Last weekend, I walked (most of) San Francisco’s Crosstown Trail, a 17-mile route across the city. You start at the tip of Candlestick Park, the old 49ers stadium, which now hosts a lush campground that looks out over the bay and resembles the set of a post-apocalyptic movie. The groundskeeper who tried to sell us on the campground said it’s patrolled 24/7 by armed guards, which made it seem less safe, but upped its ranking on my list for where to go when the end does come.
From there, you walk up through Visitacion Valley and John McLaren Park, thread through Excelsior and Portola, through Glen Park and its Canyon, and then start to question why you decided to do this while walking up and down the hundreds of steps at Grandview Park, before by the grace of God, you drop down into the Inner Sunset and elbow tourists out of the way to get a bun at Pineapple King Bakery, lest you might just keel over and die. They have no idea what you’ve just been through.
After your Inner Sunset treat, you head into Golden Gate Park and lie for a while, thinking you might not be brave enough to get back up. I can’t tell you where it goes after that because the wind was picking up and it was 6 p.m. and we still had 7 miles left of the official route, so we veered off course and headed west like so many of our forefathers, since the ocean seemed like a place of significance where we could call it quits.
It’s really a wonderful journey which I highly recommend to anyone living in the Bay Area or visiting – I promise you’ll get your steps in. You’ll see parks, murals, hidden staircases, the Cow Palace, reservoirs with giant concrete roofs which they should probably turn into parking or pickleball courts. And streets. You’ll see a lot of streets.
While my friends were trying to identify birds with their phones in the green space behind Laguna Honda Hospital (which I bet you didn’t know was there), I was reading the street signs. Tocoloma, Leland, Rutland, Felton (not Fulton, that’s a different street), Silliman (are you kidding), Bromptom. I was quite pleased with myself when I put together the collegiate cluster after I noticed a Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale right after one another, although I should probably stop looking for patterns in things. That’s a slippery slope. I like knowing that it exists, though; that in Potrero, you’ll find the state streets like Alabama, Florida, Kansas, mixed in with a “De Haro” and other charming inconsistencies. I am comforted by Beulah, Rivoli, Hugo. I think I might even love them.
I guess inspired by all the new streets I was learning, at some point on the walk I subjected a poor soul in my company to a lecture about the ones in the Sunset – how they’re alphabetical starting in the Richmond going south and then proceeded to rattle them off to him by memory, as if that was impressive or interesting. I got stuck on T and went nonverbal for five minutes which was not impressive or interesting. When I came to, out of my street daze, I wondered if I was ok, wondered if he was ok and briefly considered getting tested for something. We all have our quirks.
I’ve lived here for seven years now and sometimes I have a hard time seeing San Francisco’s sparkle. I’ve done this, I’ve eaten there, I’ve seen that. The Crosstown Trail reminded me how much I love the streets I already know, and that there are always new ones to learn.
