I pedal up from Fremont BART past low-slung office parks among under-watered conifers, the kind of hyper-bland businesses that make even an orthodontist's office seem exciting: title companies, medical imaging labs, Kumon. Almost every address is in the 40,000s because Fremont is the southernmost town in Alameda County and presumably the addresses radiate from Oakland. In The Crying of Lot 49, when Oedipa Maas leaves her comfortable Central Coast town for the alien landscape of industrial Los Angeles County, she sees "address numbers in the 70 and then 80,000s." They unnerve her. "It seemed unnatural, somehow," Thomas Pynchon writes. Everything is one-story, single-family homes, with women in saris walking out to check the mail.
Although I'm certain I've been through it, I had never been to Fremont before. The fourth-largest city in the Bay Area is a relative obscurity, not really Silicon Valley, and arguably in the most remote corner of the region (from an S.F.-centric perspective).
I'm heading uphill toward Mission San Jose, a few miles from BART. Built in 1797 and rebuilt after the 1868 Hayward earthquake, it's photogenic enough, but already closed for the day. Across the street, though, California Craft Beer is open and the air conditioner is humming. Like a City Beer Store that's open late, it's only $7.50 for a flight of four local microbrews. Almanac Meyer Lemon Gose and Altamont's Green Collar Pale Ale are the best two, and I get an extra, fifth pour of 101 Cider's dry-hopped Cactus Red Unfiltered. It's a nice bonus but nobody in here has a (confident) recommendation for where to eat.
I follow Mission Boulevard, presumably a spur of the original El Camino Real, until I'm coasting almost down to sea level, to the Tesla factory. For a company of such world-historical importance, it's about as prosaic as a Target regional distribution center, but with electric charging stations. I doubt those were there during the pre-recession NUMMI days.
Fremont has a lot of high-voltage power lines running east to west out of the drought-colored hills, and some of the sloughs and seasonal creeks still have water in them. I know there are abandoned railroad tracks somewhere and I've got my eye out for industrial decay, but little here was built before World War II.
I pop into an Afghan grocery for baklava ($9.99/pound) and Rooh-Afza (the "Summer Drink of the East," on sale for $2.99 as a Ramadan special). Like a woodsier grenadine, it counts "distillate of fragrant screw pine" among its ingredients. All the Afghan restaurants are on the other side of town, and I almost eat at a Korean restaurant because Korean fried chicken is one of my proverbial desert island foods. But the prices are astronomical, so I dash across Fremont Boulevard for a lengua super burrito at a Formica-filled taqueria. The tongue is fatty but it's got guacamole and avocado slices, extras that may seem like luxuries after a few more years without rain. And it's only seven bucks!
By now, it's too dark to bike to a neighborhood called 28 Palms, one fewer than the Mojave military town that's full of tattoo parlors and stripper bars, in spite of my intense curiosity about what is probably a 1960s housing tract. When I get back to BART, it's already 25 degrees cooler than when I arrived. That night, there's a 4.0 earthquake, a harbinger of an overdue big one. I miss all the excitement by five hours.
Comments are closed.
