Arriving into Light

The sun came up beneath the Bay Bridge, and the water carried its glow all the way to my feet. In the foreground stood a cluster of old timber piles, dark against the brightening bay.
It was my first time in San Francisco, a city I knew the way most of us first know cities, through stories and screens. Sleep could wait. Well before the streets woke, I was out walking the waterfront.
A little way along from the Ferry Building and its clock tower, the scene assembled itself: the long clean geometry of the bridge, the glow gathering on the horizon behind it, and those weathered posts standing in the shallows like a question.
I wondered what they had been, what they once held up, what tied up alongside them. The answer, I learned later, is that they are the bones of old piers, left standing from the years when this whole shoreline worked for its living. The port moved on; the timber stayed.
First mornings in new places have a light of their own. Standing there while the day arrived, I felt the particular happiness of being somewhere entirely new with everything still ahead: the morning, the city, the trip.
The eye travels from the worn timber in the shallows to the bright steel spanning the bay, the sun rising behind both. The day was arriving. So, in every sense, was I.