While living in the San Francisco Bay area, I was fascinated with how people’s expectations met with reality. A common example: people would plan for years — sometimes their entire lives — to travel to San Francisco and see the Golden Gate Bridge. Many of these people came from inland states, and had never seen the ocean, and found the vast expanse of the Pacific, when combined with the engineering marvel of the bridge, to be almost overwhelming.
But others would complain. They would complain that the bridge was not “golden,” but red. This reflects two issues, the first being: the bridge is not named Golden Gate, but rather the bridge crosses the Golden Gate Strait. The Strait, between Marin County and San Francisco, was named by John Frémont, who called it Chrysopolae (Golden Gate) after the similarity to the harbor of Byzantium, the Ancient Greek colony that became Constantinople and is today known as Istanbul. The name has nothing to do with the California Gold Rush, either; that came a couple years after Frémont named the Strait.
The second issue: the bridge is not “red” but International Orange, a color often used on navigation markers, life jackets, space suits, experimental airplanes, and other objects where high visibility is an asset. Orange is not a color normally found in nature, so objects painted in International Orange are more readily seen in forests, farm land, oceans and lakes.
When not complaining about the color of the bridge, visitors would often complain of visibility. The majority of visitors would come in the summer, and San Francisco is famous for summer fogs. As the dry, hot air from California’s Central Valley pours down and hits the cold, moist air of the California coast, it condenses into fog, often quite dense fog. I would frequently see visitors madly taking photos of “the bridge” even though they couldn’t see it through the fog. As one gentleman put it, “I spent my whole life saving up for this trip; I’m going to take a picture of the bridge.”
