There are at least two kinds of vacations - the frenetic "let's do this, let's visit that" mode & the "get away from civilization & chill" one. The past 17 days have definitely been in the first category, as most days (save for two in San Diego visiting a friend fresh out of the hospital and three in Yosemite, where we seemed to trade vistas for acquaintences) have been a cycle of visiting one person in the morning, another in the p.m., another at night for dinner. Every one of the four of us hit a wall of exhaustion at some point, so there were some modifications to this agenda (involving, as a result at least two of them, trips to Superman Returns and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, both of which are quite a bit more enjoyable than their reviews suggest, so long as you're not expecting Eisenstein).

Still, my one major regret as we head home today is the number of people I couldn't figure out how to fit in, or with whom my visits felt far too brief. In 17 days, 12 of them spent in the Bay Area, I actually got to San Francisco exactly twice, both relatively brief excursions. (It's great to see that the new DeYoung Museum has acquired, through a gift, Jess' The Enamored Mage, his portrait of Robert Duncan. It's Jess' most important portrait and the best one of Duncan as well.)

I get back to the Bay Area every year or two, so the changes here architecturally and geographically sort of sneak up on me (I saw AT&T Park lit up against the South Beach skyline from atop the Berkeley Hills last night for the very first time). The most indelible one, on this trip, is the degree to which traffic and population growth are impacting geography here. Coming from Yosemite just past rush hour on Wednesday, we could see the caravan of traffic packed tight on highway 580 as commuters head to Tracy, Lodi, Manteca and even Oakdale (in Oakdale we saw signage complaining about the repurposing of agricultural water for residential use, as this town from the east side of the central valley tries to maintain its farming base against the onslaught of tract housing). It is clear, for example, that it is far easier to get to San Francisco from Berkeley either by BART or over the Richmond-San Rafael & Golden Gate bridges than it is over the parking lot that is the Oakland Bay Bridge. I found myself on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge ten times during this trip, and avoided the Bay Bridge altogether. It felt as tho the area where I had grown up had been reconfigured, and that a new geography is in place.

There is a moment in An Inconvenient Truth where Al Gore recounts the familiar story that says that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will hop out, but that if you put it into a pot of lukewarm temperature and gradually increase the heat it will stay until ... you rescue the frog. Traffic-wise, people in the Bay Area seem not to realize yet just how hot their own pot has become.