The first time I saw San Francisco

A little after the middle of August, 1947--a couple of weeks before their 30th birthdays, and about five weeks before my fifth birthday--my folks packed up our new Chevrolet coupé convertible, with me and my two-years younger brother in the back seat, and drove out of the hot and dusty, post-harvest Palouse Country of Whitman County, Washington (State), on a trip to Santa Barbara, California: An exhausting journey in those days before air conditioning or the Interstate Highway System, and which both my mother and little brother were half dead-of (from car sickness and heat prostration) by the time we got  (via the ferry) to Umatilla, Oregon.  I don't remember the rest of the trip after that till we got to Northern California and stayed at a motel surrounded by redwoods--which was a little rustic, with no hot water, but which my father and I found acceptable, while my mother and little brother groused about it endlessly.  But I quickly escaped their depressing company and found outside, just a few yards from our cabin, a grove of serene, immemorial redwood trees--who spoke to me, bidding me welcome and telling me not to be afraid.  It seemed to me that they were laughing with me, or singing to themselves, and at the same time making me understand how incredibly old they were.  It seemed that (whether these were the spirits of the trees, or the trees themselves, they all spoke at once in a kind of harmony) they had much to teach me, and were about to--when my mother grabbed me by the hand and led me away, scolding me for getting "lost."

The next thing I remember was that it had grown hot again, and we were in Chico, California, staying with cousins of my father who possessed two things which I found to be perfectly wonderful:  An orange tree in their front yard, and a player piano in their living room.

And then, the next day, rather late in the afternoon, suddenly we were on the Golden Gate Bridge, with the top down on our Chevy coupé, heading into San Francisco.   I was disappointed with the bridge itself, with the fact that it was not, as advertised, golden.  But with the gleaming whiteness of the city, and the park-like green of the Praesidio, I was, and have ever since been, ravished.  I knew that in some sense I had come home.