Rural values

I loved the motto I saw on the frieze of a building at Berkeley yesterday. If I can remember it correctly: To Save Human Society Through the Native Values of Rural Life. I'm hoping it refers more to environmental values, though (balance, cultivation, preservation), rather than small town prejudice.

In the course of a day

On the way out this morning, a woman said to Kate, “Girl, where’s yo gloves?” “And what about her hat?” I said. “ExAAAC’ly”, she parried. Here’s an example of the quick-witted good humouredness here. As I was about to cross a street later on, I stopped. A lorry looked like it was going to turn left in front of me. The driver indicated “I’m going straight ahead”, and I waved thanks. He beamed. The courtesy here is worth remarking on. Cars stop for you before you step off the kerb. People smile when you acknowledge them. I wonder if in some way the courtesy compensates for other harshnesses of the society. Kenneth Clark, who wrote Civilization, put a lot of store on good manners.

It’s very welcoming I have to say. Though I have vivid flashes of Australia. Yesterday, turning into Shattuck Ave after coming out of the movies, with the Berkeley hills rising up above the roadway, I suddenly thought of Bowral when you turn onto the main road. And this afternoon, when I looked at the palms on the waterfront at Oakland I thought for a split second I was in St. Kilda. But I’m not nostalgic. It’s simply vividness of memory, because I’m too happy to be homesick. I have waves of excitement like the first waves of love. Apart from anything else, it’s too rich here to pine for anywhere else.

We went down to Oakland CBD today. I left Kate in a store fossicking amongst racks of jackets and jeans (‘chaquetas’ and ‘pantalones vaqueros’ as they were also signed) and went down to The Blue Bottle to have a coffee. Some cafe owners in Sydney told me that this is the only place in the States which serves coffee as good as you get in Australia (and I can believe it; much of the coffee around here is bitter and weak). I was working on my piece on La bohème. On how it’s so touching, and how so much of that emotionality is due to the shaping of the libretto. The music yes, but the dramaturgical plotting of Mimi’s decline. This feeds into my customary question about the true importance of the script in an opera. Granted, it’s the music that really carries the day, but does music always trump words? Can any composer, say, ever match the majesty of Lincoln’s prose? (“The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every patriot grave…to every living heart and hearthstone across this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of Union when touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature”?)

Anyway, I was sitting there and I thought, FDR’s presidential yacht is moored in Oakland. Why not wander down a couple of blocks to see if I can find it? (which I did eventually). But at first I walked out onto a pier and there in the distance off to the east were snow-capped mountains. I’ve never seen this before - snow-capped mountains rising behind a city. I suppose if I’d spent any time much in Hobart or Canberra this’d be nothing new, but you won’t see this most places in Oz.

On the way to the pier I’d passed this shanty-type building. I hadn’t paid it much attention. But on the way back, I read some plaques: Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon, registered as a site of national interest, etc... Built out of the remains of an old whaling ship, it has been in continuous operation since 1883. But here you go - it is immortalised in Jack London’s books and is where he used to meet his seafaring mates for a drink. Robert Louis Stevenson used to drop in as well (though I’m not sure if it was at exactly the same time).

This is the sort of thing I stumble across in the course of a day. There is really so much going on. And such linguistic richness – “Girl, where’s yo’ gloves?” “Pantalones vaqueros”. At the very least I hope I’ll learn a greater eloquence from being here.

More packed in

President Obama was here the past few days, and it seems to be a much bigger deal than, say, back home, if the PM visits Perth. It was Obama's first visit for non fund-raising purposes. The visit was announced with a certain amount of fanfare on the news and I saw that they had footage of his arrival on local TV. When he departed and went back to Washington, it was as if he'd gone a long way away.

I wonder if this has less to do with the distance travelled than with the fact that much more country is traversed. I don't mean the mileage (San Francisco to Washington wouldn't be much further than Perth to Canberra) but he crosses California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, the bottom tip of Illinois(?), Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, all those states and all their different cultures, systems and histories. And which in the course of a term he must attend to.

I know the middle of Australia is not empty, but Western Desert culture essentially covers Kalgoorlie to Areyonga. Here there is much more packed in.

Thinking locally

Coming back from the pool tonight, I noticed about half a dozen police cars parked alongside Oakland Technical High School. They bore shields saying, "Oakland School Police". I asked a policeman if this meant that the school itself had a police force. He said that they look after the 200-odd schools in the district. If someone is speeding along the street beside a school they handle that; if someone's selling drugs across the road from a school they handle that. I figured it was like having a traffic section or Armed Robbery Squad, or, as they used to have in Victoria (dunno about NSW): the Consorting Squad.

I was curious because this is a familiar country to me in many ways (and I realised the other day that it is familiar to me from teaching the children of US defense personnel in Alice Springs in the early 80s), but it is subdivided differently. There doesn't seem to be a California Police, as you'd have NSW Police in Australia. There are Oakland Police and Piedmont Police in the next city, etc...In general, there is much more local governance it seems. This makes sense given that the society is so differentiated, I suppose. But perhaps that makes it harder to find comprehensive solutions to problems.

And on reflection I realise it may not be so strange to have a school squad. Travelling on the bus to downtown Oakland at 'home time' yesterday, we were taken aback by the school kid banter. On the Glebe Point Road bus they might talk about appearance and crushes; here they were discussing who got shot!

Working on my La boheme piece

Little details

The sidewalks here are signed and dated (presumably by the contractors who built them). For example, outside these flats you find McGettigan's sidewalks, dated 1941, and in the next street, sidewalks by A. E. Clarke, 1935.

I also like the way the traffic lights tell you to "Wait!" when you press the button. It's so imperious I wonder what would happen if I crossed against the red - "I THOUGHT I told you - "

A few stops on

Over at the Presidio yesterday, a guy asked us where we were staying. When we said, "Oakland," he said, "Whoa, it's the fifth most violent city in the US." And, admittedly, when we arrived here we were shown which streets belonged to gangs. When I said, "West Oakland", he said, "That's worse".

But I had it wrong. We're more like northern Oakland, up the top end of Piedmont Ave, where the cafes are frequented by students availing themselves of the free Wi-Fi.

We loved the Presidio - sweeping views up and down the coast (over the Golden Gate, too, of course), 'historic' (remnant?) forests on some of the slopes, sea birds hovering in the thermals, city workers jogging in their lunchtime... We were intrigued to find that you can rent there. It'd be a beautiful place to live.

On the way out on the shuttle, I noticed streets named after little-known (outside the US) early 19th century presidents - Pierce, Franklin, Fillmore. I noted that the 'golden gate' itself was named by Fremont, who later became the first Republican presidential candidate, in 1856, and a Union general in the western theatre during the Civil War. All this kind of located the Presidio for me in history. Lincoln Boulevard up there then has a certain poignancy. Lincoln never made it this far west, and I remembered how I had read that he and his wife, Mary, were planning a grand tour when he left the presidency. But of course he was assassinated not long into his second term.

Back in the city itself I realised that I am growing to love the linguistic richness here - the lilt of the African-American banter of the guys picking up a load for UPS, the guys digging up the street speaking Spanish, the ads on the BART which are not even translated into English. Hey, the Presidio was founded by the Spanish in 1776.

When we got back on the BART to come back to this side of the bay, there were no seats on the train. One woman had her parcels on the only available seat. Kate looked at it, and the woman flared up, "Are you gonna say, 'EXCUSE ME'?" I was about to stop Kate - after all why should she apologise to someone taking up a seat for her parcels. But Kate said excuse me, and the woman said, "That's alright."

She had the words 'bitch' and 'nigga' tattooed on one of her forearms, and I imagined that they may have said, in full, "I'm not your bitch; I'm not your nigga", though I couldn't see the part of her forearm which was resting on her legs.

Emerging from bay tunnel, a friend of the woman's came over. Saying "excuse me", she reached across Kate and said "You getting off?" tapping the shoulder of her friend who was moving around to the music in her earphones. She said nothing, but when the train stopped she got off with her parcels - at West Oakland.

On the way to my 'office' - whichever cafe I choose in Piedmont Ave

Orientation and disorientation

In many respects Oakland is not unfamiliar. It's easy to feel as if I'm in that 'Australia on the other side of the sphere' (to paraphrase Melville). Acacia parramattensis, for example, is flowering up here in the Redwood Preserve. But a one-word difference in meaning can throw me. This afternoon a recorded message advised me that "if you know the name of the person you're looking for, enter their extension followed by the pound." The what? I had no idea what 'pound' was. Finally I worked out that it was what we call the 'hatch'. And yet, when I went looking for shoelaces later on, I was directed to 'the cobbler' - an old English word I haven't come across in Oz since I used to read children's storybooks.

I sat in Gaylord's on Piedmont Avenue this morning working on my La boheme piece (while Freak Water played over the sound system). The cafe was full of people working on their laptops. They sat in rows along the wall or at the various tables, furrowing their brows in concentration against the music being piped through for the benefit of those few customers not availing themselves of Gaylord's Wi-Fi.

To distract myself I glanced at yesterday's Oakland Tribune and a regular column called 'Voices'. There was an article by a 60 year-old insurance broker from Walnut Creek, a Lt Col in the Army Reserve, who recounted that he'd got an email back in 2007, ordering him to report to Ft Bragg within 9 days. In the few days he was given to get his affairs in order, he had to organize his office manager to take over his insurance agency, finalize a divorce, etc...

In Iraq he was a member of an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team. He said that one of the most satisfying parts of the job was briefing Baghdad civilians on "mini loans" of $4,000. It doesn't sound like much, but it was enough for Iraqis to set up new businesses. I thought "what a great thing to do - nation-building is still alive and well". And yet, when this guy came back from Iraq, he had lost his 17 year insurance agency, and was unemployed for a year. It seems no assistance was provided to help him transition to civilian life. His company allowed him to re-start his agency but contractually obliged him not to get in touch with former clients. As he said, "I never thought that I would lose my successful agency by fighting for my country."

Everybody around here is friendly and very, very polite. It is quite touching. But the sense of "you're on your own", in tales like this, is a chill wind for Australians.

Turning to starboard

The last few days in Sydney were filled with sentiment - work farewells, people saying nice things. (I hope they'll say such nice things at my funeral.)
As the plane sat at the bottom of the runway, Kate asked me for my hanky. She'd been thinking about our neighbours dropping in.
I saw the wake of a windsurfer in Botany Bay outside the port window (we were facing north). As the plane roared off, we caught up with the windsurfer himself. Then we passed him.