Berkeley hills

The Berkeley hills are a changed landmark in the childhood landscape Krause revisits as an adult. Built over by the time he returns, they help turn familiar geography into evidence of his separation from the past: the places remain, but no longer offer him a home he can recognize.

Setting and Transformation

The Berkeley hills are mentioned alongside Oakland and Carquinez Straits as part of the scenes of Krause’s childhood. On his return, Oakland is noisy and different, while the hills have been built over. At Carquinez Straits, memories of happier days meet a vast steel bridge crowded with traffic; elsewhere, bridges have replaced the ferries on the Bay. The changed landscape is not simply a backdrop: it registers the scale of the time and alteration between childhood and return.

Place and Krause’s Sense of Home

The hills’ transformation belongs to a larger estrangement. The adult Krause feels as if he had never lived in these places, and imagines his childhood as the life of another boy: one who walked to the grocery store with his mother, went to the circus, and took familiar routes to school. The built-over hills make that loss concrete. The scenes persist, but the childhood they once held seems inaccessible to him.

Against these altered shore-side memories, the passage defines Krause’s present home as the enclosed space of a ship, and his family life as life in the wardroom and at captain’s mast. The contrast gives the Berkeley hills their narrative weight: they belong to a past that no longer feels his, while duty and naval life have become the structures within which he can locate himself.