My Evening at San Francisco's Embarcadero

Once in a blue moon -- or pale gold and very blue summer evening -- I will go be a tourist in my own hometown, and I am blessed to live in San Francisco. Days like yesterday have been rare in San Francisco this year, as winter has refused to give up its influence in the city.

But yesterday, there was not a high cloud in the sky, and the air had a gentle warmth to it where the usual summer fog was not already on its way in. San Francisco sits between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, and the general rule is that if the fog is taking its time coming in, the further you get from the ocean and toward the bay, the warmer it gets and stays toward evening. You can't get further east than the Embarcadero unless you want to wade in the water! That in the distance are Yerba Buena and Treasure Islands, and beyond them, seen through the legs of the Bay Bridge, is Oakland.

The next photo is a nice segment of the Bay Bridge at another blue moment, while I was deeper in shadow:

There are still a lot of cirrus clouds -- VERY high clouds -- way up in the atmosphere, and although they are invisible to direct observation under most conditions, at certain moments one can capture the silver cast they give to the sky and the light. I have called it pale gold, but I think the color I really want to describe the cast of the light in the next picture is electrum, an alloy of silver and gold. Near sunset the golden and pink-golden hues on paler buildings and colors can be very strong under usual summer conditions (presuming the fog allows the sun to be seen at all), but yesterday one could see both warm golden and cool gray tones both popping.

I stayed at the Embarcadero and just enjoyed the evening, but was out of there before the sun, in its electrum-blue sky, dove behind the skyscrapers behind me. San Francisco's warm evenings are rare, and they tempt one to linger, but if you live here, you know better. If home is westward -- and from the Embarcadero, everybody's home is westward -- you have to go through greater and greater cold to get there. I live about three miles west, and where I live, the fog was already coming in. And then of course, night was falling. San Francisco's rare warm evenings can be an invitation to get chilled and sick, an invitation to be refused!

But, I couldn't go without snapping this photo of the fountain at the corner of Howard and Embarcadero, at a very reflective moment:

Side view #1, so you can just see how the water runs down this interesting piece of architecture...

Side view #2, the pretty blue bottom, a nice counterpoint to a blue evening...

At the very end, at my bus stop, I looked back, and there was the iconic Ferry Building still lit up in the blue and electrum beauty of the evening, a seagull wheeling by it:

An enchanted evening in San Francisco... the fog was at the door of my neighborhood and it was windy and cold when I got back, but I have the photos to show that the warmth and light actually happened, on a summer evening in my hometown...

Photo Credits: Deeann D. Mathews, the author