Along The Road

On the Skids

What is it with people? People in the USA, I mean. It's like "if it looks different I don't like it!" Leave the boondocks, any sort of boondocks, and you get endless wall-enclosed, mall-punctuated, could-be-anywhere suburbs. In the San Joaquin Valley, bread basket (and fruit basket, veggie basket, nut basket) of the USA, buburbs plunked down in the middle of practically nowhere, malls sucking what little life was left in historic downtowns, villages crumbling in the interstices, along the freeways the "come hither" beckoning signs of Wal-Lyworld, BedBathBS&Beyond, the tidal flow and ebb of traffic into and out of endless parking lots. Do these people know where they live? Do they care?

That bread basket...nobody lives there. Sure, the farmworkers stay there, but they don't live there. How could they? It isn't theirs! The "owners," the corporations and their big wigs live elsewhere, and they don't care what it looks like. All they're interested in is maximizing profits, minimizing costs. To them land, "place," is a cost of production, there is no "there" there (as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, CA). They are aliens, just as are the workers, and the sururbanites behind their walls.

Well, keep sleeping, all you aliens, mom nature is waking up. And she's gonna be pissed!

So, anyway, on the way I stopped for a few days at Mt. Madonna County Park, at the top of Hecker Pass, between Gilroy, in the Santa Clara Valley, and Watsonville, on the outwash plain of the Carmel Valley. Aside from the First Street Cafe, a nice enough (if a little sterile) java house in Gilroy (with free WIFI, of course), either side is a bit of cultural wasteland. Steinbecks promised land of agriculture, canneries and skid rows is pretty much gone, replaced by the above mentioned mall/wall complex.

A bright spot, in its own unique way, is Freedom, an outlying province of Watsonville that might have been dragged and dropped directly from Quito - a barrio in the truest sense, jammed, somewhat incongruously, between massive cemetaries: Pioneer Cemetary, St Francis Cemetary, Pajaro Valley, Valley Catholic, Watsonville Catholic. People have been living and dying here for quite a while.

Mt. Madonna is pretty typical California coastal mountain: redwood/tan oak/madrone forest, with a healthy sprinkling of Chinquapin, and manzanita/huckleberry/ceanothus scrub. Being the main barrier between the Pacific Ocean and just about everywhere else around, Mt. Madonna catches quite a bit of moisture. I was greeted, and departed, in the "beneath the trees" downpour created by fog catching in the redwood fronds.

And, now, I leave the eastern slope of the western mountains for the western slope of the eastern. Warmer probably, dryer probably, but not really any nearere, my god, to thee.