Oakland

Oakland is one of the childhood places George Krause revisits, but it no longer offers him a way back to the boy he remembers being. Its altered streets and surrounding landscape make his return an encounter with estrangement: the place remains, yet the past it once held seems to belong to someone else.

Childhood setting and return

Krause comes back to the scenes of his childhood through the chances of naval service. Oakland is now noisy and changed, and the Berkeley hills have been built over. The contrast is not simply between a remembered landscape and newer construction; the changes make the familiar setting difficult for him to recognize as his own.

A landscape altered

Other changes in the surrounding region extend that rupture. Carquinez Straits, associated with happy memories, are crossed by a vast steel bridge crowded with traffic. Ferries on the Bay have given way to further bridges, where traffic moves with a pitiless single-mindedness unlike anything in his recollection. These details place Oakland within a broader landscape transformed by modern development, while the contrast between memory and present-day movement gives the return its personal force.

The place and Krause’s lost past

The altered surroundings leave Krause feeling that he has never lived there. He imagines his childhood as the history of another boy: a child who went to the grocery store holding his mother’s hand, watched a circus in wonder, and walked to school around corners that have since changed. Oakland’s significance lies in this division between the remembered child and the adult who returns. The physical changes give visible form to Krause’s sense that he has no roots; what he now knows as home is enclosed by the steel bulkheads of the United States Navy, while family life belongs to the wardroom and captain’s mast.