I woke up a bit before 6 a.m.. The day's free. There was no reason to get out of bed for another two hours, if then. I padded downstairs two levels and found my camera, which I left on the dining table yesterday, and padded back upstairs. I pulled on black Levis and a warm shirt and opened the double doors to the deck. An hour or so later I had sixty or seventy photographs of the Bay as night becomes day, the sky to the east lightening before the rising sun turned everything brilliant reds and purples and golds.

Later, at my computer, I downloaded the camera, tossed about twenty photographs that were too blurred or too blah, keeping forty-five photographs of yet another sunrise, to add to my other collections of photographs of yet another sunrise.

What is it about sunrises?

What is it about that part of day when most of the world (obviously not all when you watch the traffic on the bridge, the ferries and working boats on the bay, and the airliners taking off for parts unknown) is still sleeping or, if awake, just barely so, reaching for that first cup of coffee.

The air is cool. The city pulses. Seagulls cry and circle overhead. The parrots are elsewhere, wherever it is they tuck in for the night. Slug-a-beds.

I watch and take photographs as the city awakes. Buses trundle up and down Battery and Sansome, dropping people off at work. The Embarcadero is busy with traffic and the trolleys but not as busy as it will be by eight.

Slowly, the tempo picks up. The traffic on the bridge thickens. A ship that had been anchored south of the bridge begins to move with a tugboat trailing behind, heading toward Oakland. Coming from Oakland and heading toward the Gate and open water is another ship. Freeing up a berth in Oakland for the ship that's heading in?

A flock of birds heads north over the waters. Every few minutes a plane takes off from SFO, also heading north, heading somewhere. Where? I want to go there, wherever it is.

Where did I get my wanderlust?

A traffic helicopter flies overhead toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Then, a few minutes later, comes back again. Mission accomplished. Traffic report made.

I'm enamored of sunrises, of day beginnings, of the anything is possible, it's a brand new day feeling that wells up as the predawn quiet gives way to the rising sun.

  

  

  

  

  

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:00 AM|| |