DAY 48: EPILOGUE

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. | Monday, April 26, 2010 | Guest room, 932 Hampshire St.

We found the pure biodiesel in Berkeley. Not in San Rafael as planned. He'd sold. They'd bought. It was sunny yet again, like almost every day has been on this trip. The place was Bio Oasis, a women-owned cooperative housed in a renovated 1930s gas station, corner of Ashby and Sacramento. They have four pumps, all of it recycled vegetable oil. Solar panels shade the pumps. Chickens for sale inside, peeping in boxes. Books on urban farming. Pretty much all the good karma you could ask for. Pricey, at $3.84 a gallon, versus $3.30 for straight diesel. But again, the idea is that we're comsuming less, so we can afford to pay a little more for something more sustainable, and remembering too, that the prices for gasoline, for soda and corn, are kept artificially low by federal subsidies, lawyering by Monsanto and global war, among other things. The system is rigged. So sometimes we pay someting closer to "people" costs, rather than "market" costs. And maybe market costs might more accurately be called political outcomes, or lobbying gold. 


The important part though, we got to my sister Margaret's, in the afternoon. Traffic coming from the East Bay was awful. A giant parking lot most of the way. Plenty of time to photograph the downtown from the Bay Bridge coming over. We made it. Seven thousand and some odd miles. 46 days. Yellow Truck intact. Us too, give or take.


We found a parking space in front of a Latino church, a renovated storefront, a few blocks from the house, outer Mission, getting toward Potrero Hill. The idea was we would hold the parking space, then Margaret would come take it, and she'd give us her driveway space. But she'd already found a space. 


Manhattans. Delicious. Out in the back garden. Sitting. Talking. Then the neighbors playing folk music on the other side of the fence, mandolin and fiddle, singing. We were singing too, hooting, standing, stamping up on top of the picnic table. The climate so good here, so agreeable. Lush. Smell of jasmine. It is good to be here. Good good.