Soy un Californio (an assignemt for my community formation class)

There is no city or small area that I think of as my physical community. Rather, I think of all of California as my physical community. I am a Californian. Soy un Californio. When I think of California, my mind usually turns first to the great caballero El Alcalde Castro, and his sons and daughter who, together with the Franciscan friars first settled the land around San Francisco Bay, and who lived among the hunter-gatherer bands of the Pomo people. And I think to myself, the Castros would be proud of us if they could see us today. They would love what we have done with their grassy land. They would be amazed by the ports of Oakland, San Francisco, and Redwood City. They would gape at the trains, the freeways, and the airports. The scale of our industry and commerce - the mines and quarries, the refineries, the salt works, the factories and skyscrapers. They would marvel at the computer Industry of Silicon Valley. I live in Silicon Valley. When Google shares go up, or when Apple releases a new product, or when AMD files a new patent, or when Intel suffers, or when Yahoo! stumbles, or when Nettaxi goes out of business, I know about it. But I know about it because my neighbors, and family, and friends work at those companies and the companies that supply and serve them. I’ve been to the garage where Hewlett-Packard was started. I have met the man who built the first personal computer. The streets of Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Santa Clara, San Jose, and Cupertino are where I drive and walk every day. But I was not born here. I was born on the other side of the Diablo Mountains. I was born in Modesto, in the great cornucopia called the San Joaquin Valley. When I leave Silicon Valley and travel Pacheco Pass to the east, over the Diablo Mountains, and see the plain of the San Joaquin spread out before me my heart thrills. I do not grow apricots, or cotton, or plums, or almonds. I don’t own one tree. But, every fruit and nut on every tree in that valley is mine. I do not own one steer, but when I see the herds of cattle being fattened for slaughter in their feed-lots along I-5 my heart swells with pride. As a boy I played in the canals that criss-cross that valley. I ran up and down rows of orange, olive, and plums trees that surrounded my uncle’s rancheria. That great Central Valley, from Redding in the north to Bakersfield in the south is mine. I have breathed in the dust stirred up by the farmers of that valley. I have lived my whole life eating the produce of that valley. That valley is in me. It loves me and I love it.

To the east of The Valley are the mountains called Sierra Nevada, home of the great trees, the Giant Sequoia, the largest living thing, perhaps the oldest. Viewed from the little Valley town of Ivanhoe close to the center of the range, the mountains are high but the ascent is gradual. At the southern end of the range they meet the San Gabriel Mountains and rise up like a sheer wall behind Los Angeles. La Ciudad de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. That beacon on the Pacific calling out across the continent, across the Pacific, the terminus of the famed Route 66, the largest and most complex city in the United States is unfathomable. The freeway interchanges are unknowable. The super rich in Malibu and Beverly Hills living with the cholos from el barrio on the eastside, the third generation surfers eating tacos made by the hands of a girl from Juarez who’s been in the country for less than a week. The nightclubs along Sunset Boulevard. This is all mine. My heart beats with the movie industry and I decide whether or not to invest in Dolby’s 3-D technology as I read Variety, my computer, my dresser, and the bananas I fed to my sons for breakfast all entered the country at the port of Long Beach. I sing with los mariachis…

¡Más te quisiera, más te amo yo, y toda la noche la paso suspirando por tu amor! y toda la noche la paso suspirando por tu amor!

And I drive farther south on I-5 along the coast to the city that seems like Disney Land: San Diego, so clean it hardly seems like a real city. And while there I visit Mission San Diego, the southernmost of the California Missions. And moving north again hear choirs singing the dawn hymn El Cantico del Alba as I retrace the steps of the Franciscans: El Camino Real connecting the twenty-one missions from sun-drenched Mission San Diego near the Mexican border to the mist-watered Mission Sonoma in the wine country north of San Francisco. Along the way I stop at Mission San Juan Capistrano to greet the swallows as they return on March 19, and at Mission San Luis Rey, the richest and most beautiful of all the missions, and San Juan Bautista where chickens descended from those of the friars still roam the streets of the town, and on north to Mission Dolores in San Francisco, where the Orthodox Christian Saint Peter the Aleut was martyred and buried in a mass grave by Jesuits. And finally, across the Golden Gate bridge and into the wine country, where the first grapes were planted at Mission Sonoma. These missions - they are mine. And I am theirs. But I can not stop at Sonoma. The redwoods and the coast are calling. North. North along the winding road along the top of the cliff. The white of the breakers below echoed by the white of the sheep grazing above. Occasionally a deer lying on the side of the road, covered in turkey vultures looking like hooded demons in the swirling mist. Out to the west the fishing boats that call Fort Bragg and Eureka home. And eventually I come to Fort Ross, the southern most settlement of the Russians. Where every year Orthodox Christian pilgrims assemble at the little wooden chapel and pray for the souls of the departed settlers whose bodies are buried in the California soil. And Fort Ross is my home. As is Mendocino, and Fort Bragg, and Eureka full of beautiful Victorian houses, and the little town of Crescent City on the Oregon border. They are in me. And I can not but love them. But I head east across the wilderness into the deep deep forest and up into the Cascade Mountains. Redwoods turn to pines and the fog quickly goes away. The sun shines hot and the only person I’ll see for hours is a lone mounted ranger hunting for poachers. Now I near Mt. Shasta, a volcano not entirely dormant. And on the lake I see the speed boats and the water skiers. I pop the lid off of a San Francisco brewed Anchor beer and take a long swallow as I watch the people play. Later I’ll drive (All Californians drive. But the best cars are the lowriders made by the homies in east Los Angeles.) down to the abandoned resort at Leonard’s Hot Spring (Near Cedarville) and soak for a while, letting the hot California minerals seep into my skin. Then south to Lake Tahoe with the deep clear water, and farther south through the Sierra Nevada passing all the ski resorts on the way to the gold country – Angel’s Camp, Columbia, Sonora - where prospectors still find gold today, where I panned for gold as a boy (yes, I found a few flakes of gold dust in my pan.). And finally, down the west side of Sierra’s, across the Central Valley again, to Oakland where Durant, Folger, Crocker, Hays, Maybeck, Morgan, and two of my friends are buried at the Mountain View Cemetery, and where I have eggs benedict for breakfast at Mama’s and then cross the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. San Francisco, where regardless of the date of your arrival, you count as a native if you’ve ever jumped onto a moving cable car, kissed a woman at the top of the Lion Street stairs, or recovered from a hangover at Puerto Allege. This place, San Francisco, where the longshoremen broke the back of the shipping companies. San Francisco where the slot machine, the television, the Martini, the Cosmopolitan, Irish Coffee, the Mai Tai, the Mimosa, and the fortune cookie were invented. San Francisco the home of Holy Trinity Cathedral, the first Orthodox Christian parish in the United States. This is my home. It is mine. Drinking martinis in the Starlight Room at the top of the Sir Francis Drake, eating a steak at Harris’s, flying kites at the Presidio, standing in clouds of incense at Holy Trinity while the deacon intones the ancient litany and I reply “Gospodi pomiliui”, drinking coffee from little cups at a sidewalk café on Columbus Street in the shadow of the TransAmerica Pyramid. But this is not all. I have to keep driving. This time, south along California Highway 1. I arrive at Half Moon Bay where I take my children every October to get their Hallowe’en pumpkins. Then to the formerly secret beach at Bonny Doon Rd. where we body surf with the seals. Then on to Santa Cruz where we ride the Giant Dipper at the Board Walk and get lamb suvlaki and baklava at Vasili’s. Then south to the Secliff where my boys and I fish off the pier and play in the waves. Then back over the Santa Cruz Mountain and in to Silicon Valley where lay my head down on my pillow, and whisper into the cool summer night,

“Amo California. California es mi corazón. Gracias, Dios, por hacerme a un Californio.”