Thursday Tides

Here's another reason to love the city. Leaving work, if I walk north on Presidio Avenue, I pass the mammoth palaces of the Pac Heights riche, both nouveau and vieux, I suppose, and reach the gates of the Presidio, the giant green and colonial creche of history and silence in the corner of the city.

From the gate, instead of following the road, I can turn at an angle and follow Lover's Lane down through a cathedral-like grove of eucalyptus and fir trees. Andy Goldsworthy is designing a new, natural artwork in this grove, a curving line of log segments tracing a path down slope, following the line left by a row of firs that could not compete with the eucalyptus trees for sun. Lover's Lane is one of the oldest paths in the city, being used by Spanish missionaries and, later, American soldiers, to travel from the Presidio to the city itself.



At the end of Lover's Lane, you can head to the Main Post, or to the YMCA gym, or you could head down to Crissy Field and its wide-open panorama of the bay, Alcatraz, the bridges, the East Bay hills and the Marin headlands. At the western end, at Fort Point, crazy surfers ply the rolling waves smashing on sharp rocks at the base of the bridge. Further around the shore, in the middle of Crissy Field's beach, you can see flocks of sails for kite-boarders and windsurfers.





It's hard to picture a better place to walk after a long day of work.