gordonzola

My apartment is very San Franciscan. Drafty windows that vibrate in the wind like speakers playing Motorhead. No central heating, just drafty hallways that are colder than any upstate NY apartment when you get up in the middle of the night. A window in the bathroom that always needs to be cracked open at the top because there's no ventilation and it's the only way to prevent Sistine Chapel-worthy mold designs on the ceiling. I know it's Edwardian, not Victorian, only because that's the kind of thing you pick up living in SF for a couple of decades.

I love the banging of the windows, the smack of the rain on the glass, the sound of hail, even if it isn't hail, on the roof. This last storm reminded all of us who were here of the storm in 1995 that smashed up the Conservatory of Flowers.* I had separate conversations about it with both anarqueso and jactitation probably because we spent that storm in my room watching storm damage on TV. At least when we had power.

I love storms, but for the last few years I couldn't. My workplace is in the lowlands of San Francisco, in a formerly industrial area that never had an income base to demand drainage repairs or sewer modernization.** During heavy storms and hide tides, this city floods. Our little section of the city, really our two block area, has flooded the last few years whenever we get a heavy fog.*** Our store's backstock, a foot or so below street level filled with rain water and overflowed drains so often that we started expecting to close during every storm. I spent a few hours of one storm, when my arm was injured and I couldn't mop, outside our front door, rain blowing in my face, trying to explain that we were flooded to customers coming from areas just blocks away which didn't have our problems.

So Friday morning, when I got to work at 6:45, I expected to grab a floor squeegee, not a handtruck, and spend the morning pushing water and bleaching. I think all of us there did.

We've spent years, and a lot of money, trying to fix this problem. I mean there's nothing you can do in a storm like a few years ago when cars were floating down Trainor Alley and water poured in through the bottom of the closed receiving door on Folsom St., But Friday was a giddy day. All the worker-owners were happy. This was a big storm**** But except for two very small floods in one backstock area, we stayed dry and open.

So, hopefully, now I can go back to feeling the wind, worrying that the house will blow down, watching the umbrella carnage pile up on the streets and trying to figure out which trees will fall and which will survive. I really missed enjoying bad weather without worrying about being called in for emergency flood duties. Whoo-hoo stroms!

Edited to add: Hold on! Here comes storm #3. I can't here my stereo over the sound of the rain hitting the roof on my home office.



*This isn't the best article about the storm but what a simile! "the monster windstorm that shook Golden Gate Park like a naughty child" . Issue alert!!
**it's truly a city-wide problem, but some things flow downhill
***Yes, that's an exagerration. But not much of one.
****Certainly the tide/rainfall combo wasn't the worst possible, and that's the single worse factor in San Francisco flooding, but last year we would have been shut down for hours in with this kind of rain.

I'm not a native Californian. My parents moved to the Bay Area in 1970 from the Midwest, though Michigan was only a stopover for them on the way west from New Jersey.

When we moved to California, they stopped going to church. How can you spend a weekend day in church when all the natural beauty of the Bay Area is there to be explored for the first time? We probably hit every beach in Marin and Sonoma counties those first few years. Still, this wasn't exactly the California my parents expected. Bay Area beaches are almost always windy and cold. Perfectly planned picnics were abandoned due to wind-cause earaches and too much sand in sandwiches. To this day when I think of eating on the beach, I think gritty frustration and hurting teeth.

We lived on the other side of a mountain from the coast. While that placement caused our neighborhood to have the most rain in our county, the fog generally burned off early. At 6 AM it may be thick enough that you couldn't see the next house, but by leaving-for-school time it would usually be sunny and getting hot.

The first time I realized I was different from other kids was that I always cheered against the sun. Every summer morning fog made me think that, maybe today, it would be overcast, cloudy, not so hot. I got my hopes up every day and then got disappointed.

I'm the only real Californian in the family. My parents were still East Coasters at heart and my brother and sister had their formative years in a Detroit suburb. I was the only one who knew I could take the sun for granted. My parents operated on the scarcity values of their youths though so when it was sunny, you couldn't waste the day. I was an active kid. I played sports in every season. But I've also always been a reader. Many a summer day was spent trying to find a place to hide from my parents so I could finish a book.

Some folks think it's odd that San Franciscans complain about the heat fairly easily, but to me this town is a refuge. SF is at least ten degrees cooler every day than my hometown 15 miles away. I love the fog. Today, after two hot days, it's back. San Francisco is cold again. Just the way I like it.