Taking us on a walk through the folds and furrows of her Oakland neighborhood, Jenny Odell steps into the age-old conversation between rocks and water, attuning to a larger narrative of deep, geological time.
IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME where I live, my answer would depend on where we are. If we are not in my city of residence, I might say Oakland. If we are in Oakland, I might say Grand Lake. And if we’re in Grand Lake, I might say “near the rose garden.” But none of those really express where I feel myself to live, which is in a giant wrinkle—just one of many in a generally wrinkly area. Every day I walk into and out of them, considering each lump of trees and houses from the vantage point of another. I have done this since I moved here eight years ago. For most of those eight years, my restless mind and body appreciated this folded terrain without really knowing how to explain it.I continued these daily ups and downs during the pandemic, and it was around this time that I came across the long-running blog of geologist Andrew Alden, Oakland Geology. Some of the posts were structured in a format that felt familiar to me: an amble through a particular neighborhood, often mixing geological history with architectural and cultural history. There was even one that covered part of my wrinkly surrounds: “Lakeshore ridges walk (#26).” While my knowledge of rocks and everything rock-related was decidedly amateur, there was something in these posts that reminded me of myself: just a person walking around, observing, and trying to understand a landscape. FOR MOREPhoto Credit: JMC 2009
