs are around the
corner.” He busied himself with preparations for launch—as the rumbling
beneath our feet rose to a low growl and the steel ramp, our only
escape, grated as it began to slide on the dock.
“Wait!” I shouted. I sprinted around the small vessel, quickly
determining that the stairs were absolutely impassable. “We have to get
off!” The mooring lines were already dangling in the water, but I began
backing my machine toward the door as one of the commuters helpfully
grabbed my antennae to keep them from snagging on the low ceiling.
Somehow the commotion reached the captain, and the boat stood
impatiently as we backed down the narrow gangway. The moment Maggie’s
front wheel hit the dock, they roared off to San Francisco—leaving us
standing breathless in the mist. This hadn’t been the plan at all. Ah
well, there’s still the Golden Gate Bridge...
After grappling with another minor obstacle (someone had chained the
gate behind us on the loading ramp), we consulted our handy “Marin
County Bikeways” map. Following it carefully, we found our way through
Sausalito and Fort Baker, down to the waterline, and then panted
furiously up, up to the west sidewalk’s bicycle entrance. Padlocked.
Grr. We kept climbing and soon reached the main gate. It was locked
too, of course. The sidewalk was under construction, and the traffic
separating us from the east side was an angry, fuming blur of
bumper-to-bumper commuters—quite impassable.
Up a hill. Down a hill. Under 101 and up a hill, through a few hundred
yards of glass-strewn gravel, and into the tourist area. Ah, bike route
signs... I started down the ramp and was immediately stuck again—in a
turn too tight for my 8-foot machine. Grumbling my sudden empathy for
people in wheelchairs, I lifted the rear end around and made it onto
the east sidewalk at last... yielding a smooth, delightful cruise all
the way across the Bay.
This 50-year-old bridge is pure poetry: technology on a scale that
mystifies, grace that belies the violence of its construction. Far
below, seagulls sideslipped across the rippled water as from the waves
towered this sculpture of steel, this thing rooted solidly in the sea
yet soaring high above it like a skyscraper-based web spun through an
inter-species joint venture of spider and engineer.
Onward. San Francisco was easy: Lincoln Boulevard, the Presidio, Golden
Gate Park, the spray of surf, the oceanfront loiterers in their cars
eating, reading, staring... Past it all we went, dodging glass, cracked
pavement blurring under skinny wheels, the City’s periphery gliding by
like the beginning of a movie.
Near Lake Merced, I half-noticed a woman staring at me as she passed in
her nondescript green Oldsmobile. Intersection, red light. The little
blue car, poised between lanes while waiting to turn left, didn’t have
a chance. In slow-motion I watched it happen: the woman’s shocked
recognition of unavoidable collision, the retired couple’s panic in
that last moment before impact, the flying debris, the ruthless crunch
of destruction, the small car lifting onto two wheels and then dropping
again as the gray heads jerk right, then left. The woman getting out,
ashen, frightened; the old couple, emerging more slowly, taking
inventory. The slow boil of anger... hot words... gawkers in other
lanes slowing, risking another accident in their urgent desire to see
some property damage—or hey, maybe even blood!
I stopped and scanned the 2-meter band for an active repeater. “This is
KA8OVA, bicycle mobile. I’ve just witnessed a 2-car accident on 35 at
John Muir, and I need to make a police call.” Once that was taken care
of, I sat out of the way and waited.
The Oldsmobile woman walked over to me and attempted, in halting
English, to explain. “No insurance,” she said. It’s OK, I said, the
police are coming. She backed off, wide-eyed, then jumped in her car
and gunned the engine—squealing a U-turn northbound and almost causing
another accident in the process. I quickly recorded her license number.
The old couple walked over. Helluva way to start a vacation. They were
fresh from Philadelphia, and had just rented this car at the airport
half an hour ago to take the 49-mile scenic drive. Now it sat with a
flat tire, shattered rear door, crushed fender, various parts in the
street getting tiddlywinked this way and that by passing traffic. “I
don’t think that woman even had a driver’s license,” the lady said. “I
couldn’t get her to show me anything.” I told her the tag number, sold
her a book, and then kept them company until a bored cop finally
arrived a half-hour later.
Onward again. Skyline Drive, Route 35, uphill through the cookie-cutter
tackiness of Daly City where thousands of identical houses offer
picture-window vistas down through brown smog at thousands of identical
houses. Onward. But as the road narrowed, an alternative emerged: a
bike path. It began normally, petered out for a while, then suddenly
became the stunning Sawyer Camp Road—a miniature highway, a bonanza
just for us, a route scaled so perfectly to bicycles that I had the
recurring illusion of being a highballing 18-wheeler. Dreamlike, it
went on for miles, lazily curving through the woods and along the
thirsty reservoir, offering vistas of water, wood, and joggers as it
brought us ever closer to Silicon Valley. “Someday,” I mused, “I’m
going to run for President, dismantle the entire defense establishment,
and build a network of bicycle paths around the country, just like
this...”
The end of that day signaled the beginning of a new phase. A layover
now begins, based in the Palo Alto area—a chance to do major bike
surgery, create a speaking business, write a few things, look into
doing a Computing Across America
video, start a magazine, and, er, relax occasionally. First stop,
Mountain View, home of network friends Tom and Barb.
It’s hard to write about real people, especially close friends. What
will they think? How can I adequately capture their subtlety and
intelligence without taping every conversation? Barb’s keen punny
rhyming wit, Tom’s finely honed and brutally honest insights. Barb’s
online wizardry, Tom’s business analysis. They are a close part of my
electronic family...
Barbara and I met on CompuServe during my first trip—when she was doing
online searching in Berkeley and I was pedaling through Florida. Within
days, we developed a sizzling relationship, inevitably escalating into
a rendezvous. It’s all described in the book... our romance escalating
into a beach fantasy in Key West, the “ultimate blind date.”
But she went back to reality and I went back to the road, and it was
only a matter of time before I was up to my old tricks and she was
falling in love with someone more tangible—Tom. He and I began
exchanging electronic mail during the slow gestation of my book, and
soon our correspondence quite outstripped the one that had started it
all. He critiqued every chapter, urged me through the rough spots,
rewarded the odd moments of brilliance, and became firmly established
as my best friend long before we met.
Since then, the two of them have shared in my every activity, following
me over to GEnie when I moved from CompuServe and helping with the
psychological management of the strange ad-hocracy that is this nomadic
business. It’s always a major treat to see them in person, of course,
and we’ve been here a week.
Lively minds. Barbara now designs operator interfaces for a living, but
her latest passion is writing musicals. She treated us to a recital of
two weeks’ work: 13 songs, each uniquely flavored, woven into a revue
slated for performance sometime this spring. “Rhyming is one of the
human mind’s highest aspirations,” she said in response to lavish
praise.
I think, therefore iamb.
Tom’s business is corporate intelligence, a marriage of
old-fashioned sleuthing and the latest in information science. His
career has been one of generalism, encompassing everything from social
research to electronic product design, and the resulting “street
wisdom” makes him a formidable force. I’m glad he’s on my side. It’s
been a week of strategy sessions, brainstorms, punfests, and epicurean
delights.
(We’re passing around a $25 Cognac Leyrat and lacing it with Mandarine
Napoleon. I remark on the extravagance. “You gotta belch something,” he says.)
There have been a few excursions this week, of course, for we’re in a
Mecca of technology. Thinking to touch it’s very headwaters, I cruised
Stanford—a campus familiar from years of Artificial Intelligence
conferences, a place that attracts me as much with its reputation as
with its legions of beautiful women. It was a sunny Sunday, and they
lay about everywhere in blatant repudiation of February.
But something was strange, something I noticed a year (but not ten
years) before. Few people smiled. There were frisbees and volleyballs
afloat here and there, but the normal Winnebiko-spawned
grins were notably absent. A few stares. A couple of nods. No spoken
greetings, no requests to stop, no questions, no curiosity. In a place
known for its research wizardry, this is a bit confusing. They can’t all be jaded.
Subsequent discussion yielded a theory. These are yuppies-in-training,
learning to live with heavy stress on a daily basis. Undergraduate
tuition and board costs over $16,000 a year here, and Stanford students
fully expect to graduate up to their assets in debt. This is not a
relaxed bastion of intellectual exploration, it’s a place of fierce
competition, unrelenting pressure, and heavy parental expectations. By
the time most students graduate, they are well-conditioned to the
intense life of fast-track corporate America. Relax? On Sunday? What,
are you nuts?
Hell, man, there’s a test at 8:00 tomorrow!
Just a theory.
Otherwise things are shaping up just fine, which is the whole point of
this layover. We’ll be moving this week to a place with lots of
workspace, building some horizontal surfaces, and attacking all
projects at once—from new bike gizmology to new ways of doing business
that are designed to render cash flow a bit less random. For despite
all the glory, fun, media, and new friends, there is still that basic
problem...
No trust fund.