533 - Mosswood Overpass
Back when I was a longboarder, I always heard that it was never a matter of if you crash, but when you crash. And sure enough, a few months into the hobby, I glided over a crack and fractured my jaw on concrete.
Three years later I picked up motorcycling as a hobby, and my instructor echoed the same age-old advice. I didn’t believe him. A year later I narrowly missed a deer carcass on the freeway going 80 mph. I swerved the bike and saw death fade into the darkness behind me.
A few weeks later I sold my Kawasaki KLR 650. I figured it was time I finally let that advice sink it. And for the years that followed, I lived by that wisdom. “It’s not a matter of if, but when… so choose your path wisely.”
Jump forward to 2023. I made a quick decision to move to San Francisco in a Prius full of photography gear. Despite the fact that, in this year alone, there had already been more than 16,000 reported incidents of larceny theft in the Bay Area, with the majority of cases coming from vehicles. In other words, I’d activated another ticking time bomb. Why, might you ask?
Well, I’ll admit, the city had me fooled. Behind the awe-inspiring shorelines, the world-class architecture, and the soft chirp of pelicans, lied an undercurrent of desperation that I chose to look away from.
A quiet, hostile desperation that enabled people to do whatever it took to survive. It’s a stark contrast from the big money that drips down from the high-rise lofts, oozes from the beach-front properties, and pours out from the tourists that swarm the streets all day, everyday.
So on that sunny, fateful afternoon when I walked back to my 07’ Prius and saw a broken back window, I knew I had it coming. I’d played my cards in this town for too long.
Not that this subtle ending of an era wasn’t without a little climax, however. My last shoot before the incident was a sunset drone-shot overlooking the Bay Area. It’s as if San Francisco had wished me a grimy, angelic goodbye before I even knew it:
“City of Dreams”
Taken with DJI Mavic Mini
[ISO 100 ~ 4.49mm ~ f/2.8 ~ 1/80s] [Panorama]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
Jackpot. But I wasn’t the only person to say that. In total the thieves stole more than $12,000 worth of gear, all equipment I’d acquired from years of delivery work.
I was also more broke than I’d ever been in my life. I had $6,000 racked up on credit cards from filming a course for 6 months. The Prius I was living in was actively falling apart with almost 300,000 miles. And now all my gear was gone, replaced by nothing but a glistening bed of glass.
The funny thing was that this was the first time I’d ever left my gear inside my car outside my buddy’s place in Oakland. I’d always brought it inside. It almost felt like someone had been always watching through some dark window, waiting for the perfect moment…
At first I wasn’t sure what to think. Then my emotions hit me like a brick wall. I think the most prominent feeling I encountered was anger. Even though I (luckily) had all the gear insured, I still felt like absolutely annihilating the person who did it.
Perhaps it was the memories from that camera that stained me. That thing was my life and the sole cause of my happiness for the past five years. And now it was in some dude’s car on the way to Mexico.
Well, I could always put a fake suitcase in my front seat, fill it with venomous snakes, leave it downtown, go about my day. In theory a great idea, but in practice probably not. So instead I opted to push that anger into my legs on a nice run across the bridge.
For a while I wasn’t sure who to blame. Myself? I fully knew what I was getting into living in this town. The city? Their policies aren’t doing anything to solve the issue, and if anything, they were encouraging it. The thief? That person actively made a choice to be immoral.
But after much debate, I finally decided to place the blame on fate. Simple, unadulterated, fate. Because somehow, a few months later, my life is significantly better than it was.
As I’m typing this sentence, I’m sitting inside a cool Starbucks outside that hellish utopia of a city. A freshly picked camera setup sits next to me, and all my debt has been completely paid off from the remaining insurance money. To top it off, another Prius somehow worked its way into my life.
If that isn’t fate, I don’t know what is. It’s time for a new era.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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