A Family that Travels: Bay Area Wandering
Postcards from a park built on rubble, a restaurant built after the '89 rumble, and a building with memorable style.
I was walking and catching up with my neighbor and pal
not too long ago. Andy is known around the world for his highly approachable style of writing about and engaging with photography at . I feel lucky to be able to call him for a lunchtime walk when I want to noodle on an idea. I had the idea I might like to start writing a Substack newsletter called Wanderlife and he was happy to spit-ball.“You are a family that travels,” he noted, and I admitted that we are.
Andy and I first met each other through a neighborhood blog I wrote called Between Two Lakes. He mulled over the made-up word Wanderlife and astutely commented that it described my writing style, which tends to be a mental meander from one curiosity to another. Though I had come up with the term thinking more of my passion for wandering, both close to home and afar, I loved the way he was peeling the onion of the idea.
In a piece by
called “We are different from all other humans in history,” Klaas starts with the provocative fact that just three and a half generations of human beings have been able to experience jet lag. Reading that, I remembered struggling to help my kids understand the concept before they knew how to tell time.The phenomenon was only identified in 1931. Before that, it wasn’t possible for a human to travel far enough fast enough to knock their internal circadian rhythms out of sync. Our technological prowess created a novel biological experience that was impossible for roughly 9,497 out of the 9,500 or so generations of Homo sapiens.
- Brian Klaas, the author of “Fluke” who publishes on Substack at
Yes, we are a family that travels. Not every family travels as much as we do - most don’t, but some surely travel more - and that is in part because I enjoy it quite a bit. But it’s not just that. We also travel because we are not from the place where we live and our immediate extended family lives all over the country. This is not all that unique in the college town where we make our home.
I am deliberately and conscientiously raising my kids to believe in Wisconsin as their home, but I know that my need to be so intentional is odd as human history goes. Yet here are our specifics: we have immediate extended family that we visit in New York, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Montana and California, but no family members living any longer in the cities where either my husband or I grew up. We also have no family from the state where we currently live, where our kids were born. In fact, of the family members that we visit in those seven other states, only two cousins live in states where they were born.
So the truth is, I feel like we ‘should’ travel more than we do to visit all our kin. Should isn’t a fun word for family visits, but if you also have family spread around the country or world, you probably know what I mean.
The Head and the Heart’s song “River and Roads” comes to mind:
Been talkin' 'bout the way things change…
And my family lives in a different state.
If you don't know what to make of this
Then we will not relate….
Because I do enjoy traveling, and taking photos, and spending time writing about and reflecting on the experiences once I’ve come back home, I’ll be sharing some bits from my travels here at Wanderlife. I’m using the tags “Wander” and “Photography” on these shares and they are organized this way on the Wanderlife website, if you want to wander back through earlier posts. Ha! More ways to peel that onion.
The Bay Area in January
We got our family of four some free tickets using airline miles and spent a long MLK weekend in the Bay Area. Aside from time with loved ones, the best thing about the Bay Area in January is the blooms. There is color! And moist air and sunshine.
We spent our time in Oakland and Berkeley, the places where our people live, and I’m sharing three special spots that we visited with you below: A now-classic Bay Area restaurant, a park built on landfill, and a building that means a lot to my husband. So enjoy some wandering without the jet leg!
To set the scene, here is a voice memo from the Bay Area - what the artist Adam Greene would have called an Audio Postcard.
(NOTE: This email will probably get cut off…so if you want to read the entire post, including a little more about Adam Greene, be sure to click "View entire message")
1. The Bulb
On a sunny day in January, it’s not easy to find a parking spot at The Bulb, a park with one of the few sandy beaches along the San Fransisco Bay and open views of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Bulb peninsula is man-made, and made mostly of construction materials like concrete and rebar, which are still very visible today. In 1939, when the Santa Fe Railroad dynamited a small hill to build a race track, the debris was pushed into the Bay to create parking lots. Then a street was extended using what they call Bay fill, which created a lagoon, which was also eventually filled in until there was a peninsula jutting out into the Bay. A small salt marsh grew in the last remnants of the lagoon—”an echo of much larger wetlands that once flourished” - and now it all almost looks natural. It is the place to go if you have a dog, and most people in the Bay Area seem to have at least one dog. At the Bulb, dogs wander around happily, making new friends and exploring like it was built just for them. The landscape is scruffy and urban and beautiful in that California way, with rebar, rubble, and driftwood repurposed by artists. Among the low trees and native flowers are murals, graffiti, stenciled messages, sculptures, and even a “Castle” with a turret and hammock. If you are curious and can’t get there anytime soon, here’s a video called Where Do YOU Go When It Rains? featuring some individuals who have spent time living on the Bulb.
2. Hong Kong East Ocean Seafood Restaurant
In 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake devastated the Bay Area. The buildings on the Emeryville Marina had to be torn down, and that’s when Hong Kong East Ocean Seafood built their restaurant. It can seat around 600 people and is described by internet foodies as the dim sum destination spot. The restaurant’s website says they served over a million guests in just the last ten years. When we were there, one portion of the main dining area, which looks out over the bay toward the Golden Gate Bridge, was bumping with a lively Vietnamese wedding party. The entire place was packed despite the pouring rain that evening and most of the large, round tables were filled with mostly Asian-looking families. Our group of twelve ordered dim sum from the huge menu, which we shared by spinning the small plates of dumplings, buns, and rolls around on the lazy Susan in the middle. But dim sum is more typically a brunch or lunch thing and this was dinner time I noticed that almost every other table was instead sharing several shiny Peking Ducks along with steamed lotus buns. At one point, the youngest in our party went to the bathroom, which is located by the fish tanks. We’d watched the fish and crustaceans while we waited to be seated, so he was shocked when he saw the chef pull a fish from the tank, let it gasp and flail, then take it back to the kitchen to be cooked. My sweet nephew lost his appetite and sat silently mourning for the rest of our meal.
3. Art Deco Living
My husband used to live in Bellevue Towers, which was built in 1925 just as a rash of Art Deco buildings and features came onto the scene in California. For the century or so before Art Deco came into vogue, the predominant style was Beaux-Arts. Both styles originated in France. The latest art, furniture, industrial design, and architecture styles emerging in the 1920s were on view at L’exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industiels modernes in Paris and then stylized geometric forms such as zigzags, chevrons, squares within squares, and diamonds, as well as stylized organic forms like fern tendrils and flowers started showing up in the US. The “Downtown Property Owners Association” of Oakland in fact encouraged the modernization of storefronts by replacing Victorian Gothic features with zigzag or other Art Deco details. Artists often looked to the distant past for inspiration. The Art Deco Society of Los Angeles website explains, “Ancient cultures, such as the Egyptian, Mayan, and Assyrian were stylized and re-imagined.”
I’ve heard stories about this building for years. My husband lived there before I met him, but he likes to tell me about how he established a worm compost for the residents on the rooftop and about how he liked to walk around Lake Merritt to get to the 2nd-run movie theater that served pizza and beer. When we were there, we got lucky enough to climb the six stories to look out over the Adams Point neighborhood of Oakland. My kids got to see a little bit of their dad, in the not-so-distant past, only slightly stylized and re-imagined for the modern era.
One more thing!
I launched Wanderlife on my 49th birthday to liberate my spirit and light up my brain. It’s been about a month and the project has kept my eyes and heart open as I make my way around the sun one more time. One of the fun things about being here (using the Substack platform) is that people get to subscribe and play along. For those who are supporting the project with a paid subscription, I’m sending out real, snail-mail cards. It’s a hands-on way for me to push Wanderlife offline and into the world!
Why an Audio Postcard?
Because I miss you already Adam Greene.
And because I would have loved to celebrate your birthday this month.
Adam was an artist
who made his life a work of art,
who was fiercely loyal
and generous with his time, his money, and his compliments,
who had big ideas and gave big hugs,
who called friends regularly during his wanderings,
from the St. Vinnie’s thrift store and
the from the Bay Area, a place that he loved,
to leave a message.
(You can read about a post-humous exhibit of Adam Greene’s work here)
Great hearing from you again! And thanks for the updates on your travels. Love the Oakland art deco--it does have quite a bit! And the eclipse totality photos were stunning. Take care!
Glad Georgia made your list. Enjoyed the post.