Coming north over the bridge, I mean to take the Alexander Avenue exit, the one that runs you out along the headlands on your left with the Bay opening on your right. It is not the only way in, and which way is right depends on where you start and what you are after; most days, I am headed to the waterfront. But Alexander is the one I aim for, and I miss it more often than I would like to admit. It comes up fast, and if my head is half somewhere else, I am already past it, carried up the highway and getting off instead at Spencer Avenue, winding down the back way into town.
It is the wrong turn I have made enough times that it has become a route of its own, down through hills where the homes seem impossibly built into the slope, looking out over Richardson Bay, a few more streets taking you the rest of the way down to Bridgeway and the water.
Bridgeway is the front of Sausalito, the waterfront road where the town meets the Bay and where most of the visitors stay. I walk it when I have errands to run, then cut a block back to Caledonia for sushi or poke, where the foot traffic thins and the place starts to feel like somewhere people live rather than somewhere they drive to for an afternoon. A block is all it takes. The water is still behind you, but the ferry crowds are not; they come off the boats onto Bridgeway and mostly stay there, and Caledonia goes about its own day, good restaurants and boutiques and delis with the odd dive bar mixed in.
Harbor Drive is where the days on the water begin. The road dead-ends at Fish., the seafood place sitting where the pavement stops, and the line to order sometimes stretches half an hour. I stand in it anyway, for the classic fish and chips or the softshell crab bao tacos. Just past the restaurant is the marina, where I get out on a sailboat a few times a year.
On the other side of town, up in the southern hills where the houses give way to trees and the road narrows, Sausalito Boulevard is the one I run. It snakes along the ridge, and from the top, San Francisco sits across the water, far enough away to look finished. Then it lets you back down toward town, whichever way you take it.
You may have noticed the names by now.
This is where they come from. Not from a story we built and then went looking for words to fit, but from a real place I drive wrong turns through, eat on, sail out of, and run above, written onto the labels more or less as I found them: Spencer the way in, Bridgeway the water, Caledonia the block behind it, Harbor the boats, Sausalito the road in the hills and the town beneath it both at once.
Not all of them. Cazneau I picked partly because it is a good word to say, and the street has a view worth the climb. Ebbtide I chose because it sounded right the first time I read it off a sign, and I will tell you plainly that I know nothing remarkable about the street itself. It is a name I liked from a town I know, which is all a name needs to be.
A brand is supposed to invent a heritage for things like this, a clean reason behind every choice. The truth is closer to the wrong turn. I learned the place by living near it and getting some of it wrong, and the names came off the same streets I would have driven anyway. They were never meant to be explained. They were meant to be from somewhere, and they are.
Kevin