The Promised Land. American Dream. "Manifest Destiny," even. Whatever you want to call it. The dream that brought settlers westward across the newly constructed railroads of the 1860s, the escape that brings people here from across borders, the hope that California residents more often find themselves clinging onto, in order to find the means to stay.
Every time I board the Capital Corridor train, which connects our state capital, my hometown, to the prosperous (or destroyed, depending on how you look at it) land to its southwest - you might be familiar with its other name, the Bay Area - I'm brought back to circa ten years ago.
Sixteen-year-old me, no, even thirteen-year-old me, was riding this train alone, escaping boring suburbia to the culturally rich San Francisco, where my father lived in a tiny studio apartment several years after my parents divorced.
San Francisco, where one could take public transit around town to restaurants, concerts, bookstores, whatever I wanted to do alone at thirteen that I couldn't do in Sacramento without asking my mom to drive me. (Even after I got my license at sixteen, I still never got my own car, and relied on my gracious high school friends to chauffeur us). Today, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) ridership is at an all-time low - still hovering around 60% of pre-pandemic usage on a good day - and many commuters would rather brave out gridlocked bridge traffic, tolls, inattentive drivers, and that one person who waits too long to merge and, with what seems like a personal vendetta, cuts you off, than take BART into work.
In my adolescent years, on a lucky weekend, my mom would drive me and my best friend to the City, and I'd eagerly watch out the window on I-80 W as all the familiar exits flew by: Travis AFB, then Travis Blvd (the exit where we'd always stop for Peet's Coffee and a restroom break), Vallejo (only 30 miles to SF! I'd internally squeal).
Now, sitting on the train car on the reverse route, as Will and I return to Sacramento after a few days in SF / Oakland, I curiously look out the window to the tracks that run parallel to the highway once you leave the idyllic bayside of Martinez. Now the long expanse and strips of land between 80 E and the train tracks are dotted with increasing numbers of encampments. Homes. Others' homes. Maybe it always was(?), maybe only recently, and maybe it always will be.
The search for a better home is what brought my parents here, my aunts, uncles, others' grandparents, [most of] our ancestors, surely yours too. These days, I sometimes veer too far to think it might have been too good to be true. It probably always was: immigrants in the 1700s succeeded at the expense of countless others whose names we have forgotten, lost to history, and of those remembered, we are not educated enough to even pronounce.
I'm sad to think it might be, but I have to hope there's a way out - to a place with a roof, ideally - to the America others dream of.
On those weekend teenage excursions to SF, I used to always remember the exit sign that signaled we had returned to Sacramento. It prominently announced the subsequent cities after West Sacramento, where US Hwy 50 begins, taking you to Placerville, South Lake Tahoe, and culminating in "Ocean City, MD 3073." Apparently there's a reciprocal sign in Ocean City, which prompted Caltrans Head of Statewide Highway Maintenance John Cropper, Jr. to spearhead the sign we see today, or at least its current iteration.
For the unawares, Will and I are moving, in fact, to the Eastern Seaboard, not far from the above sign, as he starts a new job in our nation's capital in just a few weeks. (Coincidentally, his first day on the job is the same as that of another important man, whose version of the American Dream I couldn't disagree with more strongly.) We'll actually be driving across the US on a route closely following Hwy 50, leaving in just a few days.
See you on the other side, MD.