oakland

The name says it all. It tells us what once was here, before the big downtown buildings and the residential and commercial neighborhoods.

Today, driving from downtown Oakland to the east, up Broadway and then Piedmont, gradually sloping from the Bay toward the base of the hills, it took some imagination to visualize what this place looked like before it was a city. But of course it's the modern condition that's the aberration. The oaks were here for thousands of years. The city is a thing of only the last few hundred. Where gangbangers abandoned a wrecked car in the middle of the street last night, hawks once hunted for mice. A mile or two away, where trendy professionals go shopping or out to dinner, Native Americans once gathered acorns.

The rains that fell today, those are still part of the system. They happen here only from November through April, and then it's warm and dry all summer except for the occasional fog. There's much less of that than on the other, peninsula side of the Bay.

The landforms were obvious enough, the ground higher and drier on the east side of town, downtown relatively level. At the end of the day, driving through Alameda and very close to the Bay, we probably crossed areas that once were salt marshes, or where fill has been placed in what was once the Bay.

All of those things can still be seen not far away. Seeing them here, today, meant stepping out of time for a while. Visualization is a good exercise, something we do even in places which have been altered much less drastically than this place. In those places, we visualize not only the past, but the future.