I’m standing in the parking lot of an O’Reilly Auto in Steamboat, Colorado. 

Hunched over the Corolla’s open hood, I’ve got four new spark plugs and a socket wrench and I’m trying to rip out these ignition coils from the engine because I’ve got a mission and a vision and I’ve watched a few YouTube videos goshdarnit.

Jake approaches. He tells me in at first uncertain and then certain terms that this is a bad idea, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and we have a functional engine so let’s keep it that way.

I sigh. I concede. I check their returns policy.

“Projection,” Freud writes, “is the essential character of every love.”

Goshdarnit.

Okay, here is what happens:

96 hours before this attempted repair, a hailstorm runs us off the road in Nebraska, so we pull into a Motel 6 for the night, when, yes, the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile really does, at that moment, enter the parking lot across the street. We go over to the hotel and ask the front desk clerk if he wouldn’t mind placing a call up to The Hotdoggers (as they’re called) to see if we could take them out for breakfast. He makes the call. They are not interested in breakfast. 

“Not interested?!?” my dad writes. “Isn’t that their job…to be interested?”

(The car, by the way, is doing fine. It struggled getting over the Rocky Mountain passes, revving at 4 or 5k as it went 30mph, and parts must be replaced, but it gets us here, and for that I am most grateful.)

Our luck continues in Utah, and we end up in the most beautiful campsite at the base of Mt. Timpanogos. (We’ve been using — and I cannot recommend enough — the app iOverlander to find free campsites. It’s like a kind of janky Yelp for roadtrippers, but truly very helpful.)

The All Trail reviews are formidable and warn that the parking lot fills around 3 or 4am. This is ridiculous, we think. And, in fact, it is, because we didn’t realize that early June is still the spring season there…At around 10,000ft, the only people continuing to the summit have ice picks and microspikes, so we decide to just explore the snow bowl. We end up hiking a side trail to about 10,750ft before a mountain goat(!!) blocks the path. The landscape is foreign and stunning and infinite. It is a really really wonderful day.

At this point in the trip, Jake goes on strike and refuses to eat any more peanut butter, so we stop off at a diner and soon enough find ourselves on the last night, this one in Tahoe. The lake is gorgeous and the mountain views stunning, and we meet up with Jake’s friends who are also driving cross-country. They have just impulse-bought a 10ft paddleboard, which they plan to take once around the lake and then…? They would very much like me to buy — no, just take it off their hands. And I really really want to, because, how awesome would that be? But also, even this trip has to come to terms with the real. So when we finally drive into the Bay, we are paddleboard-less but feeling a little lighter all the same.

***

I live in the most beautiful room in the most beautiful house in all of Berkeley, perhaps California, perhaps the world.

(I somehow end up in this room because I move-in late and they have forgotten about me. The only room left, they explain, is the unoccupied triple with the nook overlooking San Francisco…)

Within minutes of moving in, someone is serving me a plate of quinoa salad and pouring me a glass of red wine, and the House Manager tells me that nudity is optional on the roof deck, and communal dinners are at 7, and you can let the chickens roam but not the blind one, and, oh, watch out for the mescaline cactus by the drumset, any questions?

Kingman Hall is a cooperative living society run by UC Berkeley students. Very hostel vibes, with an industrial kitchen and dishroom (members cook nightly dinners for the rest of the house as part of the workshift agreement where everyone commits five hours a week to cook, clean, etc), a fully-stocked pantry (so much fruit!), and a storied history. Before the coop system bought the place, Ken Keyes (not to be confused with Ken Kesey, who also frequented the house) ran his “Living Love Center” here, some sort of new-agey cult. People still refer to the “Guru room” in the basement.

(rooftop jam featuring some of the drums I haul all the way from MA)

Every square inch of wall space is covered by murals and Big Thief lyrics and Mary Oliver Poems. I will admit that my questions have turned from the euphoric (“how is this place real??”) to the practical (“so, who’s actually in charge of group dishes and cleaning bathrooms?” — the joke here is that if Marx knew about the Berkeley Student Coops, he would change his mind…), but I feel nonetheless incredibly grateful to live in such a robust community.

It’s a strange place. I think I very much like it.

All of Berkeley seems to operate in this framework, and I enjoy walks around the city and campus, and the transit system seems oh-so wonderful to this boy from a town with more cows than people. (There is no way this statistic is true, but I’m sticking to it.) 

I really hate to write to my fellow New Englanders with the bad news, but the Bay does seem to be everything everyone says it is. I seem to float from outdoor music festival to climbing gym to public garden in a 70-degree-and-sunny haze. Except that San Francisco (call it “SF,” or “The City,” but never “San Fran,” or “Frisco” — they say) is inexplicably windy and gray. There’s that (misattributed) Mark Twain line: “The coldest winter of my life was the summer I spent…” 

***

My job has started in earnest, and on day two, my editor sent me to a local immigration court to report on the previous day’s ICE arrests. I feel wholly unprepared and unqualified when I walk through the door (and the security team clearly does not want me there, but has to, at least for now, tolerate the presence of journalists). I think there’s a certain level of guilt in entering a foreign and vulnerable space with so little background, but, also, I know it’s important that someone is doing this work, and I can make peace with the fact that I am learning and that I nevertheless must do everything I can to prepare and report fully.

There was no ICE activity that day, but the mood remained incredibly tense. There’s this scary moment when I walk into an elevator with an immigration attorney and his client. The client has just lost his asylum case, and as the doors open to the lobby, the two huddle together, tense, and the lawyer whispers that he will call in the morning, run fast. 

The day feels empowering and deeply distressing, and I am grateful that people still get to do this work and that I am one of them.

I’ll report on a range this summer (my next story featured a local music series), and I’m excited to learn as much as I can. Richmond’s a strange city — neighborhooded between a post-industrial/redeveloping center, posh condos by the Bay, a huge Chevron refinery (before Richmondside, Chevron owned the city’s only news outlet), an unincorporated territory, and lots of family tracts. During WW2, it served as a vital shipyard, but now much of that industrial area lies dormant. It’s a quieter place than the rest of the Bay, but I think it’s even more important to share the stories of the places where people don’t think to listen.

Much love,

Thomas