Scenes From San Francisco’s Western Front

Myriad communities call the city’s westernmost beach home every weekend. (Paolo Bicchieri)

As I sit on the face of a shrub-studded dune, wind-spiraled sand in my eyes, a man and his two children approach the edge of the beach above me. Dad, I assume, has a fishing pole in his hand, the same as dozens of journeymen along Ocean Beach headed north. The four of us are just beyond Sloat Avenue, and the ascending alphabetical avenues crawling toward the now-dark Cliff House are stuffed with pockets of people. There’s a young man and woman sitting to my right, their hoodies cinched tight around their faces. Another couple walk a unit of a Pitbull while seagulls fly overhead and a tremendous boat drifts toward the Golden Gate. The beach is massive, glimmering, detached; maybe it’s my Pacific Northwest roots, but I am drawn to San Francisco’s stark three-and-a-half miles of creeping coast like a salmon returning to the sea, over and over for nothing other than instinct, an inherited hunch.

San Francisco’s water-adjacent west side — namely the Outer Sunset and Outer Richmond neighborhoods —  are bastions of refuge for so many in the city. Fisherfolk return here year after year, generation after generation, to take their shot at our local royalty of the sea, the pink and white Dungeness crab. Teenagers come out here for love and loss: As I parked in the cramped lot, two androgynous teens made out furiously in the car to my right and a young woman sat with tears in her eyes while the driver looked down at his phone in the car to my left. Niners-themed coolers sit wedged in the sand as friends belly laugh over the roaring whitecaps. It’s miles away from any talk of doom loops or APEC or OpenAI’s Purple Wedding. The city may be shedding its skin, but everything is quiet on the western front.

Fishing poles line the coast like bannerless flag poles. (Paolo Bicchieri)

I came to surf, ignoring Surfline’s advice that the waves were trashy when I noted the cross-shore winds. No matter, as the strong southernly current made hay of my attempts to catch anything proper. The surf is boiling, kicking me out of the water in a way that left me spinning like a top in the shallows. As I exit for the fourth or fifth time to head up shore, the fisherman’s daughter called out a hello to me, her brother waving while darting his eyes toward his shoes. A man crouching near the road is filming the crashing shoreline, the sun dictating tremendous beams of light to dispel any notion San Francisco is a gray city.

“Ocean Beach’s surf is legendary for a reason,” I think to myself as I walk amongst elderly folks casting their lines. The snowy plovers are back for the winter, a few of the threatened fluffy white birds tittering around the rocks. The beach’s history is even more sprawling than the shore itself, a go-to for leisure and sport for hundreds of years. The amusement park Playland at the Beach gave city-dwellers their dose of escapism as early as 1926, invigorating the already-existing 10-acre Chutes at the Beach park with much-needed life. The famous cookie sandwich It’s-It was born here, for god’s sake, and the streets just east of the Great Highway are home to decadent food and drink like Palm City’s hoagies and Lady Falcon’s coffee.

Not much of a day for surfing. (Paolo Bicchieri)

No one here seems concerned with the issues or the history of the city; still, it’s like everyone here walked out of a scene of San Francisco’s equivalent to Midnight in Paris. Adult children walk with their aging parents on the sand, taking in the vista. There are folks without housing along the beach in the Sunset and Richmond — no surprise in an infrastructure-impotent city — but there are gardens, bocce courts, and plenty of empty space for people to relax, rest on the sidewalk. A few trendy teens iced out in jewelry make themselves heard throughout the parking lot, snapping selfies with their water in the background, and nobody bats an eye. Most of their attention is on their fishing lines.

“How are the waves?” a man in a blue puffer vest asks me as I climb toward the parking lot. I tell him it was rough, no surprise I was alone out there. He says the surf is getting stronger, harder than it was earlier. I tell him I believe it, that Ocean Beach is always like that. Bonfires are going up along the waterline, tiny torches in the distance between communal fishing operations.

For a time when it seems like enough can’t be written about San Francisco’s status — possibly the site of the technological singularity in Hayes Valley, possibly the next American city to fossilize into obscurity — the city’s western front isn’t paying attention. The denizens of Ocean Beach on a Sunday afternoon are merely living, a calmer scene than that facilitated by their country’s presidential privateer, leaving by plane just two days prior from SFO, in a battlefield on the other side of the world.

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