Romantically smug. That's one way I recently described my western love affair with place which is of course as clichéd as it is sentimental. The innocence of romance is always shattered by time and reality. Here's another conversation with the afore-mentioned brother who once lived in San Francisco but moved back east to Connecticut:
Me: It's a good thing you moved when you did. California breaks your heart. So much traffic and pollution.
Eastern brother: no response (only he looked sad and nostalgic on the video conference.)
Maybe it is my dad's death of cancer that he attributed to his time working on the Hoover Dam in the 50's, or the fact that a lead specialist found lead in our garden's soil, a remainder from the time when gas still had lead in it. Or maybe because I live within a mile of a twelve-lane highway, beside the 1 mile section known for among the worst daily traffic jams in the country. Or maybe it's also because I live across the street from coastal redwoods and can see the bay and the Golden Gate a few blocks away. The Golden Gate with its marvelous design eloquently marrying the synthetic and the organic, is too often shaded brown by a necklace of smog that adorns the entire bay and highlights the highways connecting the bay's cities. The dichotomies when they co-habitate break my heart and piss me off.
I live in the flatlands of Berkeley, once wetland, then pasture, then the workers' neighborhoods that rose up next to the over eighty industries developed around the railroad and the bay's ports. Rome lives on top of its classical past and has reclaimed relics to rebuild each new era. Here, we reclaimed relics of the past too. Our history is almost entirely modern: an hundred-fifty year chronicle of fossil fuels with only brief moments of nature's reclamation during the New Deal. Hopefully, Berkley's plans for green industry in West Berkeley will be longer lasting.
Historical link:www.webaic.org/history.html
