The Golden Gate Bridge

I once believed that the Golden Gate Bridge was so named because of its color, as in the Golden Bridge across the mile-wide Gate into San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. Not so. The strait affording access from ocean to bay was designated the Golden Gate by John Fremont in 1846, enchanted as he was by its beauty. Two years later, when James Marshall discovered flakes of gold in the race at Sutter’s Mill on the American River, the name took on a second meaning . . . the gate to the gold fields.

The Gold Rush was on.

Thereafter San Francisco boomed and prospered and grew into a bawdy metropolis of 47 square miles perched at the tip of a peninsula and bound on three sides by water. Ferries proliferated to afford access to the East Bay and to Marin County across the Golden Gate to the north. By the early years of the twentieth century people began to think about bridges. Ideas led to action. Civic leaders floated bonds, engaged engineers, and commenced construction . . . on two bridges: the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge (completed in 1936) and the Golden Gate Bridge (completed in 1937).

Pity the Bay Bridge, eclipsed immediately by its nearby neighbor, then the longest and tallest suspension bridge in the world, and oh my in what a setting.

People come from the world around to gape at the Golden Gate Bridge and to walk the span while admiring the view of the City by the Bay off to the east. Some drive up into the proximate Marin Headlands at the north end and from there enjoy the vista of San Francisco, perfectly framed by the bridge’s catenary cables. Should you endeavor to uncoil both of those main cables and the verticals descending from them to support the roadway, and then to lay the cables-within-cables-within-cables end to end, the resulting strand would circle the globe 3 1/3 times. Should you then pop out all the rivets that hold the thing together and then lay them end-to-end, the rivet trail would stretch for nineteen miles.

As the iron workers assembled the bridge (eleven of them lost their lives in the process) parties weighed in with opinions about how to paint it. The Navy favored blue and white stripes, theoretically enabling their ship captains to see the structure on dark nights and thereby avoid it. Others proposed alternative schemes. While the debate raged the painters applied an orange-y base coat, and then noticed that the color mimicked the exposed rock of the Marin Headlands. So they left it as it was, thank heavens, and now a crew chips and overpaints it right around the year, going back to one end when they reach the other end in an endless ballet of perfect International O range. At night up-lights illuminate the Art Deco towers prompting you to lean forward and crane your neck upwards as you drive across. On a clear day you can see the Farallon Islands on the westward horizon.

When I first lived in San Francisco in the mid-1970’s, the bridge’s foghorn lulled me to sleep on misty nights, two seconds of mournful mwaaaah separated by eighteen seconds of anticipatory silence. You hear that mwaaaah, but also feel it in your bones. Jane and I just enjoyed that basso lullaby as we spent four nights at a resort situated in the shadow of the north tower — Cavallo Point.

On our last day we walked out to mid span with squadrons of selfie-stick-bearing tourists, and watched a freighter slip by below, bound for somewhere.