A Portrait of the Bay
I am beginning to understand this place, The Bay Area. Suddenly I am in a time crunch. Only about three months left until I return to my natural habitat.
Saturday was spent in Berkeley, which I just fell in love with. It is full of rebellious youth, cafes, and tattoo shops. Berkeley is everything Stanford isn’t; the public university open to the rest of the Bay, full of industrial 60’s architecture. The students dress themselves in boots and oversized jewel-toned sweaters, and their faces adorn the lampposts down the quadrangle. It made me miss my university, which so resembles Berkeley. A walk down University Ave. felt like walking down a less gentrified Halsted. Each second-hand shop looked interesting, and I had to push away the enticement to roam through the stalls and immerse myself in the comfortable experience of shopping.
As a city, Berkeley is like its university campus: oddly diverse to my Chicagoan sensibilities. Perhaps not so diverse as Fremont, the most diverse city in the world, though Fremont is Silicon Valley and thus feels diverse in the most suburban geeky way possible. Berkeley’s diversity is the opposite of Fremont’s; no one is looking replicate their home country. And the yuppies are notably childless on a Saturday afternoon, unlike Lincoln Park mothers pushing strollers through Argo Tea.
At the end of the day, after a one-man show in San Francisco, we drive for an hour back to my Santa Clara apartment. In the heart of Silicon Valley, I fall asleep wishing I lived in other parts of this amazing place, so distinct from the rest of this state. The Bay has it’s own pulse; it ignores India’s and China’s recent booming successes, it ignores New York City’s obsession with culture, it ignores Los Angeles’ absurdity and fame. There are times when I see how it exists for itself. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel – these seemingly inanimate companies who produce things that we often cannot touch or feel – they have a physical entity here that I never realized. Google is a place, an actual place.
And the mountains are real here, too. So is the ocean. So are the trees – oh the trees are my favorite. The Bay is only a few hours away from the most amazing redwood forests. Forests are my escape – I always wished we had more nature in the Midwest. Not cornfield nature, not planted arboretums, but real protected nature. For things to grow as they were meant to grow. The redwoods in Muir Woods having creeks running in between them, with quaint bridges to take you to different paths. If I had a car, that is where I would spend every single weekend.
I leave this place on May 22nd, 2010. I am beginning to understand it, but I am not sure I will return here. I am made already of too many regions, have already spent too much discovering my identity without adding “the girl from Chicago” into it. That is who I am here – the girl from Chicago. And to Chicago I will return. Back to a place I already understand, where all the conversations have a familiar string running through them. And where everything has a meaning. Where the fight that needs to be fought hasn’t happened yet.
