The Mighty Bay

Here is a photo I took on a rare pause as I biked across the Golden Gate Bridge a few weeks ago. It's two frames, stitched together digitally and then cropped to look square. The stitch job is pretty bad, but if you blur your eyes it doesn't matter much.

As I shot this, I thought to myself the caption: "The Morning Commute."

Morning commute, June 2013, San Francisco (stitch of two images).

Of all the photographs shot from the Golden Gate Bridge, how many can capture the glorious might of the Bay? Lately I've been thinking about the Gate itself: not as a deep ocean channel, but rather as a fantastically monstrous river. The mouth of many rivers that gushes out to the ocean, and gushes back in, bringing life in and out with it.

That's not actually the case; it's an estuary, a complex system mixed with both salt and freshwater. I have visited two estuaries where the salinity and purity is just right to permit the survival of a marine microorganism that produces "bioluminescense", or naturally produced light (it's completely unbelievable). I've read that this was once the case for San Francisco Bay -- early explorers documented it.

40% of California's surface area (and a bit of Oregon's) drains into the Bay. Take a minute to appreciate this:

I appreciate the Golden Gate Bridge -- it enables an astounding bike commute for me. But because of the Bridge, the Golden Gate itself is too often overlooked. 

I'm OK with that, though. Sometimes I'm just getting across the bridge myself without appreciating the environs. Sometimes I'm getting blasted by wind and less than fully appreciative of that. But sometimes I stop and peer over to see the porpoises, terns, and cormorants swimming below me. They are some of the benefactors of the tremendous supply of sustenance that gushes on the current under the bridge, mostly unseen to the human eye.