Golden Gate Bridge Quotes

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

We must be trained to clarify minds, heal broken hearts, and create homes where sunshine will make an environment in which mental and spiritual health may be nurtured. Our schooling must not only teach us how to bridge the Niagara River gorge, or the Golden Gate, but must teach us how to bridge the deep gaps of misunderstanding and hate and discord in the world.

The New Colossus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.

Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco.

He smiled at the sudden image of Prometheus tossing cars from one side of the bridge to the other to build his barrier. He heard the tiny tinkle of glass and wondered if being tossed across the Golden Gate Bridge by an Elder was covered by insurance.

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me. San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold---rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of busting excitement. She leaves a mark.

Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.

...she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.

San Franciscans would have sworn on the Golden Gate Bridge that racism was missing from the heart of their air-conditioned city. But they would have been sadly mistaken. A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, “Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.

And Whoever is in charge of all this will walk with us, and will help us to sort out the mysteries and help us to complete the healing. Walls will fall and we will see each other more clearly - all of us, the Mormons and the Catholics and the Jews and the Moslems and the straights and the gays and the women and the men. Confusions will lift like fog lifts from the Golden Gate Bridge on a good summer day, and we will each see our next step and will take it.

One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.

RESISTANCE CAN BE BEATEN If Resistance couldn't be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Romeo and Juliet, no Golden Gate Bridge. Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

Before they were done, he'd bought her tons of new clothes, underwear, perfume-because a saleslady had accosted them and he decided she definitely needed to smell like what was on that little white card-a new sketchbook, a watercolor of the Golden Gate Bridge he bought from a woman on the street, and a top-of-the-line MacBook with a pink carry case.

So many people talk about the Golden Gate bridge, but I would bet they haven't seen the new Sava River Bridge. It has long metal ropes suspending it, like a gigantic angel's harp waiting for god's fingers to reach down and pluck the first chords, to send a vibration of relief and love into the heart of Belgrade.

Each morning fog rolls over the bay and caresses the Golden Gate, the most picturesque bridge in the world. In the evenings night descends from heaven like some mystical force of nature, alerting hearts that something wonderful is about to happen. The City by the Bay becomes a moonlit paradise of sounds and sensations. It teems with lights, music, ocean, and pretty girls ready to dance and have fun. San Francisco stretches out her romantic hand, beckoning you to join in all the living going on, all the love being found. And for this reason, night is the loneliest time for those of us who have no one. Oh, we try for love, desperately we make the attempt, gallantly we forge on. But inevitably we fall into a seductive whirlpool of night and garter belts, lipstick and alluring lingerie, darkened hotel rooms and passion devoid of love. Love is the trophy others raise high in happiness, leaving the rest to seek momentary solace in sex bereft of tenderness and meaning, pretending for a few moments, perhaps even a few hours, that it is something more. A hollow consolation prize for losing the romance contest.

Fog is somewhere under the Golden Gate Bridge waiting to eat us all, but it’s staying there, invisible, for the time being, waiting for the right hour to cover and consume us.

The more I looked at her breasts, the more unusually large they seemed. She must have been strapped into a brassiere with cables from the Golden Gate Bridge.

I used to go to a kids’ club at Leatherhead Leisure Centre called Crazy Tots and I couldn’t wait to share my adventures with my friends there. I didn’t try to tell them about the Golden Gate Bridge or Caesars Palace or Times Square. I wanted to tell them about the important stuff: the room service, the Cartoon Network and, yes, the red puffa jacket. Pretty quickly, however, a hard truth presented itself. Literally. Nobody. Cared.

His day is done. Is done. The news came on the wings of a wind, reluctant to carry its burden. Nelson Mandela’s day is done. The news, expected and still unwelcome, reached us in the United States, and suddenly our world became somber. Our skies were leadened. His day is done. We see you, South African people standing speechless at the slamming of that final door through which no traveller returns. Our spirits reach out to you Bantu, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer. We think of you and your son of Africa, your father, your one more wonder of the world. We send our souls to you as you reflect upon your David armed with a mere stone, facing down the mighty Goliath. Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant. Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons. Would the man survive? Could the man survive? His answer strengthened men and women around the world. In the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas, on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, in Chicago’s Loop, in New Orleans Mardi Gras, in New York City’s Times Square, we watched as the hope of Africa sprang through the prison’s doors. His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty. He had not been crippled by brutes, nor was his passion for the rights of human beings diminished by twenty-seven years of imprisonment. Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom. When Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote we were enlarged by tears of pride, as we saw Nelson Mandela’s former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration. We saw him accept the world’s award in Norway with the grace and gratitude of the Solon in Ancient Roman Courts, and the confidence of African Chiefs from ancient royal stools. No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bring the dawn. Yes, Mandela’s day is done, yet we, his inheritors, will open the gates wider for reconciliation, and we will respond generously to the cries of Blacks and Whites, Asians, Hispanics, the poor who live piteously on the floor of our planet. He has offered us understanding. We will not withhold forgiveness even from those who do not ask. Nelson Mandela’s day is done, we confess it in tearful voices, yet we lift our own to say thank you. Thank you our Gideon, thank you our David, our great courageous man. We will not forget you, we will not dishonor you, we will remember and be glad that you lived among us, that you taught us, and that you loved us all.

Don't you think the Golden Gate Bridge looks to the East in the same way the Statue of Liberty faces Europe, the Old World?' Mike now asked. 'That the Bridge and the Statue face in opposite directions, the Bridge is the end whereas the Statue is the beginning?' 'The Golden Gate Bridge should be understood symbolically,' Foucault responded, 'in the sense that it does not go from America back to America but that it should be something that could possibly open up out of America.

To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn’t already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.” —Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words

The answer to these questions is tied to the public's attitude about suicide. For many people, suicide is morally reprehensible. It's against their religion, or against their culture, or contrary to their personal values. Like other unpleasant subjects - incest, disease, discrimination - it's avoided.

If Resistance couldn't be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Romeo and Juliet, no Golden Gate Bridge. Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, at high speed, her eyes fixed on the road, Abigail asked, a little loudly above the hum, 'Do you think that neurosis is when you lie to yourself so much that other people start to notice?' Christopher, who'd been looking through the blurred bridge railing down to the boats on the bay, turned and responded, 'I think it's when your past is like a floor set on water and it won't right itself, so you're shifting your weight and contorting yourself in ways that only make sense to you because no one else can see how you're trying to balance yourself, how you're trying just to stand.

Most dramatically, the Bridge served as an agonizing or exhilarating psychological symbol for the more than 1.2 million servicemen and women who sailed beneath it during World War II and for those soldiers and Marines who saw it from the air as their chartered World Airways or Flying Tiger plane took off from the Oakland Airport, banked westward across both bridges, and headed to Vietnam. Seen upon departure, whether from the channel or the air, the Golden Gate Bridge expressed the life left behind and the fearsome dangers to come. Seen upon return, the Bridge suggested safe harbor, recovery, the joy of life in years that now would be theirs.

In the small hours of a cold February dawn, Justin and I walked to the Pacific, high cliffs eroding over the ocean, crashed and crashed by lapping salty waves. Their spray misted us in day’s young purple air, exhilarating. Walking the Golden Gate Bridge, our world receding, pale gold sunrise lit thin fog, morning coloring us like a faded fairy tale.

I concentrate on the picturesque sight of the beach, whose light sand offers a fascinating contrast to the rugged black rocks. The rolling waves with their white crests add even more sparkling nuances to the countless shades of blue and white of the sky with the low-hanging fog. And the Golden Gate Bridge towers majestically above it all. It’s overwhelming.

Suicide attempts at the Empire State Building are rare, but the same unfortunately cannot be said about the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the most popular such site in the United States. (The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in China is widely regarded as the world’s most popular suicide bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge is number two.) We don’t know, officially, how many people have taken their lives there because when the number hit 997, authorities stopped counting to avoid giving anyone the incentive of being jumper number 1,000. Whatever the number is, it could have been much higher. In 1994, California Highway Patrol Sergeant Kevin Briggs was assigned to patrol the bridge. Since then, he’s managed to talk an estimated 200 people out of jumping.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.… History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that… There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.… And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

sitting in front of the Golden Gate made me think that if we, meaning our culture, could make this bridge-sculpture right now, bad off and broke as we were, then surely we could do almost anything, and we could do it gracefully, powerfully, beautifully, and functionally.

There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty. That’s the mission of this book. We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose. It is sorely needed.

In honor of the beginning of summer, Celina had cut out large shapes of palm trees and sailboats from cardboard and painted them in vivid hues of pink, yellow, and blue to showcase her ornately embellished chocolate eggs fashioned after Richard Cadbury's original Victorian chocolate egg designs in England. Coral rosebuds, trailing green vines, tiny bluebirds, palm trees, starfish, and sailboats. Similar eggs had been popular at Easter, but these had themes of summer in San Francisco. She had even created a large, molded chocolate Golden Gate Bridge for one party.

Jobs became fascinated by the way Carr Jones relied on old material, including used bricks and wood from telephone poles, to provide a simple and sturdy structure. The beams in the kitchen had been used to make the molds for the concrete foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was under construction when the house was built. “He was a careful craftsman who was self-taught,” Jobs said as he pointed out each of the details. “He cared more about being inventive than about making money, and he never got rich. He never left California. His ideas came from reading books in the library and Architectural Digest.

What I failed to see was that, by ending my life, I would cause interminable pain to my family and friends. I could not understand the heartbreak it would cause those around me. Nor did I consider that my brother, Joseph, might live the rest of his life in continual rage, or that my sister, Libby, might shut herself off from the world and fall into perpetual depression, silence, and sadness mistakenly blaming themselves for my death as many family members do when they lose someone they love to suicide. I certainly held no understanding of the enormous pain my mother and father would suffer because they lost their oldest son in such a terrifying and devastating way. They would not have a chance to watch me mature, marry, and perhaps have children. Instead, all of their hopes, aspirations, and dreams for me would be destroyed with my decision to end my life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Life is short and that seems to be on people’s minds quite a lot these days. We have entered the era of the bucket list. No longer is it sufficient to tell anyone who wants to listen, or even cares, that you are thinking about a fancy five-star holiday. No, every proposed trip is now qualified as ‘It’s on my bucket list.’ Really? If you want to go on safari, see the Northern Lights, surf off the Maldives, or whatever, save up, drop into the travel agent or book online. We don’t care. Why should I feel inadequate about preferring a week in Blackpool to a week in Bali? And as for ‘experiences’, bungee-jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, swimming with sharks, are you off your head? That is a guaranteed bucket list, a ‘death wish’ list. Show your videos to someone who cares. Does anyone? If you want to do something useful, look after people, even those you don’t know, listen to them: you may be very interesting but others are too in their own way – and, above all, be kind.

The Oreo cookie invented, the Titanic sinks, Spanish flu, Prohibition, women granted the right to vote, Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic, penicillin invented, stock market crashes, the Depression, Amelia Earhart, the atom is split, Prohibition ends, Golden Gate Bridge is built, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Korean War, Disneyland, Rosa Parks, Laika the dog is shot into space, hula hoops, birth control pill invented, Bay of Pigs, Marilyn Monroe dies, JFK killed, MLK has a dream, Vietnam War, Star Trek, MLK killed, RFK killed, Woodstock, the Beatles (George, Ringo, John, and Paul) break up, Watergate, the Vietnam War ends, Nixon resigns, Earth Day, Fiddler on the Roof, Olga Korbut, Patty Hearst, Transcendental Meditation, the ERA, The Six Million Dollar Man. "Bloody hell," I said when she was done. "I know. It must be a lot to take in." "It's unfathomable. A Brit named his son Ringo Starr?" She looked pleasantly surprised: she'd thought I had no sense of humor. "Well, I think his real name was Richard Starkey.

Helene was a person who had never been able to ask for help, and she couldn't ask for help now. She turned north and started walking toward her home, many miles away in San Rafael. It took her almost eight hours to reach there. After a short time her feet began to hurt, so she took off the heels and throw them away. As she walked on, her nylons tore and her feet began to bleed. She passed buildings that had collapsed, stumbled over rubble, waded through streets filled with filthy water from the fire-fighting efforts. Dirty, sweaty, and disheveled, she walked down the Marina to the Golden Gate Bridge and crossed it into the next county. She reached her home sometime after midnight and knocked on her own front door. It was opened by her fiance, who had never before seen her with her hair uncombed. Without a word, he took her into his arms, kicked the door closed, covered her dirty, tearstained face with kisses, and made love to her right there on the floor. Helene is a very intelligent person but she could not understand why she had never met this ardent lover before. When she asked him, he said simply, 'I was always afraid of smearing your lipstick.' She tells me that now when she begins to relapse into her former perfectionism, she remembers the look of love in her fiance's eyes when he opened the door. She had been looked at by men all of her life but she had never seen that expression in a man's eyes before. At the heart of any real intimacy is a certain vulnerability. It is hard to trust someone with your vulnerability unless you can see in them a matching vulnerability and know that you will not be judged. In some basic way it is our imperfections and even our pain that draws others close to us.

But soon neither their cries nor the sound of weapons could be heard any more, for both were drowned in the ocean-like roar of the Awakened Trees as they plunged through the ranks of Peter's army, and then on, in pursuit of the Telmarines. Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild south-wester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being fixed to one place, was rushing at you; and was no longer trees but huge people; yet still like trees because their long arms waved like branches and their heads tossed and leaves fell round them in showers. It was like that for the Telmarines. It was a little alarming even for the Narnians. In a few minutes all Miraz's followers were running down to the Great River in the hope of crossing the bridge to the town of Beruna and there defending themselves behind ramparts and closed gates. They reached the river, but there was no bridge. It had disappeared since yesterday. Then utter panic and horror fell upon them and they all surrendered. But what had happened to the bridge? Early that morning, after a few hours' sleep, the girls had waked, to see Aslan standing over them and to hear his voice saying, "We will make holiday." They rubbed their eyes and looked round them. The trees had all gone but could still be seen moving away towards Aslan's How in a dark mass. Bacchus and the Maenads - his fierce, madcap girls - and Silenus were still with them. Lucy, fully rested, jumped up. Everyone was awake, everyone was laughing, flutes were playing, cymbals clashing. Animals, not Talking Animals, were crowding in upon them from every direction. "What is it, Aslan?" said Lucy, her eyes dancing and her feet wanting to dance. "Come, children," said he. "Ride on my back again today." "Oh, lovely!" cried Lucy, and both girls climbed on to the warm golden back as they had done no one knew how many years before. Then the whole party moved off Aslan leading, Bacchus and

Pull in Friendships and Fresh Adventures: Five men are walking across the Golden Gate Bridge on an outing organized by their wives who are college friends. The women move ahead in animated conversation. One man describes the engineering involved in the bridge's long suspension. Another points to the changing tide lines below. A third asked if they've heard of the new phone apps for walking tours. The fourth observes how refreshing it is to talk with people who aren't lawyers like him. Yes, we tend to notice the details that most relate to our work or our life experience. It is also no surprise that we instinctively look for those who share our interests. This is especially true in times of increasing pressure and uncertainty. We have an understandable tendency in such times to seek out the familiar and comfortable as a buffer against the disruptive changes surrounding us. In so doing we can inadvertently put ourselves in a cage of similarity that narrows our peripheral vision of the world and our options. The result? We can be blindsided by events and trends coming at us from directions we did not see. The more we see reinforcing evidence that we are right in our beliefs the more rigid we become in defending them. Hint: If you are part of a large association, synagogue, civic group or special interest club, encourage the organization to support the creation of self-organized, special interest groups of no more than seven people, providing a few suggestions of they could operate. Such loosely affiliated small groups within a larger organization deepen a sense of belonging, help more people learn from diverse others and stay open to growing through that shared learning and collaboration. That's one way that members of Rick Warren's large Saddleback Church have maintained a close-knit feeling yet continue to grow in fresh ways. imilarly the innovative outdoor gear company Gore-Tex has nimbly grown by using their version of self-organized groups of 150 or less within the larger corporation. In fact, they give grants to those who further their learning about that philosophy when adapted to outdoor adventure, traveling in compact groups of "close friends who had mutual respect and trust for one another.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era - the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time - and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights - or very early mornings - when I left the Fillmore half - crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn - off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll - gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. .There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high - water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era - the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time - and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights - or very early mornings - when I left the Fillmore half - crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn - off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll - gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high - water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. ― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

there is some evidence that governments are getting even more sluggish. It took America four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge, starting in 1933, and fifteen years to build the bulk of the Interstate Highway System, starting in 1956. As Philip Howard points out, a project to build a wind farm near Cape Cod has already been under scrutiny for a decade while seventeen agencies studied it, and it could well be under scrutiny for another decade, while eighteen lawsuits wind their way through the courts.12 Governments are devoting ever more resources to fulfilling inherited obligations rather than investing in the future.

And it is here—on this western end of the street—that over the years has become known as Louisiana State’s most prominent breeding ground for disappearances and suicides: the delta region’s bastard lovechild between The Golden Gate Bridge and the Bermuda Triangle.

The Golden Gate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich retiree living out in wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. The Bay Bridge is—was—San Francisco’s workhorse bridge.

poster of San Francisco. The image of the Golden Gate Bridge with Alcatraz off in the distance was one of her favorites. If she could visit one place in the world, that’s where she would go.

Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. Devotees paid cash to be “audited” by practitioners who claimed the power—if, naturally, you paid for enough sessions—to remove “trauma patterns” accreted over the 75 million years that had passed since Xenu, tyrant of the Galactic Confederacy, deposited billions of people on earth next to volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs inside those volcanos, thus scattering harming “body thetans” to attach to the souls of the living, which once unlatched allowed practitioners to cross the “bridge to total freedom” and “unlimited creativity.” Another religion, the story had it, promised “perfect knowledge”—though its adherents’ public meeting was held up several hours because none of them knew how to run the movie projector. Gallup reported that six million Americans had tried TM, five million had twisted themselves into yoga poses, and two million had sampled some sort of Oriental religion. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in eleven cities had plunked down $250 for the privilege being screamed at as “assholes.” “est”—Erhard Seminars Training, named after the only-in-America hustler who invented it, Werner Erhard, originally Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car and encyclopedia salesman who had tried and failed to join the Marines (this was not incidental) at the age of seventeen, and experienced a spiritual rebirth one morning while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge (“I realized that I knew nothing. . . . In the next instant—after I realized that I knew nothing—I realized that I knew everything”)—promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself,” all that in just sixty hours, courtesy of a for-profit corporation whose president had been general manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California and a former member of the Harvard Business School faculty. A

John Battelle, a healthy San Francisco media entrepreneur with a wife and two teenagers, initially had his doubts about whether it made sense to pay thousands of dollars per month to Dr. Shlain to treat his generally healthy family. But then Battelle’s teenage son broke his leg during a suburban soccer game after school. Naturally the first call his parents made was to 911. The second was to Dr. Shlain. “They’re taking him to a local hospital,” Battelle’s wife, Michelle, told Dr. Shlain as the boy rode in an ambulance to a nearby emergency room in Marin County. “No, they’re not,” Dr. Shlain instructed them. “You don’t want that leg fracture set by an ER doc at a local medical center. You want it set by the head of orthopedics at a hospital in the city.” Within minutes, the ambulance was on the Golden Gate Bridge, bound for California Pacific Medical Center, one of San Francisco’s top hospitals. Dr. Shlain was there to meet the Battelles when they arrived, and their son was seen almost immediately by an orthopedist with decades of experience.

It was easy to see that I was made up of exactly the same basic material as the people who built the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, heart, blood, bone and dreams. And desire too.

We crossed the famed Golden Gate Bridge, which you may know best from the opening credits of Full House, and also every bit of visual media that wanted to make clear that it takes place in San Francisco. The dense fog shrouding it cleared once we reached the other side. “Thickly fogged,” not California, may be the bridge's native state.

They sped by a pack of sea lions lounging on the docks, and she swore she saw an old homeless guy sitting among them. From across the water, the old man pointed a bony finger at Percy and mouthed something like Don’t even think about it. ‘Did you see that?’ Hazel asked. Percy’s face was red in the sunset. ‘Yeah. I’ve been here before. I … I don’t know. I think I was looking for my girlfriend.’ ‘Annabeth,’ Frank said. ‘You mean, on your way to Camp Jupiter?’ Percy frowned. ‘No. Before that.’ He scanned the city like he was still looking for Annabeth until they passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and turned north.

There was a beautiful picture of the Golden Gate Bridge with the blue sky, mountains, and ocean in the background.  In front of it was a large expanse of what appeared to be many different pairs of empty shoes, hundreds if not thousands of them.  I thought it was some silly work of art, and there were people all around it taking pictures, but what it turned out to be was a display of shoes representing all of the people who killed themselves by jumping off the bridge during the 75 years of the Golden Gate Bridge's history.

Golden Gate Bridge is the most popular spot for committing suicide in the country, and some sources state that it's the most popular site in the world.

She felt a pang, a deep wish for the bay, the soaring towers of the bridge, the sunlight skipping across ten thousand whitecaps between the Golden Gate and Alcatraz. She wanted the scent of the Pacific and the beauty of the cities and the mountains, and her man. She closed her eyes. She opened them and felt small, surrounded by the sweep of the continent. The sky was vast. It was glorious and terrifying.

Golden Gate Bridge themed clock on my wall, I saw the big and little hands were just about lining up on noon. I decided I’d let myself off the hook this time for coming in late as I’d done all right at the poker table last night, picking up a couple C-notes. I’d rolled into bed some six or seven hours ago as

each other in Marin County in Larkspur, which is about ten miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Larkspur’s eleven thousand residents

the bushes no more. I stare up at the looming, lit, downtown skyscrapers, the Transamerica Building, Grace Cathedral and Coit Tower spearing black skies beyond crooked hills, the Bay Bridge’s running lights behind me like an airport landing strip, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate, the roaring Pacific leading to the Great Highway’s abandoned beachheads where the Boys of Belvedere and I used to stay up all night building giant driftwood sculptures and setting them on fire at dawn, dancing like Indians, and I know nowhere I go can compare to this place, because nowhere else can offer me what this city has, standing on 22nd and Mission, two o’clock on some random Sunday afternoon, fat, orange sun splashing, the mango, melon, and papaya peddlers on rolling carts camped beneath the giant Woolworth’s sign, the Mexican panadarias baking empanadas, rich, wheat breads, taquerias stewing al pastor and grilling carne asada, onions and avocado and horchata, greasy spoons carved into alley walls and indie beaneries brewing pungent coffees, the bead and trinket stores with their Jesus and Mary candles for 99 cents, the outlandish drag queen fashions in the Foxy Lady display window,

Her son survived the sickness, then dove off the Golden Gate Bridge. He left a note telling her he couldn't trust the world anymore.... "When could we ever?" she says.

As the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge, I looked out onto America: once, the land of the free. Now, the land of the zombies.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" -Emma Lazarus

September came, and then the attacks. Alongside the rest of the world, the trio hung on the endlessly looping, slow-motion, cinematic insanity. From the Central Plains, New York was a black plume on the farthest horizon. Troops were securing the Golden Gate Bridge. Anthrax started turning up in the nation’s sugar bowls. Then the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan. A broadcaster in Omaha declared, It’s payback time, and all along the river came stony, unanimous assent.

Next to Alma on our All Saints’ table was an icon of another accidental saint, Harvey Milk (the first openly gay person elected to public office in California, who was shot to death by a fellow city employee in 1978). The icon showed Milk standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with five silver bullet holes in his chest and a golden halo behind his head. The icon was created by Bill, one of our congregation’s artists, who called me later when someone challenged him for creating a visual representation of sainthood for someone who was not Christian. I explained to Bill that what we celebrate in the saints is not their piety or perfection but the fact that we believe in a God who gets redemptive and holy things done in this world through, of all things, human beings, all of whom are flawed.

When I think of suicide, I often think of a man named Ken Baldwin, who leaped off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1985, when he was twenty-eight. Unlike 99 percent of jumpers from that bridge, he survived. As he fell, he later told the author Tad Friend, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable, was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.

His voice jolted Zoe out of her memories. Eyes fixed on the elegant bridge that arced over the Golden Gate, she recalled Uncle Yuan’s words as they sailed into San Francisco Bay: “Old Gold Mountain will give you a bright future.” Chasing their destiny, Chinese had called San Francisco Old Gold Mountain since the 1840s gold rush. But Zoe knew she was different from the dreamers of a hundred years ago. “I’m seeking knowledge, modern science, and technology, not gold,” she told herself. After the horror of the Japanese occupations and the chaos of China’s civil war, she’d been so happy in San Francisco. But after reading her father’s letter, even the glorious March day, with the bay a sea of diamonds under the bright sun, couldn’t ease her distress. Gloom descended and her eyes filled with tears. What a beautiful city, but I must leave you.

Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge only at that given moment.

Apparently, jumping as a means of killing oneself is usually chosen for convenience, which is why places like San Francisco, with its Golden Gate Bridge (the world's top suicide destination), are so popular.

The people prevented from killing themselves on the bridge wouldn't go on to jump off something else. Their decision to commit suicide is coupled with to that particular bridge... according to a very clever bit of detective work by psychologist Richard Seiden.. Seiden followed up with 515 people who had tried to jump from the [Golden Gate] bridge from 1937 and 1971, but had been unexpectedly restrained. Just 25 of those 515 persisted in killing themselves some other way. Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off the Golden Gate bridge at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate bridge ONLY at that moment. So when did the municipality that run the Golden Gate Bridge finally decide to install a suicide barrier? In 2018, more than 80 years after the bridge opened.

Since the [Golden Gate Bridge] opened in 1937, it has been the site of over 1,500 suicides. No other place in the world has seen as many people take their lives in that period. What does coupling theory tell us about the Golden Gate Bridge? That it would make a big difference if a barrier prevented people from jumping or a net was installed to catch them before they fell.... So when did the municipality that run the Golden Gate Bridge finally decide to install a suicide barrier? In 2018, more than 80 years after the bridge opened. In the intermediating period the bridge authority spent millions of dollars building a traffic barrier to protect cyclists crossing the bridge, even though no cyclist has ever been killed by a motorist on the Golden Gate Bridge. It spent millions building a median to separate North and South bound traffic on the grounds of public safety. On the southern end of the bridge, the authority put up an 8 foot cyclone fence to prevent garbage from being thrown onto Fort Baker, a former army installation on the ground below. A protected net was even installed on the initial construction of the bridge at enormous cost to prevent workers from falling from their deaths. The net saved 19 lives. Then it was taken down. But for suicides? Nothing for more than 80 years...

The Golden Gate Bridge was a tall orange suspension bridge that connected the city of Don Francisco to the Marin Headlands on the other side. It had been built millennia ago by some ancient civilization,

Without warning, a 9.5 Richter scale earthquake began just off the coast of California, near San Francisco. For the U.S. Geologic Survey, there had been no indications of a pending super quake. Seismic monitors were showing no activity for California for the previous six months, which had the scientists concerned, but they weren’t terribly worried about it. The shockwaves from the quake extended into San Francisco itself, but the scientists were shocked when it didn’t extend to Oakland, to any of the towns and cities south of the San Francisco International Airport, or anything from the Golden Gate Bridge northward. Unfortunately, the suddenness of the quake made it too late to warn the citizens of that city.

We use enough metal in caskets and underground vaults that we could rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge every January. The embalming fluid they pumped into my grandfather causes a higher incidence of leukemia and brain and colon cancer in funeral directors. The waste from the dead, along with embalming fluids, is pumped into the sewer, draining straight off the embalming table and down the drain, accompanied by the bleach that’s used to disinfect the body.

The fog, which Meg knew from her father wasn’t fog at all, but low-lying clouds, began to burn off as the morning sun continued its climb through a blue-gray sky. The Golden Gate Bridge came into focus right before her eyes through a cloud that caressed the crimson metal into view.

Golden Gate Bridge in Marin

Oliver Marley supposed there were more dignified ways to end his life. A lifelong victim to the twin sins of an infertile imagination and pragmatism, the thought of travel simply never crossed his mind.   Had it occurred to him, Oliver could have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, into the abyss of the Grand Canyon or said au revoir off the Eiffel Tower. But truth be told, Oliver never was much of a traveler. Even locally there were certainly higher quality casinos to choose from, taller parking garages from which to leap. Instead he found himself perched atop the nearest appropriately-sized structure to his home, that being the parking garage of the Circus Time Hotel & Casino. His view not of Alcatraz Island and the rough waters of the San Francisco Bay, nor the breathtaking vistas of the Arizona desert, or the romanticism of the Paris skyline for that matter. Rather he found himself bathed in a noxious blend of pink and green neon, staring into a pair of giant blinking pastel eyes belonging to the eighty-foot clown staring down at him like a frilly guardian angel. Then again, when your primary objective is to pancake yourself on a public sidewalk, perhaps you’re not in the best position to nitpick over the intricacies of what does and does not constitute bad taste. Oliver would just have to live with the clown, at least for another minute or two.

I typed the winery address into the GPS and then proceeded to pull out of the rental company driveway. I screeched and slammed on the brakes every four feet until I got out onto the street. There was going to be a learning curve. The GPS lady successfully got me over the Golden Gate, but I didn’t get to enjoy one minute of it. Paranoid that I was going to hit a pedestrian or a cyclist or launch myself off the massive bridge, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the car in front of me. Once I was out of the city, I spotted a Wendy’s and pulled off the highway. GPS lady started getting frantic. “Recalculating. Head North on DuPont for 1.3 miles.” I did a quick U-turn to get to the other side of the freeway and into the loving arms of a chocolate frosty. “Recalculating.” Shit. Shut up, lady. I was frantically hitting buttons until I was able to finally silence her. I made a right turn and then another turn immediately into the Wendy’s parking lot and into the drive-thru line. I glanced at the clock. It was three forty. I still had time. I pulled up to the speaker and shouted, “I’ll take a regular French fry and a large chocolate frosty.” Just then, I heard a very loud, abbreviated siren sound. Whoop. I looked into my rearview mirror and spotted the source. It was a police officer on a motorcycle. What’s he doing? I sat there waiting for the Wendy’s speaker to confirm my order, and then again, Whoop. “Ma’am, please pull out of the drive-thru and off to the side.” What’s going on? I quickly rolled the window all the way down, stuck my head out, and peered around until the policeman was in my view. “Are you talking to me?” To my absolute horror, he used the speaker again. “Yes, ma’am, I am talking to you. Please pull out of the drive-thru.” Holy shit, I’m being pulled over in a Wendy’s drive-thru. “Excuse me, Wendy’s people? You need to scratch that last order.” A few seconds went by and then a young man’s voice came over the speaker. “Yeah, we figured that,” he said before bursting into laughter and cutting the speaker off. The policeman was very friendly and seemed to find a little humor in the situation as well. Apparently I had made an illegal right turn at a red light just before I pulled into the parking lot. After completely and utterly humiliating me, he let me off with a warning, which was nice, but I still didn’t have a frosty. Pulling my old Chicago Cubs cap from my bag, I decided that nothing was going to get in the way of my beloved frosty. Going incognito, I made my way through the door. Apparently the cap was not enough because the Justin Timberlake–looking fellow behind the counter could not contain himself. “Hi,” I said. “Hi, what can I get you?” he said, and then he clapped his hand over his mouth, struggling to hold back a huge amount of laughter and making gagging noises in the back of his throat in the process. “Can I get an extra-large chocolate frosty please, and make it snappy.” “Do you still want the fries with that?” There was more laughter and then I heard laughter from the back as well. “No, thank you.” I paid, grabbed my cup, and hightailed it out of there.

I see a lavish procession of frothy strawberry mousses, strips of smoked eel, bundles of mixed seaweed and mushrooms, exquisite spiced biscuits and specialist honeys. The photographs show pyramids, three-arched bridges, palaces with several floors and balconies and terraces- works of art for the delectation of the mouth. I admire a Golden Gate Bridge made of nougatine, an Eiffel Tower of profiteroles and a Taj Mahal in meringue.

Up and up he went, in a wide circle, his heart pounding with a crazy excitement that was more than half fright. The wind was wet against his face and his ears were full of the breathy whirr of feathers. It was a pretty frantic and frightening few minutes until at last he broke out above the fog into the clear open starlit sky. Coming up so suddenly out of damp gray blindness, Harry was amazed to see how bright it was, and how clearly he could see. As he climbed higher into the starlit brightness the fog became only a rolling gray river beneath him. It poured in through the Golden Gate in great gray billows, spread out over the water of the bay, and spilled up onto the surrounding land. To the south, the tops of some of the tallest buildings looked like the last remains of a sunken city. As Harry turned in his circling flight, he caught a glimpse of the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, barely showing above the foggy flood. Farther north, small patches of the hills of Marin could be seen through the fog breakers that dashed over their tops and almost seemed to splash down to the bay below.

Having opened up a way for the imprisoned souls, the chief celebrant had succeeded by means of spells and incantations in breaking open the gates of hell. He had shone his light (a little hand mirror) for the souls in darkness. He had confronted Yama, the Judge of the Dead. He had seized the demon torturers who resisted his progress. He had invoked Ksitigarbha, the Saviour King, to aid him. He had raised up a golden bridge, and now, by means of a litle flag which he held aloft in one hand, was conducting over it those souls from the very deepest pit of hell who still remined undelivered.

a black site, a night chapel, spoiled land, a kind of charging station for evil. “They’re all over the place. The Paris catacombs, Guantánamo Bay, Lake Powell, the Bellagio, the House on the Rock, the Golden Gate Bridge.” There are at least two others in Oregon alone. The Rajneesh compound and the Lava River Cave.

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows, you heard a lot of ''Wow,'' and ''Beautiful,'' though Zoyd only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea. They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to half a car length. . . . Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. . . . The storm lashed the night, dead trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy and glistening, the highway was interrupted by flooding creeks and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation, the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.