Notes from Half Moon Bay and Stanfurd

At 7:45 am on Tuesday September 21, 2011, I set out from Oakland, Ca intending to go to Stanfurd University to get some paperwork pushed through. These are my notes from the day.

To me it makes perfect sense that, while driving across the San Mateo bridge, you should hazard long glances to your right and left knowing full well that your gaze will catch and linger on the brooding rectangle skyscrapers of San Francisco shrouded in the morning gloom to the north, or the thin pencil line of Dumbarton bridge floating in the swath of brilliant, sunlit haze to the south. And if in front of you the cars flash red warning signals as impatient commuters swerve from lane to lane, and if perhaps the waters below lap at the pilings with murderous intent, consider that a marginal increase in the probability of having an accident on a bridge might be well worth a moment of your attention expended on the far horizon.

I hit traffic before the San Mateo Bridge intersects the US-101. I freaking hate traffic so I pull off and go to Target. Two girls in an SUV roll past me in the Target parking lot. Tanned skin, tank tops, glossy lips, sunglasses on high cheekbones and highlights in their hair. I raise an eyebrow and turn my head as they go past. ‘What am I doing?,’ I think, ‘As if I could glimpse more of them by the shape of taillights and the scuff marks on a rear fender.’ But still I stand there and watch them go.

When I get back on the freeway forty-five minutes later there is still traffic, so instead of heading south on the 101 I keep going west on CA-82 toward Half Moon Bay. A few miles farther and I’m at the I-280 interchange. The 280 is moving along well and I remember that it’s just as easy to get to Stanford from the 280 as the 101, but the hills to the west are already calling me; they’re telling me about all the things I should do before the things I need to do.

A beautiful woman in a simple black dress and a broad straw hat is at the beach with her daughter, a precocious child of three or four years who is engrossed in the serious business of moving sand from one place to another with a blue plastic shovel. Her mother stands a few feet back, one hand clinging to her hat, the other occasionally readjusting her dress in a vain struggle to undo the perturbations of the wind. When the little girl tires of digging her own hole, without a word or glance to her mother she clambers into a larger hole nearby, left by some other industrious beachgoer, and resumes shoveling sand with her head just peeking out over ground level. The iPhone comes out of the mother's bag, and a frenzy of picture taking follows. She orbits around her daughter and the hole to get shots from different angles as the iPhone makes the fake camera shutter noise again and again.

Farther up the beach an woman with thinning gray hair sits alone in a lawn chair. She’s brought her lunch in a small wicker basket, but she does not seem to have reading material or any other form of diversion with her. She is merely sitting and watching the waves crest, crash, unfurl and recede. Fifty meters out, surfers are camping the break point. They rise high on the swells and for a split second intrude into the sky, precariously transcendent figures already tilting backwards into the waiting trough. I wonder what a 4-6 meter rise in sea level will do to the surfing here.

Stanford is a strange other world. Everything is so pretty and clean. The tables in the main courtyard of the civil and environmental engineering building are not bolted down to the floor. Students leave their laptops unattended in glass-walled study rooms for fitteen, twenty minutes at a time. I think madly of renting a UHaul, pulling up outside the building, and throwing as many tables, chairs, and laptops as I can into the back before they call the campus cops on me. Or at least I consider buying a pack of chewing gum then chewing every stick and rubbing it into the sidewalks.

It’s easy for a Cal student to hate Stanford. They’re our richer, smarter and better-looking cousins from across the bay, or if they aren’t really all these things, our inferiority complex makes them so. They also seem happier than Berkeley students, perhaps because they lack our self-important sense of liberal guilt (or maybe it’s just the sunnier climate).

Damn that school is nice.