Mad Dash Home

Years ago, a scrum of engineers burst forth from a committee meeting with plans in hand and a gleam in their eye.  Time to build a new and updated Highway 101, they announced.  That spelled disaster for Santa Rosa, a once pretty city filled with pleasant and sedate streets, fine citizens and bucolic views of fertile farmland on all four sides.  The result of the engineers' crazed stares was a freeway slammed down on the midsection of the town like a cleaver on a beautiful cake. The town was effectively cut in two and any sense of cohesion and centralized organization was ruined.

When you drive around the city now, you feel you are moving through the equivalent of a Picasso painting:  A cubist representation of a pretty lady that seems to have left a lot of what was feminine off the canvas.  Santa Rosa, you'll discover, is found in sections here and there; remnants of its formerly lovely self divided up and separated, one from another, but still alive and kicking.

I stayed overnight at the North Bay Inn, a motel on what was once the main north-south thoroughfare of Santa Rosa before the new freeway was built.  The hotel has recently been fluffed and polished, looks and acts like a Best Western Hotel, but the price for the night's stay was only $69.  Right in the middle of town, right in the middle of wine country.

I left for home and drove on the very freeway that had bifurcated the town, heading south, back home.

It was a pretty drive south, but it was also kind of like looking at Ireland on steroids.  That is, there was much faster driving, much uglier buildings along the way, higher hills, but every hill was just as green.  I actually saw a few sheep, but even they were bigger than what I saw in Ireland.  Everyone everywhere seemed to exude a sense of urgency, energy and single-minded haste to get away from whatever they were leaving behind, roaring down the road like madness itself.

San Francisco, a city with few visual equals, looked like a glittering platter piled up with jewels and treasure.  It beckoned in the distance, distracting me from "The Bridge" (The Golden Gate), one of the top ten scenes most likely to promote an outburst of singing in the United States.  You could write and exclaim for your whole life long about the city, its qualities and facets, and then you'd have to start all over again because the city is always a new kind of gorgeous no matter when you see it or from what angle.  Today, it shone like a promise, dazzling in the midday sun.

I'd have liked to have eddied out of the snorting, roaring river of automobiles, straight into the arms of San Francisco, but I had no spare time.  She deserves a long admiring gaze, which I will be happy to give her on another day, at a much slower pace.