on the Pacific side of things
I walked with ghosts, from the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge where it stands anchored on deep bedrock on the San Francisco side of the strait, its footings armored by a modern seismic system designed for the bridge to withstand the next great movement of the San Andreas Fault, its benthic presence just 6 miles off the coast of the peninsula.
Why ghosts? Well, for one thing... those of the American soldiers in warships steaming west through the self-same Golden Gate Strait before the bridge spanned it, at the turn of the 20th century, to quell the liberation fires of the Filipinos just freeing themselves from the 3-century long shackles of Spain. Some of them who didn't return from that war are buried nearby, at the San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio; I've seen the gravestones and the chronological and geographical text totems.
I walked the Anza Trail roughly along the lines of the old, hulking batteries — Marcus Miller, Boutelle, Godfrey, Chamberlin — the cannons spectral and long gone but still suggested by the shapes of the casements in which they once menacingly sat, swiveling with lethal purpose. Didn't follow the well-trod paths, though, dipping down lesser trails (or invisible ones, really) to the very edge of the cliff to see if there was an unorthodox way down and to the beaches of rock, stone.
At one point I lost the cellphone signal and Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians abruptly cut out — a sign for me to stop and sit zazen for a while on a tiny, grassy promontory, the sounds of waves and occasional gull the only audio soundtrack to the Saturday afternoon.
Time abides, but also slows down and the rest of the afternoon was spent in conversation with a new friend who shared with me the delights and histories of mate, Argentinian herbal drink of yore which, in its earthy essence was an utter revelation and illumination to me. The moments a refracting of chanoyu (茶の湯) but in a southern hemispheric manner, the steeped and filtering leaves shallowly buried in the beach's warm sand after many stories and philosophies had been exchanged, the warm drink sipped back and forth with that charming, angular metal straw.
Gaby had recently finished Hofstadter's magical and magisterial Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and had wanted to discuss it with me; I'd read it soon after its 1979 publication, and it had always stayed with me, a subliminal pattern in the fugal counterpoint of my life. On the trail, on the way down to Baker's Beach where G and I had agreed to hang out, I asked ChatGPT to remind me of the bones and sinews of the book; which it did, marvelously.
The young man, a Google lifer (he's been there for the better part of a decade), is one of those brainy outliers I am so familiar with from my past life in academia and UC Berkeley's program for so-called 'gifted' students. The conversation was rich with insight and surprise and that, too, is a specie of ghostliness for me now, two decades past the milieu of bright adolescents with the world of the mind so wholly embraced, the future a dazzling nova of light and possibility.
It was, of course, good to revisit in this way. And so I found myself in the ambit of that dimension again... effortlessly, joyfully, while cognizant of the precious finity of it all.