A Familiar Sight

Taken by my husband from the deck of the USS SHOUP, currently in San Francisco for Fleet Week.

That is Treasure Island. No, not that big lump of land on the right. That's YBI, or Yerba Buena Island. It's more to the left... if you squint... kinda see it yet? It's a little flat. ;) That's because Treasure Island is built on landfill. An island of landfill? In the middle of the bay? In an area laced with faults and prone to earthquakes?

Yeah. Not the smartest idea. As they found out in October of 1989. October 17, to be exact. Weird to think we're coming up on 20 years since then!!! Oh wow, do I feel old all of a sudden. Ok, so in a week it will have been 18 years. Since the largest earthquake I've ever personally experienced. Something none of us in the Loma Prieta earthquake will ever forget.

Living on an island made of landfill in an earthquake is an unsettling experience (pardon the pun). Try being stranded in the middle of a body of water for two weeks. With your streets flooded with raw sewage. The air reeking of natural gas. Statues and old building foundations emerging through the ground, long buried from the 1939 World's Fair. No water. No electricity. Cracked walls. Sinking floors.

Scary? Um, yeah. You could say that.

Eventually the sewage was cleaned up. We had lye sprinkled on the streets and sidewalks for weeks after that. My cat ran away, and was gone until almost Halloween. Thankfully, she did come home - almost starved-to-death. They anchored an aircraft carrier out in the bay to provide us with electricity. They brought in porta-potties (one per court... for the occupants of the approx. 24 housing units surrounding that court to use) and water buffaloes, and eventually set up an army tent so we could get showers. They alternated men's days/hours with womens' days/hours. Very odd experience, that.

I lived on Naval Station Treasure Island from Aug. of '89 until late-1995, when they were in the process of closing down the Military bases in the Bay Area. Presidio had already been turned into a park. Oaknoll Naval Hospital was closed. Ships were slowly being transferred from Naval Air Station Alameda to various other ports. My dad was on the Abe Lincoln when it changed homeports to PSNS-Bremerton (now NBK-Bremerton. Though the Lincoln isn't there anymore; it's now stationed at the same base as my husband's ship, in Everett). So right before my 16th birthday, we moved away.

It's so sad to go visit the island now. We were down there a couple years ago to visit my family in the area, and we made a quick stop to drive around the island. It was so weird. No gate guard, for one. Well, there was someone there, but I'm not really sure what his job was. BLDG 1, what used to be the Admin. building, and housed the Treasure Island museum (not to mention was featured as the Nazi airport in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - they hand-painted those Third Reich banners on the celluloid after-the-fact, as the Navy would not allow them to hang Nazi symbols on their building, of course) was completely empty. Well, except for a small SF police office, and the dozens of teenagers in formal wear streaming out of one of the doors.

Most of the houses were fenced off, with strange signs warning people to keep out. Someone was living in my old house. As we drove past, I looked at the trees out back and remembered all the times I'd sat up in those branches, just looking down on the world. Thinking about the time my kitty first started climbing the tree - poor thing, it took her a while to get the hang of it. She actually fell out of it a couple times at first. She was ok. :)

The old NEX was still there, though all boarded up and closed. The fields where we'd had carnivals set up multiple years in a row, were all occupied by tractor-trailers and mobiles.

The old elementary school, where I'd spent so much time rollerblading (I was homeschooled when we moved onto the island, so I'd never gone to school there) was completely dark. No lights on anywhere. The gym, where they filmed a scene from Copycat (and shut it down for a month to do so - which didn't go over too well with the residents) was shut up... and the theater where we'd had our town meetings after the earthquake, gone to USO shows, and seen countless movies... in complete disrepair.

A lot went on those years I lived there. Some good. A lot of bad. But I'll always remember it for what I loved about it. Driving around YBI and over the "pearly bridge" at night, all lit up and leading into one of the most beautiful skylines in the USA. (You know that typical "calendar shot" of the SF-side of the Bay Bridge, shot looking over it into SF? Yeah - that was shot from YBI. I saw that view every time we came home.) Seeing the Embarcadero buildings lit up at Christmastime, looking like huge harmonicas. Driving down the Avenue of the Palms, watching them sway in the ocean breeze blowing in through the Gate - I always said we had the most beautiful driveway in the world. Waking up to the fog so thick you couldn't see the light in your court, or even the wall of the house right outside your front door.

I could go on forever about memories I have of that place. :) Someday, maybe I'll write them all down - just so I can pass them on to my kids, and let them know what it was like before everything changed, and everyone left.

There's only one other person I still keep in touch with, outside my family, who lived there at the same time and watched it all happen. Our next-door neighbor on the island - even though she moved away long after we did (they couldn't kick everybody out at once ;) she only lives a few hours away from us now; so she comes up to visit every once in a while. :)

I know everything changes in life. Nothing can stay the same. But when you're a Navy brat, change is a constant. You're always moving, always making new friends and leaving the old. You don't get a chance to put down roots. You never know what's going to happen next, so you try to hold on to any steady thing you can. For me, as ironic as it seems, it was this flat patch of landfill out in the middle of the bay.