Please enjoy this post from Annie Burke, who recently walked the Roundabout with friends and offered to share her experience.
Dear San Francisco,
I know you get a lot of love letters, but do you ever receive thank-you notes? It seems to me that the folks who created the Crosstown Trail, Double Cross, and Roundabout appreciate you as much as I do, so I’m sending this to them with the hopes that they’ll deliver this note to you. They seem nice enough.
You see, on a beautiful weekend in February, six friends and I walked the Roundabout Trail. We walked it clockwise, starting and ending at the Ferry Building. We started out on a Saturday morning with a chai latte from Blue Bottle, and we ended with an ice cream cone from Humphry Slocombe on Sunday evening. It was almost 40 miles of walking over two days. I returned to my home in the East Bay even more appreciative for you than I was before, and I didn’t know that was possible.
San Francisco, I want to thank you for a lot of things.
I want to thank you for being home to so many non-human residents. While walking the Roundabout, we saw a banana slug, a coyote, a cooper’s hawk, and a jack rabbit. We saw and heard sea lions. We walked under redwoods, cypress, and eucalyptus trees. We saw community and pollinator gardens full of bees. Red-tailed hawks circled overhead, and hummingbirds zipped around us. There’s nature living and thriving all around you, San Francisco.
People are a part of nature, too, of course. Thanks for being hospitable to all of the people that make their home here, especially the original residents of this place called Yelamu, the Ramaytush Ohlone people. You are home to so many human beings! I appreciate the school-aged kids riding their scooters near Candlestick Park, the runners along the Embarcadero, dog walkers at Fort Funston, and tourists from all over the world who were taking selfies from all over your northern edge. Thank you for the Valkyries, Giants, and Warriors and their home courts and fields we walked past; for the open water swimmers and surfers and their waves and bays. It’s really something to behold all the kinds of people we saw over those two days in February.
Thank you for everything they bake at Neighbor Bakehouse, the mushroom paninis at Alma Cafe and the coffee at Mission Blue Cafe. Each of these spots provided us with energy boosts to keep walking. And even though it’s technically in Daly City, thank you for Banana Island. If you’ve walked 44,000 steps, a meal there is the best meal you could possibly have. Thank you for being home to Devil’s Teeth Baking Company and their vegetarian breakfast sandwich. It’s the most delicious breakfast sandwich ever, and not just because we had walked six miles by the time we got there on our second day. I swear that sandwich would be delicious even if you just rolled out of bed into the long line of people patiently waiting for theirs.
Thank you for the sweet neighborhood of OMI (Ocean View, Merced Heights, Ingleside) – another thing I didn’t know from over here in the East Bay – and places to stay like this one. Staying there Saturday night meant that we could stay on course and not lose precious energy traveling back and forth across the Bay. It meant we could put our heads on a comfy pillow and our feet up in the air. And boy did that feel good.
You’ve been around for a long time, San Francisco, and it might sound rude, but I’m grateful that you’re so old. Because of millions of years of plate tectonics and all that water flowing downhill from the Sierra, over the two days on the Roundabout, we had views of Mount Tamalpais, Mount Diablo, and Mount Hamilton. We smelled the salty air of the Pacific on your west side, enjoyed the peace of India Basin on your east side, and saw snow over on the peaks of the Ohlone Wilderness east of Fremont. All of the hills (Hawk! Montara!) and islands (Angel! Alcatraz!) that are visible from the trail are impressive.
You contain multitudes, San Francisco, and I love you for it. But we gotta talk about the extreme disparities in economic wealth that the humans who live here are experiencing. On the southeastern side of the city we walked by people living in the street, and on the northwestern side we walked through a neighborhood of homes worth more than $20 million. We walked by families living in RV campers within a golf ball’s throw of the Olympic Club. What does it mean to have such wealth and such poverty within close physical proximity? What does it say about our values as a city, a region, a state, a country? We are grateful for this walk along your edge to see it first hand, and to discuss these questions as we traveled through very different realities. I hope more people will take this walk – the whole thing at once or in parts – to see the breadth of the city’s economic realities, not just the ones that are easy to digest. It’s not something we should ignore.
Speaking of multitudes, I’m in awe of your parks, San Francisco. Who knew about Crocker Amazon Park!? Well, I now understand that thousands and thousands of people know about it and enjoy it on a daily basis, but I had no idea. It’s got trails and fields and courts for miles and miles. I’m grateful for Sunset Dunes and the community and creativity that’s happening there. Ocean Calling? That took my breath away. Thank you for that. And thank you for the chasmanthe lined trail at Lands End and the Outpost Playground at Tunnel Tops. If my feet weren’t so tired by then, and if I were a lot younger, I would have loved to play there. Wow, we are fortunate to have these welcoming and special spaces available to anyone and everyone.
San Francisco, it was such a pleasure to walk your perimeter along with some very good friends. We walked and talked, connected to one another and to this place. We put our handheld machines away and soaked up all of the sights and sounds and smells you had to share with us. We learned about history and the present, about you and about ourselves.
I’m grateful for you, San Francisco. Thank you for all that you are. And thanks to the creative and resourceful and thoughtful people who created the Roundabout. What’s brilliant thing it is! My friends and I had a memorable and meaningful and totally fun time walking it over the course of that weekend in February.
With gratitude,
Annie Burke
Annie lives in Berkeley, leads TOGETHER Bay Area, and loves exploring new places by foot.
