Hayes Valley Tentative Reopening

Other than the new murals on boarded up storefronts, Hayes Valley has looked pretty bleak for the last four months of the pandemic, with almost all businesses closed and tent encampments scattered everywhere.

Last Saturday there were new signs of public life as restaurants set up outdoor seating on the sidewalks with all the tables spaced six feet apart. (The Robert Louthan mural above is on the Gough Street side of Absinthe).

The sidewalks are still a bit too crowded for me so I am sticking with takeout from local restaurants, but the neighborhood has gotten progressively better about universal mask wearing when walking about.

Hayes Valley isn't at inner Richmond levels of mask adherence, but it's much better than the scofflaws of the Marina District or downtown Palm Springs where tourist families and gay bars seemed to be in a contest to determine who could be the least safe during my recent visit.

The old Arlequin cafe has been rebranded as Arbor and it opened for takeout last Friday.

The redecoration job looks spiffy and if the virus isn't raging out of control in San Francisco, the beautiful backyard may open next month.

We ordered a pair of $5 Fort Point KSAs and some curly fries to welcome them back to the neighborhood, but they had not yet figured out their ordering software or their two takeout windows, so it was a bit of a service mess.

It did not matter as the uncrowded, old iron tables on the sidewalk felt like a temporary oasis.

One only had to walk a half block to the corner of Franklin and Hayes for a reminder that we are still in a dystopian world, with trashed cars sitting out on streets for weeks at a time.

This particular vehicle has started to look like a public art piece entitled The Looting and Trashing of America.

Ponytails Unmasked!

An old friend in the 1990s once pronounced, "I don't trust women with ponytails."

It is an absurd declaration but one that came to mind while walking through the Marina District last Saturday afternoon.

The majority of people ignoring public mask advisories in the Civic Center neighborhood tend to be male, but the Marina District offers a glimpse of scofflaws from both genders.

In the case of one anomalous couple, it was the guy wearing the mask while the woman was not.

Most maskless couples, however, were engaging in the new ritual of ignoring their other half while looking at their mobile.

What was amusing was the outsized percentage of female scofflaws sporting ponytails while they checked their texts...

...or ate at tightly packed outdoor cafes...

...or walked their dogs...

...or jogged through crowds on the Marina Green.

In a pandemic where the numbers are rising, this kind of behavior is not sustainable, and is possibly murderous when walking around older people like the masked woman above.

In San Francisco, at least, we may have to amplify the public shaming because there really is no good excuse not to slip a mask off and on when walking in public.

As for maskless men riding bicycles on public sidewalks, I have become that old man on the lawn, except what I shout is, "Get off the fucking sidewalk! And put on a mask!"

Tilden Park Stroll

Visiting a pair of old friends in the East Bay a couple of Sundays ago, I suggested a nature hike, "ideally with no dogs, bicyclists, or elevation change." (All photos by Austin Newsom and Jim Roach.)

They knew just the place, Tilden Park in the Berkeley Hills.

Like many other Shelter-in-Placers, sluggishness has become the new normal.

Navigating our new pandemic reality has conjured up all varieties of new etiquettes, and it was a joy to see most fellow hikers slipping on masks when they got too close to each other on a narrow pathway.

I had not been to Tilden Park since the 1980s when I occasionally golfed at their rough-and-ready municipal course in a gorgeous canyon, and had forgotten what a treasure the unmanicured park can be.

We are going to have to figure out how to be outdoors together in a safe way because we need nature and we need other people. Creating those new protocols is going to be fascinating, a mixture of science and creativity.

On the way home, we stumbled into the BLM protest on the Bay Bridge where 50 vehicles blocked westbound traffic, and inched across the span for three hours. Possibly because the near-solstice sunset kept us gloriously entertained, the stranded vehicular crowd stayed mellow during the inconvenience, and a few cars turned up the music and made it an excuse for a dance party.

Larkspur Landing Trail

Last weekend we drove to Larkspur Landing in Marin County to check out a beautiful, flat walking trail along Corte Madera creek.

My preferred route to the trailhead is via the Larkspur ferry from San Francisco, always a gorgeous, inspiring boat ride, but Golden Gate Ferry service has been terminated for weekend trips during the COVID shutdown. That is a shame because riding outdoors on a ferryboat seems reasonably safe, unlike Muni or Caltrain.

The trail starts at the Larkspur Landing Ferry Terminal and winds under a series of freeways, highways, and rail bridges.

It soon opens up to marshland, the trail winding through low-rise housing developments with Mount Tamalpais towering over them.

I discovered this trail accidentally a couple of decades ago with my late spouse, Tony Hurd, and hadn't returned in many years.

The trail was still charming, but with an unwelcome development in the form of too many bicyclists racing by at potentially lethal speeds.

Kids and family groups tooting along on bikes are fine, but the Tour de France wannabes can be terrifying as they whizz by you from behind.

So we turned back after a mile...

...and followed a socially distanced power walking trio who looked like Marin County Fitness personified.