Blog o’ Gnosis

Well, it’s been a busy week since I came back from my trip. I think I’ve caught up with everything essential, even plowing through the dreaded FAFSA form for Lyra’s financial aid. Ugh, I absolutely hate that thing, but I’ve filled one out for various kids for several years running now. You’d think it would get easier with time…but then again, my mother always told me I’d learn to like peas when I got older, too.

On the flight home I had the opportunity to play my favorite plane game: Name That Landmark. We flew south into the SF Bay Area on a clear night, and the first thing I noticed out my window was blackness with here and there a cluster of soft lights and no lighted roads anywhere. Then there was one curved, lighted bridge expanse, very short, leading from nothing into nothing. Must be a levee over the Delta.

More clusters of light followed, and here and there a straight line of road. I’m a little hazy on my Solano County geography, so I was waiting to see something like the Carquinez Bridge, or Highway 37 heading west from Vallejo into Novato. But for some reason I never saw that. Then the plane window gave me a huge hint: a very long, well-lighted bridge with a rise on the Eastern side, and on the West a peninsula of intense floodlights. Easy: the Richmond Bridge and San Quentin Prison, locus of human cruelty and suffering. Even from the air with the advantage of distance it looks hideous. But the lights outlining the hills and the vast, black Bay are still absolutely breathtaking to me.

It’s not always easy to love the Bay Area. I grew up here, and think it is the most beautiful place on earth. But I’m always happy to drive home after my frequent visits, back up to the North Coast where the traffic thins out and there’s room to think. I’m glad I learned to drive down there during the ’70s when there were probably about a third as many people on the roads; today I’d be in constant fear of my kids’ lives if they were teenagers out on the highways.

Once we passed the Richmond Bridge the game became pretty easy: Lawrence Hall of Science. The Mormon Temple. Lake Merritt! The Bay Bridge, Alameda with its little curlicues of housing development streets right up to the water’s edge.

I have very little respect for Alameda but I love Oakland, my hometown. There is something very right-sized about Oakland. There’s the best and the worst there, with rarely any margin between the two. If you’re from Oakland you can’t really put on airs. There are beautiful neighborhoods, sure, with high-priced housing and high-end shopping districts. But you’re still in Oakland. You still have to stay grounded and keep your wits about you. Yet even in the worst parts of town, I experience Oakland as being a softer city than San Francisco. Maybe it’s something in the air, having more of a buffer from that salt spray.

I also spent a fair amount of time in Berkeley growing up, as my best friend in high school lived there and we always drove to her house when we cut class. You can travel anywhere in the world, and if they ask you where you were born and you say “Berkeley,” it is immediately understood: you stand for something. They don’t know quite what, yet, but they will watch you closely and assume that sooner or later your radical stripes will emerge. Whereas if you say you grew up in Oakland you have immediate street cred, even if you grew up in the hills like I did, and people will generally relax and assume you’ll be comfortable anywhere. That part comes in handy.

Oakland is gritty and urban, but not as jagged feeling as San Francisco. In Oakland I like the feeling of being able to head East into the hills and find solitude. If you’re in San Francisco with no access to a bridge and you need to leave, you either have to swim or head south into the death pit of San Jose and the South Bay. Not that I plan my travel to the Bay Area with planned escape routes in mind, but the reptile part of my brain doesn’t rest easy for very long in the City.

Still, I consider myself bi-coastal. Yes I know, there are those who say that’s a cop-out, that you should choose a coast and be happy with it, that everyone who says they’re bi-coastal secretly is more one coast than the other. But I can honestly say that I love both coasts of the Bay: San Francisco and Oakland/Berkeley. So which is my City By the Bay? I may have to take that secret to the grave with me. It is a fact, however, that that song by Journey was going through my head as we landed, even though I thought the band went downhill after Steve Perry became lead singer. But what’s a Bay Area girl to do?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.