San Diego

High, wide and handsome, Californias second largest city is riding a crest.
It is midnight, moonless and surreal, at the busiest border crossing in the world. Prowled
by bandits and rapists, hundreds of Mexicans huddle for the run of their lives. Their eyes
shimmer with dread and hope, here at the sagging south fence for each patrolman, there
are at least 100 Mexicans. The migrants await a quieter moment to start their dash across
field and freeway to the fabled land of El Norte – the North.
“When they run, we grab as many as we can” an agent says. “We take them back to the
border, and they try again. Eventually most of them get through.”

San Diego – still predominatly white and middleclass, they have cherished their cul-de-
sac in the southwest corner of the country, walled in by sea and mountains, Los Angeles
to their north and the Mexican desert to their south. Now Mexico spills over.
San Diego is a filigree of neighborhoods and subcities that sprawls 50 miles northward
from the Mexican border, linked by canyons, bays, hills, parks and freeways.

For years, a confining geography isolated San Diego and shaped its history. Instead of
wooing factories and tankers San Diego established itself as a preeminent city. There is
no oil to be pumped in San Diego. Its dwindling farmland requires intense irrigation most
of the water and power come from far away. But San Diego air and bays and parks
remain relatively unsullied, its trolleys purr along and its freeways usually work. It is rich
in space and parkland and health care and unmatched in climate. Tourism spurs the
economy. So does high-tech industy.

Urban-sprawl Californian style: Row upon row of terraced housing crowds the steep
hillsides. San Diego is the home part for a 100 navy vessels. Some 700 military aircraft
are based here too.

In the rain shadow of the coastal ranges, elabourate irrigation systems allow a few citrus
growers to wrest profits from the Anza-Borrego desert. A wilderness of desert, chaparral
and mountains, much of the eastern two thirds of San Diego county is unpopulated an
unfarmed. Also harvests the countries largest avocado produce/ export.

Small Town AMERICA

An endangered species?

Small town life has always held a special place in Americas affections. “Crime is scarcely
heard of,” Thomas Jefferson said, “breaches of order rare, and our societies if not refined,
are rational, moral and affectionate at least.”
Our memories of small towns are laced with warm nostalgia.
“The people who lived in the towns were to each other like members of a great family.”
Sherwood Anderson. “A kind of invisible roof beneath which everyone lived spread itself
over each town. Beneath the roof boys and girls were born, grew up, quarreled, fought
and formed friendships with their fellows, were introduced into the mysteries of love,
married and became the fathers and mothers of children, grew old, sickened and died…
under the great roof every one knew his neighbor and was known to him.”

We remember small towns as places of contentment and stability – of volunteer fire

departments and town bands, of gazebos, on the main square, of courthouses and
barbershops, of horses and hitching posts, of general stores and county fairs and choir
practice and moonlight walks, places where people had a sense of common purpose and
shared values, and the constable always knew which boys were sneaking cigarettes.

Their very isolation provided a sense of security. “The town waited for you, “ recalled an
editor of Saturday Review from 1924 – 1936, “It was going to be there when you were
ready for it. Its life seemed rich enough for any imagination… you belonged – and it was
up to your own self to find out how and where. There has been no such certainty in
American life since.”

A quick cure for excess sentimentality about small towns is to talk to someone who has
actually lived in one. They will tell you of the lack of privacy; of the occasional self-
righteousness and meanspiritedness, of the urge to conformity that is the dark obverse of
values shared.
Grounded in 19thC ways of life, smalltown America reproduced itself across a continent.
Examine the counties on a map of the US, and you will find these basic units of American
self-government remarkably uniform in size across the county’s eastern half. That is no
coincidence; they were commonly drawn just big enough for any farmer in his horse-
drawn wagon to reach the county seat and return home in a day – about a 20 mile round
trip.

But the small town is vanishing. Behind dismal statistics lie deep changes of technology
and economics, of mind and attitude. Together they stole not only the small town’s
purpose but its innocence as well. People felt the ambivalent lure of the great cities. For
some they held the promise of jobs; for others they offered “an almost heavenly radiance
of change and refreshment.”

Many who chose to abandon the rigid order of small towns did so to escape responsibility
rather than to gain it; they “came to the cities not… to get work but to be entertained, not
to be masters but to be chargers.”
Then WWI came along – millions of Americans went for the first time beyond the
horizons of their towns; in a real sense they could never quite go home again.
And everywhere there came to be automobiles and paved highways. Together these
banished the historic logic of the small town – the day’s ride in the wagon – and freed the
farmer to shop at lower prices in more distant cities.

Today, survival has come easy to those small towns that have devised new purposes for
themselves – some attract urban retirees, some commuters who combine small-town
living with city jobs. Dormitory towns for young professionals. For the rest – for the
quintessential small towns that framed whole lives from birth to marriage, to old age and
death – the future is far less sure. More than larger cities they have difficulty surviving
the economic pressures of hard times.
Some are thriving; some are death masks, some are spruced up, other are ulcerated; still
others are forested with for sale signs. Interspersed between them are the ubiquitous rural
convenience stores that have in many ways supplanted the old market towns themselves.

Yet what seems gone now, irretrievably so, is the old innocence. When I consider what
has changed, it is not the satellite dish or the cable beaming the Super Bowl, nor the black
and yellow Neighborhood Crime Watch signs, nor the Manhattan-style spray-can graffiti
splashed on a library wall.
Instead it’s the recipes in the locally distributed advertising broadsheet. The “Back to
Basic cooking” – pot roast and homemade bread? No, the recipe of the week was
angelhair pasta with snow peas in Chinese sauce, stirfried in a hot wok.