I take the train in the morning and the bus at night. I’d take the bus both ways, but I leave too late for the last AM express, and the local is a long run. I prefer the bus. It’s cozier. I get to relate to the driver. I can check out the view. Just yesterday, I glanced up from my book and was astounded at the western sky.

I was sitting as usual on the starboard side of the bus, sideways over the rear wheels, so I faced west whenever we ran north. For the SF to Berkeley express, north is most of the route. As we were cruising along the highest part of the freeway interchange in the East Bay, I looked up and noticed that San Francisco was under a veritable wave of fog. Apparently behind and above the city, like a cresting shadow or a billowing shroud, a gray bank of fog reared beneath a blazing blue and gold sunset sky. The hills of the city hunkered in the grayness, with the BofA obelisk and the Transamerica pyramid poking up puny. But the top of the fog bank was edged in lit yellow, a thin blaze of incandescence like a rip against the high azure.

It was a rare sight, changing while I drank it in. I wanted to point at it like a child and stutter “Look look!” for the other passengers, but I didn’t follow that impulse. As swiftly as it rose came the understanding that “Look look!” would bring them little satisfaction and me none. They were two dozen and oblivious. Some reading, many napping, a few nodding to whatever came into the devices in their ears. A number on cell phones. I’d noticed three rings. I counted seven talkers. It annoyed me a little, because the conversations were distracting and yet insignificant. But I was also impatient; my neck hurt.

I didn’t see Josie. I wouldn’t have recognized her or approved of her if I had. She sat on my side of the bus, facing forward near the front. She talked quietly on her cell phone. I couldn’t hear her. Cindy held up the other end of their conversation, encouraging Josie to continue her classes. I didn’t know it then, but Josie was stretched rather thinly between the demands of husband and young children, her part-time job in Oakland, and her attempts to go to school at night. That’s why she was on the commuter bus, only unlike the rest of us, she was not going home.

I was. I got off the bus at my usual stop but instead of proceeding directly down the four blocks to my own I veered a bit north and approached my house from the other direction. That route took me past one of my favorite spots, a corner just a block above my place, but the intersection of some kind of magic. It always felt good right there, with the air circulating quietly, effervescing almost. Maybe it was spirits of some kind – perhaps the unassuming single family homes on that corner are built above some important graves – or maybe it was just fortunate topography. There was a little hill, with a view due west of the bay and the gateway to the ocean. And there was the fog wave, still poised above San Francisco like it was about to curl the sunset into a roiling tube of light and shadow, break upon the stepped buildings in a dark cascade, and then ebb the daylight away like undertow, pulled down and drawn west into the night.

I stood there on a quiet hill street in a residential neighborhood in a town of a hundred thousand looking on a city of a million, massaging the side of my neck with my fingers, feeling the air gentle, cool and slick against my cheeks, and I felt as if I were the only person then alive.

It lasted four minutes. In that time the setting sun changed the color of the high sky from turquoise streaked with yellow to pale striped with salmon to shading indigo, and the gray cloud transformed from a cresting frozen wave to a smoky down blanket. It seemed to tuck the city in for the night. I watched it entranced until an SUV driver pulled into a curb spot half a block down the hill and paused for some reason with headlights on. Amazing headlights: bright as day and piercing the dusk for three hundred feet. I’m sure it cost the driver little fuel, what with the engine on and all. I’m sure it blasted my reverie.