Seeing from public transit
There’s a group of older people decked out for a trek outside North Berkeley BART Station—wide-brimmed hats, stuffed packs and hiking poles—but I can’t tell if they’re gearing up for a hike, or in their normal clothes. The overlap between everyday wear and through-hiking gear, for this population, is a circle.
We don’t stick around to find out. We’re on our own quest. Decked out with our own provisions—massive sandwiches, full water bottles, power banks and cords and a Thai herbal inhaler for nausea (iykyk)—my friend A and I descend for the first leg of our trip: an hour on the orange line from North Berkeley to Milpitas. Today is the second day of Spring, and we’re going to circle the entire Bay on public transit.
The first stops are old friends, but the stations look less and less familiar as we get further south. To pass the time, we speculate about where the fellow queers who sit across from us for most of the ride are going (I think they’re meeting someone’s parents in the South Bay for the first time, but A thinks they’ve been together a long time and have met before).
Every equinox or solstice, A does some ritual that invokes the cycling and changing of the seasons, an opportunity to reflect on the next season. Last Spring equinox we went on a long and roughly circular walk through Oakland. This year, my intention is to pay more attention, and this trip is an effort towards that. His intentions are to practice: he describes winter as having been a cave, and this spring as being a field outside the cave, kicking around a soccer ball. As we travel this stretch of above-ground track, we’re speeding past innumerable soccer fields and fruit trees. Everything travels in seasons, I think. Soccer season. Orange season.
In Milpitas, we disembark into a station that feels like a glass cathedral, color-stained windows and all, the most beautiful BART station I’ve ever seen. We transfer to the Valley Transportation Authority light rail, which serves San Jose and the surrounding areas. I am immediately disappointed to find that both of the little train’s two cars are entirely covered with a wrap-advertisement for some sort of AI service called “supermicro,” which would be cute if it were the name of the train but is unfortunately not cute because it is not. It is the name of an AI service. The wrap distorts our view out the windows, though what I can see looks suburban and office park-y. There is a stop called “Lockheed Martin” that services, you guessed it, a Lockheed Martin facility. We contemplate boo-ing whoever gets off or on there, but nobody does.
We get off in Mountain View, hop over to the Caltrain platform, where a student-like crowd mills about. Despite having lived in the Bay Area for most of my life, I’ve never taken Caltrain, and I find it surprisingly pleasant: the suburbs speed by, the ride is smooth and quiet thanks to the new electrified trains, and there is plentiful Stanford undergrad gossip to overhear. (“He was hiding me from his friends…and he lied on his LinkedIn!”) Spit out along with the undergrads onto 4th street in downtown San Francisco, we quickly locate Muni and take a short tour of some of the city’s most heinous public art, all the way to the Ferry Building, where tourists are bustling around the farmers’ market and the roti stall is blasting EDM.
We are 40 minutes ahead of schedule, a sweet little layover to eat our large sandwiches in an immaculately groomed public park, where we watch a city employee use a plastic Starbucks cup to bail water out of a muddy hole in the ground for about fifteen minutes. By the time he’s done shoveling dirt into the hole and tamping down sod, we’re heading back to the dock, and the long ferry lines. Geographically, we’ve completed about two-thirds of the circuit, but this last third will take about the same amount of time. No more fast trains for us.
The ferry to Sausalito is crowded with tourists, and A takes a picture of me on the chunky medium-format camera he’s been lugging around, which gets us some curious looks. Landing in Sausalito, I feel like I’m in Disneyland—everything heavily landscaped and the building facades look like they’re made of cardboard. We don’t have a ton of time to kill before our bus comes and neither of us is the type to cut it close, so we forego a restorative coffee. A man with the tiniest Hydroflask I have ever seen asks us where we’re going, and we tell him about our journey. It becomes clear that he thinks we are a pair of unattended teenage boys. (We are adults in our late 20’s.)
We board the (surprisingly comfortable) 130 Northbound along with a much less touristy group than our ferry passengers, stopping along the 101 at those little bus shelters on the side of the freeway. They look perilous, but seem to function quite well.
When the 130 drops us off at the downtown San Rafael transit center, we’ve missed our connection, the 580, and have forty minutes to kill. I locate a yerba mate at a cafe that does vocational training for autistic youth, while A goes into an Italian restaurant looking for a cortado. Despite a prominently placed espresso machine, the kid working the front says that A is the first person to order a coffee in a month. He has never made a cortado, and pages fruitlessly through a laminated user manual before looking it up on his phone. (A gives the cortado is a seven out of ten.) As we leave the Italian restaurant, a man walks by with a shirt that says, in small letters over his heart: “I am comfortable with violence.” We scurry back to the transit center.
The bus is smooth as it takes us over the Richmond-San Rafael bridge (though slowly, as we are at the mercy of Saturday afternoon traffic). The ways I like to move through the world—busses, trains, my bike—might be slow or inconvenient, but they force me to slow down and see things, and interact with people. There is value in this “inconvenience.” I can’t look out at the waters of the bay going by below me when I’m driving across this bridge in my car; similarly, the stretches of suburban peninsula might as well not exist when I’m driving through them, while the Caltrain makes me stop and notice. Something exists in that corner, there: There are bugs in the fruit trees and people kicking soccer balls and men fronting toughness and undergraduates falling in love and things I can’t even comprehend. Maybe that’s my spring intention: I want to try my best to see it all.
It’s almost 5 pm when the 580 takes us to El Cerrito del Norte, two quick stops from where we began. The whole day traveling just to end up in the same place again: a BART station I’ve been in hundreds, if not thousands of times in my life. But ascending the stairs up into the light of North Berkeley station, I think: I’ll do it all over again. I’ll see something new.
