I was hungover the first time I visited Oakland. The night before, I’d downed roughly an entire bottle of red wine and several cans of Milwaukee’s Best, smoked most of a pack of Camel Lights, and stayed up all night trying to impress my mother with my knowledge of ’70s rock (I had both Mott the Hoople and the Raspberries on my iTunes playlist — who wouldn’t be impressed?). My husband and I had an early flight to Oakland the next morning to visit his parents, who’d recently moved there from Tucson.
I had no interest in seeing Oakland. I imagined it as an antechamber to San Francisco, a place where you slept between doing exciting, life-affirming things in the city — somewhere to hang your hat, but no destination for two strivers with newly minted graduate degrees.
It was raining when we arrived, a pelting downpour with sideways winds, so the plane seemed to leapfrog down the runway, and a little girl in front of me vomited on my husband’s shoe. We took a shuttle from the airport to my in-laws’ house, and as we approached the hill that led to their neighborhood the driver doubted aloud whether the van could make it. It did, and from my in-laws’ house I could see five miles of wet concrete and another five miles of bay separating me from the glittering cosmopolis across the bridge.
The next day we went to Walgreen’s and walked through a neighborhood I now know to be affluent. I marveled at the sidewalk cafes and the lights garlanding a mom-and-pop grocery and kept thinking, “This isn’t slummy. This isn’t slummy at all.” Oakland’s violent reputation had colored my view of the city to such a degree that each organic coffee roastery and high-end tchotchke shop seemed new, rolled out just for my visit and sure to evaporate as soon as I looked away. That Oakland was in the vanguard of a new zeitgeist never occurred to me then; I was just thankful we weren’t mugged.
On the third day of our trip, we finally made it into San Francisco. The lanes on the Bay Bridge seemed impossibly narrow and chaotic, everyone hurtling toward certain death just to edge one car length closer. The city delighted me with its sheer glass buildings and strong coffee and women hurrying back to work in black heels. It had a verticality, a cityness, conspicuously absent from Lawrence, Kansas; Birmingham, Alabama; and Syracuse, New York — the three places I’d lived since leaving my hometown in South Texas eight years before. Walking through SoMa I said, “I could live here.”
One year later that possibility became reality — sort of. We didn’t quite make it to SoMa but settled instead in the basement apartment of my in-laws’ house. My husband had left his job in academia for the private sector at the same time that I was trying to find a position in finance (scarcely three months after the Lehman Brothers collapse, someone really should have steered me toward the comparatively lucrative world of fast food).
The bay, the Golden Gate, the trees and the verdant hills, the vistas — always another goddamn vista. Eventually, the landscape washed out and became white noise I learned to ignore.
Oakland was never meant to be permanent. “I didn’t move all the way from Kansas to end up in Oakland,” I told myself. “If we’re gonna be here, we’re gonna be in the city.” I could always see San Francisco. I could see it from my in-laws’ living room, from their dining room, from their bedroom, and even from their driveway. The basement was the only part of the house without a city view. Jobless, friendless, and penniless, my husband and I spent 11 months in that house at that dining room table, firing out cover letters and résumés, starting blogs and abandoning them weeks later.
I realized I hated Oakland.
I looked down at it from my vantage point 1,000 feet up the hill, and it left me cold. The bay, the Golden Gate, the trees and the verdant hills, the vistas — always another goddamn vista. Eventually, the landscape washed out and became white noise I learned to ignore.
Then I began to think that I didn’t deserve it, that Northern California belonged to happy people who could gorge themselves on spectacular sunsets and $15 sandwiches. I longed to return to Laredo, Texas. The Bay Area was too big and too expensive, but mostly it was too precarious, toy cities awaiting destruction. As I was two months pregnant at this point, my husband did me the courtesy of pretending to consider a move to Laredo, America’s largest city without a bookstore. Chalk it up to pregnancy hormones, but the infatuation with Texas died a quick death once I realized that Trader Joe’s sold chocolate-covered potato chips.
We moved out of my in-laws’ house after 15 months and took a nondescript two-bedroom in the Adams Point neighborhood near Lake Merritt. Stricken with what I later realized was prenatal depression, I spent the first few months in our new apartment crying. I cried because my husband left for work in the morning, and I cried because I was happy he came home in the evening. And again I blamed Oakland. I walked to the Lakeshore neighborhood, a vibrant place teeming with city life, and all I saw were strangers. For at least a year, I had the recurring thought that if I died on the street, no one would know who I was. Lingering at the free sample counter at Trader Joe’s, willing the spoon of chicken tikka masala and one-ounce cup of coffee to kill another hour, I’d wish that someone would speak to me. Once someone did, but only to admonish me for having caffeine while pregnant. When my daughter was born, the loneliness became even more apparent: my only friend in the whole city was a baby.
It's a peculiar thing that happens to people when they move here, but at some point you begin to feel ownership of the place and pride in its progress, as though you did that. Maybe it's borne of the city's hardscrabble image. Do people in Detroit or Baltimore have the same urge to brag that more than 200 new restaurants opened in the last three years?
But friendships did form — first a trickle, then a stream. I had a second baby, and my pregnancies and their attendant miseries are so removed from my life that now I tell out-of-town guests I can give them a tour of parking lots I puked in. We live in a different neighborhood now, a place where I feel, perhaps erroneously, that it's safe to leave on my wedding ring when I walk the kids to the park. And I don’t feel so alone anymore, though I’m not yet familiar enough with cashiers that I can forget my ID and still buy wine.
Best of all, Oakland no longer leaves me cold. It’s a peculiar thing that happens to people when they move here, but at some point you begin to feel ownership of the place and pride in its progress, as though you did that. Maybe it’s borne of the city’s hardscrabble image. Do people in Detroit or Baltimore have the same urge to brag that more than 200 new restaurants opened in the last three years? Or is civic pride just confirmation bias for having chosen to live in a city where rent is nearly double the national average and homicides occur in the triple digits? No, Oakland is a city on the ascent (if Oakland was a start-up, perhaps we’d be in the mezzanine capital stage), and everyone wants to leave it better than they found it. Volunteering, shopping local, attending First Friday, and paying too much for jerky become civic duties more empowering than, say, voting.
What are we telling the world when we wear our address on our sleeve? It took me six years, three address changes, and 2,400 miles logged on my stroller to figure it out, but here it is: a city isn't simply where you live; it shapes who you are.
There’s a popular line of T-shirts that proclaims, “I hella love Oakland.” The slogan works on two levels: not only as a declaration of civic pride, but also as a nod to a particularly Oaklandian word — hella. Other shirts iconify the 240-foot-tall cranes that tower over the Port of Oakland, massive brontosaurus-looking structures built to unload millions of shipping containers. Oakland has transcended the bounds of geography to become a brand. But why has such ferocious worship become a local pastime? What are we telling the world when we wear our address on our sleeve? It took me six years, three address changes, and 2,400 miles logged on my stroller to figure it out, but here it is: a city isn’t simply where you live; it shapes who you are.
I realized I had come to love Oakland one day while walking up MacArthur Boulevard near Lake Merritt. I bent down to tie my daughter’s shoe, and there by her feet was a tiny wooden painting of a gnome, maybe three inches high, nailed to a utility pole. The charm of this unexpected street art wasn’t what got me, but rather the fact that it seemed so obvious that such a thing would exist here. Of course there’s a guy who goes around at night and nails little paintings of gnomes to utility poles — it’s Oakland!
What if I had left after that first miserable year here? Packed up and headed back down south? I might be a scrapbooker; I might own a four-wheeler; I might be a Republican. Or what if I had convinced my husband to move to San Francisco and forgo homeownership in service of a belief that living in Oakland was somehow selling ourselves short? I imagine the San Francisco version of me would own more Lululemon pants.
Before moving here, I had a jaded view of America, having lived in the North, South, East, and Midwest and having crisscrossed the country several times in my Hyundai. American cities were all the same, I told myself. The same Chili’s, the same bland strip malls, the same manufactured town centers with a fountain and an Apple store. Oakland taught me that a city is more than what’s there — it’s a place made most real by its flaws.
If a city is in your bones when it becomes a thing you call yourself, then let me declare: I’m hella Oakland.