Welcome to my new life

The east side of U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. – T. S. Eliot

On April 22, after 21-plus years of enjoying the landscapes and rhythms of northern California, my wife, Jodi, and I waved goodbye to the San Francisco Bay Area and headed east on Interstate 80. Our final destination? None other than the greater Washington, D.C. area, our new home.

As it happened, over the next week, we drove 2,950.6 miles – covering 13 states starting from California. We crossed the finish line in Maryland on Saturday afternoon, April 29, after beginning the final day of our journey in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Our Passivhaus town home in
Mount Rainier, Maryland.

Our travel week was very busy for us, but one in which we both embraced. After all, we had purchased a brand new house, a Passivhaus town home, in funky Mount Rainier, Maryland, just a couple of short blocks across the District line from Washington and about 15 minutes by car south of the University of Maryland campus in College Park. And, on May 1, my wife began a dream job in research and development at the Library of Congress, which served as the impetus for our leaving California for the Mid-Atlantic east coast.

As we drove across our beautiful and diverse country observing – through the snow-capped Sierra Mountains of California and Nevada, across the massive and great Salt Lake of Utah, alongside the majestic Rocky Mountains of Colorado, across acres and acres of Kansas wheat fields, near the picturesque Gateway Arch of St. Louis, through the Big Ten country of Indiana University in Bloomington, beside the Great American city of Cincinnati and up and down the hilltops of Morgantown – I was reminded often of how Mother Nature often holds up a mirror to us so that we can see more clearly the ongoing processes of growth, of renewal and of transformation in our lives. Our hours and days on the road were also filled with an abundance of music CDs – Pink Martini, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Valerie June, Diana Reeves – a variety of NPR podcasts like "Make Me Smart," and we tried to limit our driving to daytime hours so we could rest and renew ourselves at night.

The scenic beauty of the Donner Summit as seen driving
along Interstate 80 through the California Sierra Mountains.

Fortunately, social media and the Internet enable us to stay more easily connected than ever before with family and friends and we still plan to follow and support our favorite Bay Area professional and collegiate sports teams – just from a different city and time zone. So far, we are enjoying the fine public radio offerings from WAMU in Washington, D.C. as well as reading the Washington Post and the national print edition of The New York Times. And, we've learned thanks to the University of Maryland, which won both the men's and women's national championships in lacrosse, that people in this part of the country do take their lacrosse seriously. We've got tickets to see a Washington Nationals baseball game against the San Francisco Giants, and already we've been to a WNBA women's professional basketball game, too. Yes, there's plenty of rich of history and culture that awaits us in and around the nation's capital city, through its many museums and monuments, parks and trails – and I'm sure our free summer weekends will fill up fast with things to see and do. Already, we've explored historic Annapolis (which I'll write more about in the weeks to come) – it's only about 40 minutes away by car – and I'm sure we'll be back, soon.

Our future looks bright – and it doesn't even have anything to do with the abundance of sunshine we've experienced during the past month. Indeed, as the French novelist Marcel Proust once said, "the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

What a mural can tell us about our glorious past

Our glorious past / A mural depicts the famous Key System
electric trains that connected Oakland and San Francisco.

There are many colorful, vivid and fascinating murals that dot the urban landscape in my Oakland neighborhood. While some of them are reminders of the glorious past history of this East Bay city situated across the bay from San Francisco, in particular, one of them depicts the famous Key System electric trains.

Believe me, there's plenty we can learn from studying a single, neo-WPA mural.

The Key Route Plaza mural, a 23-by-14-foot colorful and historic mural created by local artist Rocky Baird in 2005, tells a story about a bygone era of transportation that once connected Oakland and San Francisco, two major northern California cities on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay.

The Key System electric trolley car company established its first transit depot at Key Route Plaza, at the corner of Piedmont Avenue and 41st Street in Oakland, in 1904. The orange and silver train depicted in the mural that is located on what formerly was part of the transit depot is Car No. 159 on the C-Line which, according to a historic plaque, made its final departure from Piedmont Station on April 19, 1958 at 6:45 p.m.

The quixotic creator of the Key Route, Francis Marion "Borax" Smith, is a larger-than-life giant figure shown in the mural. He was a Nevada mining magnate who made his fortune in borax before he lost much of it in transit. The key that he is holding "has three rings at its handle to symbolize three lines to Berkeley, Oakland and Piedmont. The long stem represents the Key Pier, which carried trains about three miles over the bay, and the teeth represent the ferry slip," wrote Sam Whiting in a 2005 San Francisco Chronicle article.

At its height during the 1940s, the Key System had over 66 miles of track and serviced the hills and dales of Oakland and Berkeley as well as other East Bay cities like Alameda, Emeryville, Piedmont, San Leandro, El Cerrito, Richmond and Albany.

A historic plaque at the site of Key Route Plaza.

According to the commemorative plaque at Key Route Plaza, back in 1939 it took the streamlined trains 27 minutes to travel from Oakland's Piedmont Station over the Bay Bridge to the First and Mission Station in "The City." Not bad considering that in 2014 it still takes 20 minutes to travel by light rail transit on BART from MacArthur Station in Oakland to Embarcadero Station in San Francisco.

The Key Route Plaza mural is filled with other symbolism, too. There are sections of the mural in which we see figures representing the Black Power and Women's Suffrage movements as well as a link to U.S. military might and our need for petroleum.

According to the artist, who was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle about the mural, "the mural took two months of research and three months of painting." At a cost of $5,000 to create, Baird sold off the window seats in the train at $500 each to help raise funds.

Today, half of the depot sits idle while it awaits refurbishing into a cafe, while the other half has morphed into a popular municipal parking lot, which tells the fate of a train system that was displaced by the rise and popularity of the automobile.

To learn more about the history of the Key System: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System

To read more about the history of Oakland's electric trains: http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/Oakland-Magazine/January-2008/When-Trains-Ruled-the-East-Bay/

Photos by Michael Dickens ©2014.