Storming the Gates of Paradise (47 page)

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Each of the past several summers, I’ve spent a month or two at a friend’s small house in rural New Mexico. Every year, I’d come back to the city joking that I wasn’t sure I was closer to nature, but I was definitely closer to my car. Really, it depends on how you define nature. In the country, there’s more wildlife to be seen—though this place surrounded by cattle ranches was not so prolifically populated as many far more suburbanized places I know, where the deer come down and eat the tulips (or, even more thrilling, the mountain lions eat the cocker spaniels).

Around the New Mexico house, coyotes sometimes howled at night; vultures, ravens, and swallows all had their appointed rites from dawn to dusk; and last summer a vivid violet-blue bird I eventually pinned down as a male blue grosbeak arrived like a minor hallucination. Most of all, there was the changing light and sky. Without lifting my head from the pillow, I could watch the summer sun rise in the northeast near where the constellation Cassiopeia made her regular nighttime appearance. I watched the transition from sunset to dusk every evening; the one time I went to a movie instead, I sat there thinking, “I’m missing the show! I’m missing the show!” With views to the horizon and dark, dark nights, the sun, the moon, and the stars lived with me, or I with them, and with the lightning and the wonderful cloud operas that passed by. That was glorious.

But my own life was strictly unnatural. Everything practical I did involved getting into a car, because there wasn’t a newspaper, a stamp, or a bottle of milk for sale for many miles. It would have taken me a full day to walk to the nearest grocery store. So I drove there, and drove to the houses of my friends, aunts, and uncles, to hikes in places less restrictive than the ranchlands, to everything. Out there in the little house on the car-alarm-free prairie, I had a great sense of cosmic time and a certain kind of slowing down—until it came time to hit the highway at seventy miles an hour, and that time came often.

Driving a whole hell of a lot is the unspoken foundation of most rural life in America, as well as a lot of wilderness adventuring (a backpack trip of a hundred miles begins with a single parking spot?). We talk about transportation as though the question is whether you drive a Yukon or a hybrid, but the question could be whether you drive, and if so, how often. I know people who really went back to the land, grew their own food, made staying home their business, ranchers whose work is really “out there”; but most people who claim to be rural have just made the countryside into a suburb, from which they commute to their real communities, jobs, research, and resources.

Ed Marston, publisher emeritus of the great environmental newspaper
High Country News
, once remarked that the West won’t be destroyed by ranching, mining, or logging, but by ten-acre ranchettes. And those ranchettes seem to preserve the frontier individualism of every-nuclear-unit-for-itself; they’re generally antithetical to the ways in which community and density consolidate resources. The urbanist Mike Davis talks of “public luxury”—the shared libraries, pools, parks, transit of urban life—as the way to sustain a decent quality of life that’s not predicated on global inequality.

The “new urbanism” can be a solution when it is really about public luxury and pedestrian space, not about dressing up suburbs like Disney’s Main Street USA. The old urbanism was a solution before we really had a problem. Today, most of the United States is designed to make driving a necessity, turning those who don’t or can’t into shut-ins, dependents, and second-class citizens. As my own neighborhood went from working-class African American to middle-class white, it too became much more car-dependent. A lot of people seemed to exit
their houses only to get into their cars, depriving themselves of the expansive sense of home that pedestrian urbanism gives you, or the democratic social space that’s created by coexisting with strangers from, as they say, all walks of life. Watching this transformation taught me that urbanism and suburbia are defined as much by the way you perceive and engage your time and space as by where you live. And it made me wonder if New York City isn’t, in a few key respects, the most natural and democratic space in America, one where stockbrokers and janitors daily coexist in the same space and much of the travel doesn’t involve any machines whatsoever.

I’ve had the rare luxury of living, with rustic intermissions, in the heart of a genuine pedestrian-scale city since I was a teenager, and though the house by the creek might have been natural habitat for a blue grosbeak, the city might be mine. Scratch pedestrian-scale; call it human-scale, since humans are pedestrians when not fitted with vehicular prosthetics.

And in this city with wild edges, I can and do walk to the beach and the hilltops (from which I can see the peaks of five counties, and where blackberries, miner’s lettuce, and a few other wild comestibles grow). Sometimes I think that the intermittent stroll of shopping, people-watching, and errand-running is a pleasantly degenerate form of hunting and gathering, that the city with its dangers and invitations and supplies is more like a primordial wilderness than a predator-free parkland where one leaves only footprints and takes only pictures.

Really, it’s about how you define nature. I think we have tended to define nature as things to look at, and we think we’re natural when we’re looking at nature, however unnatural our own circumstances at the time. If you think of yourself as a species, the question arises of what your natural habitat is: it should be a place where you can forage, where your body is at home, where your scale is adequate, where your rites and sustenance are situated. And then, of course, cities host a kind of human biodiversity that delights me. San Francisco is not only one of the most multiethnic places in the world, but one of the most eclectic. The elderly Asian man in a rose-covered picture hat who strolled down my street one day rivaled the blue grosbeak when it came to provoking amazement.

I love wilderness, wildlife, views straight to the horizon, dark nights, the
Milky Way, and silence, though I love my large libraries and pedestrian practices too. I wish I could have it all all the time. But we choose, and I think that if we changed the way we define nature and imagined our own bodies as part of it, we might more enthusiastically choose the places of public luxury and human scale, not as a sacrifice but as a kind of sanity. Besides which, I saw a golden eagle in Oakland the other day.

San Francisco is bounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by the San Bruno Mountains, a small kingdom whose heights lift you up above the concrete to see the hills, the bay, the sea beyond, with a grid of straight avenues that become lines to the horizon, light shafts, and axes: you always know that there’s a beyond to this city, America’s second most densely urban city, after New York. I’ve been walking it for three decades, since the days when I’d cut school to catch the bus into the city, and now the place is layered with ghosts—of my own life, of the events of my lifetime, and of the histories that unfolded there before. Everything used to be something else. This mutation itself seems to be a definitive condition of the place. Where the Batman Gallery showed avant-garde art by the likes of Bruce Conner in the 1960s, a Starbucks now serves up Frappuccinos; and where the African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane survived into the twenty-first century, a boutique now showcases ironic denim creations and stretchy sweater items. That’s gentrification’s cultural degradation for you, but the longer stretches of metamorphosis get really interesting.

The particular stretch of South of Market where photographer Eadweard Muybridge lived in the 1870s while he was laying the foundations for motion picture technology was, by Jack Kerouac’s time, “the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of lost bums even Negroes so hopeless and long left East and meanings of responsibility and
try
that now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard.” Third and Howard, not far from downtown’s shopping and financial districts, is
now the location for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, across the street from Yerba Buena Center, a strange mix of nonprofit arts and corporate entertainment that was built where the residential hotels of Kerouac’s time stood.

Those hotels were full of the old white guys who’d launched the great dockside strikes and union drives of the era from the 1910s through the 1930s, and when redevelopment came to their neighborhood, they fought the toughest battle in the country against it and won a lot of concessions that, for example, the African American community across town in the Fillmore didn’t. When I was a young punk, this central place where the old men had lived out the ends of their lives or had been evicted to die elsewhere was nothing but a vacant lot. Moscone Center, named after the progressive mayor assassinated in 1978, along with gay supervisor Harvey Milk, by ex-cop Dan White, opened in time to host the Democratic convention of 1984; but what would become Yerba Buena Center, to the north, was just a huge expanse of gravel and dirt where we held demonstrations against the Democrats. I still remember watching MDC (whose initials initially stood for Millions of Dead Cops but, as their political education progressed, came to signify Multi-Death Corporations) play there, that summer of my brother David’s War-Chest Tours of the downtown corporations that backed the Democrats and built nukes. The vacant lot is now Yerba Buena Center, a strangely dislocated place with an airportlike atmosphere that only once recovered its soul: when the gallery exhibited Ira Nowinski’s extraordinary No Vacancy photographs of the old men, their homes, their struggle, and the ruins through the years of the redevelopment fight.

Kerouac continued: “and here’s all those Millbrae and San Carlos neat-neck-tied producers and commuters of America and steel civilization rushing by” to catch the train. The commuter train still runs, but the huge Mission Bay railyard that was long the headquarters for America’s first spectacularly corrupt mega-corporation, Southern Pacific, is no more. It was actually a bay, once, a fact preserved, after all the landfill dumping, only in its name, Mission Bay; and it was thus named because Mission Creek emptied into it for all those millennia when Ohlone Indians were paddling their reed boats there, looking for shellfish. Mission Creek was long ago driven underground, but the mission that gave the creek and
the bay their names still exists—Kim Novak visited its cemetery in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
—in the core of the hipster zone of the Mission District. As for Mission Bay, after being a rail hub, it became a spacious, morose hobo jungle; and now it’s halfway to being a huge biotech campus. Southern Pacific money begat Leland Stanford’s fortune, and that fortune begat Stanford University, which begat Silicon Valley and, as a sort of by-blow, a fair bit of biotechnology, come back as another form of colonization where the railroad Frank Norris described as the “Octopus” once sat.

The Bay Area has generated plenty of octopi: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chevron, and Bechtel, the last recently hit with protests for being such a war profiteer under the Bush administration and targeted by activists a year before for its attempt to privatize water supplies in Bolivia. In the 1880s, it was
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad
that laid the legal basis for corporations to claim the privileges of human beings. If we generate octopi, however, we also generate their opposite as activism, and not all the trajectories are downward. In 1877, when all across the country the riots of the Great Railroad Strike were breaking out, San Francisco’s white working class, underpaid and unemployed, failed to join that Commune of anti-corporate action and instead started anti-Chinese riots. They blamed the Chinese for taking jobs and undercutting wages, though they eventually ended up on Leland Stanford’s doorstep atop Nob Hill anyway, facing off against the real reasons they were being squeezed. The riots were organized in the Sandlots next to City Hall, a sort of oratorical equivalent to Hyde Park, and where those sandlots stood, the new San Francisco Public Library stands, across the street from the old library, which was damaged in the earthquake of 1989 and reborn as the Asian Art Museum, one of the finest of its kind outside Asia, a victory over a past almost no one remembers. Everything metamorphoses; some things don’t decline; and much is reborn.

San Francisco was destroyed by fire six times in its first few years, destroyed on a far grander scale when it was a far grander city by the 1906 earthquake and fire. Its buildings, populations, and continuities have been ravaged by redevelopment and gentrification since World War II; and around the time of the millennium, it was raided by the dot-com kids, before the recession fixed them. The
image on the state flag is the California grizzly, which became extinct several decades ago; but the creature on San Francisco’s flag never existed at all: it’s the phoenix, the bird that rises from its ashes. San Francisco is forever being destroyed, forever reinvented, and some thread of continuity always runs through. The naked peaks of the highest hills are reminders of the bleak windswept expanse of dunes, the original terrain, that underlies much of the city, and nearly every development project begins by peeling the city back to the sand.