A Stay by the Bay
If only the road were level.
While I had visited Berkeley when deciding where to go for graduate school, I really didn’t appreciate how mountainous it is. Thus, when we moved to the Hill-Road house with a U-Haul towing an old VW Beetle, I looked at the map for the easiest way to get there. If you zoom out a few times on the map, you’ll see Marin Ave to the northwest. Marin Ave., being straight, seemed like a great route to get to Grizzly Peak avoiding the labyrinth of all the other roads. Being from southeastern Michigan, I never considered the elevation change; a road called Grizzly Peak should have clued me in. At the time, I didn’t know that Marin Ave. had been constructed as a trolley route and was a road no one really used because it went straight up the mountain, roughly 700 feet over about 0.8 miles, a 25% (30% maximum) grade. It is the steepest road in the SF Bay Area and legendary with hardcore cyclists. Going up is rough on a car’s clutch/torque-converter and going down is rough on the brakes, so people rarely used it.
View from the top of Marin Ave. over the San Francisco Bay
We got maybe a fourth of the way up the road before it was clear we needed to rethink the route. Unfortunately, this was 1993, and we didn’t have a detailed map of the area. Thus, we turned off Marin, unhitched the car, and continued up separately. I don’t recall the details, but I suspect I drove the car because it had a manual transmission. There was a stop sign at every intersection, and starting from a stop on a 25% grade with a clutch is quite tricky. I either used some fancy footwork with one foot on both the brake and gas pedals or, more likely, used the emergency brake.
The time I spent in the San Francisco Bay Area–in and around Berkeley–was probably some of the most enjoyable of my life. The first semester was stressful for a few reasons. First, I had never lived in an urban area, especially with a population density as high as it was. It took a long time to become accustomed to everything you wanted to do taking more time than you thought it would. Traffic was always a nightmare both on the expressways and the surface streets. Parking was always a problem; I had never had to circle a grocery store parking lot for 15 minutes to park. Lines everywhere were always extremely long. The DMV was a nightmare but lines in grocery stores usually extended down the aisles. At first, this was extremely frustrating, but there was nothing you could do about it. You had to simply learn to give yourself extra time and not stress too much about getting things done quickly.
The other stress when we first moved to Berkeley was the living situation. My aunt had a friend whose mother, Alicemary, rented part of her house in the Berkeley Hills to students and was looking for a new tenant. The house wasn’t particularly nice, but it was on a million-dollar lot at the very top of the Berkeley Hills. Grizzly Peak ran along the crest of the mountain, and Hill Road rose above it. Our next-door neighbor (in the house to the southeast that looks more like a commercial building) was Donald Glazer, a Nobel Prize-winning physics professor. What isn’t particularly clear from the map is the topology. 37 Hill Road is at an elevation of almost 1200 feet, and the bus stop to the west is nearly 100 feet below. Walking up the hill from the bus stop was pretty good exercise.
The deal was that we would take care of the property, house, and three dogs in exchange for not paying rent as Alicemary was too old to maintain the property. Taking care of the property was not an easy job. We were asked to rejuvenate and maintain the elaborate tiered garden that is now a grassy slope to the west of the house; it was completely overgrown with weeds and brush when we arrived. Not only were the plants all dead, but the wooden walkways that zigzagged down the hill and the watering system were falling apart. It really needed a professional gardener and landscaper to redo everything completely. We tried, but nothing we did seemed to be enough. We also learned that one of the dogs wasn’t house trained and would pee all over the house. This prompted the other dogs to do the same. I’d never house trained a dog, and Rita tried her best, but he’d been peeing in the house for so long that it was tough to change his behavior. I wonder if he ever got house trained.
Unfortunately, between the time we agreed to this deal and moved in, Alicemary’s health got much worse. When we first arrived, she was in a nursing home but came home soon after. Thus, taking care of Alicemary became part of our (i.e., mostly Rita’s) job. Obviously, Rita could not provide the needed medical care, so the family hired in-home nurses. Things from the house then started disappearing. It was very awkward because it seemed we were being blamed for this, either for actually taking the stuff or for not preventing it. I don’t remember the timing, but before the end of my first semester at UC-Berkeley, Alicemary passed away. I suspect this may have been in October or November. After that, Alicemary’s daughter essentially moved in. Her other daughter’s ex-husband then effectively moved in. Yes, it was an odd situation, and it was clear that Rita and I needed to find a new place. One good thing about living in the Berkeley Hills was that it allowed us to learn the area and make a much more informed decision about places to live. Thus, shortly thereafter, we moved to an apartment in a city just north of Berkeley, El Cerrito.
Rita found a job at a Stride Rite store in a nearby shopping center. The apartment was very close to a BART (subway) stop, so I commuted to school that way most of the time. Fortunately, at this point, I had found an adviser and had a desk in a lab. Thus, I could basically treat school like work. I recall that we lived here for about two years before getting a spot in “family housing.”
Northern California is a great place to live if you’re not trying to raise a family. Thus, as a student with no children, I was able to take full advantage of the area. Rita and I went on three whitewater rafting trips; two down the south fork of the American River and an overnight trip down the Klamath River. The Klamath River trip was great as we explored some beautiful areas near the river when we stopped to make camp. This trip was at the end of August 1997, as I recall hearing Princess Diana had died on the trip home. We went to wine country (Napa and Sonoma Valleys) a couple of times. We camped and explored the area around Big Sur on three or four occasions. We explored Monterrey, Carmel, and Santa Cruz. We went to Yosemite and camped near Mammoth Mountain, Mono Lake, and Lake Tahoe. We spent a few days during the winter near Donner Lake (near Lake Tahoe) in a cabin owned by my thesis adviser. I’d never seen so much snow; the cabin spent much of the winter nearly entirely buried.