San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Area goes for the green, a sure sign that spring is near
Julius Caesar famously wrote that all Gaul is divided into three parts. The Bay Area is divided into three seasonal colors: green, gray and brown.
These colors provide the backdrop for the cities that ring the bay: green hills in winter and spring that turn brown in May, and gray fog in the summer.
Just now, the color of life is green.
Springtime comes a little slowly in this part of the world. The acacia trees bloom in yellow toward the end of January and the almond trees blossom in February, Now, in midMarch, the hills are as green as Ireland. It’s spectacular. The hills are “so green it made my teeth hurt,” book columnist Barbara Lane wrote in The Chronicle the other day.
Spring doesn’t officially start until the equinox on March 20, but Northern California has both a Mediterranean and a mountain climate and springtime with fields of wildflowers arriving in the High Sierra in June and even midJuly.
But it’s pretty much springtime by the bay now, complete with spring showers, which are different from the wind and stormdriven winter rains. We had a mild winter this year, but on Jan. 26, the National Weather Service issued a gale warning for the Bay Area and one of those deepwinter blizzard warnings for the Sierra. It was severe enough that the Weather Service warned against all Sierra travel.
It’s different in the city. The highlight of my urban winter was on the last Monday of the old year, when I made an early morning trip to the corner mailbox and saw two coyotes loping up the street, following the call of the wild toward Bernal Heights.
But now, in March, there are milder nature sightings — flocks of pigeons, which fly in formation like stunt pilots on sunny mornings. I think they live in a belt of trees not far away. I often see them scrounging for crumbs in the Safeway parking lot, dirtylooking city birds, “flying rats,” Herb Caen called them. But when they fly together in long looping swoops, down low over the city, then high, 30 or 40 together, they are transformed.
Because most of us are working at home these COVID days, I have time to look out the window. There are flocks of crows that show up in the afternoons. They are social birds, and noisy, too. Sometimes eight or 10 will fly in together, and perch on roofs or trees and call to each other. And then, as if they had received some signal, fly off all at once. Maybe they are planning something.
I also noticed another spring special — big clouds, sometimes carrying a spot of rain. The Bay Area doesn’t have clouds as big as castles the way they do in the East and Midwest. The winter clouds here look as if they mean trouble. Downpours, floods, car accidents. But the spring clouds only bring showers that keep the grass green until the second week of May.
The green grass makes everything look better — a neglected backyard can look like a garden in March. A city park can look like a jewel. I took a walk one afternoon to one of my favorites: Billy Goat Hill, at the west end of 30th Street, “perched on the rim of Noe Valley.”
The park is small — only 3½ acres — but it has a steep, winding trail that leads up grassy slopes to a scenic spot under two big trees. Here the city is laid out at your feet, from the downtown towers to the Bay Bridge and the East Bay hills in the distance. In the old days, this spot was a quarry and then a kind of neighborhood dump, with rubbish and household junk. It became a city park in 1975. The city and a group called Friends of Billy Goat Hill watch out for it.\
Wednesday is St. Patrick’s Day, the very celebration of green. One year, The Chronicle assigned me to do a piece about Irish bars, so a colleague and I roamed the Richmond and Sunset districts in search of
a Gaelic word that combines fun, talk, music and drink, a combination supposedly found in Irish pubs. We found plenty of it, too. Tough work, but somebody’s got to do it.
Only two years ago, St. Patrick’s Day was an important festival for one of San Francisco’s many tribes that celebrate the Lunar New Year, Pride, Cinco de Mayo, Italian heritage and Fleet Week with equal enthusiasm.
They used to block off the street in front of Harrington’s in the Financial District. Harrington’s had survived Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the changes in the city. But it couldn’t survive the pandemic and closed permanently last spring.
Now it’s midMarch again, and things are looking up. Only a year ago, we held our annual St. Patrick’s family gathering in honor of our Irish mother. We must have had 30 people, a new record for our small family.
This year, we’ve scaled way back. It will be the first time I’ve seen any of my relatives in a year.
We’ll offer a toast, 6 feet apart: Here’s to springtime.