MY FAVORITE CORNER OF SF
When I was four or five, my street got repaved. I remember being enthralled by the steamroller — and probably by its burly operators — but most of all, I remember the smell of fresh asphalt. Most people find that aroma industrial and unpleasant. Not me, though: To this day, the acrid odor of high-viscosity bitumen evokes summertime even more than a chlorinated backyard pool can. But even then, my reaction to asphalt isn’t as visceral or somatic as the foghorn on the Marin Headlands, which all but summons me to within earshot on hot days.
The best place to hear that impossibly diffuse sound is in the Presidio, at Lincoln Boulevard and Langdon Court, a few hundred yards south of the Golden Gate Bridge. This is my favorite intersection in San Francisco, and the gateway to my favorite place in the entire world: Marshall’s Beach.
During the pandemic’s long tail, I’ve committed to cycling like never before. I try to go out four or five times a week, and in September, I rode 130 miles around the entire Bay in one day. I go to different places with different co-conspirators, but whether I’m circumnavigating the city or heading over the bridge to Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands, I ride past Langdon Court at least a couple of times each week.
It’s like passing a house you used to live in and where your friend still throws good parties. It’s especially satisfying en route to Marin because after the low, gradual curves along Washington Boulevard in the Presidio, Langdon is essentially the crest. From that point, you can breeze to the stop sign at the next intersection, Merchant Road, and onward to Stinson or Sausalito. Once you’re there, the adventure has begun.
Maybe it’s because of all the times I’ve played hooky. Or when I was a barista working the opening shift, and I could get there before noon — my workday already over, but chaining my bike up at Langdon Court always feels ripe with the same possibility. It’s beautiful there, although not exactly pretty in the classical sense.
The parking lot is dusty and there’s a lot of concrete. The low-slung, proto-Brutalist military installation is Battery Godfrey, a bunker that feels like a place to take refuge from radioactive fallout in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or to shoot a music video for a band signed to Matador. Built in 1895 and decommissioned during World War Two, it’s older than it looks. Along with the Batteries to Bluffs Trail, you can see the sea-teeth of the Farallones when the air quality is good. And you can hear the basso profundo foghorn, sounding even on the clearest days.
Foghorns are meant to warn mariners away, but this one tugs me in close. It’s less like a siren (in the sense of that alarm that used to sound off every Tuesday at noon) and more like a Siren (those sea-hotties who caused Odysseus’ sailors to jump in the ocean and drown). I think about this a lot: Shouldn’t a sound that loud and low-pitched be terrifying, like the tripods in War of the Worlds? Instead, its timbre comes across as very warm. Technically speaking, its sonic envelope lacks an “attack.” It’s a hypnotically pleasant sound.
Marshall’s Beach is the one beyond Ocean Beach, the one near the bridge, the “gay one.” It’s a paradise of such implausibility that I almost can’t believe it: two clothing-optional stretches of sand at the base of a semi-hikable cliffside near the most magnificent Art Deco bridge in the world. I’m not really that into sexy beach shenanigans — one grain of sand, and we’re done — but I’m transfixed by that frivolously erotic, maritime homo energy, sound bathing in the foghorn, and sunbathing by the sea.
The first time I went was probably in 2009. I didn’t know where I was going, and I clambered over the rocks like an idiotic crab. I still love that you sort of need to be initiated into finding it. I once biked there with a friend — who’s long since moved away — and we met up with a group of handsome boys who shared their warm white wine with us. It turned out that we had all biked there, so we left together as a caravan, listening to the Magnetic Fields and singing along as we pedaled away. It was one of the sweetest, most spontaneous afternoons of my life.
Back when I still had an attention span, I would bring novels to read. Now I can maybe get through a “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker before mostly completing a crossword puzzle on my phone before just closing my eyes and giving up altogether. You’re not supposed to bring dogs, but I used to bring my dog sometimes, tethering his leash around my ankle and hand-feeding him peanut-butter pretzels from Trader Joe’s. The last time I took Dudley, he was 15 and got so tired that he couldn’t make it back up the 300 steps to the parking lot. That was when I knew his time was growing short.
On Sept. 1, 2017, my partner and I finished our move from the Castro to Hayes Valley. Or we would have, anyway, if the temperature in San Francisco hadn’t hit 106 degrees that day, an all-time high. That was a Friday. Saturday, September 2, wasn’t technically as hot outside, but the heat that had collected inside everyone’s apartments proved otherwise.
So I went to the beach. I don’t think I ever saw it as crowded as it was that day. Even the elephant seal rookery on Southeast Farallon couldn’t accommodate that many sunning bodies. Even in that triple-digit weirdness, I could only tolerate submerging my head in the water for a few minutes. I don’t think there’s any other way to experience such temperature extremes in San Francisco, where it’s always cold yet never cold.
Until a year or so ago, a bike ride from wherever in San Francisco I lived to that intersection near the edge of the world was a substantial undertaking. If you go through the Arguello Gate, the last two blocks into the Presidio are crazy steep, and if you’re into a more punishing ascent, the western route via El Camino del Mar in Sea Cliff up Lincoln Boulevard is tougher still. So getting to Langdon Court always feels like a reward.
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But now I can get there easily enough. We get to live in a beautiful city grafted onto a unique topography and surrounded on three sides by water, right next to a national park that contains a pet cemetery and many mysteries. I haven’t been to that beach at all this year, and in 2020, I went only once.
But I ride past it all the time. There, I feel free.
