Golden Gate Bridge

Our feet are in the soil, most of us. We’re rooted. Travel doesn’t come naturally nor is it entirely pleasant. Think jet lag. Think Traveler’s Diarrhea. We evolved to roam by foot, not by engine, and any deviation from that genetic dictum takes its toll.

When I travel, I kiss my wife goodbye as if I might never see her again. I’d do the same to my son except he’s not the physical type. (And when did that happen? Around age six, I think. Before that, he couldn’t get enough hugs.) People die all the time on the road. Shit happens. When I arrive, I call Karen to let her know I got there safely. I doubt I’m all that unusual to do so, but I also doubt that most folks are as bloody-minded as I am. Hi, Karen. I’m here. Which translates as, The vultures aren’t picking my bones . . . but they’ll still have another shot on the return voyage.

I prefer new places, given the choice, because I find displacement in space far less disturbing than displacement in time. If I could travel from new location to new location I would be just fine. I could imagine that those old places had never changed, that they would always be as I had remembered. The roots I had put down would rejoin me somehow and all would be as it was. I would be like Dracula with coffin-bearing safe houses all across London.

On the Stanford Campus, things look familiar but never too familiar. When I was there, I spent 98% of my time on the medical school campus, with a spot of time spent in the biology and chemistry buildings (across the street) and precious little time dodging the undergrads’ bicycles on the main campus. I still have to dodge bikes, only now the kids are listening to their iPods, smoking cigarettes, or texting — all while biking. I’m not kidding. So this campus has only vague familiarity, and when I try to come up with place names, my mind substitutes proper nouns from the Berkeley Campus. No, that is not Zellerbach Auditorium. No, that is not Moses Hall.

College campuses minimize the sense of displacement in time. They’re intrinsically conservative since it takes a major disaster to motivate them to tear down and rebuild. That’s what happened at UC Berkeley in 1989 after the Loma Prieta quake, and parts of that campus will never look the same to me. Still, I like it better than the Stanford campus. Berkeley is where I shed my childhood, made friends that have lasted a lifetime, met my wife. Stanford is where Karen and I spent some of the most challenging years of our lives together (and not challenging in a good way).

That photo of the Golden Gate Bridge was taken with a long exposure time. In real time, the towers loom less brightly. They’re ghosts, orange behemoths. They would lurch from their moorings, their dripping feet encrusted in concrete, and would vault north past Sausalito, past the Muir Woods, dragging their spans behind them like wedding trains. They’d do it in a steel heartbeat were it not for the fact that after 71 years, even a bridge puts down roots.

D.