entry 002. forged in salt, wind & gold // San Francisco
Salt, Wind, & Gold. Forged in Salt, Wind, & Gold. 2025
Is there a place you have a peculiar, inexplicable connection to? Not somewhere you've lived. Not somewhere you visit intentionally. No family there, no close friends, no obvious reason to keep returning, but for some random reason or another, you always find your way back there?
For me, that place is San Francisco.
The first time I visited "The City" was for work. I traveled a lot back then, so whenever I arrived somewhere new, I carved out time to explore. San Francisco is one of the truly great American cities. Its history, its influence on the world, its density of idea and ambition. As someone who appreciates that weight, I made sure to accommodate a full day of discovery and exploration.
My honest first impression: it was fine.
Iodized. Forged in Salt, Wind, & Gold. 2025
Bustling. The cityscape. The hills. The homes. The homeless. Mostly what I expected, which wasn't a disappointment exactly, more like confirmation. I wasn't quick to dismiss it. However, I wasn't necessarily in a rush to come back either.
And yet, a few years later, I found myself heading back.
This time, I had an entire team based in SF. Different exposure entirely. A few of them were younger, twenty-somethings still finding their footing, while others had been there long enough to feel like part of the city's furniture. It was a dynamic contrast, but offered me two very distinct lenses to see and experience the city differently.
Every time I came into town, I asked a different cohort of the team to plan an outing. Over time, they walked me through nearly everything. We ate everywhere and ate everything. They took me glass blowing in Bayview. Speakeasies, dive bars, gay bars, Giants games, Warriors games, museums, cable car rides, Chinatown. I saw the city through their eyes, not mine.
Despite all of that, I never looked back upon the city and said to myself, "wow".
Over the years, San Francisco kept finding ways to pull me back anyway. A conference. A speaking engagement. A client meeting. A trip north to the wine region. I kept arriving, kept exploring, kept leaving without the feeling I was apparently supposed to have. I wasn't even sure what that feeling was. I only knew it hadn't come.
Descent, In Layers. Forged in Salt, Wind, & Gold. 2025
On my most recent visit, I had real time to myself for the first time. I talked with strangers, locals and visitors who carried different versions of the same city. I had a solo dinner. But what grounded me was an afternoon at the SFMOMA, where I walked through a KAWS retrospective alongside a long-overdue exhibition of Suzanne Jackson's paintings. The quiet tension in that pairing sparked something. A global art market phenomenon sharing walls with a Black Bay Area painter who spent decades being looked past by those same rooms.
And then it all settled.
Not a revelation. More like a gradual recognition of something I'd been circling for years.
Every visit, every outing, every conversation. The moments that felt most alive were the ones mediated by other people. Different races, orientations, nationalities, ages. Long-time locals who remembered a different city. Bright-eyed transplants still charmed by the version they arrived to. Through them, I actually learned something: how much the city had changed, and what it had traded away to become what it is now. Its cultural roots. The slow erosion of economic diversity. The particular strain of a place that calls itself a global center of progress and innovation, while the communities who gave it its character, its music, its rhythms, its nerve, keep getting quietly displaced to make room for that progress.
That's what had always felt off. The city I kept visiting wasn't fully the city those people were describing. I was seeing the surface of something that used to be layered.
Maybe that was the disconnect. The city never felt real because I hadn't found the real of it yet. Not in the landmarks or the views or the menus. The real city was in the people still carrying its history forward, even as they were being edged out of it.
Next time I go back, I'll look for that.
Then again, I'm not sure the city wants to be found like that.
Not yet. Maybe not ever.
In Wind. Forged in Salt, Wind, & Gold. 2025
Written & Photographed by Terrence True
Shot on Fuji X-T5 + Shot on iPhone.
