San Francisco has hills; McLeod is hills, bathed in stairways and buildings of heart-stopping verticality. One wrong step could easily end it all, either by a precipitous fall or a speeding taxi.
Everywhere, there is new construction, often illegal. At midnight, we hear axes against trees. In the morning, new areas have been cleared, awaiting the brick-burdened donkeys that comprise much of the hillside traffic. Saturday and Sundays are often the most active. For hours at a time, Indian construction workers hammer the concrete wall of our apartment. The sound is unbearable. The only thing worse might be doing the work itself, seven days a week.
Here’s the wall of the apartment where we’re staying…
…and here’s what it sounds like from the inside (add a debilitating case of food poisoning to the mix and you’ll have some sense of what this day was like).
