I drove a lot today. Initially through the highways of Oregon and northern California, but at long last I arrived in golden San Francisco, which might end up hosting most of the rest of my trip.

I also ended up driving quite a bit inside the Bay area – I found myself attending a lecture in Stanford about the middle-east situation and possible conclusions to it. The lecture itself wasn’t very good, but it was a very surprising place to find an old friend, and above all – it led me through several sections of the I-280, one of the bay area highways.

Let me tell you, I’ve driven through many roads in the last month. The Illinois tollways and the endless Nebraska corn-strewn interstate, narrow Upstate New York country roads and crumbling Wyoming trails. In Seattle, the highways converge into large overpasses near the city center, but it’s all a mess of ramps and tunnels and you can’t actually see anything there.

But in San Francisco… wow. Huge concrete shafts, 10 or 20 meters tall, 10 meters wide, reach out to the sky. On these supports rest the highways – wavy platforms of concrete and metal that wind around high above the city, offering an amazing view of the city. The sheer size of them is amazing. Thousands of tons of concrete poured into free-floating curves soaring above the city. It’s fucking MAJESTIC. It’s like the very essence of the Second Wave. Modern Man holds in his hands the steam engine, the electric motor, the nuclear bomb. He surveys his surroundings and imposes his vision upon it. If there’s a mountain, we’ll dig through it. If there’s a valley – we’ll bridge over it. I think this is what appeals to me in the aesthetics of the skyscraper and of the parking lot – the sheer magnitude of the engineering and construction involved. Modern society totally overwhelming the world around.

Before any would-be treehuggers accuse me of encouraging indiscriminate arborcide and rapine, I do believe the second wave belongs in the past, and present and future engineering efforts can learn to work with and around, not through and against. We’ve gotten good enough to complement rather than replace. But that doesn’t mean I can’t admire these relics of a civilization not quite gone.