top ten: blue bridge. In which adventure I am a coward of a little girl.

(click for larger image)

Pleasant touristy picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. Except that I didn’t realize at first there was a bridge in it. I = worst tourist anywhere ever.

These were my last hours in San Francisco and I felt so restless for more of it. Walked the way I hadn’t been yet, which was Chinatown, and North Beach, past Fisherman’s Wharf, ending up at Fort Mason and this skinny spiral walkway deep into the bay. Out there I got obsessed, dazed with all the astounding, shadowy tones of blue surrounding: in the sky, between the hills, under the crook of each little wave. And the gulls there, biggest gulls I have ever seen, and how the blank and solid massy white of them was so different from the vague shifting sea-light blues, those unreal blues—so opposite and so evolved to cut through them, transcend them.

Anyway, when I tried to photograph all these self-indulgent daydreams, this particular transcendent bastard flew directly at my face with muscular determination. I may or may not have squealed. Then he flew away and a bridge was behind him. The end.

(Coming up next: a real gull, standing still and managing not to scare the crap out of me. Some bird-rescue-volunteer-slash-intrepid-world-traveler I turn out to be.)