InsideStory

Two Years Before the Mast of Trying to Remember: Why Bay Crossings?

By Bobby Winston

Bay Crossings will be two years old this January, so it seems a good time for reflection on how it came to be.

For many years, I lived in San Francisco where I ran the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. It’s maddening to run a non-profit organization these days – particularly a performing arts group, even more so a theater group and most of all if you happen to be, as I was, cursed with the role of founder. So, burnt out before forty, I retired. Within days, my wife, who works in Oakland and had been commuting none too happily from the City, was scouting out places for us to live in the East Bay. I’m an amiable fellow, I figured, "Why not? The change might do me good."

So it was that we came to live in Alameda, the "Isle of Style". The adjustment involved some challenges. I mean, one day I’m living in the Upper Castro, where my dry cleaner is a transgender drag queen, and the next I’m living in a community of retired Marines. It gave me a case of the bends.

But the biggest shock came the first time I had to drive to the City for a morning appointment. What I saw – what tens of thousands of commuters experience daily — would appall Hieronymus Bosch, or even someone from New Jersey. Dead-stopped traffic, fuming trucks, traffic helicopters zooming overhead; it felt like Apocalypse Now. I was, of course, absurdly late: the trip – less than 12 miles – took well over an hour.

The experience prompted me to write an Op-Ed piece for the San Francisco Chronicle in which I decried the absurdity of a transportation infrastructure that made it easier and faster for me to get to Los Angeles (via Oakland Airport) than downtown San Francisco at rush hour. Soon after, I was invited by Ron Cowan to play a minor role, that of volunteer propagandist, in the campaign that successfully persuaded the Legislature to create the San Francisco Bay Area Water Transit Authority (WTA as it’s become commonly known).

I had already begun using the Alameda/Oakland ferry, and it seemed obvious that a free handout to inform and engage ferryriders in our campaign made sense. Our first issue came out two years ago this January. I, joined by group of volunteer IBU deckhands led by the indomitable IBU Regional Director Marina Secchitano herself, passed it out by hand. We met at the Ferry Building before dawn to be in time for the first boats. I can remember clearly the sun coming up, dramatically breaking through clouds, fog and the Bay Bridge. This may not be so glamorous, I remember telling myself, but the views sure are great.

Dawn that day I remember as if it were yesterday, but try as I might, I just cannot remember the pivot point at which Bay Crossings tipped from volunteer newsletter into full-fledged general interest publication. Memory is a trickster bartender, blending past embarrassments, flights of self-importance and disappointments, garnishing them with today’s absurdities, and serving up cocktails of momentary delusion. So I’ll settle for this: whenever – and however — I did decide to make a go of Bay Crossings as a newspaper, it was a wildly imprudent, romantically impulsive decision. The best choices are.

On the other hand, my beloved yoga instructor, a perfect sadist, tells me that memory is stored in muscle tissue as aches and pains, to fester until released by bodywork. If that’s true, then the full story is to be found in my sore lower back, for producing Bay Crossings is surprisingly strenuous.

Yes, newspaper publication is unglamorous. And I won’t get rich publishing Bay Crossings, though I can’t resist a certain smugness at being in the black as dot-com hotshots like the Industry Standard dive-bomb into bankruptcy. Most important, and more than ever, I feel a sense of purpose in promoting such a sensible public transit option as water transit. And it is wonderfully fun covering the waterfront; the quirky characters, the rapidly expanding waterside economy, the unspeakably beautiful recreational opportunities. It is certainly flattering to see our readership grow to over 45,000 each month, to the point where the majority of our readers are not even ferryriders. And it is a privilege beyond my due to work with the creative and dedicated folks who have so kindly agreed to work with me making Bay Crossings possible: folks like Art Director Francisco Arreola (there from the very start), Publisher Joyce Aldana, Lisa Klairmont, writers Bill Collidge (also our landlord), Wes Starratt, Nancy Salcedo, photographer Shu Nishioka and too many more to mention here.

So this Holiday Season may I, on behalf of everyone in the Bay Crossings family, thank you, dear reader, for your gift of paying attention. We’ll repay that gift, with interest, in the months and years ahead as we sing for our supper.