City of Misfits

EdgeCity

There is something about this island city that attracts misfits. The very fact that it sits on an island off the coast of Oakland, accessible only by water, bridge, or tunnel is critical to that attraction. For starters, only a masochist would add such a complication to his or her commute. But we’re also seeking refuge from something “over there.”

I write a blog called Edge City, because I think of this part of the world as the very edge of Western Civilization, and in some respects also edgy, on the very edge of the conventions of ordinary reality. Nothing more conventional than something that is called “Midwestern.”

So here we are on the verge, and on an island to boot. We take that movie, The Misfits, one more notch closer to the edge. Arthur Miller, screen writer of that film, fashioned most of his work around various aspects of the American psyche, from witch-burdened Salem to the end of the American frontier populated by a dead and dying breed: the cowboy.

We have a closed and deteriorating Naval Air Station that occupies fully one-third of the island, and thousands of retirees who once worked at the base are still living here. Many of those former base workers came here during World War Two, when the whole nation was united to fight the war. They also witnessed embarkations to the War in Vietnam, and war protestors from Berkeley trying to shut the base down.

And so the values residing here are working class, patriotic and somewhat conservative.

John Huston directed The Misfits as a western — complete with an ersatz Reno saloon dancehall girl, Marilyn Monroe, three cowpokes, (Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach), and a kind of Ma Kettle older gal, Thelma Ritter. Ostensibly, the drama is all around the capture of wild horses for sale to the dog food factory. Gable and Monroe clash dramatically.

In Alameda, the clash is very similar. Newer arrivals are generally more affluent, (hence can afford current real estate prices), better educated, more liberal and, because they are new arrivals, predisposed to favor change, growth, development, more houses for more people like themselves. And many of them favor the theory of “Density.”

Density is the notion that it’s better to locate populations near the inner city, where the jobs are, rather than promoting suburban sprawl and longer commutes. Native Alamedans, on the other hand, resist change and want to preserve its small town feel. They point to added traffic as a prime reason for no or, at the most, managed growth.

In the movie, Gable is the old way, the cowboy way, barely getting by, and Monroe promotes something new and more sentimental, but also retrograde — let the wild horses run free!

When I first arrived here I was channeling Clark Gable, the handsome, virile, ex-cowboy making a living catching mustangs. Nowadays I play the drifter and stove up old rodeo cowpoke Monty Clift. There’s at least one depressed divorcee in my life as pretty as Monroe and at least one Thelma Ritter, disguised, perhaps, as a nurse.

In this City of Misfits, we wrangle over the taxes, the frontier, the mustangs. Even the elites know they are small fry compared to the elites in Hillsborough, or even Marin. And the old timers see their way of life becoming obsolete, like that old Navy base, and know that just over the next rise there’s a factory making dog food.

©2010 Dennis Green