What Remains of Port Dover and Battery Davis

In the summer of 2025 I rode 250 kilometres from Burlington down the Welland Canal to Port Colborne, and out to the lighthouse at Port Maitland. Most of that shore is ports that aren’t really ports anymore. Lock gates, warehouses with the glass gone, docks built for ships that stopped coming a long time ago. Nobody tells you what any of it was. You piece it together from what’s left, a spur of track that ends in grass, a company name fading on brick, and after a few hundred kilometres you have something that isn’t quite a history but is close to a feeling.

San Francisco is like that if you let it be. I ran a trail ultra through the Marin Headlands, past the old coastal batteries, concrete rooms poured into the cliffs to watch the Pacific for a war that went somewhere else. Across the Gate, at Fort Funston, there’s one called Battery Davis. During the war, soldiers sat there in shifts listening for reverberations in the water or the air. Now there are hang gliders over it, and swallows nesting in the sand below, and on the drive back into the city every billboard on the 101 is selling AI inference.

I knew the name before I knew the place, from a song. ee was a San Francisco band that started in 1999, and there isn’t much of them to find: a few albums, a Bandcamp page, and song titles that read like a map of the west side.⁠Sutro and Battery Davis, from Ramadan (2000). yellow taraval, from For 100 We Try Harder (2002). The original CD of their second album has short silences between the songs, left there on purpose. The streaming version takes them out. What survives depends on what it’s kept in.

Before ee there was Seam, and a guitarist named Sooyoung Park, who later played with them.⁠ee’s bassist, Che Chou, remembered first seeing Park’s name on the liner notes of a CD in the late eighties: “Holy shit! Who’s this Asian with a really hardcore Asian name?” The music didn’t sound like where anyone came from. It was slow and inward and American, and you could only tell who was making it from the outside: a name in small print, a crowd of black-haired kids.⁠Tobin Mori, ee’s singer, on Seam shows: “you’d see this sea of black-haired kids in the audience just rocking it.” I don’t know what it meant to be one of them. I only have what’s left.

So I go looking for the rest the way I did on the lake. Channel 26 broadcasting from San Bruno Mountain, cartoons dubbed in English in the afternoon and the news in Chinese after seven. The fountain at Serramonte in Daly City that shot up to the skylight every half hour, where lost kids were told to wait before anyone had a phone. The L-Taraval running out to the ocean through the fog. KUSF on 90.3, playing records nobody else would until the morning in 2011 when the university walked into the booth and switched it off mid-show. None of it adds up to a story. Held next to each other, they start to feel like somewhere you could have grown up.

On the hill above the labs in South San Francisco there’s a steel harp, ninety-two feet tall, put up in 1967 and left to rust for thirty years before the city bought it back. Nobody plays it. When the wind comes in off the bay it sings, and it never sounds its own note, only the ones above it.