Seeing Green

Holly Moeller / Columnist

Issue date: 11/26/07

There was something profound about the first time I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. Perhaps it was the iconic scene, engraved into my imagination by movies, photographs and songs about flowers in one's hair, which I realized as I tilted my head sharply upward in salute to the red-painted towers that supported my passage. I always loved San Francisco: With its trolley cars, fortune cookie factories, steep streets and say-anything flavor, it never failed to reinforce the magic and myth my mind envisioned. Yet up on the bridge, where a crisp wind blew my gaze from Alcatraz Island across the bay and city to the Pacific Ocean and sculpted California Coast beyond, I was most impressed by the natural beauty that still ruled the scene. San Francisco Bay, dotted with sailboats and windsurfers, seemed pristine and changeless from that great height.

So I can only imagine the horror that must have struck visitors earlier this month when their views of the storied bay were fouled by an inky black shadow that passed beneath the bridge in a fleeting but dark symbol of a more troubled reality...

http://www.dailytargum.com/news/2007/11/26/Opinions/Blackened.Bay.Golden.Gate-3114304.shtml