If Dickens were to rise from the grave tomorrow, I bet he’d head straight to the East Bay.

Because we are watching a tale of two Oaklands.

One Oakland is advancing on this country’s greatest political prize. The other Oakland is circling the urban drain. The two Oaklands demonstrate just how little space there is between top and bottom, between power and powerlessness.

Read the headlines, and in Oakland it is the best of times, the epoch of belief, the late summer of light.

A proud daughter of Oakland has emerged unexpectedly as a close contender in the race for president.

She has made history, in California and everywhere. She’s the first Democrat from the Golden State to win the party’s nomination, the first Black woman, the first Indian American woman, even the first major party presidential nominee to have worked at McDonald’s.

And if she can win—hold your breath—she’d be the first Northern Californian ever elected president. Oh, yes, and the first woman president too.

Oakland would be on top—of government, of American politics, of the free world. And that wouldn’t be its only conquest. Oakland is a democratic innovator, adopting a novel way of funding campaigns and allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote for school board.  “O-Town” has also become a cultural capital, a citadel of Black excellence to rival Harlem or Chicago’s South Side. Hollywood luminaries Zendaya, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, all hail, proudly, from Oakland.

And yet, if you go to Oakland today, it is the worst of times, the epoch of foolishness, the season of darkness and despair.

Oakland and its government have hit rock bottom.

Downtown is dead. East Oakland’s streets are a mess of trash, busted cars, and broken glass. Homelessness, that never-ending California pandemic, is rising faster in Oakland than just about anywhere else.

And while violent crime falls across most of the rest of America, it increases in Oakland. Property crimes are commonplace. Last year, one car was stolen for every 30 Oakland residents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The police department, in constant turmoil, lacks the leadership and personnel to do much about it. Cops all but ignore robberies and burglaries.

The city budget is in crisis. Political leadership is paralyzed, with Mayor Sheng Thao consumed by a corruption investigation that included an FBI raid. Thao maintains her innocence but in November faces a recall vote, brought before the raid, because of crime and other governance failures.

There’s also a recall against Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who runs the office where Kamala Harris started her own career as a prosecutor. Price is a parody of a progressive prosecutor, lashing out at critics and journalists and offering rationalizations for not pursuing offenders. Her former spokeswoman, now a whistleblower, claims that Price ignored laws on public records and disclosure.

With law enforcement on the sidelines during a public safety crisis, the state has tried to fill the void. The state took over Oakland’s schools in the first decade of the century; today, the city is a protectorate in matters of policing. Gov. Gavin Newsom has sent in the California Highway Patrol to try to get a handle on car thefts and other property crimes, making arrests where Oakland police have failed to act. The governor also dispatched California National Guard prosecutors to handle Oakland cases.

The population is declining, as housing prices stay high even as conditions deteriorate. Businesses are fleeing, including businesses that never flee. In-N-Out permanently closed its restaurant in Oakland—the first such closure in company history—because of robberies of customers and staff. Denny’s closed its one restaurant in Oakland, too, citing similar safety concerns. Kaiser Permanente warned employees to stop leaving their Oakland offices to eat lunch. All three of Oakland’s major pro sports teams—basketball’s Golden State Warriors, football’s Raiders, and now baseball’s A’s—have left the city in the past five years.

“I’ve been in Oakland 58 years. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Ken Chambers, a West Oakland pastor, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

In Oakland residents you’ll find despair and resignation, mixed with a hope that the city’s tough people and resilient communities will climb out of this hole. You’ll also find conspiracy-mongering—a sense that Oakland is being targeted by larger forces that would discredit its progressive politicians and policies.

There’s some truth behind this conspiracy. It’s not fair for Trumpians to point to Oakland’s failures to discredit Harris, who left town decades ago. But it is fair to criticize her for not doing more for her hometown now. Harris’ meager campaign policy proposals offer some benefits for children and small businesses, but nothing to empower cities to fix their governments and finances.

What Harris offers Oakland is the promise of symbolic triumph, of a bit of representation. Those are nice, but will they make the cops come when you call?

In borrowing Oakland’s reputation for toughness and the underdog credibility it provides—she doesn’t much mention Berkeley, where she lived as a child—Harris is giving the American mainstream the sort of story it cherishes. We love to celebrate winners who escape rough places, but we don’t much care about supporting such places, and changing the systems that make living there so hard.

Instead, we try to take heart from the hard places and hard times we left behind.

In his book Wandering Stars, the indigenous author and Oaklander Tommy Orange writes, “You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. It lives behind you. It’s there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I’m not there. Back there when we thought the lights went out forever. At least this is not that.”

The post It’s the Best and Worst of Times in Oakland appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Oakland A’s are baseball’s biggest losers. But their new temporary home—West Sacramento—is one of California’s greatest winners.

No California city has had a better 21st century than West Sacramento. The municipality of 54,000 people has grown in population and prosperity with striking speed, even as California has stagnated on both fronts.

The A’s will spend three years, 2025 through 2027, in West Sacramento’s minor league ballpark as the team waits for a new stadium to be built in their future home, Las Vegas. Perhaps their relocation will bring West Sac, as it’s often called, more of the notice it merits, both in California’s city halls and among state policymakers.

The city’s success is attributable to smart local governance, and to three paradoxes best explained in light of California peculiarities.

The first paradox: West Sac was able to grow rich because it was so poor. Across the river, Sacramento became a city in 1849, a year before California won statehood. West Sacramento didn’t incorporate until 1987. For most of the 20th century, it was an afterthought—an industrial town of seedy hotels, vacant lots, warehouses, rice silos, and major highways nearby communities didn’t want.

All that kept land prices low, which made West Sac attractive as the rest of the region became more expensive. The city carefully invested in new infrastructure, streets, and sewers to allow for new neighborhoods. A first wave of development, around the turn of the century, focused on the riverfront. Among the catalysts there was the A’s future digs, previously called Raley Field (now named for Sutter Health), which opened in 2000.

This brings me to the second paradox: West Sac achieved big success because it was small. A quarter century ago, it had just 30,000 residents and a median household income of $32,000.  Residents wanted to see improvements. And the powerful unions, environmental groups, and state agencies that so often delay California projects were too busy elsewhere to mess with a poor city with relatively few people.

So, Raley Field took just 19 months from ground-breaking to opening. Restaurants and other businesses found they could launch quickly. And while housing construction languished elsewhere, West Sacramento built both market and affordable housing at some of the fastest rates in California. That speed was a function of West Sac’s ability to create entire new neighborhoods, like master-planned Southport, as well as infill development in the city center.

The small city also faced little public opposition as it used its cheap land to bring in several large retailers, most notably the Capitol region’s first IKEA, a crowning achievement, in 2006. The retailers produced considerable sales taxes that provided the city with revenues for more projects. After the retailers came corporate headquarters, many of them companies involved in food production.

Such speedy development points to the third paradox: West Sac benefited both because of its distance from, and its proximity to, the city of Sacramento.

The two cities lie just across the river from each other. But West Sac is its own separate municipality and is situated in a different county, Yolo, with a mix of rural places and smaller cities. Sacramento runs on constant political competition, which can distract from the slow and painstaking work of governance. West Sac has had the good fortune of stable political leadership for over a generation.

The embodiment of that stability was Christopher Cabaldon, a legislative aide and higher education administrator who first moved to West Sac after taking the wrong freeway off-ramp. He ended up serving on the city council and then as mayor for more than two decades.

In a small community, he could move fast. “We focus on results as opposed to process,” he told Governing in 2019.  “A lot of other communities are into community meetings and workshops and planning and task forces and consultant reports, and, no, that’s not us.”

In contrast to Sacramento, whose city government is prone to obsess about creating signature attractions (an arena, an aquarium), to draw visitors, West Sac focused on building the housing and amenities to attract more residents.

Its proximity to the Capitol eventually became a draw. As California’s growing state government brought more people to Sacramento, and affordable housing became ever harder to find, people took notice of West Sac, with its new housing, new neighborhoods, and new restaurants. Many West Sac residents lived so close to the Capitol that they could walk across the Tower Bridge and be at work in minutes.

In 2014, West Sac was named the “Most Livable City in America” by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The honor only made West Sac more ambitious. In 2017, with more families moving in, the city devoted its growing revenues to West Sacramento Home Run, an initiative offering universal preschool and college saving accounts. Its household median income now exceeds $87,000.

Ironically, the very same state government whose proximity helped West Sac grow also produces regulations that make it harder for California cities to grow. Now that West Sac is bigger, its leaders confront more obstacles and opposition. But West Sac remains a great counter-example of what California cities might do if they had more freedom.

The A’s decision to come to town brought public joy. Many Capitol region residents say that they can’t wait to go to the West Sac ballpark and marvel at the famous stars of the Dodgers and Yankees as they hit homers against the weak, and temporary, home team.

Of course, the real marvel won’t be the ballplayers, but the small city they’ll be visiting.

The post The Losing A’s Found a Winning City to Host Them appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is only one person more obsessed than I when it comes to the memory of Don Andrés Bermúdez: his son, Andrés Junior. Junior lives with his family in the place where he came of age, a spacious ranch home his father acquired in 1993, on the outskirts of Winters, California, in the western Sacramento Valley.

In a nod to his Catholic upbringing, Junior crosses himself when he passes the town cemetery, where his father is buried. He bought the burial plot adjacent to his father’s, so that he can be as close to him as possible.

It’s easy to understand the devotion. Bermúdez, the “Tomato King,” who died of cancer in 2009 at just 58, willed himself from undocumented field worker and ranch hand to naturalized U.S. citizen; from successful farmer and labor contractor in California to pathbreaking congressman and migrant politician in Mexico.

In 2001, he made history by being elected mayor of his hometown of Jerez, in the state of Zacatecas, which has sent over half a million people to the U.S. over the last half century. Bérmudez is believed to be the first U.S. immigrant to win a mayoral election in Mexico. His first victory was overturned—because his primary residence was in the U.S.—but he won again in 2004 after his binational residency was established, then left that post to run for federal congress in Mexico City two years later. There, Bermúdez championed migrant causes, including allocating greater federal resources for the repatriation of paisanos who died in the U.S.

I am writing a biography of Bermúdez, and I am drawn equally to this complex and contradictory figure by his larger-than-life character—in his signature all-black cowboy ensemble—and by the unprecedented transnational movement he ignited. Bermúdez gave migrants a voice in the politics of their homeland. He also reproduced the strongman tendencies and political bossism he fought against, not to mention machismo.

He is both rule and exception: so much like millions of fellow Mexican migrants who anonymously toil in this country, but also remarkable for transcending strictures of citizenship and borders. Tracing his California path through rural swaths of the state is a reminder of how Bermúdez, and others, have made it their home while maintaining lifelong ties to their ancestral motherlands.

And so I take the 99 Highway to Porterville, where the Bermúdez clan’s U.S. trailblazers first arrived in the mid-20th century as part of the Bracero program, which brought hundreds of thousands of guest workers from Mexico to the fields of California. Fiddling with the radio dial, I’m as likely to hear conservative Christian propaganda as I am to stumble over country music or a Mexican station with Mixteco programming.

In Porterville, I meet a group of Bermúdez’s first cousins and contemporaries. Their aging bodies and visible ailments—strained backs, aching knees—are a testament to lifetimes of physically taxing work in the fields.

We sit in their back patio under a light drizzle and talk. Like any good transnational testimonio, the assembled elders start by honoring their elders, the patriarchs who first came to the U.S. They left rough upbringings in the scattered ranchos of the Zacatecas mountains, where they migrated seasonally between their native El Cargadero and Cueva Grande, tending drought-stricken land and famished dairy cows.

After stints in construction jobs in L.A., these pioneers eventually landed in the Central Valley. They worked the crop circuit up and down rural California, picking grapes, peaches, apricots, plums, strawberries, cherries, oranges, and olives. Labor contractors murdered workers for their paychecks. The migra launched raids that sent them scattering through orchards “like deer.”

When Bermúdez followed these forbears, arriving in town in his late teens in 1969, he did what the rest of the single migrants did, his cousins tell me: worked, drank, smoked, dated. You couldn’t tell, in Porterville, that his trajectory would be any different.

And so I head to Winters, a small town of just over 7,000, the place where Bermúdez’s path diverged from other young undocumented migrants’ stories. After his stint in Porterville, Bermúdez briefly returned to Mexico to marry and start a family. He then moved them to the U.S., choosing Winters for yearlong agricultural work—more appealing for a new father than following the crop circuit. A local white rancher named Tufts saw in Bermúdez a swift English learner and a hard worker, consistently the fastest picker on his crew. He invited Bermúdez and his young family out of the subsidized housing they lived in on the other side of town and into a trailer home on the ranch property.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the flow of migrant workers into California was plentiful, and Bermúdez, now bilingual, struck out on his own and began recruiting laborers for the U.S. Forest Service. By the 1990s, he returned to Winters a wealthy man and ventured into tomato growing—this time, as his own boss. He got involved in every stage of production, from sowing to transplanting, even innovating a technique that would earn him the “Tomato King” moniker, adapting agricultural machinery for a greater yield. He supplied Ragu, Morning Star, Del Monte, and Campbell’s.

In Winters, memories of the man in his “Tomato King” prime abound. Driving through the quaint town with Junior, he’s quick to point out McArthur Street, where his father bought his first property. Where he leased land to grow tomatoes. The exact spot where he got pulled over for driving under the influence, or where he broke out into a brawl. The Buckhorn, his favorite bar to rub elbows with the region’s white farmers. Rotary Park and the Winters Community Center where he hosted the Fiesta Mexicana and delivered impromptu speeches. The place where he threw epic parties for hundreds of his workers, many from his hometown of Jerez.

Most dream of a return. But Bermúdez actually managed to go back—and to take an unlikely and unprecedented leap into the Machiavellian world of Mexican politics. His critics will insist that Bermúdez was drawn by the allure of power; still, as a mayor and congress member, he battled the establishment by giving migrants a voice. “I am here to represent my people,” he once told me. He always told elite politicians that “to do away with migration, they need to have been migrants themselves. Nobody can do away with that which they have not felt.”

Death brought Bermúdez back, again, to the U.S. In the five years that I’ve been researching my book, I’ve grown close with the Bermúdez family; on another recent trip to Winters, I attended a rosary for Andrés Junior’s maternal grandmother, who died last year; Bermúdez jokingly called her his favorite suegra (mother-in-law) in an unabashed reference to his infidelity and cheating ways.

The family buried her just a few yards away from Bermúdez, where the entire nuclear family has plots. To paraphrase the migration scholar Osman Balkan, the interred bodies serve as anchors, investing the soil with political meaning for their relatives and survivors.

In death, as in life, Bermúdez has imbued this corner of California with his legacy—one that stretches to Zacatecas, and beyond.

The post In Search of the ‘Tomato King’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In California, a land blessed with more than its fair share of winners, we learn our most important lessons by dwelling among the losers.

So, in this final week of the baseball season, your columnist visited the bottom of the standings in American League West to ask: Which pro sports owner is the more instructive California failure—the failed heir fleeing Oakland, or the billboard billionaire sticking around in Anaheim?

Bay Area fans and pundits already have their answer: John Fisher of the Oakland A’s.

The core allegation is that Fisher, the youngest son of the billionaire Gap founders and philanthropists, Don and Doris Fisher, is engaged in a ruthless campaign of sabotage—of his own team. His goal has been to alienate fans so that he can justify moving the A’s to Las Vegas, where he stands to receive hundreds of millions in public subsidies for a new stadium.

This has made him the most hated sports figure in Northern California, and singularly unpopular beyond. The Mercury News, distilling local sentiment, suggested that Fisher might be the “worst owner in sports history.” CBS Sports called him a human embodiment of “the depredations of shareholder capitalism” and suggested that describing his true awfulness would require the invention of a new pejorative.

To be fair, Fisher’s start with the A’s wasn’t bad. The team had several winning seasons after he became owner in 2005. But Fisher’s real goal seemed to be no victory but rather a taxpayer-supported new stadium. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for taxpayers, California and its communities have wisely stopped offering subsidies for those. Oakland officials did propose a massive entertainment development and ballpark on the bay, at Howard Terminal, near Jack London Square. But the deal wasn’t generous enough to satisfy the billionaire and his team.

At some point, Fisher seems to have concluded that he could only secure massive subsidies for a new stadium by moving elsewhere. So, in recent years, he stopped supporting the team, and started dismantling it. He raised ticket prices, while letting the stadium fall apart. And he got rid of all players who would give the A’s any real chance to win. As a result, they became the worst team in Major League Baseball.

Fans stopped coming, allowing Fisher to justify his decision, announced earlier this year, to relocate the A’s to Las Vegas. Fisher has refused to sell the team to anyone who might keep it in Oakland, despite campaigns by fans and local politicians. Fisher has even refused to give up a partial stake in the Oakland stadium and its land—a position that will make it hard to redevelop the area after its team’s departure.

Fisher’s behavior has been so deplorable that even a sports villain, Mark Davis—owner of football’s Las Vegas Raiders, which abandoned Oakland twice—was moved to say of the A’s under Fisher, “All they did was f—k the Bay Area.”

Fisher’s malperformance might seem hard to top, but he has real competition in Southern California:

Arte Moreno, owner of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Moreno is a different character than Fisher; a Mexican American from Tucson, he made his own fortune in billboards before buying the Angels in 2003.

Just as the A’s won during Fisher’s early years as owner, the Angels repeatedly went to the playoffs in the early years of Moreno’s ownership. But in the 2010s and 2020s, the Angels have become one of the most puzzling failures in the sport, with Moreno largely to blame.

The trouble in Anaheim was not Fisher-style sabotage. Moreno kept ticket prices affordable and spent money on his team. It was how he spent that money that’s been the problem.

The best baseball teams are deep, especially in pitching. But Moreno was obsessed with stars he could promote—the kind of star ballplayers that would be recognized on a billboard. This strategy produced a familiar sort of California inequality. Moreno, by multiple accounts, including his own increasingly infrequent public interviews, sought to build his team around one or two superstar players. He spent big money on huge contracts to established players, while neglecting homegrown talent.

The Angels became one of the most imbalanced teams in history. For the past 12 years, they have employed superstar outfielder Mike Trout, statistically the best baseball player of the 21st century. Five years ago, they picked up the most talented baseball player on Earth, the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, a top-10 hitter—and pitcher. The only comparable player in baseball history is Babe Ruth.

Even with Trout and Ohtani, the Angels have been losers, making the playoffs only once since 2010. Why? Because beyond these players, and one or two other expensive stars, the rest of the team is well below average.

Moreno disinvested in minor league players who might have provided greater depth for the major league team. (In one case, he was accused of not providing them with enough food to eat.) And he vetoed trades of older players for younger, healthier athletes to support Trout and Ohtani. As a result, the two superstars seem overburdened; both ended this year on the injured list.

Angels fans—including your columnist, introduced to the game by grandparents who lived in Anaheim—rejoiced last year when Moreno announced he would sell the team.

A sale promised a more balanced squad and a fresh start in the community. Moreno infuriated many fans with his public backing of Donald Trump. He and the Angels were also at the center of an ugly scandal in Anaheim involving a stadium lease and development rights for stadium parking lots. That deal with the city ran afoul of state laws requiring affordable housing, and led to the FBI arrest and federal conviction of former Mayor Harry Sidhu.

Despite the scandal and the fan base’s desire for new ownership, Moreno took the team off the market earlier this year, and the future is bleak. Ohtani, frustrated at the franchise chaos and losing, is all but certain to leave to play for a franchise with better owners, perhaps the L.A. Dodgers or San Francisco Giants.

This season in the AL West, the A’s will finish last, and the Angels next to last.

All these two owners have given us this season are two very California models of failure. Fisher, a rich man who refused to invest in the team that was his asset, is all too much like the state of California, which refuses to put enough of its wealth in service of its infrastructure, its people, and its future.

Moreno, all too much like the state, devotes its attention and money to the very richest of its players, thus failing to recognize that California, like a team, can only win when the whole roster of people performs well.

Perhaps they’ll come to their sense while watching the balanced and well-managed Dodgers in the playoffs.

The post Which California Baseball Team Has the Worst Owner in Pro Sports? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Which region is the greater threat to humanity: Northern California or Southern California?

That’s the most urgent question raised by 2023’s great cinematic contest between Oppenheimer and Barbie.

Sure, these are entertaining films about a physicist and a doll. But both movies are also, in no small part, California-based stories about global nightmares, about the Earth-altering threat of bombs and bombshells alike.

Embedded in those nightmares are warnings about the damage that Northern and Southern California can do when we send our ideas out into the world.

Oppenheimer is the Northern California nightmare. While much of Christopher Nolan’s film takes place in New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were built, the most important moments occur at Berkeley, where J. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor from 1929 to 1943.

It’s there that he meets the Manhattan Project’s military chief, Leslie Groves, and befriends the physicist Ernest Lawrence (the Lawrence of the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab), who becomes a crucial collaborator in the Manhattan Project. In fact, the lab in New Mexico that produced the nuclear bombs ended up being managed by the University of California.

The whole endeavor is a quintessential Bay Area enterprise. Very smart people from around the world come together to rapidly create a disruptive technology, without fully appreciating its perils and complications until it’s too late. Oppenheimer has prompted comparisons to how Silicon Valley is now making available artificial intelligence tools available without understanding their consequences.

Among the nuclear age’s cultural and commercial products was Barbie (born in 1959). She, and the new film about her, are Los Angeles nightmares.

The director, Greta Gerwig, is a Sacramento kid who shares her home city’s loathing of all things L.A. So, her film pins most of the damage that Barbie has done on Southern California, where she was invented and manufactured.

Barbie, like Los Angeles itself, is a sun-splashed comedy with a dark noir heart. The central joke of the film is that when Barbie, in unexpected existential crisis, leaves the seeming perfection of Barbieland for “Reality,” it turns out to be L.A. Amid the city’s most unreal Westside precincts (especially Venice), Barbie learns of the impossible expectations her example places on women.

Barbie’s would-be boyfriend Ken, who is confined to hanging around the beach in Barbieland, discovers the possibilities of patriarchy after he falls in love with the phallic glass office towers of Century City. And when Ken takes those supposed Southern California values back to Barbieland, that utopia of feminism (with a set design that resembles Palm Springs) collapses. Soon, the various Ken dolls have imposed a bizarro dictatorship of men, who subjugate the various Barbies, who’d previously served as president and controlled the Supreme Court.

It might be wrong to think too hard about a movie as addled and antic as Barbie, but the film does reflect the Hollywood work realities of the women who made the movie. Gerwig, star-producer Margot Robbie, and their colleagues have had to navigate an entertainment industry dominated by dim-witted Kens. (The rest of L.A., thank goodness, is a bit more egalitarian, as Mayor Karen Bass and the all-female Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors can tell you.)

Both films, however, feel more than a little soulless. Barbie, for all its righteous feminism, is a corporate vehicle for selling dolls. It misses opportunities to make light of the cynicism of this American moment, when corporations try to talk like social movements, and social movements often behave like corporations. The anxieties of Barbie are firmly upper-middle-class and higher; none of the women or men of the film worry about what worries most Angelenos—scratching out a living in a too-expensive place.

Oppenheimer is even more callous. It’s a film about nuclear weapons that doesn’t show their victims. We never see the human horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is why the film can’t get screened in Japan), or the damage people endured because of their proximity to the testing of such weapons, from the South Pacific to Central Asia.

This distance from real-life human concerns is what makes both films so unsettling—and so convincing as apocalyptic documents.

Together, they offer a two-part scenario for the end of humanity. First, we grow divided and isolated from each other because of the unattainable lifestyles and cultural expectations that Southern California creates and promotes. Second, we kill ourselves with the technologies masterminded by Northern California.

The post Will SoCal’s Barbie Doll or NorCal’s Bobby Oppenheimer Destroy the World First? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When you move to a new neighborhood, you scout it out. It’s all a matter of staking out territory, getting comfortable in your new surroundings. If you’re in the city, your early forays on the streets might lead you to that perfect pastry at the corner bakery, the savory brick-oven pizza from a nearby bistro, a well-lit coffee house, or a well-stocked bookstore.

I moved to Dunsmuir, in the mountain country of far Northern California, 26 years ago. After visiting several times and finding it absolutely charming, I came here for a change, to experience small-town living and more outdoors than I had in the city, and to get away from the sprawl and traffic, noise and asphalt.

Over the past couple of decades, the move to mountain country has come to mean much more than all of that. It has been a way to connect with something primal in the landscape dominated by the natural world. I find it all around me—on every forested hillside, on every winding trail.

When I landed here, I got acquainted with my new “neighborhood” by climbing mountains and exploring trails, even making my own walking paths on the mountain sides above my home in the Sacramento River canyon. On my trips of discovery, I found deer carcasses and large round piles of scat on old logging roads, calling cards left by cougars and bears. Not as savory as your city finds, perhaps, but just as characteristic of my own home region.

My walks led me to a special sacred place, the equivalent, perhaps, to a spot in your own neighborhood—maybe a secluded, leafy glade in a nearby park—that you go to when you seek peace. Mine is a place long sacred to native Northern California tribes: The upper slopes of Mount Shasta.

It is difficult to put into words the feelings I have when I climb toward the upper reaches of the mountain. It is the experience of entering a different world. I feel a powerful spiritual presence, something that transcends all the rock and ice and snow, in the same way that a cathedral, in the eyes of a believer, is much more than a pile of bricks and stone and mortar.

Thousands of people come up here every year to climb to the 14,000-foot summit, but that particular goal doesn’t interest me. What I am seeking on its slopes is something less tangible. When I’m up above the 10,000-foot level, heading into the upper regions of snow and ice, I begin to feel the spirit of the mountain, never more powerfully so than when clouds descend from the summit and surround me in mist, in a kind of spiritual embrace made palpable.

In my previous life, I was a flatlander from the temperate climes of Sacramento. Moving to Dunsmuir I quickly gained a close acquaintance with snow and ice. Not only from my forays on the mountain, but on 22-mile bicycle trips to my part-time job as an English instructor at the college in Weed, just north of Dunsmuir.

There is nothing more enchanting than cycling through a landscape of snow-covered fir trees. There is nothing more painful than flying over your handlebars on an icy road. On my first encounter with an ice-covered road, I assumed, incorrectly, that applying the brakes on the downhill slope would help me stay in control. Instead, I got a mouthful of gravel. From then on, I walked the bike down ice-covered roads and have not had a tumble since.

Tim Holt on the Pacific Crest Trail. Courtesy of Tim Holt.

I have learned to love the change in the seasons, the beauty of a snow-blanketed town as well as a forest. And just as I’ve learned to walk my bike down icy slopes, I’ve learned to strap small chains to the bottom of my snow boots so that I can enjoy all this winter beauty from an upright position.

Pedaling along with my wife on our tandem bike, I have had the more pleasant experience of cycling through the nearby Scott Valley, one of the few flat landscapes in our region. It is a sprawling expanse of ranchland, alfalfa fields, postcard-picturesque barns, and charming little towns. One of them even has a gourmet restaurant featuring brick-oven pizzas.

This is the valley where my great-great grandparents homesteaded. They are buried on a hillside above one of those little valley towns. They established a ranch, worked hard on it, died young. My great-great grandfather Alexander Walker was only 33 years old when, one night in the stable, he got kicked in the head by a horse. He died a few days later.

I am only two generations removed from that ranch. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—grew up on it. I now live in the town where the family moved, and where my mother was born. It is nice to have these family connections to the place I live in now, but all that is in the past—all of those relatives moved out long ago, to Sacramento and cities in the Bay Area—and has little to do with why I live here now.

I am on friendly terms with many of the folks in my small hometown, and with many of the natural features of this mountain region. I have a special bond with a pine tree I’ve watched grow over the past 20 years, since it was a small sapling. Around Christmastime I worry that someone might chop it down to adorn their living room. I had an especially anxious few days recently, when timber company employees swept over the hillside where the tree lives. They were cutting down medium-sized trees as part of a wildfire-mitigation project. Fortunately, my friend was spared. I offered up heartfelt prayers of thanks.

It’s easy to see, in retrospect, where all my staking out of territory was headed. Up here I’ve come to truly understand that I’m part of a larger living world. I had to get past the cars and asphalt, all the noise and distractions, to fully realize and appreciate that connection.

Up here in mountain country, I truly feel at home. 

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Seeking Peace on the Upper Slopes of Mount Shasta appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was about 3 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 27, and my husband Tom and I were asleep. My nose twitched and I thought, How odd to smell something burning. I assumed I was dreaming and kept my eyes closed.

Then I heard the wind through the open bedroom window: Whooooooosh, whoooooosh, whoooooosh!

I immediately opened my eyes—a burning scent and a boisterous wind do not a good combination make. I looked out the window and glimpsed the last thing I wanted to see: small embers falling in air. I recognized them as embers because they were orange. An intolerably pretty orange. A color not associated with the darkness of a normal night.

I didn’t yell, only because I didn’t want to accept what I recognized. But I did speak loudly enough to wake my husband: “Fire!” Later, I’d learn that the conflagration had a name—the Glass Fire—that it had started in our neighborhood, and that it was devastating tens of thousands of acres across Northern California’s Napa and Sonoma Valleys.

Tom jabbed the fire alarm buttons. We threw on yesterday’s clothes and rushed out of the bedroom. I stopped in front of the windows overlooking the courtyard when I saw flames perhaps 75 feet away. I was stunned. The hillside facing our house was on fire. Tom sprinted to the front door. He ran outside to turn on the fire suppression system’s sprinklers.

I forced myself to move, running to the basement to grab the cat carriers. We have three dogs and three cats. While the confused dogs remained by my heels, the fire alarm’s reverberating wailing din had sent the cats scurrying to various hiding places.

I looked, but I couldn’t find the cats. I opened the front door and found myself facing flames larger than they’d seemed moments before. I ran across the courtyard yelling for Tom, but the gray smoke filled my mouth, made me cough, and muffled my voice. I had to run back inside the house to breathe.

As I coughed, I mentally exhorted myself: Stay. Calm. Perhaps I would have panicked, but I faced three worried dogs I needed to evacuate: Ajax, Neo, and Nova.

I inhaled, pushed open the front door again, and ran back across the courtyard to the garage.

The flames looked even larger and, offensively, prettier. I backed the car out and pulled up to the front door. I screamed again for Tom—he later told me he’d been watering flames near one end of the house—and when I finally saw him, I shouted, “We have to leave!”

I kept the car running as we both rushed back into the house. Tom scooped up an empty cat carrier and began to look for Tarzan, Addie, and Suki. I was already holding another carrier when Tom suggested I take the dogs and go. He would stay to find the cats, and follow separately in his car.

I paused to look at him. This time, I didn’t just stay calm. I became cold. I assessed the risks while Tom searched the room. I’d turned 60 earlier in the month. Sixty is an interesting number of years—one hopes to live longer, but it also suffices as a full life. I realized that if I expired at that moment, I would have had a great run because of Tom’s contributions to our shared life.

If I left ahead of Tom, I might have a better chance of survival, but I didn’t prefer a life without him. Suddenly, I understood why couples who’d lived long lives together sometimes died in short succession.

Coldly and firmly, I announced, “I am not leaving without you.” I raised my voice and said it again, with a silent apology to the nearby dogs I presumably could save: “I won’t leave without you.”

But though I’d thought to apologize to the dogs, I really should have apologized to the cats whom Tom would not, on his own, have left behind. Forced to choose between his wife and three dogs on one hand and three cats on the other, however, he received a reason not to stay.

We rushed back into the courtyard. Tom helped put the dogs in my car, then ran to the garage to get his car and lead our drive down the winding, one-third-mile road from our house to the gate. As it turned out, I might not have been able to make it on my own. I couldn’t see through the gray, ashy haze. But I could see the dim yellow tail lights on Tom’s car and stuck to him like… well, like white cat fur on a black sweater.

Later, Tom told me he also couldn’t see through the smoke, which was why we crept forward at about one mile per hour despite desperately wanting to rush away. It would have been disastrous for our cars to veer off of the asphalt road cut into the mountain. Tom said he felt the car wheels nearly slip off the edge a few times. He made it down safely, partly through muscle memory and partly because he understood that those of us in the car behind him depended on him.

Tom led us through the gate, and we continued on to the parking lot of our local Safeway. He then told me he was going to return to the house to find the cats and show our fire suppression system to the firefighters, who had converged near our gate at the bottom of the mountain.

This time, I didn’t protest—he would be in the company of well-equipped firefighters. I also understood he needed to make another attempt; it was not in Tom’s character to give up easily.

Tom later returned with the cats. It required half an hour to find them all. Addie had stowed away in a cabinet, Suki had burrowed in a closet, and Tarzan had hidden under bed cushions.

Tom also returned with the depressing news that while our primary residence was safe, our guesthouse had burned down. The “guest house” was actually a library that happened to contain a bed. In this library were critical components of my archives as a writer, poet, artist, editor, and publisher.

The author’s guest house before the Glass Fire. Courtesy of Eileen R. Tabios.

Here are some of the items that burned:

—two decades of notes for, and various false starts on, what will be my first novel, DoveLion, which will be released in 2021;

—about a thousand books, including inventory from Meritage Press, a literary and arts publisher I created in 2001;

—the entire series of The Asian Pacific American Journal, for which I was editor in the 1990s;

—nine personal diaries focused on encounters I had with poets and artists, including original work by some of them, like a bird drawing by the late poet Philip Lamantia, scribbled over lunch at a cafe near City Lights in San Francisco;

—drawings, small sculptures, and photographs from my poetry performance, and exhibitions related to my project “Poems For/From the Six Directions”; and

—copies of and correspondences for Black Lightning, a book I’d edited that is significant for being the first anthology of Asian American poets detailing and discussing the progress of poems from first to last drafts.

There was more, as well, in my library’s six floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and dozen four-foot-wide file cabinets. Recalling my library’s contents, I realize again that Tom has given me a great life, but so has another love: the love for, thereby the love of, poetry.

We (like other evacuees) have not yet found housing for the months ahead; it will take time to address the toxic aftermath of what’s burned and make our property livable again. We are temporarily in San Francisco. As I write, Tom is on the phone dealing with the insurance company and contractors for rebuilding. At our feet lie three sleeping dogs, and on the bed three sleeping cats.

The Glass Fire still burns, and our house—with even more books and archives—remains at risk. But looking around, my legs itching from wearing the same pair of jeans in which I fled the fires five days ago, I am moved by how much that has formed my life has been love—making me even more thankful and humbled to be alive. No wonder everything I write is fueled by love—a love that burns hotter than fire.

The post A Letter From Napa Valley, Where Love Burns Hotter Than Fire appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Further north, welcome as well to Modesto, Sacramento, Placerville, and Yuba City. And, to the south, you’re invited, too, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and Salinas. And while you’re almost in another state, don’t worry, Tahoe City, because the Bay waters are warm.

This expanded notion of the Bay Area’s reach isn’t a joke. It reflects the biggest thinking about California’s future. If you’re in a smaller Northern California region struggling to compete with the advanced grandeur of the Bay Area, why not join forces with the Bay Area instead?

The Bay Area would benefit, too. It is one of four connected Northern California regions—along with the greater Sacramento area heading up into the mountains, the northern San Joaquin Valley, and the north Central Coast triumvirate of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties—that face severe challenges in housing, land use, jobs, transportation, education, and the environment. Since such problems cross regional boundaries, shouldn’t the regions address them together as one giant region?

The Northern California Megaregion—a concept developed by a think tank, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute—includes 12 million people, 21 counties, and 164 incorporated cities. It extends from the Wine Country to the Lettuce Lands of the Salinas Valley, and from the Pacific to the Nevada border.

These places, while different, are already linked, by infrastructure and flows of capital and commodities that date back to the Gold Rush. Today, the Megaregion has grown more integrated as people search a wider geography for jobs and schools, while businesses expand by serving more of Northern California.

The trouble is that this growth is imbalanced. The Megaregion is home to the mega-rich San Francisco and Marin and three of California’s poorest cities: Stockton, Vallejo, and Salinas.

The 21-county, 12 million person Northern California Megaregion, a concept developed by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. Courtesy of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The imbalance of high-paying jobs created in the Bay Area, coupled with scant and expensive housing, results in a sky-high cost of living that blunts the benefits of high salaries. It also has produced an out-migration of younger people and companies. Some of these Bay Area refugees head to East Bay exurbs, the Sacramento area, and even to the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where housing prices are one-third of those in the Bay Area proper and still haven’t recovered to their pre-recession highs. But once there, they often find themselves too far away from their jobs and preferred educational institutions. The result is brutal traffic that slows the movement of goods, produces more greenhouse gases, and creates long, unhealthy commutes for workers.

Figuring out how to rebalance the Megaregion and solve such problems is a high-stakes challenge, and not just for Northern Californians. The entire state relies heavily—perhaps too heavily—on the growth and tax revenues generated by the Bay Area, which accounts for one-third of the California economy.

Nationally, too, the future of megaregions matters. Defined as sets of neighboring metropolitan centers that share infrastructure, environmental concerns, and economic connections, Megaregions are projected to be home to 70 percent of the national population growth between now and 2050. During that period, just 11 American megaregions will be home to 80 percent of the country’s job growth.

For all these reasons, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute’s 2016 report, “The Northern California Megaregion,” deserves more consideration because it offers a vision for how the Golden State might spread out prosperity beyond its richest centers, creating a more distributed version of the California dream.

This is not about letting the Bay Area colonize its neighbors. Rather, it’s a mega-rethinking so that planning and development enable the Megaregion’s pieces—Bay Area tech, Sacramento government, Northern San Joaquin Valley trade and logistics, and the Monterey Bay Area’s farming dominance—to magnify each other.

To pick one example, if new state research-and-development tax credits were to target inland companies, an infusion of technology and investment could allow the Northern San Joaquin to make its logistics industry much less polluting in terms of greenhouse gases as it moves the vegetables of the Salinas Valley to market, perhaps through expanded ports in Stockton, West Sacramento, or Oakland.

The think tank report and its co-author, Jeff Bellisario, a man whose colleagues call him “Mr. Megaregion,” offer dozens of similarly transformative ideas. The Northern California Megaregion could create a “more distributed high tech sector,” with more companies, and more jobs inland, by better connecting universities, laboratories, and research institutions with local entrepreneurs.

Imagine, if the center of gravity in Northern California shifted southeast, landing in the fast-growing Tri-Valley, which includes the cities of Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, and San Ramon. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, better linked with entrepreneurs and investment, could be a jobs hub that turns into something of a megaregional capital.

Such planning should be performed by new economic development entities that extend across the entire Megaregion; companies that now leave the Bay Area for Austin in search of cost savings might be redirected to Sacramento or Santa Cruz. Such an effort would be strengthened if Bay Area entities jointly lobbied Sacramento to improve education outside the Bay Area. Only half of the people in the Monterey and Northern San Joaquin areas have had some type of post-high school education, as opposed to 70 percent in the Bay Area proper.

The report shows such investments could spin off literally hundreds of new ideas. My favorite: The Megaregion could have its own…well, I’ll call it a Nerd Army of overeducated consultants, or, in the report’s words, “a megaregional corps of consulting post-docs and advanced graduate students” that could be dispatched to solve regional problems and prepare local talent for higher-skill jobs.

Of course, making such a shift would require a well-integrated set of transportation connections from one end of the Megaregion to the other. The goal would be to get trucks and commuters off the hellish 80, 580, and 101 corridors, making it easier for the state to hit its targets for reducing greenhouse gases.

Suggested changes include more service on Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor between San Jose and Placer County, an extension of rail service to Salinas, and support of planned expansions of the ACE (Altamont Corridor Express) train down to Modesto and Merced and up to Sacramento. (Political note: The gas tax increase, on the November ballot for repeal, produces $900 million for these ACE expansions.) And all these changes, in turn, would make the actual completion of high-speed rail more urgent, since the first segment, extended from Bakersfield to San Jose, would connect with this expanded Megaregional transit system.

It is easy to mock such mega-visions. For years, real estate interests have broadcast silly promotions, like touting a major housing development in San Joaquin County as being in the “Far East Bay.” (Local joke: Is that nearer Singapore or Hong Kong?)

But if the Megaregion could harness its joint economic and lobbying power, much of this seems possible. It could even inspire imitators. Could Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas further integrate into their own Megaregional triangle? And might they throw Tijuana and Mexicali into their planning mix as well?

If it built a record of success, the Northern California Megaregion could expand, connecting to planning efforts in the troubled Northstate, and even extending down the San Joaquin Valley to California’s fifth-largest city.

Welcome to the Bay Area, Fresno.

The post If You Can’t Beat the Bay Area, Join It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear Bay Area,

Welcome to Wasco.

You may never have heard of this small city of 25,000 in the San Joaquin Valley. You probably can’t pronounce it (it’s WAW-skoh).

But you and Wasco share a future.

You could be connected—at least temporarily—by the most expensive infrastructure project in state history.

Your Wasco connection is a byproduct of problems with high-speed rail’s plan for a San Francisco to Los Angeles train. The financial and engineering challenges of tunneling the Tehachapi Mountains have delayed construction to L.A. And the project is short $2 billion to get the train to Bakersfield, which happens to be the hometown of U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a fierce opponent of high-speed rail.

So, unless the money materializes, the high-speed rail could start by connecting the Silicon Valley to the Central Valley, starting in San Jose and concluding with a temporary station in Wasco, 24 miles northwest of Bakersfield.

A confession: When this plan became public last year, I said Wasco was an unworthy southern terminus for such an ambitious project. But after recent visits, I’ve changed my mind. I now believe that a fast train from America’s wealthiest metropolitan area to the best darn town in northern Kern County is kismet. Wasco offers much of what Bay Area residents might be yearning for.

And don’t worry about showing up in large numbers. Wasco is expert at processing heavy volumes of visitors; after all, the Wasco State Prison, which accounts for about 5,000 of the town’s people and a good chunk of its employment, is also a “reception center” that processes people into California’s prison system and, within months, gets them to the right state corrections facility. Of course, you don’t have to go there—unless you want to be part of the prison’s successful community volunteer program. Wasco offers so much more.

The Wasco water tower. Courtesy of the city of Wasco.

Imagine yourself boarding the high-speed train in San Jose and arriving, less than two hours later, in Wasco. On the way down, to prepare yourself for crossing cultural borders, you’ll listen first to some Korn (a band with Kern County roots) followed by country songs, from the late Merle Haggard’s classic “Radiator Man from Wasco” to the rising L.A.-based country star Jaime Wyatt’s “Wasco,” about picking up her boyfriend the day he gets out of prison.

If the weather is good, you’ll be greeted in Wasco by a spectacular view, from the coastal mountains to the west to the Sierras in the east. This time of year, you’ll be treated to the glory of blossoming almond trees.

If you arrive hungry, you’re in luck. Wasco offers the kind of stick-to-the-ribs vittles that have gotten harder to find in health-conscious Bay Area eateries. Head first to Hoyett’s Sandwich Shop, a centerpiece of Wasco life since 1948, with terrific char burgers and chili (the local gossip is free). On Friday nights, the place stays open late—until 7 p.m.—for fish dinner. And if Hoyett’s is closed, it’s a short stroll to Teresa’s for chile verde or to La Canasta for shrimp cocktail.

Bay Area types should feel comfortable getting around Wasco. Bring your bike: The city has been adding lanes. Or walk: Wasco is building new green spaces and meandering sidewalks to make the city more pedestrian-friendly. And while your Uber or Lyft app won’t work here, the city’s Dial-A-Ride service will take you anywhere within Wasco’s 9.4-square-mile city limits for $1.75, and outside town—paved roads only, please—for $2. (Kids, seniors, and people with disabilities pay $1, and a 13-ride pass is available for $15.)

No stop in Wasco is complete without a visit to the Wasco Union High School auditorium. No joke. The Renaissance Revival auditorium, constructed in 1928, is one of the most colorful and beautiful buildings in California, and deserves its spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

From there, you can walk back toward downtown to do some window shopping. And anything you can’t find downtown, you can pick up at a retailer that Wasco has but San Francisco lacks: Wal-Mart, up on Highway 46.

Wasco is great at putting on special events. There’s the spectacular Festival of Roses in September, the local bands at the Wasco Music Festival in October, and Día de Los Muertos in November. Locals will tell you nothing beats the spectacle of the November rallies before the annual high school football game between the Wasco Tigers and the Shafter Generals, from the town just down the road. (Plus, there’s a good chance you’ll see Wasco win, as they have 10 years in a row).

But the best thing about Wasco may be the slower pace and all the ways to stay chill. The local parks are large and leafy. During hot Valley summers, you can pay $1 and swim all day in the public pool. There’s a skate park, and you can bring your pets along without worry. The local vet, Thomas Edick, is so good that people come from all over the southern San Joaquin Valley to have him look after their animals.

Visitors from the Bay Area who enjoy people watching will not be disappointed. One great spot is a downtown alley where the city sometimes sets up a piano and invites anyone to play; and those who appreciate the weird can search for the Wasco Clown, a scary figure who started appearing four years ago and became an internet sensation.

All the fun Wasco offers may leave you ready for a good night’s sleep. Don’t worry: When it’s time for bed, you’ll have options. If you want a hotel, the best bet is the new Best Western on Highway 46. If you decide to settle in for a while, for just $189,000, you can get a terrific four-bedroom, two-bath home with a two-car garage and, according to the listing, a driveway large enough for an RV. You could rent it out via Airbnb, which could have a big future here, since well-to-do locals leave their homes empty on weekends and sneak away to their cabins near Glennville (up in the Greenhorn Mountains).

Indeed, one thing you’ll love about Wasco, once high-speed rail takes you there, is that its central location makes it a great starting point for trips around the region. In the Wasco vicinity, you can watch drag strip racing in Famoso, raft the Kern River, hike in The Wildland Conservancy’s Wind Wolves Preserve, or rent a houseboat on Lake Success near Porterville on the Tule River. You can even hire a limo to take you on a tour to Paso Robles wine country, or rent a car nearby and head up to Sequoia.

Wasco, given its dependence on prisons and agriculture, has an economy very different from technological and sustainable San Francisco, but you have enough in common to compare notes. There’s a solar array near the elementary school offices. A local start-up, Sweetwater Technology Resources, is developing ways to clean up water from the oil industry. And if you want to commiserate about economic disruption, Wasco will hear you. Just as Bank of America abandoned its San Francisco headquarters for Charlotte, Bank of America recently shut down its Wasco branch. Wasco folks will tell you about how their area has had to pivot from being the world’s potato capital to a producer of first cotton, then roses, and, lately, almonds and pistachios.

If you’re one of those stalwarts of Bay Area politics, drop by the Wasco City Hall, where the quiet diversity of the city council is instructive. With one white woman and four Latino men, the council boasts a higher percentage of ethnic minorities than the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It’s also close to the community; when I spent a morning with Mayor Tilo Cortez recently, constituents greeted him with hugs.

At the council, of course, you’ll discover one giant irony about the potential Bay-to-Wasco connection: The city officially opposes high-speed rail, because of concerns about the effect on local businesses in its path. In particular, the SunnyGem almond processing plant may be condemned and relocated.

Here’s hoping things work out, and, before long, you Bay Area folks will be dancing the night away at Mr. and Mrs. Nightclub near the train station. When you step outside for some air, you’ll appreciate Wasco’s beautiful water tower.

It has lights that change color with the seasons. There’s also the city logo, featuring a rose and Wasco’s welcoming motto, one the rest of California should get behind: “Grow With Us.”

All aboard,

Joe Mathews

The post All Aboard, Bay Area, on Your Fast Train to Wasco appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m so famous for keeping a low profile that some people doubt my existence. So I’m here to tell my fellow Californians that I’m proudly one of you.

I travel widely in California (Bigfoot sightings have been reported in every county of this state), and as I do, my fears have grown about our home state. My anxiety is not because of all the strange California characters who are always claiming to have seen me (I made my peace with my celebrity stalkers decades before TMZ came along) but because I’m seeing far too much of all of you.

Now, you may have noticed that, as a 21st century Sasquatch, I’m a global figure, and have been spotted in almost every U.S. state and in foreign places from Congo to Indonesia to Siberia. And it’s true that there have been a few more sightings of me in Washington state (about 450, according to Bigfoot trackers online and in books) than in California (about 400), but I must confess that my trips to the Pacific Northwest are really just a tax dodge; those Prop 30 rates are monstrous, and Washington state doesn’t have a personal income tax.

But let me be clear: every hair on my body calls California home. The most famous pictures of me (the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967) were taken in the Golden state. And I’ve always been proud of the way I bring its disparate regions together, from the Bigfoot-themed bars in L.A. and San Francisco to the terrific Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I bridge Hollywood (which made me famous through TV and movies) and Silicon Valley (Did you see those ads I did for Google’s photo storage service during the Rio Olympics?).

I spend most of my time in the far north of the state—there’s a reason Siskiyou, Del Norte, and Humboldt counties boast the most sightings of yours truly. I’m particularly loyal to the tiny Humboldt town of Willow Creek, the world’s unofficial Bigfoot capital. This Labor Day weekend, as usual, I’ll ride down Willow Creek’s Main Street in the parade for the annual Bigfoot Days celebration, check in on my personal artifacts at the Bigfoot Collection at the China Flat Museum, and cheer on the competitors in the lawn mower race, the hirsute’s answer to the Grand Prix.

A road sign in Humboldt County, CA, home to the world’s unofficial Bigfoot capital.

Seeing old friends in the Bigfoot community—the folks who study and obsess over me—will be fun. But I also have to confess that at times I miss the solitude and quiet I used to enjoy when I had California’s wilder areas mostly to myself.

These days, I’m encountering so many people in our state’s once-remote precincts that I can hardly get a moment’s peace. The marijuana-industrial complex is relentlessly pushing into the lightly populated regions I favor; the noise of their trucks—bringing in soil, shipping out the finished product—disturbs my sleep. And the epidemic of NIMBYism preventing Californians from building sufficient housing in urban regions is forcing more and more people to build in places near my remote haunts. Some days, the traffic on State Route 299, the main artery for those of us who haunt the lands between Redding and Arcata, can be bumper-to-bumper.

Then there’s the homelessness problem, which everyone except Gov. Jerry Brown thinks is an emergency. The homeless issue isn’t just in the middle of big cities or under freeways. I can’t walk a ridge or wade through a creek in state or federal lands without running into a new homeless encampment. People are pitching tents and trying to survive anywhere camping is legal, and quite a few places where it isn’t.

The presence of more people on hillsides and forests is adding to the risk of giant wildfires at a dangerous time. The drought has dried up waterways and turned brush and trees into kindling. And while I’m more of a coastal guy, I do enjoy roaming the western Sierra, especially in the Oroville area, but the death of millions of trees there—from beetles and drought and climate change—has made some familiar landscapes almost unrecognizable. The erosion is extreme in many wild places, including Bluff Creek, where that video was shot of me nearly 50 years ago. Californians are now running roughshod over the neck of my woods.

I find these intrusions on my wild existence so depressing that lately I’ve been cheering myself up by spending more time intruding on your cities, particularly in settings where I fit in. I caught a number of Bernie Sanders rallies in the East Bay and Central Valley earlier this year. And men are so allergic to shaving in the hipster havens of San Francisco and Los Angeles that I’ve found that, if I wear a beanie hat, skinny jeans, and custom-made sneakers, no one pays me any attention.

My urban forays have led me to wonder if the incursions into my once-quiet wilderness are my fault, at least in part. Californians used to be scared of the woods and wild things like me. I showed up in horror films. “In the ‘70s, Bigfoot was frigging terrifying—he was a monster who killed people,” says my friend Bobby Green, designer of the Bigfoot Lodges in Culver City and Atwater Village in Los Angeles. “When I went skiing as a kid, I was scared to death.”

But then a more accessible, even cuddly, me showed up in cartoons, funny commercials, and comedies like John Lithgow’s Harry and the Hendersons. “Bigfoot has been sugarcoated a lot over the last couple decades,” says Green. “Harry and the Hendersons was cute and funny, and now he’s selling beef jerky.” And he’s right: I’ve become a cousin to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. And that makes me passé, compared to more visceral mythology like Harry Potter or even “Pokemon Go.”

Michael Rugg, who has studied me since before he was a Stanford student and who now runs the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, California, has written that we seek Bigfoot at three levels: at the level of myth; at the level of actual biology, as we look to confirm reports of the living thing out there; and at the level of the paranormal, in our search for forces and things that exist but that we’re not yet capable of seeing.

That third, paranormal level can be the hardest to take seriously, but it may be the most important. One of the things that has always motivated me to keep roaming in my elusive way is the knowledge that I can help people recognize that the most important things in our world may be those things that we don’t understand, that we can’t quite see or prove. And so we must be careful to acknowledge and respect unknown places—and hold to a healthy fear that keeps us from treading too heavily where we do not belong.

I used to create that fear. I used to be scary; but these days, not so much. Now I’m running scared.

The post I, Bigfoot, Am One Frightened Californian appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.