Angel Island

It was the morning after the night before.

My cousin Danny and his bride Noelle's wedding of yesterday was both beautiful and a blast! Great food, music and dancing. Much fun was had by all. A little too much fun. Well, a lot too much fun. We got home around midnight and I needed to make a decision:

To go or not to go?
That is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous hills,
Or to take arms against a sea of trails,
And by opposing conquer Angel Island?

To snooze: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The foot-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd!^*

Of course, I decided to go. So I quickly packed my gear and laid out my clothes for a very early morning start on Sunday.

The alarm went off at 6:30 am. About 6 hours after I had finally gotten to sleep. Definitely not enough sleep. Definitely had too much fun last night.

Did I really want to go? My husband said yes, and kicked me out of bed.

Yeah, right. He gets to sleep in! What a slug. Nevertheless, I remained envious. But he knows me well, as he should, after 11 years of marriage.

I quickly showered and dressed, then I grabbed a vitamin water and drove to our carpool rendezvous at a local shopping mall. There I grabbed a coffee and a sandwich from Le Boulanger before we left at 7:30 am. What a wonderful invention is coffee! Deb, our mentor from Team in Training, drove us up to the Pier 39 parking lot, where we were to catch the Blue & Gold Ferry to Angel Island. It was still early enough that a human being wasn't in attendance at the ticket booth, but fortunately there was a ticket vending machine nearby.

It had probably been at least twenty years since I was last on Angel Island. My karate dojo had a picnic at Ayala Cove, right before I left to go to law school. It was the last time I saw our sensei, as he died a few years later. My family had also been there many times when I was a child. It was a favorite place to take a weekend picnic and bicycles. My brothers and I biked all over the island, but it was my brothers who did most of the hiking with my dad. During the 20 minute ferry ride, I wondered if it would still look like I remembered it.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous, even while on the ferry. Not too much wind, and plenty of sunshine. I was too warm, so I took off my jacket. It was shaping up to be a picture perfect day, as we passed Fort McDowell, and then rounded the lighthouses at Point Blunt and Point Stuart. Finally, we pulled into Ayala Cove at about 9:20 am - right on time. I was impressed at the number of new buildings - mostly concessions - and the vastly improved dock facilities. There wasn't much more than a bathroom and a dock when we came here as children years ago. No restaurants and no bike rentals - we had to bring our own.

We used the restrooms at the dock, regathered the "troops" - a collection of mostly Team in Training alumnae - and then we were off. Today's destination: Mount Livermore - the very top of Angel Island. We began our hike along the North Ridge trail, which begins with a series of near vertical stairs right behind the docks. We ascended the first set, passing Perimeter Road, then the second set. We reached and crossed the fire road, continuing on along the North Ridge Trail.

At this point, we had a pretty good view of the U.S. Immigration Station, although there was no direct route from where we were. We planned to visit the Immigration Station later in the day, before our ferry ride home.

By this time, the view was becoming quite beautiful - and I was finally rid of that groggy feeling from the night before. It was also quite warm and I decided that I needed to take off my outer shirt. This posed a minor problem since I had forgotten to put the short sleeve shirt on under the long sleeve shirt. Since we were primarily a group of women, and since we asked the lone gentleman to please turn his back for a minute, a few of us exchanged our long sleeve shirts for short sleeves at a convenient bend in the trail. Ahh! Much better.

We kept hiking up the North Ridge trail, gaining altitude until at last we emerged from oak woodlands and into grasslands and manzanita during the last half mile to the summit. The flowers are mostly gone now. But what this hike lacked in flowers (at this time of year), it more than made up for in sweeping panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay. We arrived at the top at about 11:45 am. At the summit were some benches and a couple of picnic tables. We sat down and ate our lunch and chatted for a while. Then we snapped this group photo with bay vistas and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.

After lunch we descended via the North Ridge trail, but this time took the Sunset Trail at the first junction. The Sunset Trail would take us around the island though via a somewhat shorter path than the fire road. We needed to do this if we were going to make it to the Immigration Station in time to visit it and then catch our ferry back to San Francisco. The Sunset Trail has some very pretty views of Ayala Cove.

We made it back to Perimeter Road, just above the Ayala Cove Vistor Center by 1:20 pm. We had about an hour before it was time to rendezvous at the docks, so we immediately walked another twenty minutes to the Immigration Station at China Cove via the Perimeter Road.

The U.S. Immigration Station had not been restored at the time of my previous visits to Angel Island. Then, it was a only group of decrepit and crumbling buildings that we could see through a chain link fence. My brothers and I wondered what it had been, only having some vague notions of its previous use. Now that several of the buildings have been restored, it is possible to walk into the barracks where would be immigrants were once housed.

Enticed by promises of gold and a better life, Chinese began immigrating to the United States in 1848. Soon after, however, discriminatory legislation prevented the Chinese from mining for gold. In addition, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and essentially froze Chinese immigration. However, this legislation could not keep sons and daughters of U.S. citizens out of the country. People attempting to emigrate from China often bought documentation claiming that they were children of U.S. citizens, and therefore citizens themselves.

Proving the validity of these claims was difficult, and an interrogation process was developed. The Department of Immigration needed a place to detain immigrants until the interrogation could be complete. In 1905, construction of the U.S. Immigration Station began. It became a detention facility, where Asian (primarily Chinese) immigrants were detained until they could prove they were joining relatives already in the country.

Angel Island State Park, About the United States Immigration Station

Here we were able to see Chinese graffiti covering the walls, and also a more rare Japanese graffiti. I thumbed through several photo albums, which contained many hideous photographs of Chinese women who had had their feet bound. Apparently, foot binding was a status symbol among wealthy Chinese as it represented their freedom from manual labor. But the practice is abhorrent to the Western Christian mind precisely because of the deformity and disability that it inevitably causes. While I had learned about the practice of foot binding in a high school history class years ago, what I had not understood previously is that binding the feet does not actually prevent the foot from growing. Rather the foot continues to grow, but curls under such that four smaller toes wind up grafted to the bottom of the foot. Whatever pain I felt in my feet after today's hike must have been nothing compared to the pain felt by these Chinese girls suffering from the pain of foot binding.

We exited the barracks and walked further down the hill towards the bell. This was the original fog-warning bell at the station, which had disappeared from the island after it ceased being used. Most likely it was replaced by a compressed air foghorn, as many of the bells and lighthouses were. When the original bell was later rediscovered in a San Diego junk yard, it was restored and returned to Angel Island, eventually to the U.S. Immigration Station from whence it first came.

By this time it was about 2:00 pm. It was time to hike back to the docks. Then along came the shuttle. Three of us climbed on board the shuttle and the rest of our group hiked back to the docks at Ayala Cove. We sipped some cold diet Cokes at the cafe while waiting for the ferry, and the rest of our group, to arrive.

The breeze began to pick up around 3:00 pm and our ferry ride back to San Francisco was more windy than it had been that morning. This corresponded to my memories of windy afternoons on Angel Island. Even so, I barely needed a jacket. What a glorious day it was!

* With all due apologies to William Shakespeare