Ride into Tomorrow

To you, with the engine still warm,

Welcome to the Storm Post Office. Let us lend you a sentence first; the man who wrote it later lived for a while in this very city: "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." — Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879)

The city is San Francisco, the time around September 1990. Fog climbs the steep streets from the bay, and a cable-car bell rings on into the night. The envelope is black-blue, its headline pasted together from cut-out letters, each with a temper of its own and none of them hard to read. A motorcycle wheel, photocopied until it went cream and grainy, sits beside rust-colored concert-flyer strips and a lavender xerox haze, and an olive stamp printed like a city grid is pressed into the corner.

Our carriers, though, do not ride motorcycles. The post goes slowly, slowly enough for you to finish thinking what you want to say. Write one when you are ready; the rain will keep it for you.

Green lights, and good fog

Storm Post Office

Around September 1990 · San Francisco