A long weekend in Berkeley was more than my first post-pandemic travel. It had been twenty five years since I had been in the Bay Area; that time was also to visit my college roommate and longest friend, Mary-Ellis. In 1997, as a response to breaking up with a boyfriend, I drove from Seattle to Berkeley on Highway 101 and Highway 1 all the way from the Washington/Oregon border.  This time I took the train.

I had a grand time. I had been viciously ill for two weeks prior to my leaving for California so one could argue it could only get better. But it was more than that: At the end of this trip I reflected that the mini-break was as good as electroshock therapy for busting up my frame of mind. Specifically, it was Mary-Ellis who had that effect on me. She always does.

I was not feeling tiptop when I boarded the train in Seattle. I was still “having a bit of A Do with my stomach,” an expression my English cousins reliably inform is not a Briticism so I must have picked it up somewhere else. I was prepared for the train to be cold but my tiny little compartment was well heated. I ended up needing the cool weather clothes for Berkeley, which, while warmer than Seattle, was still a bit chilly. After going through a winter, I forget what 65 degrees feels like.

What was lacking on the train was wi-fi. “I hope you all have a good book,” said the voice on the P.A. system after cheerfully telling us the Coast Starlight was an old train and not equipped for the internet. I had a lot of books and audiobooks on my tablet but I soon found out that just because there’s title in my library doesn’t mean it’s downloaded. So that was rude. In Portland I went into the station to download a few more titles.

I listened to Kenneth Branagh read Heart of Darkness, (Joseph Conrad) a gorgeous listen. The language is as luminous as the tale is dark. And I started Empire of Pain Patrick Radden Keefe, which was chilling.

The dining car had an ambitious menu, almost none of which I could eat due to The Do with my stomach. I picked at a child’s plate of roast chicken, ate the inside of a baked potato and took a complimentary mini-bottle of Maker’s Mark for Gwen in Seattle because she had taken me to the train station. For dinner, I had tea delivered to me in my compartment and ate the yoghurt and crackers I had brought with me.

I figured out how to pull the two facing seats into a bed, giving me an opening of about a square foot to change into sleeping clothes. I love sleeping on the train although it can be difficult to know if you are mostly awake and dozing off now and then or mostly asleep and waking up 487 times. I know I surfaced when the train stopped in Klamath Falls, Oregon and was awakened with the announcement that we were stuck there for an unscheduled hour and a half for some reason. When I awoke next, it was light outside and we were pulling into Chico, California.

The train was then an hour and a half late getting into Berkeley. I waited by the door with other detraining passengers. Our steward had his hands full so I slipped a five-dollar bill into his pocket. It stuck out so I gave it an extra poke.

One of my fellow passengers snickered and said, “You never know who might grab it!”

I said, “It’s not that. No one needs to know how much or how little I’m giving him.” Course now everyone reading this post has an opinion about what kind of a tipper I am.

One thing that I love about train travel is that train stations tend to be accessible and uncrowded the way airports used to be. You can park close and be in the receiving line for your guest. And there she was, Mary-Ellis, a head taller than the group of Amish people waiting to board.

Mary-Ellis and I roomed together for a year at Whitman College. We pledged a sorority in our junior year. I felt my social life was lacking and I wanted easier access to the fraternity houses. Mary-Ellis, however, was born to it. Not specifically to sororities with their hallowed and silly traditions but to the Women’s Club movement that she would discover later in her life and which had to be explained to me on this visit. There are aspects to Mary-Ellis. One is Ms. Junior League. Another is Fifth Grader at Camp. I love the latter—always have. The former is calm, gracious, solid, patient, beautiful. Yet a third would be The Mom which I especially appreciated what with The Do with my stomach. She was solicitous as only a mom could be and she paced the weekend to accommodate my weakened state right down to policing my butter and lemon intake.

We pulled up to the Mary-Ellis House of Whimsey where she lives with her husband Phil, where they raised their two sons and which is across the street from the grade school Kamela Harris attended. A garden with paved paths inlayed with whimsical flowers and creatures wind around a golden-orange house; if you are of a painting bent, think New Gamboge. Two Australian bottlebrush trees sit in front and a Meyer lemon tree in back.

I greeted Phil when he emerged from his office in a suit and red bow tie. “You get all dressed up to sit in front of your computer?” I asked, then realizing that sounded kind of snarky and he wasn’t used to me, I added “Because you’ve always dressed for work.”

“It’s important to look reasonably professional for clients,” he said

Phil was a public defender for years and he is now a judge. “But not in the courtroom.”

“Why is that important?” I asked.

“People think of all judges as being in the courtroom.”

“Do I have to say ‘but not in a courtroom’ when I tell all my friends you’re a judge?”

He smiled, “No, that’s not necessary.”

Phil is a judge.

For lunch, Mary-Ellis thawed a sumptuous creamy asparagus soup she had made. This might have been when I began saying “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.” I got her recipe. She took me around the corner to the Airbnb where I would be staying and we met Suzanne, an elderly woman with a load of energy and a beautiful smile. She’s rail thin but claims to be trying to get rid of the five pounds she gained while in Europe for three weeks.

Succulents on Steroids

I had a large sunny room upstairs and a bathroom to myself. After dispensing with all the pleasantries, Mary-Ellis left and I fell asleep on the comfortable bed until time for dinner. Walking back to the House of Whimsey felt like a stroll through a continuous garden. The neighborhood is old and lovely, full of flowers, birds, Little Free Libraries, a wishing tree, a poem tree and what I dubbed Succulents on Steroids. The little things we call Hens and Chickens in Seattle are sunflower-huge and sitting atop foot- long stems. An aloe bush looked like a colony of octopi. I remember the first time I saw geraniums in the Bay area: I thought, “Oh my, that’s what they are supposed to look like!” Everything there seems to explode with decadent voluptuousness.

We had a lovely meal at a Thai restaurant where I could get fried rice with half a star (to accommodate The Do in my stomach). Mary-Ellis and I walked up to Indian Rock Park, (“an acre of rhyolite outcroppings, deposited by volcanic eruptions some 10 million years ago” says the Cal Alum page). It and several other rock “outcroppings” in the neighborhood are used for beginning rock climbers and for anyone who wants to sit and watch the sun set on San Francisco Bay or just clamber around the rock. You don’t need climbing gear to get up there, there are plenty of ways to climb even in my insubstantial shoes. Truth be told, I was still feeling the train rocking me back and forth or I would have stayed for the sun set.

And the sun set on Day Two.