Urban Camping, Day 2: The Long Walk

Jun 01, 2023

From the forsaken Irish Hill to the wilds of Glen Canyon Park.

Alta Journal is pleased to present the second installment of a five-part original series by author and Alta contributor Gary Kamiya. Each week, we’ll publish online the next portion of “Urban Camping.” Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading, and sign up here for email notifications when each new installment is available.This Alta Serial is a camping story with a wild twist: It takes place in San Francisco. Kamiya sets out on a four-night, five-day adventure, not planning to sleep in a hotel or at a campground. His aim is to touch each of this seven-by-seven-mile city’s four corners and to immerse himself in its natural beauty and built environment. Carrying a backpack and a sleeping bag (and a credit card), he has abandoned the familiar comforts of home. Day two finds Kamiya waking up just below the summit of Irish Hill.

Tuesday, May 30, Dogpatch. At 6:30 a.m., I get out of my sleeping bag and stand up, quickly surveying the scene from my perch. I’m relieved to see that the streets are empty. I roll up my inflatable sleeping pad, cram my sleeping bag back in its stuff sack, put on my pants and walking shoes, and shove all my stuff back in my backpack. This whole breaking-camp process takes about 10 minutes. In my mind, this is the time of maximum vulnerability: if some disapproving official were to suddenly appear, it would be hard for me to deny that I had just spent the night here.

As I shoulder my pack and start walking down the overgrown path off the hill, one of the security cars that periodically cruises around the area enters the parking lot from 20th Street and starts south, heading straight at me. I hope the guard doesn’t look up. Though if someone is crazy enough to want to sleep on this godforsaken, weedy hill, I doubt anyone would care. The ghosts of Irish Hill must be protecting me: he drives past.

I walk over to 22nd and Minnesota, the main intersection of Dogpatch, and order a $6.25 latte at Piccino, a fancy little coffee bar and offshoot of the adjoining restaurant that I knew would be open. Ah, the joys of the per diem and a credit card! I’m that San Francisco socialite who had a Sherpa carry her espresso machine up Mount Everest, except without the guilt. I sit down on a chair and watch Dogpatch waking up. Young people walk past. Computer backpacks and coffee cups, dogs. They live in the stylish new apartments that have sprouted up near here, or in the roughly dozen Victorians that give this peculiar neighborhood in the lee of Potrero Hill its time-capsule character.

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As I sip my latte, I’m amazed to realize that I feel great. I didn’t think I slept a wink, but I’m not tired at all. My unexpected energy, my relief at having survived my first night, the coffee, and my front-row seat at this early-morning Dogpatch sidewalk ballet have put me in a state as close to euphoria as I’m going to get at 7 a.m. I wash up in the Piccino bathroom, put my pack on, and start walking down Minnesota Street.

My destination, the place I’m planning to spend night two, is Glen Canyon Park. It’s only about three and a half miles from Irish Hill to Glen Canyon as the crow flies, but if I’m a crow, I’ve got a broken GPS. It looks like it’s going to be a hell of a long walk.

I walk down Minnesota Street after it emerges from its dead end near the Hells Angels clubhouse. Indiana Street is a block to the west. I’ve never walked down it, so I head over, going past little Tubbs Street, whose name commemorates a unique gold rush–era business, the Tubbs ropewalk—a 1,000-foot-long building in which workers would walk back and forth, twining heavy ropes that were used on sailing ships. This whole area, known as Potrero Point, was once filled with heavy industries, including gunpowder manufacturers, which were forced to locate out here beyond the city limits. The most exotic plant was the Arctic Oil Works, at Illinois and 16th Streets, where whale oil was refined and baleen from whales killed by the city’s large whaling fleet dried in the open air.

This was once part of a vast marsh. Today, it’s a dystopian urban wasteland, Antonioni meets Blade Runner.

Indiana Street comes to an end on the north side of Islais Creek. I had thought I might cross the creek on the old 1930s bridge, west of Third Street, but I’ve never walked along this side of Islais Creek, so I decide to head west. This side of the creek has been landscaped and features a little park, complete with a sculpture. In stark contrast, the opposite side of Islais Creek is a wasteland, a thin strip of inaccessible muddy shoreline behind the collapsing fences of what look like salvage yards or scrap heaps.

Someone has left a pile of stuff on the walkway, including a book sadly titled The Competitive Edge. Just past a Muni yard, I step through a gap in a chain-link fence and find myself standing on a polluted, junk-strewn “beach” that marks the place where Islais Creek abruptly stops.

This was once part of a vast marsh. Today, it’s a dystopian urban wasteland, Antonioni meets Blade Runner. A decrepit Weber Baby Q barbecue sits on the oily dirt, stuffed with charred wild anise stalks that someone has tried unsuccessfully to use as fuel. Old engine parts, tattered clothes, and other nameless detritus are scattered about. A spur of the 280 freeway runs overhead a few yards to the west, next to a train track. The place stinks of rotting matter and mud and what smells suspiciously like raw sewage. A few feet away, a monstrous pipe five feet in diameter, carrying God knows what, runs beneath the freeway. Some deeply antisocial and light-averse hermit has created a strange and forbidding 10x10 structure, cobbled together of scrap material, in a permanently dark, reeking crevice under the freeway and next to the pipe. I’ve seen many depressing domiciles in the course of my wanderings across San Francisco over the years, but this is the unquestioned champion.

I walk to the south end of the beach, hoping I can get through. But I can’t climb over the pipe, and the way is partly blocked by a hulking tracked vehicle that has been abandoned here. I go back. A half mile to the east, the two massive towers of the Islais Creek grain terminal, the most imposing industrial building left in San Francisco, loom above the creek as it empties into the Bay. I go back through the gap in the fence, the wardrobe opening onto this extremely gnarly Narnia, and walk north. I find myself on a sidewalk that runs along the freeway.

On the south side of Cesar Chavez Street, I see a trail running up an embankment to the south. I follow the trail until it ends near a desolate block of Marin that runs off to the west. The way down to it is blocked by big mounds of garbage. I pick my way through the refuse and go past several inhabited trailers. They’re all over the Bayview: this vast light-industrial neighborhood is one of the few places in San Francisco where people can still live undisturbed in their trailers.

I look to the south and see the cylindrical blue-green water tower that is the best-known landmark of the Excelsior. It’s miles away. I’m heading to that tower today—via a circuitous route that’s going to take me to the bay shore miles to the east—and then to Glen Canyon. I hope I’ve got the legs for it.

Half an hour later, I walk into the SF Market. It’s a big open space with dozens of vendors located in two long parallel warehouses, with boxes of vegetables and fruit stacked up in front of them and cars and trucks coming and going. The wholesalers and buyers are mostly Latino and Asian men.

I walk past boxes of lettuce and tomatoes and into Marvin Gardens, a café inside the produce market that opens at 1 a.m. and closes at 11:30 a.m. It’s a small room with a couple of tables and a tired-looking Latina woman behind a counter. I wonder if she’s been up since before 1 a.m. I order a huge and delicious California Breakfast Sandwich: egg, bacon, and avocado on a soft Mexican-style roll. Fueled up, I walk out of the market, past a Chinese guy loading boxes into a van, and go south to Palou, then turn east, heading into the heart of the Bayview.

At Third Street, I turn south. This motley, downtrodden street, one of the longest in the city, has been the main drag of San Francisco’s dwindling African American community since Fillmore Street lost that title. In 1966, a few blocks south of here, one of the worst riots in the city’s history erupted after a policeman shot and killed a black teenager fleeing from a stolen car on Navy Road in Hunter’s Point. The city has been trying to revitalize Third Street for decades, with the Muni T Third Street line a recent effort, but nothing has worked.

Sometimes Third Street is depressing, but today it feels almost cheerful, like a bedraggled living room whose stained rugs and thrift store furniture come together as someone’s lived-in home. On Quesada Avenue, about 30 feet east of Third, 5 or 10 guys are playing craps, the shooter throwing the dice down with a theatrical flourish next to a big stack of bills on the sidewalk.

I wind my way to the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area. A couple of people are fishing off the pier to the east. I follow the shoreline south to Tubsinthe village, once a large Yelamu Indian site in San Francisco. The shallow waters in this part of the bay led the Yelamu to set up one of their seasonal camps here, 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. They used to walk across the city before it was a city, sleeping out wherever they wanted. It feels good to be following in their invisible footsteps.

I go through a strange little tunnel and into the city’s most obscure neighborhood, Little Hollywood, squeezed between Bayview Hill and the city dump, then across Bayshore and into Visitacion Valley. I’m tired and rest my weary bones on a curb near a 7-Eleven. As I begin climbing up to McLaren Park, I put on my headphones and energize myself with a thundering-hooves Pat Metheny tune called “Facing West.” The walk to McLaren Park is brightened by music and by the cascading Visitacion Valley Greenway, which includes one of the most exquisite neighborhood gardens in the city. At the end of Campbell Street, I enter the big park, trudging up a long stairway to Visitacion Avenue. When I get there, high up on the hill and look back to the east, I’m jolted. I’ve never seen the Bay from this vantage. For the first time, I have an inkling of what Sergeant Ortega, the first non-native to see San Francisco Bay, felt when he looked down on the “grandiose estero” in 1769.

A few minutes later, I arrive at the highest point on the eastern end of the park, capped by a brutalist-looking observation tower. The upper levels of the tower are locked, but the view from here is jaw-dropping anyway. To my amazement, Coit Tower, completely across the city, where I started my trek, is visible. So are some of the landmarks I have walked past in the Bayview. The distances are epic. It doesn’t seem possible that I’ve covered so much.

I was hoping to enjoy a bucolic meander along the Philosopher’s Way trail in McLaren Park, but “bucolic” and “meander” don’t mean anything in my current state. By the time I make it to the Excelsior’s blue-green tower, I’m running on fumes. I manage to trudge down Avalon Avenue, past the suitcase-sticker streets: Athens, Vienna, Naples, Edinburgh, and Madrid. When I cross Mission Street, I’m too tired even to reflect on the fact that I am briefly on the El Camino Real, along which Spanish priests and soldiers once strode to and from Mission Dolores. I walk across the nerve-racking pedestrian walkway, suspended above eight lanes of traffic going 70 miles an hour, and stagger up to the Glen Park Station, the neighborhood watering hole. I take off my pack, sit down, remove my boots, put on my slippers, and rapidly consume two Tanqueray and tonics. I have walked 16 miles.

The good-looking bartender who makes my drinks asks me if I’ve been hiking on the Crosstown Trail. “A lot of people who come in here have been walking on that,” she says. “But I haven’t seen many with a pack as big as yours.” I’m too tired to tell her why it’s so big. She goes off shift and a new bartender comes in, who recognizes me. It turns out he’s a screenwriter named Barrett, who a few years ago picked my brain about S.F. locations. I tell him what I’m doing, and he buys me a martini.

I eat a good Amatriciana pizza and have a glass of white wine at a lively pizza restaurant Barrett recommends. It’s been too long a day for a nightcap, so I start walking to my sleeping site. It’s farther than I want it to be to Glen Canyon Park. As I enter the long, narrow canyon, I see a young guy with a backpack walking out. He looks searchingly at me for a moment, and I suddenly realize I saw him earlier, in McLaren Park. He must be on to me. I’m glad he’s walking out and not in.

It’s another tiresome stretch to the sleeping site I scouted out earlier, behind the building unexpectedly located in the center of the canyon. It’s a building that for years has been home to the city’s Silver Tree Day Camp. I enrolled my daughter in the camp once, but she didn’t like it and bailed out after the first day.

Coyotes and other wild animals live in this canyon. The last time I was here, a pathetic, mentally disturbed man with no shoes was dragging himself slowly up the rocks. There’s nobody around now, and no sound of any animals. I go behind the building and climb up to the third of four terraces carved out of the hillside, each with a picnic table and a fire pit. It’s the perfect sleeping site.

I get into my sleeping bag. Shadowy trees wave in a light breeze. To the west, I can see a few houses above O’Shaughnessy Boulevard. It’s misty. As I lie there, I realize that the mist appears to be turning into rain. I reach down and feel the outside of my sleeping bag. It’s wet and getting wetter.

The mist briefly gets worse, then lightens up. My bag isn’t close to being soaked through. The day swirls in my head, a confusion of images. An owl hoots in the darkness. It doesn’t take long before I’m fast asleep.•

TO BE CONTINUED

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