Angel Island

Started: 2023-09-14 20:29:10

Submitted: 2023-09-14 22:37:18

Visibility: World-readable

Taking the ferry to Angel Island; seeing the immigration station; contemplating the racism of the American immigration system; and riding BART's retro-futurist legacy fleet in regular service one last time

Angel Island State Park identifies the eponymous island as "the largest natural island in the San Francisco Bay" (emphasis added). This clarification distinguishes Angel Island from Alameda, which used to be a peninsula until it was cut off from the mainland in 1902 to form a channel all the way around the island with the hope that the tidal current would help keep silt out of Oakland's inner harbor.

I remember visiting Angel Island a couple of times as a kid, including a trip for my birthday, when we took the ferry from Tiburon just opposite the island in Marin County. As an adult I've visited the island on two separate trips as employer-sponsored team-building exercises (with Google in 2016, and with my current employer last December). We visited Angel Island on Saturday, the 2nd of September, on Labor Day weekend.

On Saturday morning we drove across the mountain to Daly City to take the train into the city. I sort of think of Daly City as my local BART station, with the caveat that I have drive more than an hour over the mountain and up the peninsula to reach the station. (There are closer stations on the outskirts of San Jose on the southern end of the East Bay trunk line, but they're kind of awkward to get to and don't provide especially fast service to San Francisco; though I usually prefer those stops when I'm taking the train to Oakland.)

We got off the train at Embarcadero, walked through the Ferry Building, checked the Solari board for the ferry departures, walked to the wrong boarding gate, and then found the long line of people waiting to board the ferry to Angel Island. The ferry service was previously operated by Blue and Gold until they gave up the service because it wasn't profitable and Golden Gate Ferry picked it up in December 2021. (The most important difference was that we could board the ferry from the Ferry Building rather than making the awkward trek up to Pier 41. The next most important difference was that we could pay our ferry ticket with our Clipper cards.) I don't know how many people ride the ferry on an average day, but the 11:10 departure from San Francisco on Saturday of Labor Day weekend was packed.

The ferry Marin pulled up to the dock and we followed the crowd to board the ferry. (This is the largest vessel in the fleet, with a capacity of 750 passengers.) We found seats on the open-air bow of the ship, facing backwards, crowded with the other passengers, and waited for the ferry to depart. We had all brought jackets to hedge against the breeze in the middle of the bay, but sitting on the deck of the ferry in front of the Ferry Building waiting to depart was warm and almost stuffy until at some length we pushed off.

The ferry cruised northward through the bay, past a fleet of sailboats anchored off Treasure Island, and past Alcatraz. (I brought my nautical chart of San Francisco Bay to watch our progress.) The air was still, except for the forward motion of the ferry, and the water was almost perfectly flat; only the slightest waver kept it from being a perfect mirror several nautical miles wide.

The ferry cruised around the east side of Angel Island, giving us a good look at the historic buildings on the island, then turned into Raccoon Strait to dock in Ayala Cove. We took the stairs down to the lower deck to disembark and stepped out onto the dock and then onto the island itself.

From the ferry dock we walked clockwise on the paved road that circles the island to the immigration station on the north shore of the island, tucked into a small cove with a handful of historic buildings. We ate lunch on the picnic tables nestled in the foundation of the administration building, then walked through the foundation towards the dock that used to bring immigrants onto the island.

The state park had installed modern sidewalks with stairs and ramps in the aging concrete foundation and set up interpretive signs to discuss the state of the US immigration system when the immigration station was active, in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike Ellis Island, where the majority of the immigrants were coming from Europe and were presumed to be eligible to enter into the United States unless proven otherwise (by virtue of being white Europeans), on Angel Island many of the immigrants came from China and east Asia, where most immigrants were barred by the Chinese Exclusion Act — unless they could convince immigration officials that they already had a parent in the United States. This was a loophole large enough to squeeze through; Chinese immigrants claimed fathers they were not related to, becoming "paper sons" and memorizing details of their supposed childhood to answer questions from immigration officers.

Before coming to Angel Island I wondered how the site would treat the obvious racism of the immigration station. I've seen too many displays at other historic sites claiming that "it was a different time then". But the displays at Angel Island were clear: the US immigration system was blatantly racist in its exclusion of Asian migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the treatment of those migrants in the immigration detention barracks on Angel Island. It was clearly wrong then, and it's clearly wrong now, and we cannot excuse it as a historical artifact or say that it was a different time. The best we can do is to acknowledge the sins of the past and to correct the sins of the present.

We entered the immigration detention barracks and found rooms where Asian immigrants were packed into bunks suspended from the metal poles running from the floor to the ceiling. The most distinctive feature was the Chinese poetry carved into the walls. Even when painted over the marks remained, still legible under multiple coats of paint. Displays in the room explained and translated the poetry, and pulled out the references and allusions to classical Chinese poetry and to other poems elsewhere on the same walls. The poems talked about the immigrants' home villages, their hopes for the future, and their anger and frustration at being detained.

Next door to the immigration barracks was the mess hall, which included a Lego model of the immigration station as it looked when it was operational.

The second floor of the immigration detention barracks showed how immigrants were housed indefinitely in narrow bunks packed into long rooms while they waited to be admitted into the country. Here I felt the connection to the sins of the present as immigrants are held (today!) in immigration detention on the border. (The interpretive displays did not make that connection explicitly, but I felt the implication was obvious.)

There is a straight line from the unjust racist detention of Asian immigrants on Angel Island in the last century to the unjust racist detention of Central and South American immigrants on the US southern border today. We must do better, to fix the sins of the present before we can atone for the sins of the past.

After the immigration detention barracks, weighed down with the memory of an unjust past and the knowledge of an unjust present, we found a monument to immigration perched on the hillside above the cove, overlooking the northern part of San Francisco Bay. The monument was an obelisk of black granite carved with an inscription in Chinese calligraphy honoring the people who immigrated to the United States.

On the hillside opposite the barracks stood the old hospital at the immigration station, which has been renovated and populated with new exhibits to become an immigration museum. (The interior was strikingly bland in the same way that some flipped houses in San Francisco are; it almost had "new museum" smell.) Many of the exhibits made explicit the plight of immigrants and the racism they face getting to and inside the United States. The displays inside the museum were new enough that they included a collection of masks lost on the island during the pandemic, illustrating a modern connection to the health scares of the last century and their effect on immigration.

For my birthday this year, I bought myself a wide-angle lens for my Nikon DSLR, a Nikon AF-P DX NIKKOR 10-20mm f/4.5-5.6G VR Lens. This gives me a huge field of view (bigger than the wide-angle lens on my iPhone), and it made some of the interior pictures above possible. I knew I had made the right choice when I unpacked my lens the first day I got it and immediately took a great wide-angle photo of my kitchen table, and I expect to use the lens to great effect in the future.

While we were at the immigration station looking out over the bay I saw a ship cruising towards us, guided by a tugboat on the near side. The outline looked familiar, with the large cranes fore and aft over cargo bays in the hold, and I confirmed on Marine Traffic that the ship was in fact SS Jeremiah O'Brien, a liberty ship built during the Second World War now restored and operating as a museum ship in San Francisco.

By the time we finished the immigration station it was getting late in the afternoon, but we still had more than an hour before the last ferry of the day departed for San Francisco. (Just in case we missed that one, there was another ferry for Tiburon, but then we'd be stuck on the wrong side of the bay.) The rest of my family wanted to head straight back to the dock and wait, but I wanted to walk a bit more, so I took a slightly longer route up and around the island, to the unpaved fire road half-way up the hill at the center of the island, before looping back to the dock to wait for the 16:45 ferry back to San Francisco.

We were in line when the ferry departed Tiburon and crossed Raccoon Strait to Angel Island, but we were far enough in the line that the best seats we could get were on the lower deck, where we couldn't get four seats next to each other and the waves splashed the windows, obstructing our view, giving the appearance of a darker and stormier return cruise.

We took BART to the Mission to eat dosa for supper at Udupi Palace, then caught BART the rest of the way to Daly City. We rode a two-door train from the legacy fleet, with the retro-futurist steamlined driving cabs, soon to be retired from regular service, though BART is maintaining the trainsets in operational status for special events until next year. As we rode into the setting sun, the evening light shown on the little boxes of ticky-tacky on San Bruno Mountain, as I struggled to get a decent picture out the dirty windows of the moving train.

As we drove onward to Daly City, the setting sun shone in the windows of the train. This turned out to be the last time I rode in a legacy train car in regular service, before BART removed them from regular service the following weekend.

The sun was setting over the legacy fleet. This was real, and also a metaphor.