Burma Road
It doesn’t quite look like this any more — if nothing else, the bridge in the distance (the old San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge) is gone, and the replacement (seen being built behind it) was finished and opened a few years ago.
I used to ride my bicycle deep into The Port, dodging the container trucks and service vehicles, waiting for endless container trains to pass in front of me, listening to the characteristic whirring, whining, and hollow metallic collision sounds of the cranes themselves, taking photos whenever I could…. I still do that a bit, but the place is slowly becoming more self-conscious about things like security, and while you can still just ride down streets like Burma Road (above), it’s getting a little harder, a little more likely to get you asked what the hell you think you’re doing. And photo-taking gets a lot more attention. And more and more fences have gone up to obscure the view from the streets.
This is one of my fave Port of Oakland photos taken on one of those rides — which is weird, because in so many ways it’s almost completely unrepresentative of the Port I know. No container cranes (those omnipresent symbols (or mascots) of Oakland; no container trucks (part of the natural wildlife of the Port); no long container trains inching their way elsewhere right next to — or across — the roads; no cradles picking the containers up from the yards and slinging them onto the trains or trucks; no forklifts scurrying around; no locomotives idling thunderously in pairs and triplets next to the fences; no colorful container mountains stacked in yards here and there; none of the signature busyness at all.
But the languid shimmering in the summer’s afternoon light, the undulating deserted road (very unusual), and the long view towards the bridges are typical, in their own ways, and something in me wants to go cycling there again whenever I see this image….
