This is what San Francisco's 16th Street BART station in the Mission looks like at 5:00 a.m. on a Wednesday. When the station was built 40 years ago the wall tiles below were selected to honor the Mexican American heritage of the surrounding neighborhood. Whether they ever accomplished their object is not for me to judge.
Above, the parking lot of the East Bay station where the train drops me shortly before 6:00. The sun has been up for a good while, but heavy fog sustains a twilit atmosphere.
By 7:00 a.m. the fog has not lessened. The nail salon in the off-kilter A-frame has not yet opened its doors. We are on Piedmont Avenue now – in Oakland – where I am wiling away several hours while the surgeons do a little job on my friend at nearby Kaiser Hospital. (In accordance with my compulsive nature, I have already figured out exactly where I can maneuver the car closest to the hospital discharge doors.) Meanwhile, I wander the cold streets looking for signs of life, but the signs I find (below) look to me more like archeological fragments of lives long past.
The side of a mailbox reads to me like a curt summary of current events. I am thinking about the largest oil spill in history (leaking upwards from an American drilling site six miles below the ocean's surface) occurring within days of the executive order by the President of Hope authorizing a massive expansion of offshore drilling. A piece of wickedness beyond what Bush attempted.