San Francisco’s charms are legion, but he’ll settle for the peace of the Rock

We had driven up to San Francisco over Interstate 5, turning off toward the coast to spend the night at Santa Cruz.

Interstate 5 goes north over the Ridge Route and strikes northwest through the San Joaquin Valley.

It is not generally thought of as the scenic route. To some, the valley seems bleak and forbidding. But it is not barren, and to me it has an arid beauty. One passes vast fields of green; oil wells on low brown hills; miles of yellow grass; and one knows that off to the side, hunkered down in the dust just over the horizon, are small, God-fearing towns with ferocious football teams.

Somewhere near the Hanford and Coalinga turnoff roads we passed an enormous fenced enclosure in which tens of thousands of cattle stood idle in their own dung under the burning sun. It was the Harris Ranch feed lot. The cows were being grain-fed for market. They looked quite miserable and hopeless. Some of them stood in the path of a great revolving nozzle that sprayed out a stream of cooling water. But most just stood there, looking despondent and betrayed, as if knowing that their purpose was to be slaughtered and eaten. (They don’t say slaughtered anymore; they say processed .) The stench was sweet, pungent and unpleasant.

“Well,” I said, half a mile later, “now you know where hamburgers come from.”

In Santa Cruz we tried an old motel that had a swimming pool, and a weather-beaten man came into the office and told me we could have a room for $35.

“But I got to tell you,” he added, “we’ve had the plumber here since 1 o’clock this afternoon and he hasn’t fixed it yet.”

“Oh? “ I said. “Fixed what?”

“Our main line’s plugged up,” he said. “Just thought you ought to know.”

We found a room in a multistoried hotel on the bay. It had the improbable name of Dream Inn.

That evening we walked out to a restaurant on the pier and had red snapper and a bottle of Chardonnay. Neither of us felt yet like eating beef.

Santa Cruz is one of our oldest seashore towns. It still has an old-fashioned pike, and at night the lights of the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster glow soft orange, like illuminated junk jewelry.

In the morning we drove into San Francisco and checked into the Huntington (for Collis P. Huntington, the railroad builder), on Nob Hill. We walked a block to the Fairmont and went up to the Crown Room in the annex for lunch. I remembered the furor when the Fairmont built the annex, blocking a part of the famous view from the Top of the Mark.

The view indeed was splendid. We could see the Golden Gate Bridge reaching out into the mist, and the nearer span of the Oakland Bay Bridge. Many new buildings had been added to the skyline since our last visit, when the citizens were still in an uproar over the triangular Transamerica building. It was still there, but it had been squeezed almost into inconsequentiality by dozens of other, more recent skyscrapers. They were of many shapes, colors and textures; they seemed to symbolize the city’s diversity of taste and political turbulence.

“There’s no doubt,” my wife said, “that San Francisco is a better place to visit than Los Angeles.”

“No doubt,” I conceded.

Of course the jewel of the view was Alcatraz--The Rock. It still stood in the bay with its cream concrete prison blockhouse on top, above the precipitous cliffs. It had always seemed an exquisite punishment to me that prisoners should have to look out their barred windows and see the shining city with all its promise of fleshly pleasures. No wonder so many tried to escape, only to drown or be captured in the rough and icy waters of the bay.

The next morning we walked down Nob Hill to Union Square for a nostalgic look at the St. Francis Hotel and then on down to the Embarcadero. The notorious sculpture that had aroused such conflicting emotions in San Francisco was still there. It looked as if it had been thrown up in a train wreck--a seemingly haphazard stack of great oblong concrete tubes through which water gushed out in seemingly haphazard directions. No one was paying it any attention.

We walked under the notorious freeway to nowhere, which had also caused a furor of protest when it was built, evidently with no useful function in mind. It still looked unused.

Near the old Ferry Building, whose threatened destruction had also anguished San Francisco’s diehard preservationists, we caught a ferry to Sausalito. It is still one of the world’s great boat rides.

Back in San Francisco we had lunch in the Hyatt Embarcadero, a huge brown chunk whose construction had once again outraged the citizenry, eating in the great triangular atrium that is meant to simulate outdoors.

We walked up Market Street to the old Palace Hotel, which is happily preserved, and looked into its historic Garden Room--one of the world’s great interior spaces.

That night we went to Pier 39, a tourist trap evidently built to emulate the nearby Fisherman’s Wharf. It was gorged with restaurants and souvenir shops that featured such treasures as T-shirts saying “Alcatraz Swimming Club.” That ought to be pretty funny in Sioux City, Iowa.

We had a pretty good fish dinner in a restaurant at the end of the pier, but I had a feeling that Herb Caen had never been there.