It might have been him. The man I saw in a trenchcoat with an upturned collar smoking a cigarette on Geary Street. It could have been Jack Kerouac, if only in spirit.
Something lured me to the second floor of a drafty and dilapidated motel on a chilly Saturday night. I’d decided that morning to take a quick jaunt up the coast, yet I continued northward as if drawn by some mysterious and magnetic force. I’d packed nothing for the trip, save for my laptop, a few notebooks, and a pen, yet here I was in downtown San Francisco.
From Santa Maria, Highway 101 brought me through farming communities to Salinas, where I turned west on Highway 68 to Monterey. There, I parked off an entrance ramp to Highway 1 and hiked down the mammoth sand dunes to the shore of Monterey Bay, where surfers and paragliders took advantage of the day’s strong prevailing winds.
I hopped on Highway 1—pausing momentarily at a tranquil, grassy park full of wind-stripped trees at La Selva—then continued to Santa Cruz, where I witnessed a brilliant sunset from the pier.
Traveling farther north on Highway 17, through San Jose, I reconnected with 101 into San Francisco. I was just catching my first glimpse of big-city bright lights when my car’s Global Positioning System failed. Road-weary and sans navigation, I checked into the first motel on Lombard Street that would take me in without requiring a credit card.
Now it’s Sunday morning, and my first stop is the serpentine Russian Hill section of Lombard, the famed “Crookedest Street in the World.” While it looks at home in the pages of a Dr. Seuss book, it isn’t all that out of place in a city like San Francisco. Coming from my hometown of Phoenix, where streets are laid out in perfect square blocks, the city is a labyrinthine maze of cable car tracks and impossibly steep inclines. Parking in San Francisco is like parking inside a carnival funhouse. It’s the reason they invented cars with automatic transmissions. Or so I like to think.
Once settled, I walk to Fisherman’s Wharf to see the clipper ships and Alcatraz, and I consider finding a boat to take me to the infamous prison, but I’ve got other ghosts to chase. Making my way to the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid, I explore Chinatown and North Beach, Kerouac’s old haunting grounds, until my camera dies.
I buy new batteries in the city’s financial district, and pay a homeless man for directions to the Mitchell Brothers Theatre on O’Farrell Street. The theater—the term is used loosely in this instance—is where a certain famous Hunter claimed to spend time as a night manager. I pay my respects to the Good Doctor and head up Geary Street to Japantown, where the Peace Monument looks to me vaguely like a stack of vinyl records. With music on my mind, I pass by a bit of real rock’n’roll history at the Fillmore Auditorium. Like a rolling stone, I move on.
With my GPS still on the fritz, I follow the scent of patchouli until I reach the haven of hippiedom known as Haight-Ashbury. If not for the Day-Glo graffiti and abundance of head shops, Haight Street could be any other Main Street in America today. Lined with decidedly un-psychedelic businesses like American Apparel clothing and check-cashing stores, I begin thinking that the old hippie high weirdness is just part of a bygone era—until I see a small person, wearing a costume made of empty Girl Scout cookie boxes, attack a pedestrian.
“Can you believe that?” the accosted man says, passing me by with a shrug. “Only on the Haight.”
Via Park Presidio Boulevard, I arrive at the Golden Gate Bridge for the requisite photo op, with a breathtaking vista of the Bay Area as a backdrop. I hike across to the first orange vermillion-colored pillar, and, as if to address the elephant in the room, I spot a sign that reads, “The consequences of jumping off this bridge are fatal and tragic.” Duly noted.
Exiting Golden Gate Park, I drive south down the Cabrillo Highway, passing a series of beautiful state beaches to the Los Padres National Forest and Big Sur, the land where Kerouac and Henry Miller lived and wrote. I visit Nepenthe restaurant, which treats this tired traveler to a spectacular elevated view of the Pacific Ocean at dusk and a fire pit outside to rest and warm my feet.
Back on the road after dark, the winding Cabrillo proves a challenge to my motor skills, and it takes all the remaining concentration I have to maneuver the sharp turns and avoid the occasional patches of rocks that have broken loose from the cliffs above.
There’s a sense of relief when I reach the level straightaway, and as I fly back home through a breezy San Simeon, I imagine the ghost of William Randolph Hearst peering down from the lit spires of his castle by the sea. He and I sit at opposite ends of a banquet table, in an enormous dining hall, sipping aged whiskey under the watchful eyes of a statue of Athena.
“I was a newspaper man,” Hearst says, in my mind.
“I’m in the newspaper business myself,” I say to him as I traverse the coastal hills, high beams on.
“How is the business these days?’ Hearst says.
“Not good,” I reply. “Not like it was in your time. People don’t read newspapers much anymore.”
“That’s a pity,” Hearst says, fading into the black night. “Need a loan?”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas is looking for Dean Moriarty. Send him tips at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 19-26, 2009.