Another Dawn at the Seal Rock Inn
writing from the Hunter S. Thompson room at Point Lobos in San Francisco (from the notebooks)
Dear Wanderers,
I am writing to you from the Hunter S. Thompson room at the Seal Rock Inn in San Francisco. Immediately to the left is Sutro Park, and directly in front of me Land’s End and Point Lobos. The ocean is a few hundred yards from here, but I can’t see it. From this vantage point, all the world is a cool white blanket of fog.
Room 305 of the Seal Rock Inn is called the Hunter S. Thompson room because it is the room where Thomspon infamously holed up for three weeks in January of 1973 to write Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail 1972. The room had been rented for Thompson by Rolling Stone magazine in the hopes of getting him to write the book they’d been bankrolling for a year. Fear and Loathing famously begins like this:
Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 a.m. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn…out here at the far end of Geary Street: this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America. From my desk I can see the dark jagged hump of ‘Seal Rock’ looming out of the ocean in the gray morning light. About two hundred seals have been barking out there most of the night. Staying in this place with the windows open is like living next to a dog pound…
I am writing this in July of 2024. It was the early morning buses that woke me this morning, and they’re now lined up in a row along La Playa, the 38R sign glowing in the fog.