Sonder

Grizzly Peak musings

Behind UC Berkeley’s football stadium and past Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, alongside the estates nestled into the hill’s embrace, Grizzly Peak rises. On any clear night, if you wind your way along the hill’s curve, the city unfolds beneath you bit by bit like a sparkling map, its largeness daunting, sundry magnetism breathtaking and big.

At night and from above, all cities look the same: lit up and shimmering with untraceable movement. The higher you go — the further from the people in rooms, and the room you woke up in, and the cracked cement streets of downtown Berkeley, WALK sign flashing red against the pavement — the more the city seems to expand, zooming out as you spiral upwards.

With the trees dark around you, everything down there feels brighter. You can imagine it from an airplane. You can imagine it from a satellite — just a pinprick on a moving map. Floating, suspended up here, you can imagine crushing the city between your fingers. It makes you wonder at your own insignificance, makes you poke and prod at it gently — as if the four and a half million people beneath you only just came into existence a breath ago for your realization.

Standing a few steps from the hill’s dulled precipice, or perhaps crouching on a log, curled into your knees and shivering in the wind-chilled air, you feel like you could step off the side of the cliff and just walk right into the city’s reflection. Besides the sky, looming formidable and lightless in the background, the dark water of the bay is the only spot of blackness on the map that is spread out before you. Cleaving the lights in half, dividing Berkeley from San Francisco, it is split only by the long straight edge of the bridge.

The cars move across, glimmering faintly. Crawling along like metal-shelled beetles during the day, at night, they turn into red streaks of light, long threads of fate connecting strangers together by the thousands. The threads tangle, pulsating with life — each sparkle, each light just slightly out of focus, is a new life with an entirely different sense of personhood. The boundlessness of perspective is overwhelming, but also thrilling. The knowledge of your inconsequence washes over you soothingly.

You think of Vegas, its capriciousness, its transience, foundation shaky and sunk shallowly into the earth’s surface. You think of all the people there, all coming and going, looping in and out of one another in an immense tangle of red thread, forging temporary connections that will be broken by morning, leaving behind a lonely frayed edge or the crease of an untied knot.

You can feel your own red thread, tugging on the end of your pinky. Intertwined immutably with Vegas’s constant ephemeral cluster, it winds its way up and down California, where it crosses and converges with hundreds of thousands of others.

Light speed on long exposure paints the Bay Bridge with brightness; the hills rise around you, dark and comforting. The precipice you stand on is quiet — you breathe a little easier up here. Below you, people go on living. People are alive everywhere, and the stars show their faint faces everywhere, and from up here, the connectedness of the world is dazzling.

Words: Vivian Stacy

Photos: Shayla Madha