Rideshare Vignettes, Vol. 1

Drivers who want to be heard, cities that want to be seen

Gilberto wants to talk. He has a lot to say and only forty-five minutes — the length of our ride from my home to the airport — to tell it. He returned the day before, he said, from a fishing expedition in the Gulf of Mexico. His thick hands, veined, streaked I’d like to think with gasoline, grip the steering wheel as we wind through traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, as he describes his thirty-eight-foot vessel, his four coolers of fresh-caught fish, his dismay at a new law that would prohibit cell phone use while driving in nearly half the country, as he scrolls his phone for the TikTok video that told him so.

***

Chain-link fences everywhere. Hegenberger Road and Seventy-Third Avenue in Oakland are long and flat and wide and mostly straight. Built for speed. Fast and cracked. The occasional human body — peering out the front door of a small house, navigating a narrow sidewalk, meandering into a roadway where they ought not be — was a surprise. Commercial buildings not boarded up, not graffiti-tagged seemed the exception to the rule. But one appeared open, one near the start of our drive, one that made me pull my phone from my pocket in the back seat of a Lyft to snap a picture: “Citizen Canine - A Unique Hotel and Day Care for Dogs.” This neighborhood is on the move.