Portrait of the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area [antikvár]

Portrait of theBAYAREAWhen the young map-maker and military scout John Fremont saw the present Golden Gate, a gap in the coastal mountains that allowed the mighty Sac-ramento and San Joaquin rivers to reach the ocean, he felt the place deserved an auspicious name.Fremont perceived then, in 1846, that this portai to the Bay Area would be the setting for dramatic future events. He envisioned the narrow mouth of the expansive, protected bay as a route of commerce between Asia and undeveloped western North America. The site reminded him of Chrysoceras, the "Golden Horn" of ancient Byzantium, crossroads between Europe and Asia. So he labeled the gap with the Greek Chrysopylae, or "Golden Gate," on the map that accompanied his geographical report to the U.S. Senate in 1848.Natives and visitors alike can usually remember their first sight of the Golden Gate. I recall driving to the viewing park at the south end of the bridge. For several minutes I stood in the garden of flowers, allowing elements of the picture to soak in. The green coastal headlands of Marin County, the blue of sky and water, and the graceful orange arc of steel that bridges the imposing gap all jumped off the postcard and into my felt experience. With classic proportion the elements balanced each other. My life seemed enhanced, exhilarated, ennobled by that view.The Golden Gate Bridge satisfies as an introduc-tion to the Bay Area partly because it is accessible to people as well as cars. I've walked or bicycled across it on several occasions. For an outing on the bridge, though, one must come prepared for windy, chilly weather in all seasons. Mark Twain said it best: "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."From mid-span the views are rewarding. A fully loaded container ship may pass beneath, revealing its carefully stacked cargo. Distant panoramas show brilliantly, especially after rains have cleared the sky. Standing on the bridge, you can easily orient yourself to all the land masses of the Bay Area. To the north lies Marin County, with Napa and Sonoma beyond. Looking east, you can see Berkeley, Oakland, and the counties of Alameda and Con-tra Costa, all in what is called the East Bay. Im-mediately south of you is San Francisco, jutting out as a peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean on the westand the bay on the east. South from San Francisco, San Mateo County and the northern part of Santa Clara County are sometimes called, simply, "The Peninsula." Beyond them Santa Clara Valley ex-tends long and fertile to the southeast.From the bridge you can alsó get a perspective on the size of the bay, originally 700 square miles but today shrunk with land fill to only 400 square miles. This filling has now been stopped, and legal safeguards have been set up to ensure that the bay's size will remain stable. Though the water reaches a depth of 357 feet below the bridge, much of the bay is shallow, with the San Pablo arm to the north only 10 feet deep.To get out on the bay, you can take a commercial cruise from Fisherman's Wharf. This tour takes you under both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, past picturesque Sausalito and Tiburon, around the abandoned prison island of Alcatraz, along the San Francisco waterfront. Commuter ferry boats alsó cross from the Ferry Building (Pier 1) in San Francisco to Larkspur, Sausalito, and Tiburon in Marin County. My favorité bay outing is the National Park Service trip from Pier 43 Vi to Angel Island. The park there is a fine place to hike, bicycle, or picnic, with sweeping views of the bay and its shoreline.The bay supports a diverse wildlife, most notably the trophy-size striped bass, taken by anglers, and the migrating waterfowl. Two refuges that offer a satisfying encounter with the bay's bird life are Coyote Hills Park at Fremont in the East Bay and Baylands Refuge at the end of Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto in the South Bay. During winter months you can see thousands of migrating canvasback ducks and possibly encounter the endangered clapper rail. The vegetation at both sites is alsó unique. Salt-marsh cord grass has a biological pro-ductivity ten times that of a wheat field.Political efforts to preserve the bay have been substantial. In the past decade the water quality has improved, but dreams of returning the bay to the purity and fecundity of its former oyster bed fisheries are a long way from being realized. En-vironmentalists' fight, now and in the future, is to ensure that enough fresh water flows into the bay from the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers to flush it properly. California's thirst for water to farm the Central Valley or develop Southern CaliforniaBay Area pioneers lie at rest in the graveyard ofFather /unipero Serra's sixth mission, San Francisco de Asis; it was later called Mission Dolores after a nearby swamp.