We went down this morning to visit Daui's grandnephew at Santa Clara University. Santa Clara is at the foot of the Bay, near San Jose. The Santa Clara River once flowed freely and contributed major amounts of sand to the beaches of southern California. The land around the lower Bay is flat and completely developed, perhaps once sea bottom, or high marsh: strip malls, warehouses, several story apartment buildings and hotels, single family houses. I suppose the flats were originally wooded with Douglas fir and redwood, with some pine, cypress and coastal scrub near the water, some oak and bay along the brooks, serpentine meadows. The campus consisted of tall yellow stucco buildings, on wide lawns decorated with dying redwoods. Against the mission church was a walled rose garden. A black phoebe flitted from shrub to shrub in an alley. We took the kid to lunch at a "pedestrian mall" set down with its own parking garage off a major road, a totally fake urban scene: America as Disneyland.
We drove there from Berkeley, also totally built up, with its tiny yards, scattered redwoods amd palms, unkempt old gardens, a totally mixed and wild vegetation, redwoods growing up against house walls, wild orange bushes, palms two feet thick and sixty feet tall growing out of three square feet of soil, with stone steps laid around the fibrous trunk to a front door; Berkeley with its parks, organic amaranth, sustainably fished salmon, fresh greens, mushrooms smelling of the woods, round topped trees pruned by the wind, happy eggs, bottles of fresh squeezed blood orange juice, affordable apartments set among million dollar houses, round soft green hills fading away to the east from Inspiration Point, the swirl of plastic bottles amidst swimming ducks where Strawberry Creek enters the Bay. A few days later, in early morning we drove Daui's niece and her husband to the airport, through flat gray light, eight lanes of traffic, rain washed buildings visible above the elevated highway, water from the streets running into the Bay. Real life in our capitalist world was along the walled interstates leading down to San Jose.
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I read this when you first posted it and I have been trying to put into words what I see when you write.
ReplyDeleteWhen you related how the lower bay perhaps was sea bottom at the beginning of the post, I pictured how everything would look if it were taken back by water. How the walled interstates and the affordable homes nestled between million dollar ones would make such great man made coral! The eroding warehouses would be like rock formations, schools of fish glistening through the broken windows of the apartment buildings.
How true your last sentence is!!! Walled interstates, 8 lanes of traffic!! How could anyone be able to break the focus off of their controlled mind when those are the structures they have to travel thru. Plus, to further capitalist inebriation, the poisons from the autos conveniently pour into a water source, which I am sure causes some kind of mental/ physical dumbing.
It is all so very perfect. Capitalism works so very well- of course for those not in the "worker bee" realm. The capitalist mechanism is quite brilliant in fact. Enslave people by pumping them full of the notion that they are "free".
Sure 8 laned highways maybe a way to get to your job, to pay the bills, to buy that dress, to wear to work, so you can pay the bills, to buy the car, to get to work, so you can pay the bills.... But maybe something is afoot! Who said we need ALL of these bills?
So, a big hooray for thinkers and observers!!! Spreading the word that maybe things are not quite as they seem.
Thank you for your blog entry. I always enjoy your observations.
By the way all of the sudden its spring here! The first reddish buds on tree branches are appearing, the day lilies broke through the ground next to the Carriage House, and people without piles of clothes on are in the streets! WOO!
Miss you!
xxx alee ooo