“Mouth of the Sundown Sea”

I’ve been awake since 3:07 AM. It’s Saturday morning 6:52 AM at this very moment. I’ve been at Vista Point off the Alexandra exit at The Golden Gate Bridge, walking a good one hundred feet down the top of the hill and now my gear is all set.

My gear includes a small travel easel, and a small pack that contains my iPad mini, a sketch pad, a watercolour sketch pad, paints, brushes, pens, a small container with water, and rubber bands. I set my easel in the perfect spot close to the edge of a precipice down a ways from where everyone else is, and rubberband my iPad to it, angled such that it can see the sun’s rays rise above the bridge. Then I touch the “time lapse” button on the iPad and let it work its magic.

And now I sit here marveling at the sun coming up over the hills. It’s Saturday morning and it’s beyond beautiful. I can hear everything… the sound of a slight breeze, ships bellowing at a distance, cars racing on the bridge, geese flying overhead cawing, birds chirping, etc. I’ve got music playing on my phone; right now “Knights of Cydonia” by Muse is playing. Soon, I will be sketching and I will be painting.

A hundred years before the bridge was built, the captain of the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers John Fremont gave this area the name Chrysopylae, or Golden Gate, referencing the three mile channel that linked the bay to the ocean. The bridge itself was built in 1937, while the channel was named in 1846. The Spanish soldiers who “discovered” it called it La Boca (“the Mouth”) in 1769. Earlier still, the area’s native Miwok called it “Mouth of the Sundown Sea.”

I call it home. I call it breathtaking. I call it hello.

I sat there for almost four hours, painting and drawing, and watching the sun rise. Satisfied with what I had done and what I had seen, I packed up and then left for home.

It was not yet 11 AM and I had already been up for almost eight hours, the morning experience enriching my soul.

Today was going to be a good day.