6. The East Bay

Previous - Transbay Transit Center

But first...

Back in 1992 I had an idea for a movie. Over the years I've had lots of "ideas" for movies but this one was different, for one thing I plotted it out scene by scene and even wrote it all down -- someplace. But just now the idea came back to me and, 24 years later, I still have the whole thing in my head. All the connections and character overlaps... the whole thing.

I'm no more likely to do something with it now than I was then, (for one thing the idea built on two movies that had recently come out and the context was important to the surprising place the story was to go), but that something as ephemeral as an imagined movie can hang around in your head for so long really surprises me. 

Oakland 

Oakland, not San Francisco, really should be the first city of Northern California. The transportation connections are much better. The weather is better. There's more room to expand. True, it is sitting on a fault that is due to cut loose at any moment, but that's not the kind of thing we hold against a city here in California.

On Friday I took the train to Oakland and then transferred to a bus to go up in the hills to the surprising location of a lawyer's office. I'm in Oakland so infrequently that when I do pass through I really see it. The area between Broadway (downtown) and Lake Merritt seems to have been redeveloped during those ghastly (for redevelopment) decades after the war. The scale is wrong for cities but right for "California." The message the built environment is sending is "we all have cars now so let's spread out."

I rode the bus about half way to Piedmont (an enclave of wealth in the Oakland hills) and walked a convenient block to the lawyer's office in a great old house. The house across the street was a grand old Victorian stripped down, but not as brutally as you sometimes see. You really had to look before you notice there must once have been much more decorative trim. The vent duct sticking out the second floor turret wall facing the street is an unfortunate addition, but I bet the wall heater or, better, stove in that bedroom is a wonderful addition on rainy winter nights. It would have made much more sense to have set the TV show Charmed here rather than in SF. Here houses really do have front, back and side yards.

The lawyers house is a completely different California look: Stucco walls and arched windows. More rambling and not as tall. There's even a citrus tree just outside the conference room window. These streets are closer to Pasadena than SF.

The only time I worked in Oakland (in my coding days, I mean) we were located in an even grander house than this right on Lake Merritt. It was wonderful, though a long walk from the train, until it caught fire and we had to move to a more conventional office in another neighborhood. 

Berkeley 

This weekend I worked both days of the Berkeley Kite Festival. The setting is wonderful. Caesar Chavez Park sits atop an old landfill in San Francisco Bay. It's connected to Berkeley by a causeway. You might be thinking this is a flat park, but it is anything but. There are hills. It has had many years to become "natural." So natural, in fact, that they've had to start a program to exterminate the burrowing animals that were disturbing the seal that separates the bay from all the tons of waste under the park.

The festival itself is quite spectacular with huge kites and experts flying kites in formation and kite fights. (Do a Google Image search.) But on the hills overlooking the main venue and to the north, just behind the row of food vendors, there are hundreds of people putting on their own show with their own kites. Many are as spectacular as the ones featured in the event.

Normally our home base is wherever they leave the giant debris boxes (dumpsters), but the City of Berkeley pays their (union rate) sanitation people to man a couple conventional garbage trucks and haul the bags of waste we sort to the trucks. (Until the end when they drive the trucks through the event and pick up anything that remains.) 

The trucks -- and therefore our home base -- are located in a saddle between two areas of hills. Looking west from that vantage point you see across the bay past Alcatraz to the Golden Gate and its bridge. I stress the Gate and not the bridge because the weather here (the micro climate) is determined by the wind and fog blowing directly through the Gate. North and south it might be sunny and warm but here it is often foggy, cold, and very windy. Hence a great location for a kite festival. 

I tend to get really wrapped up in my work so I can be oblivious to my surroundings, but I really do try to pay attention -- especially in Golden Gate Park and here on the Bay (Treasure Island is even better). Every time I would climb the slope up to our home base I would see the stunning vista of the Bay with SF's skyline to the south and the hills of Angel Island and Marin to the north. And then I would turn around (looking down wind) and see the sky (often blue on Sunday) full of colorful kites.

And then I would go back into the crowd to sort down a badly contaminated three container (compost, recycling, landfill) trash station only to have someone toss their plate full of food into the landfill container I had just cleaned out, and I would want to drag that person to the bay (by the hair or the junk) and drown them... slowly.

Next - 7. Socks & concrete