Caught up in a web of backyard wonders

It wasn’t that long ago when it was a big wide world out there. You could head for the airport one morning and be in Los Angeles for lunch, or fly all night and be in Europe in the morning, or cross the international dateline and be in Tokyo by nightfall. My companion, the Sailor Girl, accompanied me to all three places last year. On one of the flights, I looked out the airplane window and saw Iceland.

Now, like everyone else, we are sheltering in place. We are confined to an old, but comfortable, house on a lot 25 feet wide by 100 feet long in Bernal Heights. We are lucky; we have a view and a backyard. Not everyone is so fortunate — thousands of San Franciscans live in apartments, or glass towers, or even single rooms, like a miniManhattan. Our world has shrunk.

There is not enough work, not enough books, or Facebook posts or old movies on television to keep me occupied, so I set out to explore our little world.

The house faces the street, and that is familiar; I’ve walked it for years, driven up and down forever. It’s a narrow street. Two cars can’t pass easily, so there’s usually a little dance between a car coming uphill and one going down. There is hardly any traffic now so that problem has gone away. Otherwise the street is the same.

The back of the house has a nice view over Noe Valley to Twin Peaks. The tallest structure on the skyline is the 977foottall Sutro Tower. There is also a glimpse of the northwestern edge of San Francisco and the Marin Headlands in the far distance on the very edge of the world.

But I can’t see over Twin Peaks into the Sunset District, or past the local trees into North Beach or Chinatown. There’s a famous city out there, they say, beyond the horizon, like Oz.

I sat in the backyard and thought of the wider world and where we might go when we can travel again. For now, a trip to the mailbox two blocks away is a big deal. We are also making plans to go to the pharmacy up in Diamond Heights, a drive of about 15 minutes.

But for the moment, the trip of the day is usually down the back steps into the backyard. When I got there one afternoon, I looked around. The yard is a bit unkempt, I must admit. The trees need trimming, the weeds need pulling. A project.

Yet on further review, as they say in football, my little backyard world has some surprises. For one thing, it had its own microclimate, different from the front of the house. The westerly wind was stronger in the backyard yet there were some outoftheway places, like miniature dells. There were patches of flowers, blue and yellow and white. I’ve lived in that house for years and don’t remember planting them. Yet, there they were, like a gift.

It is quiet back there, especially in the afternoon. A wind chime from next door. Two small girls playing basketball two doors down. It was hard to hear the usual city noise. After a few days, I began to notice the clouds, big puffy ones during a rainy spell toward the end of March. In the past week, the cloud pattern has shifted, the wind has picked up, and the fog rolled in, tentatively at first, as if testing the climate. If you are locked in, there are worse things to do than watch the clouds roll by.

One day, I discovered a spiderweb. In ordinary times, I would get a broom and sweep it away. Cobwebs, after all, are a sign of sloth and neglect. Spiders are nobody’s friend. “Weaving spiders come not here,” as Shakespeare put it in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Then I took a close look; the web was an intricate construction with a crosshatched pattern designed to catch prey and braced by support webs like the cables on a suspension bridge.

Two days later, not far away. I found a bigger, more elaborate web. In this case, the spidery engineers had built a set of three crosshatched webs spun out from a corner of the house. They connected it with two thick supporting webs like silvery cables tapering to the letter V and anchored to a twig on a laurel tree on the house next door.

The whole device, anchors and all, spanned about 4 feet. It is 20 feet off the ground, like the net to catch the daring young man on the flying trapeze. It is also built with strength and flexibility so it can move in a strong wind. The weather service said the wind gusted up to 20 mph the night after I discovered the web. In the morning it was still there. A human engineer would be proud to have designed something like this.

I would never have seen this if I had not looked; I would never have looked if my world had not become smaller.

So take a look around. It’s a big world full of small wonders.

Photos by Carl Nolte / The Chronicle A bank of fog rolls in on Twin Peaks above Noe Valley, as seen from Bernal Heights. But it’s not thick enough to hide all of the 977foottall Sutro Tower.

Patches of flowers have emerged in spots in the backyard, like a gift.