San Francisco

San Francisco enters J.D. Vance’s memoir as both a destination and a point of comparison: during his first trip to California, a visit to the city’s Castro District formed part of a broader experience that made the West Coast feel unlike the places he already knew. The trip widened his sense of regional difference while helping him understand an unexpected kinship with people from his own family’s Appalachian migrant world.

Arrival and the California Journey

J.D. Vance traveled west with Lindsay Leigh Lewis after Uncle Jimmy flew them to his home in Napa, California. The six-hour flight from Cincinnati to San Francisco was his first flight, and he stayed awake through the journey, absorbed by the changing scale of the earth and sky. Before the September 11 attacks, a flight attendant allowed him to visit the cockpit regularly; the pilot gave him brief flying lessons and updates on their progress. San Francisco thus first appears as the endpoint of an exhilarating journey, before the memoir turns to the varied experiences awaiting him in California.

The city belonged to a trip that felt more like entering a different country than continuing the family road journeys he had known. Earlier travel had taken him to places including Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and Lexington, as well as several Southern states, but those destinations had not seemed so different from home. California, by contrast, brought a succession of new experiences with his teenage cousins and their friends. The account distinguishes the arrival in San Francisco from the wider itinerary: the flight landed there, while the visit to Napa and other California activities framed the trip as a whole.

The Castro District

One day, J.D. Vance’s cousins took him to San Francisco’s Castro District. His older cousin Rachael presented the outing as a chance to learn that gay people were not a threat to him. The episode places the city within the memoir’s account of a boy encountering unfamiliar social settings through his relatives, rather than through an abstract lesson. The evidence identifies the outing and its purpose but does not describe further events in the district.

The trip also brought him into contact with people who heard his speech as a Kentucky accent. He enjoyed being told that his accent was funny, while recognizing that the description was not entirely misplaced: he had family roots in Kentucky. The city and the wider California visit therefore made regional identity audible and visible, even as J.D. Vance approached the difference with excitement rather than simple discomfort.

Regional Difference and Recognition

J.D. Vance had visited many places before California, including cities in the Midwest and South, yet he wondered why California felt so distinct. His retrospective explanation is that most of his earlier travels had remained within a social and cultural world resembling his family’s: people ate similar foods, watched the same sports, and practiced the same religion. California offered a stronger contrast because it took him beyond that familiar pattern.

That contrast also clarified a connection. J.D. Vance links the movement of his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, from eastern Kentucky to southwest Ohio to the hillbilly highway, the migration route that had carried families like his across regions. He came to see that the people with whom he had felt kinship at an Ohio courthouse were hillbilly transplants in one way or another. San Francisco is therefore part of a journey that first heightened his awareness of difference and then helped him recognize shared origins beneath it.