Friday, March 29, 2024
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‘And Castles Made of Sand…’

Up and down the beach, kids with pails, shovels and rakes were shaping the sand. The youngest ones dug holes and pushed up ramparts around the holes. The ambitious ones built fortresses, carved moats and channeled the tide. 

Behind them, facing seaward, were the houses, some built right on the beach, some on the embankment above the beach, some on the hills above the embankments, some on the mountains above the hills.

I’ve just spent a week in one of the houses on Monterey Bay. I did all the things a beach vacationer does: swam, walked, read, dozed, grilled, watched dolphins, threw frisbees, played Wiffle ball and carried my year-old granddaughter down to the water so she could dip her toesies in the surf. 

Could I live here? Easily. Would I buy here? Never. I can’t visit California without thinking about earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, traffic, homelessness and the preposterous price of housing. The million-dollar castles are all sandcastles.

The week before our beach week, we drove from the Sierra foothills, where I used to live and work, over the mountain passes to Lake Tahoe. The next day, a fire was burning along the exact stretch of road we had taken to the high country. It started hours after we passed through. The mountains were enveloped in haze. 

A few days later, another fire broke out in Yosemite, threatening the park’s largest grove of giant sequoias. At this writing, 10 days later, the blaze remains small by California standards – less than 5,000 acres.

It’s stubborn, though. Here is what the National Park Service expected for the early part of this week: 

Continued warming and drying will maintain the potential for active to very active fire behavior… Smoke will be visible in the late afternoon with southwesterly transport wind. Nighttime cooling will allow smoke to accumulate in the valleys due to downslope flow and a strong inversion.

Six other fires are burning in California as I write this, all small. Fire season is just getting started. 

Today, our journeying has taken us to a house in the Oakland hills, where a friend is housesitting for a friend. I’m sitting in a garden of ripe lemons, blooming roses, mums, hibiscus, poppies and several varieties of succulent. 

A white butterfly visits them all. Two mourning doves sit on a wire (I cannot dissuade my 4-year-old granddaughter from insisting that the hoo-hoo-hooing of doves is from owls). A hummingbird is trying to tell me something. Not a whiff of smoke in a baby-blue sky.

Across the bay, San Francisco is wreathed in its summer mantle of fog. It’s 74 degrees here, 60 degrees there. On such a day in October 1991, a fire broke out near here that killed 25 people and destroyed 3,500 homes.

In the Bay Area and on Monterey Bay and in the High Sierra I’m reminded of what a paradise California once was and at times, still is (for those who can afford it). But throughout this month-long ramble across America and around California, I’m trying to be as mindful of what I’m not seeing as I am of what I’m seeing.  

As we drove through San Francisco, for example, I noticed, under the freeway, a chain-link fence around a recently cleared homeless encampment. That just means the tents have been pitched elsewhere.

And at a farmers’ market in Oakland, it took only one person to shatter the illusion of universal prosperity and abundance: amid the long lines for the pastries and the oysters and the dumplings and the crepes, one ragged, skinny man, wildly waving his jacket around his head.

To be sure, every era has its problems. The impression I have now, as I read of Joe Manchin’s intransigence, collapsing glaciers, endless gun violence and runaway prescription drug costs, is that America has stopped solving its problems.

We feel powerless. At a reunion of reporters who started our careers at a small newspaper in Sonora, California, we talked about the tiny actions we take to use less and conserve more while from over the hill came the roar of the monster trucks at the Mother Lode Roundup, burning fuel for the sheer nose-thumbing fun of it.  

It’s tempting, at such a time, to take the long view of a paleogeologist I once met on an airport shuttle. She all but shrugged at my mention of climate change. Temperatures rise and fall, land masses emerge or drown, species come and go. From this perspective it scarcely matters whether humans are causing the problem or failing to address it. 

“And castles made of sand,” sang Jimi Hendrix, “fall into the sea, eventually.”

I wondered if the paleogeologist had grandchildren. It is because I just saw mine and my children, and just said goodbye to them all, and love them all so much, that I am feeling melancholic and grateful and guilty today, in the false paradise that is California, that is America.