Nostalgia-trip

How many times have I driven over this bridge?

The Golden Gate is what people associate with San Francisco but my story begins and continues on the Bay Bridge, connecting Oakland with San Francisco's Financial, SOMA and Mission districts.

It started as an undergrad, living in Berkeley's sorority houses, commuting to Pacific Bell Park; Piedmont to College, Highway 24 to Highway 80, bridge and exit at Folsom Street. That time also included various ventures to the Richmond District and home : Geary to Stanyon and then the magic of the stoplights of Oak Street, turning green on command and allowing you to zip across town in the late night hours.

One time coming home at 3am on the lower tunnel of the Bay Bridge, a car pulled up next to me to display a creep with his hand down his pants, keeping in line with my Buick Century's ebb and flow on the lonely stretch of highway above water. I jammed on my breaks and shaking, realized I was a young woman alone in a car.

And that's who I continued to be when I moved into a duplex off San Pablo in South Berkeley, right off the University Ave on-ramp to 80, 6 minutes from the toll-plaza. Serena, Jayne and I shared a three bedroom, split level and ate a lot of Jack N' the Box. Our apartment was broken into right before we moved ourselves in but after we'd moved in our boxes of college crap.

I was the first to move in that house on Allston as I slept, the first time ever alone in a house, in a city, with my right hand wrapped around the neck of a baseball bat. My father had tried to give me a hand-gun to keep. I wrapped my hand around it's grip but couldn't take it out of the holster.

"If the safety comes off, you're pulling the trigger," my father established of the hand-gun's rules.

That concept shook me as I realized I wasn't ready to keep a gun.

"The bat's the next runner up," my father said before leaving me alone to ponder my third home in the Bay Area.

That winter break I continued to commute to Pacific Bell Park, this time in a green Ford Taurus, aptly dubbed, "the Little Mermaid" for her ability to glide through the rain and look as wide as a whale.

The Mermaid came with me two years later when I moved into my breathtaking studio apartment on the Best Street of San Francisco, in the BEST neighborhood of San Francisco, saddling the top of it's BEST park with the most INCREDIBLE views of the city.

The Mermaid was now commuting the opposite direction on the Bay Bridge, getting to know the stress of rushing against straffic, a salmon under the top deck, spawning towards the cute towns of the East Bay that were now the places where I worked before I returned home, the the city I liked better all along.

As I got to know the city better, I got to thinking a lot about her streets and avenues; which lane one should be in while taking Franklin instead of Van Ness and why Guerrero just might be the vein of the city's auto transportation. The Bay Bridge became a burden and once I moved to the Mission District, the Mermaid sat parked while I explored the underground snake of BART.

BART is an entirely new perspective on the repetition of city-to-city transport. Instead of the splay of cars from the mouth of the Eastbound tunnel into the four separate freeways which feed the East Bay and a sometimes hopeful sunset over the downtown views of 80 West, BART pops your ears under the water of the San Francisco Bay before thrusting you in the lap of West Oakland. There in a parking lot to your left, sitting before the aggressive blossoming of condominiums, is a Burning Man collective that, depending on the time of year, displays large burnable statues and animal-shaped mobile art. It's weird and also slightly annoying but it's also distinctly Bay Area and there's some charm to that.

When BART dips above ground again at McCarthur, I look to the left of the train to the underside of the 580 interchange and see how many people are still sleeping there or, if the area is empty, wonder what time the police did a "clean out". As 2008 unfolded and the ecomonomy slips more and more obviously into recession, there are more people sleeping outside, there are more people sleeping in cars. Oakland, like my neighborhood in San Francisco, starts to play host to a series of fancy condos with people still sleeping outside them.

From 16th Street BART station to downtown Berkeley, the number of people living outside, panhandling and using scarier and scarier amounts of drugs becomes worse. And the condo market becomes shiner and the coffee shops more abundant. The middle class, what's left, rides BART and ride bikes and those living inbetween the very rich and very poor find ways to survive by picking up a second job or relocating to a rural area.

But this story is about the Bay Bridge and the promises it makes and keeps, the places which it has taken me and the way it has held me up, somehow kept me driving straight, especially when I've felt a strong urge to veer my steering wheel hard right and push my weight into the gas pedal.

But the Bay Bridge always got me home.

When I was a young girl living in Tahoe, I loved nothing better in the entire world than to come to San Francisco and the drive there was the best part. The city unfolds right in front of you, the pink and yellow houses of Nob Hill and the asymmetry of the downtown triangle. I would cry to myself when driving home, even then knowing that act was slightly dramatic but using it to pay homage to the kinship I felt with the city.

The City. Living in the City, the City of San Francisco. A City Girl. It's hard to reconcile the act of leaving this city and of loving her and the memories and people she holds. The memories in every stretch of pavement, every store front and parking space, the feeling I get around 11th Avenue and on Embarcadero at the foot of the Ballpark, and the bridge is just a monster of memories. So many stories were bookended by her stretch between the towns she holds apart. And the radio was always on and the window was always down, even just a little bit.

95% of my life will change in 3 weeks when I move across the country. There's a lot to do, there are a lot of people to see and yet, the only image I have is of that final moment I'll have, looking back over the bridge to the city I hate to leave. I know I'll come back and that the feeling, just as it can be incited while exiting, is reversable upon re-entry. I know I'll be back but still dread the image of leaving; the connotations of catapulting East.

I just wonder what song will be on the radio.