San Francisco Bay is both a sustaining landscape and a measure of what has changed since the collapse of civilization. Its fish and surrounding streams help support the surviving community, while its bridges preserve a visible record of the world Ish remembers. Over time, the Bay’s waters and shores become part of a new pattern of life in which human settlement is no longer the landscape’s controlling force.

Setting and Changing Perspective

From the balcony of his home, Ish can still see much of San Francisco Bay and its two great bridges, though the trees have grown taller during the years since the disaster. The view brings together two different ways of understanding the same place. To Ish, the bridges testify to the power and achievements of the civilization that built them; the younger generation regards them as ordinary features of the landscape. The Bay thus remains physically familiar while its meaning shifts across generations: for Ish it is bound to a vanished human world, whereas for the children it belongs to the world they have always known.

The surrounding landscape has changed along with that perspective. Ish notices that the air no longer carries the mixture of smoke, gasoline, cooking, garbage, and human activity he associates with the Old Times. It has the fresh quality he once associated with fields and mountain meadows. The Bay is not simply a backdrop for memories of the city. It belongs to an environment in which human activity has receded and other forms of life have become more visible.

Food and Water

The Bay provides a practical resource as well as a setting for reflection. In Year 10, children propose calling the year the Year of the Fishing, because they have discovered that the Bay is full of striped bass. Fishing supplies a welcome variety in the diet and gives the community a shared source of enjoyment. Ish observes that their way of life already provides plenty to do in securing food and comfort; the fishing adds pleasure to that work rather than replacing it with a separate pursuit of amusement.

Water is another part of the community’s relationship with the region. When concern arises over the failure of familiar household conveniences, the older adults initially think in terms of finding bottled water in shops and warehouses. They then recognize that the area is not a desert, even in the approaching dry season: small streams in nearby gullies must be supplying water to cattle and other animals. The younger people know where seasonal streams, pools, and springs can be found, while Ish, despite his training as a geographer, still thinks readily in terms of streets and intersections. His son Walt directs him to running water in a gully beneath San Lupo Drive, carried under the road by a storm drain. The episode reveals a generational change in geographical knowledge: the children know the land by its living water sources, while Ish’s knowledge remains tied to the built environment of the former city.

Bridges and the Human Past

The two bridges hold different practical and emotional positions in Ish’s view of the Bay. He has not visited the Golden Gate Bridge for many years, and reaching it would require a long walk or a difficult journey with a dog-team and an overnight camp. The Bay Bridge, by contrast, remains visible from his home. He remembers it as a crowded crossing, with six lanes of fast-moving traffic and buses and trucks rumbling along its lower level. In the present, only one car remains on it, an empty coupe parked near the western end.

The change is visible in the bridge’s surfaces. Its green paint has faded to a moss-gray, and rust has dulled the steel towers and cables. Birds perch on the high structures; Rats live among the piers, where they feed at low tide on mussels and crabs. The roadway has roughened and cracked, with a little grass and a few hardy weeds growing where dust has gathered. Yet the bridge’s deeper structure remains largely intact. Corrosion has penetrated farther at the eastern approach, where salt water reaches the steel supports during storms, and an engineer would have required repairs before reopening it to traffic. The contrast is central to Ish’s impression: the bridge still embodies the engineering capacity of the Old Times, but its continued existence does not mean that the society that maintained it can return.

Fire, Wildlife, and Ecological Change

San Francisco Bay also shapes the course of a major wildfire. In a dry summer, lightning-set fires burn through northern California’s tangled second-growth forests and accumulated slash. Ish and his companions watch the fires at night as they sweep the slopes on the north side of the Bay, burning from the bottom of the mountain to the top and stopping only when no fuel remains. The Bay’s broad arms help keep the fire on the north side; with no lightning storms on the south side to ignite new fires, that side escapes this outbreak. Ish believes that few forests in California may remain unburned and that their recovery will take centuries.

The novel places this event within a broader account of how the environment changes after human management ceases. The forests that burn are described as products of human activity, made more vulnerable by slash piles and brush fields and previously protected by sustained fire suppression. Once the hoses and bulldozers are left unused, the landscape’s accumulated hazards meet the dry season and lightning without human intervention. The Bay’s role as a barrier matters, but it does not restore the old system of control: it limits the spread of this particular fire while the surrounding region undergoes extensive damage.

The Bay’s animals and food sources likewise appear as parts of an altered ecology. Striped bass offer the community both nourishment and recreation; birds occupy bridge structures once dominated by traffic; and Rats thrive around the piers. At one point Ish fears that plague among Rats could endanger people through infected fleas, but this is his apprehension about a possible risk, not evidence that an outbreak has occurred at the Bay. The distinction underscores the uncertainty of life in the new environment: familiar human protections have disappeared, and the surviving community must assess dangers in a landscape it no longer fully controls.

Significance

Across these episodes, San Francisco Bay connects survival, memory, and ecological change without remaining fixed in any one role. Its waters provide fish, its surrounding gullies offer dependable sources of water, and its breadth helps contain a wildfire. At the same time, its bridges make the past legible to Ish even as they become ordinary scenery to the children. The Bay outlasts the systems built around it, but it does not preserve civilization unchanged. It is a working environment for the survivors, a record of human ambition, and a boundary within a landscape increasingly governed by processes beyond human management.