I belong to a family of immigrants. Ancestors of both my father and my mother arrived in America from across the Atlantic Ocean. It was in the early seventeenth century when they came from England to Virginia and Maryland. They arrived without papers, visas, or green cards. No relatives met them at a dock to give them a bedroom or offer them a job.

Some of these immigrants were Catholics who came seeking religious freedom—my mother’s Burch ancestors who sailed in ships, the Ark and the Dove, that landed in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, in 1634. The Ark was a large vessel for its time, 110 feet long and 30 feet wide—as wide as four cars like my Toyota Camry parked side by side, not quite as long as six Camrys lined up at a traffic signal. The Dove was one-seventh the size of the Ark. I’ve seen the place where the ships are supposed to have landed—reeds and softly lapping water, wide luminous sky and dark woods.

I know that John Merryman arrived in Virginia sometime prior to 1650. Records show that he was awarded a grant of 700 acres of land, so he must have had connections. I don’t have any clues as to why he came to the New World. Perhaps there wasn’t much opportunity for him at home, perhaps he wanted a taste of adventure. I would like to know why he was willing to leave his known world, relatively safe and predictable. I am amazed at his bravery and that of the Maryland folks who crossed the wide and treacherous ocean for many months in tiny ships only to debark at a place where they had to build their houses, grow their food, make their clothes, and deal with a vast unknown at their back door. 

            By the 1930s the Merrymans and the Burches were living comfortable lives in Baltimore, by then a dreary, decaying city. My mother’s sister worked for a bank president. She came home one evening and said to my grandmother, “The banks are going to close in a few days. Take out all your money tomorrow morning.” I don’t know how my father’s family made it through the Depression, but he was able to go to college and sail in the annual Bermuda race. After they married, my parents lived in a shingle-sided house in Alexandria, Virginia—I have a photo of Dad and me sitting on the porch steps. Evidently that wasn’t far enough from Baltimore, because when my father was offered a yearlong job in San Francisco, he took it. I was four years old when we joined him in January 1942, one month after Pearl Harbor. I remember the five-day train trip. We had a tiny compartment, my mother, my baby brother, and I. The sound of the train, its rocking motion, and the food brought on trays to our room were all terribly wonderful to me. It must have been an ordeal for my mother. The black porter was kindly and looked after us, even gave me a miniature bag of salt from the Great Salt Lake. The rest of the train was jampacked with soldiers. The narrow corridor outside our compartment was filled with men day and night. Everyone was wearing khaki. 

The train tracks ended at Oakland. A lumbering ferryboat took us across the bay to San Francisco. When my mother saw my father waiting for us at the end of the gangplank at the Ferry Building, she looked into his eyes and knew they were never going to return to Baltimore. She was ecstatic—California had been her fairy tale dream since she was a little girl. Now she could begin to live that dream.

            So my family became immigrants again. My parents created a new life for themselves amid the hustle and vitality of wartime San Francisco. The three thousand miles of North America between them and their families could just as well have been a trackless ocean. In those days you told the long distance operator you wanted to make a phone call to Baltimore and she called you back many hours later when a line was free. Letters took five days or more. Air travel was expensive and on a trip east the plane stopped in both Denver and Chicago. It was as if we had journeyed to the fabled island realm of Queen Calafia at the sparkling edge of the known world. We had left behind the old world—the cold dark streets of Baltimore, the narrow dark houses full of steps, and arrived in a warm, sunny land of perpetual flowers and opportunity. I grew up regarding my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins as dimly drawn mythological creatures. They were as insubstantial to me as the Jack and his beanstalk giant in my great big colorful picture book.

            When my grandmother and my cousin Anne came to visit us in the 1950s, I realized how changed our little family had become. Granny and Anne noticed with arched eyebrows that we set our table with no soup spoons and only one fork, wore brightly colored clothes, and sported sunglasses all the time. I was proud that our view of the world was as bright and breezy as the Pacific Ocean that rolled beyond the horizon all the way to China and Japan, the next tier of fabled lands we would dream about—and someday visit.

            These days, during our current struggle with trying to understand immigration and immigrants, I think about the bravery of these people without papers who leave the places and families they know and love and who journey, led on by the sunshine of freedom and promise, to a land of uncertainty and peril. The perils and uncertainties are different now than they were in the 1600s, but they still call for risk-taking and energy. Isn't that what America is all about?