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Breach Baby in the Bay
Words: ANTHONY BARSTOW
------Or Choose a story from below------
Rio: City of Wonder and Poverty
A Million Needles: Catching the King
A breach baby, I have had a poor sense of direction since birth. Just this afternoon, a 10-minute trip for pizza turned into a four-hour odyssey in an unfamiliar city. My host here, my best friend since junior high, who is acutely aware of my lacking internal compass, had to retrieve me.
The adventures I have endured - the half-day trip to nowhere, the 300-mile, rain-soaked voyage to return videos on time - as a result of this biological quirk are innumerable. And, since hindsight is 20-20 through rose-colored glasses, I remember not the tumultuous journeys but the wonderful tales.
On a cold, dark and windy winter day in San Francisco, one of the great misadventures of my life took place. The task was simple: see “Little Children,” a small independent film at the Presidio small independent theater in the City.
Spanish soldiers founded the Presidio of San Francisco in 1776. They wished to defend the San Francisco Bay as part of the Spanish Empire. During the Mexican revolution, Spain ceded control to the newly-independent Mexico.
However, in 1846, the American settlers revolted against the Mexicans and took control of the Presidio. From then on, American troops from the Presidio fought in every war through Desert Storm. I just wanted to see a movie there. So, I picked up my movie-going friend, Stephanie, at her house, and we proceeded to take the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train to San Francisco, about a 45-minute ride from our hometown of Fremont, Calif.
I looked up only the movie time, 12:30, and neglected to get directions. I felt that once we got there I could find it alright, but I did not even know at which stop to get off the BART train. I consulted the track map on the car I was on and thought I recognized a street name: Chestnut Avenue. I recalled that to be the name of the street on which the movie theatre was. South San Francisco was the correct stop. The Presidio Theatre is on Chestnut Street. The difference between Street and Avenue is three letters, but it is also around 20 miles and $15.
We got out at the South San Francisco stop and, not wanting to take any chances, hopped in a cab. I was excited since this was only the second taxi ride I had ever taken. Surely, the cab driver would know where the movie theatre on Chestnut Avenue.
He did not because there was, of course, no theatre on Chestnut Avenue. We did, however, find a very quaint suburban neighborhood near an elementary school, and should I every find myself with the necessarily excessive monetary means, I would not mind living in this pleasant little area.
We headed back to the BART station, I paid the cabbie for the $10 ride to nowhere, and my friend and I were in a worse state than when we started. After another $5 to re-enter the station, I broke down and called a friend for directions.
Knowing where we were going did not help us to get out of South San Francisco any faster. The BART station at South San Francisco is a subterranean cavern with the etchings of indigenous people on the walls advertising for toothpaste, high-speed internet, and ballet tickets. An anthropologist more versed in cave paintings could probably have deciphered these pre-iPhone communiqués better than I.
Every ten minutes or so, we would hear the hopeful rumble of an approaching train, but inevitably it would be headed in the wrong direction. I, then, realized that we were at the second- to-last stop on the line, and after the third such train passed us, I began to wonder where they were all going.I decided that they were reaching the final station and, just thereafter, falling off a geologically unexplainable cliff. After about 45 minutes, some brilliant conductor, whose name I never got, navigated his way out of the abyss and came for us.
Finally, Stephanie and I were headed to the heart of downtown San Francisco at the speed of rapid transit. We had missed the early showing of the film, but as long as nothing else went wrong, we could make the 3 p.m. Having neglected to write down the directions once I had them, I promptly forgot them. We wandered the Civic Center area for a solid half-hour before I called for a repeat of the previously given directions.
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