Golden Gate

Short Story by David Andersen

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Sand swept across the Great Highway much the way snow blows across a North Dakota road.  The storm that deposited it there during the night was now spent, and the windmills turned their faces once again to the sea, while wind-bent trees pointed their branches to where the storm had gone.  The ocean’s surface was now calm, quiet, dark, and exhausted from the night’s struggle.  But the air was fresh and renewed.  And that was how Edgar felt, too.

Turning onto Fulton Street, he cruised past the palms and began to climb eastward.  Traveling to the top of the city, he turned towards Science Hall near the University of San Francisco.  He slowed and pulled in line with the other machines.  He shut off the ignition, and the engine became still.  Edgar wondered what stories these machines told one another while their masters were in class.  His old bike had plenty to say.

So far, school was easy, easier than he had imagined.  He was used to working hard. Older than most other students, he didn’t have their emotional overhead to interfere with studying—he was all business.  His work experience helped him, too.  The drafting course was almost trivial—he knew blueprints well.  Physics and electronics came naturally—just living a physical life brings a qualitative understanding of many things. All that’s left is to learn to express them mathematically.  When the physics course covered adiabatic expansion, he envisioned clouds forming on the upwind side of the Bitterroot and vanishing on the Lee. He knew diffraction patterns from mists near a waterfall, waves breaking through the entrance of a harbor, and oil slicks by a river barge.  His vivid memory of a brake failure on a mountain road was now regarded as the conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy to inelastic deformation.  When his geology professor illustrated cretaceous rock with a PowerPoint slide, he recognized the scene as Guadalupe Peak. (He had worked on a ranch nearby.) He formed a mnemonic trick for remembering other rocks by thinking of where he had seen them—schist along a Wyoming highway, basalt in eastern Washington, dolomite on a riverbank in Michigan…

Organic chemistry was a revelation.  He already knew the names and purposes of many of the studied reagents, but now he discovered why they behaved as they did.  It made him regret not being more careful when filling the hoppers of cropdusters and draining anhydrous ammonia tanks.  He could personally relate the effects of spontaneous combustion in a South Dakota grain elevator.

German was the last class of the day.  On the first day of class he volunteered that he had already learned some German from a shipping clerk in a hat factory in Minneapolis.  His boss, Karl Lesser, fled Germany before the war and never learned English well enough to speak coherently.  It was easier, Edgar explained, to learn a few words of German than to struggle with Karl’s bad English.  But this left him fluent in only numbers, colors, the words for truck, railroad, bill of lading, and colorful Teutonic profanities.