At The City’s Dividing Line:

Next, we were off to Lake Merritt itself, to see if we could talk to folks there about their impressions of how to locate West and East Oakland. Lake Merritt, sometimes referred to as the ‘Jewel of Oakland’, is one of the City’s most unusual features: it is the largest fresh and salt-water lake contained in an urban area.

After we rode through the Lake’s beautiful pergola, we ran across a group of high school girls doing some community service work: they were dredging what looked like thousands of Canada geese from the lake. The geese have made this spot their permanent home. We stopped to talk to the girls. They all agreed that the Lake was definitely not East Oakland. However, they were all pointing in different directions to try to set us towards East. Their teach pitched in and gave us her sense of the easterly direction too.