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I’m From There

A Good Destination is Hard to Find

Reflections on Oakland

    Fifteen years ago—in December, 1993—I shouldered an enormous backpack and walked the three blocks from my sunny flat on 41st Street to the MacArthur BART station.
    My notion was to make my way around the world—from Oakland, California to Oakland, California—without leaving the ground. I’d travel by land and sea, but never by air. If I’d known exactly what such a journey would entail, I might have turned around before I reached Telegraph Avenue: The trip would take nine months, cover nearly 30,000 miles, and leave a trail of my DNA across the maps of 27 countries.
    The act of leaving Oakland, even with a Mini Cooper–sized pack on my back, carried an undeniable romance. I was not the first adventurer to set off on a journey from this city (though, perhaps, the first to set off on a global circumnavigation via BART). In April of 1894, a teenage Jack London boarded the Overland Limited at the downtown depot and began a six-month, 10,000-mile odyssey that would define his character and shape his life of letters. In March of 1937, 39-year-old Amelia Earhart took off from Oakland Airport for Honolulu, on the first leg of a voyage she would never complete.
    I rolled and walked, galloped and sailed from here to San Francisco, Mexico City to Belize, Brooklyn to Dakar and far beyond. My travels were occasionally perilous and often enlightening, but seldom fatal (one can follow them in my out-of-print travelogue, The Size of the World). Like Jack London, I found my perceptions of the planet indelibly altered by my experiences and encounters. Unlike Earhart, I was able to celebrate my 40th birthday en route—while stranded in the Sahara, amid the pieces of a ramshackle jeep.
    My journey ended in September 1994, aboard the Hapag-Lloyd container ship Bremen Express. We’d taken 18 days to cross the Pacific, arriving that crisp morning in sight of the Point Reyes cliffs before bearing south. No moment in my life will compare to the jubilation I felt as we sailed through the Golden Gate, past Alcatraz and beneath the towers of the Bay Bridge. The horse-like cranes lining the Port of Oakland seemed to nod in greeting. It was a triumphant homecoming: I had proved the world was round.
    Last week, I took the Blue & Gold Ferry from San Francisco to Oakland. It’s an exercise I perform, occasionally, to remind me of that long-ago day—as a middle-aged orthodontist might stroll across the field at Memorial Stadium, recalling a moment of pigskin glory.
    It was a warm summer day, and the blast of the ferry’s horn startled the tourists snapping digital photos of the Bay Bridge, the city skyline and one another. For them, I knew, the trip to Jack London Square was a diversion; a short side trip away from the Main Attraction.
    I, meanwhile, was tumbling through the Time Tunnel. The moment we cleared the dock, the emotions of that long-ago September afternoon flooded my memory circuits. As the gunmetal-gray span of the bridge blocked the sky above me, I asked myself the same question I’d asked 15 years ago: You could live anywhere. Why here?
    It wasn’t a rhetorical question. As a travel writer, and an iBook-toting citizen of the Information Age, any city on Earth—any village, almost—could serve as my base. During my round-the-world trip I’d fallen in love with a number of possible homes: Oaxaca, Marrakech, Barcelona, Kathmandu. Yet I’d made the choice to return, and cast my lot with a place that isn’t even mentioned in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.
    But while these other cities had tempted me, none had seduced me. As the ferry sliced through the water by Outer Harbor, I remembered what I’d remembered: the things I’d missed most during my absence. The salsa table at Cactus, and the barbequed-salmon-in-banana-leaf at Lotus Thai; the summer solstice performances in the Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium; the fruit stalls in Chinatown; the breeze over Lake Merritt; the Mondrian-like landscape of the docks themselves, with their labyrinth of cargo containers. I’d longed for the funky charm of Piedmont Avenue, the urbane intimacy of Yoshi’s, and the wildflowers that blanket Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve in the spring.
    The image that had returned to me most, though, was a specific memory of lunch at a popular Vietnamese restaurant. Every table in the joint was full, and the atmosphere was loud and lively. But what struck me most was the sheer, unselfconscious diversity. There were blacks, whites, Latinos and at least six Asian ethnicities. There were Jews, Muslims, pagans and Christians. And they weren’t sequestered at separate tables. Humans of every stripe were eating together, talking together and laughing together.
    It may seem incredible, but this isn’t a sight you see everywhere—not even in Sidney or Berlin, Saigon or Santiago.
    “The journey is my home,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote poetically. I like it when that’s literally true—when that sense of adventure stays with me, even after my bags are unpacked. Oakland, with its scores of interwoven cultures, is a journey all its own. It’s incredibly international, yet totally unselfconscious. It puts on no airs. Either you get it, or you don’t. And if you do, no other city in the world seems to make quite as much sense.
    The Blue & Gold ferry threaded its way along the Estuary, and snuggled up to the Clay Street Pier. I watched the riders disembark. They scattered hopefully toward the various attractions of Jack London Square. I recognized the compulsion: You visit a thousand exotic destinations, hoping to cobble together a sense of the world.
    How many of them would realize, I wondered, that it’s all right here?

Armchair Travel

    Jeff Greenwald’s solo show about his adventures, Strange Travel Suggestions, will open at the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut Street, Berkeley, at 8 p.m. Nov. 13. Tickets are $15 for JCC members and $20 for nonmembers. To purchase tickets, call (510) 848-0237 or visit www.jcceastbay.org.

—By Jeff Greenwald