the 880
There's a particular shudder that comes with "The Nimitz," nothing to do with the Admiral, everything to do with knowing exactly which stretch of concrete it names and what it means to be on it at 5pm on a Friday. If you felt that shudder just now, you and I are probably from the same place.
The Town. Oaktown.
Said with a specific kind of affection that doubles as a mild rebuke to The City, which names itself with that particular Bay Area arrogance, as if there were one city and it were obviously it. The City does not notice the dig. Well, it wouldn't, would it. But the naming is doing the work none the less.
Triangulating speaker and listener, running a quiet pat down before the conversation has properly started. The old Cooperhouse. Our very own "down past where the old mill used to be." Either charmingly local or a mildly passive-aggressive act of hostility toward anyone who had the nerve to arrive after the mill came down. "The Nimitz" works the same way, naming itself for an Admiral nobody on it is thinking about, sorting the folks who knew it before from the ones who only ever knew the road.
That ratchet ratchets the other way too. Flip it around and you get a mirror image of the same tool.
Gough. The way you say it tells on you immediately, and you do not even know. San Fran, also. Frisco is, whoah, just no. Contingent on context, a tell or a deliberate provocation. An outsider mangling a street name is accidentally doing the same thing as the insider invoking the old Metreon. Place-names as tribal membership. As identity. "The Nimitz" again, said with that shudder, doing exactly this, marking me as someone who was there.
What I am less sure about, looking back at all of it with some affectionate distance, is whether "Locals Only" deployed as language is shared culture or gatekeeping with better aesthetics. The warmth is real. The exclusion is, sadly, every bit as real.
Those two shadow each other. Much like my shudder at "The Nimitz" casts a pall on my genuine fondness for a place that used to have a lower deck. A bottom deck that came down in 1989, with commuters on it, when the double-decker pancaked in the Loma Prieta quake. That is what makes me flinch. Not the traffic. Gough sorts who can say a street name right. The Nimitz sorts who is carrying the same wound.
What happens to the shibboleth when the thing it names is gone, when the mill is gone, when that lower deck is gone? Is the ache a defense against outsiders, or just grief in a language only the people who lost the same thing can hear?
Cypress Freeway Memorial Park, Oakland: photo by Lthomas2, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).