Perhaps to go to Fort Mason on a sunny Sunday morning, that beautiful
relaxed moment of the whole week, and there to sit with others who have
no autos to go gallivanting in, and to sit idly gazing off at the bay.
That’s not bad. To read a little and doze a bit, but mostly to gaze out
to sea and dream.
A big foreign steamer in port, perhaps a Scandinavian boat, inert,
enormous, helpless, while the little tugs chatter, around it and finally
get hold of it, and tug it slowly around with its nose pointing out to
sea. Lumber schooners come in slowly and rhythmically, long and low and
clean. The Vallejo boat, looking like a rocking horse, goes importantly
chugging off toward Mare Island. It’s hard to read a book with so going
on out there.
Sunday morning, blessed play time, there is a fellow in a green canoe,
and the muscles of his body play into the movement of the waves until he
and his green canoe and the white capped waves are all one motif of
the whole symphony. Men play around the yacht club like a lot of school
boys, and now--“Shoot,” they push a long slim racer into the water.
Dainty white yachts go dipping to the waves and seem like lovely young
girls in among the sturdier boats.
Now the fishermen come in from their night’s work, making music all in
an orderly procession, and every boat of them a brilliant blue inside.
I’d like to catch a Maine fisherman allowing color in his boat, like a
“dago” or a “wop.”
Over all the swing and dip and rhythm of the sea gulls. How beautifully
they accent the movement of the symphony, like the baton of some great
leader--this great beautiful Sunday morning symphony.
Then there is Alcatraz. Oh, Alcatraz, why should they have placed a
prison there as a monument to men’s failure to order their lives
in harmony with nature. Alcatraz, most beautiful island in the most
beautiful bay, you sound an ugly, sinister, most unhappy undertone in
the morning’s symphony.
Still it is a symphony. A symphony of San Francisco Bay. Why shouldn’t
the composers put it into music. We’re sick of the song of the huntsman
by the brasses, the strings and the wood instruments. With Whitman we
exclaim: “Come, Muse, migrate from Aeonia,” and come out here to the
West, and conserve the symphony of the bay which is already composed and
waiting.
And for the argument, the overture, the prelude, there could be a
sailing schooner with sails all set coming into the Golden Gate, in the
full brilliant sunlight, or mysteriously through a fog, or against a
sunset sky. It should be “full and by” like that beautiful painting by
Coulter in the stock exchange of the Merchants’ Building.
Symphony of San Francisco Bay, boom of fog horns, calls and answers
of the ferries, chug of the fishermen’s boats, twink of lights in the
harbor at night, rhythm of sea gulls, and the brooding fog to soften it
all. “Come, Muse, migrate from Aeonia.”