Postcards From Home

My favorite spot on Earth isn’t on Google Maps. In high school, older kids told us how to get there: on the drive to Stinson, turn right onto West Ridgecrest Boulevard where it intersects with Pantoll Road. Go past the first couple of parking areas, letting the traffic thin out. You’ll drive for five or so minutes, winding your way carefully around the golden hills, until you come up on smaller pullouts. Park there, cross the road toward the Pacific, and you’ve reached heaven.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in airports lately, and have started identifying their particular rhythms: the sterile shininess of EWR, the frenzied chaos of LAX. But anyone who’s been to SFO knows that its particular rhythm feels different. Named the best airport in North America by at least one publication, SFO will always have my heart.

View from Banyan Tree Veya Valle de Guadalupe. I think about California’s quality of light often. When I first read Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “The Changing Light,” which describes the particular luminosity of San Francisco, it rattled around in my brain for days, the words appearing like hallucinations. “The changing light at San Francisco / is none of your East Coast light / none of your / pearly light of Paris,” the poem begins.

Every June, San Francisco summer rolls in grayer than you’d expect. As the dreary mornings and wet evenings settle in, everyone seems a little stiffer and a little less happy, the way I imagine East Coasters steel themselves against the winter cold. But the start of summer also always holds promise in at least one regard, and that’s the release of Stern Grove Festival tickets.

I consciously realized it’d been a stressful couple of weeks when I told a friend, “I’ve been dreading waking up,” and she replied, “That’s just called low-grade depression.” I’m not sure it was depression, but sometimes my remote job — in which I’m wrangling talent and creatives, trying to make media that we’re excited about through the black box of my laptop — feels so out of my control that the only thing that brings me back to earth is literally walking outside and feeling my feet sturdy...

This is a newsletter about life in San Francisco, for people who love it here. My name is Lena Felton. I’m a Bay Area native who, after nearly a decade building my career as a journalist and editor on the East Coast, moved back to San Francisco because I couldn’t stay away. And lately, I’ve found myself craving stories that reflect the particular magic of this place. So I decided to start Postcards From Home. Twice a month, you’ll get a postcard from me with words and photos that capture life in SF.

I recently spent a weekend exploring Tomales Bay, Point Reyes Station, and Olema House. I’ve always loved the drive to Point Reyes Station along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the way the smooth road hugs redwood groves and horse stables and grassy hills. It’s only an hour from the city, but the drive is transportive, and by the time you reach Tomales Bay it’s as if you’ve entered a faraway land full of treasures: oysters and chanterelles and sparkling wine.

Photos taken by me (right and left) and Tony Kurz (center). If you attended an open mic in the Outer Sunset recently and stayed until the last few acts, you may have vaguely recognized one of the performers. When he started playing, you probably realized he wasn’t just here for a hobby — that he might actually do this for a living.

The first time I went to the Coachella Valley, I was newly 21 and searching for meaning in the cacti and purple sunsets. I’d always romanticized the desert but had never been. During that trip, my friends and I slept in an Airstream, stumbled into Western bars, and hiked in Joshua Tree National Park. Ten years later, I’ve now been to the area five times — and three times just in the last year.

I heard spring before I saw it. At the beginning of March, I’d get woken up long before the sun came up by a pair of birds singing in the courtyard: a clear, confident melody that made me feel warm and joyful, even though I was still half asleep. Of course, after our unseasonable heat wave, it feels like we’ve altogether skipped spring and fast-forwarded to October, the evenings unfamiliar in their sumptuous heat. But those songbird calls stirred something in me.