Photo: The Ruins at the Edge of the World

It's surprising, sometimes, how quickly the works of humans can fall into wreck and ruin. Such is the case with San Francisco's Sutro Baths - one hundred years ago, they were a proud complex of swimming pools. They burned down in 1966, and what's left today is crumbled stone next to the roaring, ceaseless Pacific waves. When I went down to them, I found them strongly reminiscent of the ruins of Pompeii; as if some very lost Romans found their way to the Golden Gate centuries before any other Europeans, and built themselves a city on the shore of an endless ocean.

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