The Golden Gate - 14 December 2001

As we wheeled north over the long peninsula that sticks up like a thumb with San Francisco as the nail, on our right were the salt reservoirs, on our left the Pacific Ocean.

And after a further turn we were over the great bay and the arching span of the Oakland Bay Bridge.

An old man leaned over and squinted down.

"Well," he said, "it's still there."

And almost in the same breath, as he sighted the rust-red span of the Golden Gate Bridge: "They're both there."

This was a pretty grisly joke to be making just then but if many passengers had heard him I'm sure some would have heaved a chuckling sigh of relief.

Only days earlier the governor of California had taken to the telly and reported a word he'd had from some government department, which was never quite clear at the time, that there was reason to believe an attempt would be made to destroy some of America's bridges - unspecified.

The United States is a land of hundreds of rivers.

The heartland of the continent - the great middle stretch between the Appalachians in the east and the Rockies in the west - alone has 57 navigable rivers flowing into the huge Mississippi, all of which made possible the settlement and commerce of the Midwest and the South.

And farther west, between the high Sierras and the smaller coast range, is a long central valley in California which is half the length of Europe, whose two rivers were made to reverse their flow so as to distribute water where it was most needed.

The Central Valley Project, you may be sure, was one of the first American institutions to call on the government after the dreaded 11th to have its dams protected both by land and by fighter jets.

But to come back to where we were.

No city's commerce - work and pleasure, life - is more dependent on two bridges than San Francisco.

The beautiful Golden Gate Bridge spanning the entrance to the bay is not only a symbol of California's power and pride as the prime North American link with the commerce and cultures of the Pacific, it's an essential highway to northern California.

And the Bay Bridge that joins the city of Oakland and San Francisco itself is the main artery to the inland cities of California and on east. It carries the densest commuter traffic of any American city.

When the Bay Bridge was damaged and out of order after the 1989 earthquake the added mileage that every commuter, every trucker, had to drive every day was not only a huge inconvenience but a massive blow to the region's prosperity.

So when Governor Davies got the warning word apparently it was left up to him to pass it on to Californians or take the risk of keeping it to himself and have the thing come true.

Well it didn't come true then and the governor was hotly denounced. Of course if he'd said nothing and it had had happened he would have been castigated for life.

When we arrived in our hotel and looked out, down and out, on the old Chinese in the park below doing their grave, slow-motion exercises, no sight could have been more reassuring - the same scene, could have been the same Chinaman, I'd photographed from that same angle 40 years ago.

We found people a touch sobered by the recent bridge scare but 11 September had not apparently had the deep wounding effect it's had on all New Yorkers. With old friends we talked very little about it, with some not at all.

Of course we did not mingle with people on the streets - there are sections of the city that still hold the national record for random street crime - but I did notice that on the stroke of noon the same daily queue gathers without fail outside a Methodist church - they're generally classified as the homeless and in song and story are sad, decent, losers down on their luck.

But they include also and plentifully the shiftless and the listless, the junkies and the chronic winos who started the queues and will end them.

The additional beggars were waiters and janitors and other workers laid off by the big, the swankiest hotels. They have taken a ferocious beating.

For San Francisco's main business is tourism and it's a wonderful tourist city and always a favourite for the annual convention of everybody from political parties to bank managers, architects, women's clubs to chiropractors.

In the week after the 11th the wholesale cancellation of conferences, conventions, balls and celebrity crooners dropped the occupancy rate of two of the city's grandest hotels to 15 and 20% respectively.

Such a hotel throughout the year expects to average 80-85% and can get by on, say, 70.

But while we were there most people were eager to assure us, or perhaps to hope, that things were perking up.

The bigger blow to San Francisco business - to the restaurant business most of all - fell last summer, after the big bang you heard was the bursting of the stock market bubble. The end of the dreamland 80s and 90s and the dot.com millionaires.

But certainly there were cheering signs of a slow return to what we used to call normal and President Harding called "normalcy".

Conventions. Last week there was, I think, the first serious one in San Francisco.

A national society - the American Geophysical Society - held its annual meeting to consider, among other things, the story accompanying a scary headline in a paper that doesn't go in for scary headlines.

It proclaimed "Drastic shifts in climate are likely, experts say". Not a scare cooked up by a lazy journalist but a long, grave report, published by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which is just about as expert as a group as you can get on any scientific specialty in this country.

The report was written by 11 geoscientists, climatologists, biochemists and a professor of atmospheric sciences. I didn't even know there was one atmospheric science.

Anyway their conclusions are pretty startling and should not be taken lightly.

Briefly: It seems that we've been thinking too long about climatic change as a slow, massive, elephantine process.

It's time, the San Francisco geoscientist says, to consider the real possibility of abrupt changes.

We think of changes being like those on a light dimmer but some coming changes, he said, could be as sudden as a light switch.

As a recent example he mentioned the Younger Dryas cold interval.

And how recent was that, professor?

"We're talking about," he says, "12,800 years ago."

Anyway the Ice Age had slowly vanished. All was, compared with previous ages, cosy and warm. And suddenly: Bam!

The switch went off and the average temperature everywhere dropped by 10 degrees and it stayed cold for more than a thousand years.

No humans, by the way, were around - at least they hadn't yet invented barometers, thermometers or insurance policies.

How do the professors know all this? - as my grandmother used to say about the nastier bits of the private life of Napoleon, of whom she was a great admirer.

Well it's always a good point when experts start pinpointing 12,800 years. I'd always thought the Younger Dryas dated from 12,780 years ago.

One expert says that before we get the big surprise and wake up to a thousand years of Manchester in January we could get a sort of warning from watching the atmosphere flooded with carbon dioxide. That is if George W Bush doesn't sign a treaty forbidding it.

Anyway they all concluded that it's unlikely to happen next Friday morning.

Some time, is one expert guess, some time in the next couple of centuries.

But the report ends by warning: "The public must not be fatalistic about this threat."

This is rather like the attorney general telling us not to get anxious about anthrax but at the same time be on the alert every time we go shopping, or stoop to pick up the morning mail.

So I think the final word is: Men, don't get panicky. If you wake up on Christmas morning and it's 10 degrees colder than had been predicted it may last only till 3,001 or even this New Year's Eve.

This sort of painstaking research reminds me of the prophesy years and years ago of a distinguished ophthalmologist from the University of Minnesota which, by the way, is the centre, possibly the world centre, of sleep research - you heard me.

The ophthalmologist's bombshell was dropped, I think, sometime in the 1930s but the reverberations of it rippled through medical circles for decades.

Quite simply, Dr Shastid predicted that the human face was developing in such a way that in time man would become a Cyclops - a being with one eye only.

There would be a period of preliminary narrowing of the bridge of the nose, as the eyes grew closer and closer.

Then came the soothing punchline which was passed on to a nervous old New Yorker, a portly man with a broad face, a moustache and I admit a squinty look, name of Benchley.

Told that all was well, that Dr Shastid didn't expect the process to be complete perhaps for a millennium of two, Benchley said:

"Well, I don't know, my eyes are so close together as they are that I bet I win. I bet I'm the first one-eyed man in the world."

Talking of Robert Benchley and memorable humorists I must say that in San Francisco I had a line addressed to me that was worthy of Benchley.

Four of us had ended dinner and were getting up to leave the restaurant but four people in the opposite banquette had just risen and were blocking the aisle.

"They won't move," my host said.

So I announced in a public voice: "We'll make them move." It had the desired effect.

A big man of the four swivelled round, peered at me and said: "Has anybody ever told you, you look amazingly like Alistair Cooke?"

I said, as I've said a hundred times: "My mother was the first."

Immediately their other man, a small Scotsman, leaned over and said gently: "She must have been a very elegant lady to notice it so soon."

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