December 2004 Archives
Seeing Contra Costa Boulevard from the bus, I almost forget the view from my wheelchair. Close up, the pavements are old, cracked, sections tilting like tectonic plates. Maybe this sums up something about America or, at least, California. That the infrastructure is worn. The foundation is eroding. The businesses along Contra Costa Boulevard date from the sixties, or maybe the seventies, and they look it. The sidewalks, aside from being irregular, are of that old curbless design, rounding to the street. What does it mean that this area hasn't modernized its pavements, changed its businesses, grown and improved? Maybe a Californian just assumes that there is more and more affluence, and the resulting taxes get plowed back into an ever evolving, and forever improving, world. Where funky little stores with post-war Quonset hut roofs give way to offices or Crate & Barrel. And the edges of sidewalks descend sheer as the Grand Canyon. Pleasant Hill, California, is looking tired to me. People have stopped investing in their own communities.
When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), the region's subway, extended its line out here, California was still in its post-war heyday. In the sixties, the state built the world's largest water project. Not to mention, the most extensive road system ever. And the University of California, which educated me at a level worthy of Harvard and at a cost per semester equal to a 5-minute run through Costco. And taxpayers, i.e., my parents, and everyone's parents, paid for it all. Out of what we used to call "taxes," but now, in the neocon era, is widely assumed to be robbery. And, beneath it all, lies a poverty of spirit. A mean spirit. A depletion. Which only an American can really feel. For we are young and brash of heart and believe that if we are not immortal as individuals, certainly our nation is.
En route from Pleasant Hill's BART station to Millbrae's, I realize that I have spent virtually an entire day in transit between two fairly close suburban locations. I tell myself that I was truly serious of purpose, this would not happen. I would get in my car and drive. I am a disabled, failed writer with nothing better to do than sit on subways. At least at Millbrae I will get off BART and get on a real train. But, somehow, having not quite figured out the odd way BART bifurcates, just north of the airport, my train takes me right to the international airlines terminal, instead of Millbrae, half a mile south. Why there are two BART stations this close is a long and maddening story. It has to do with America and politics and the business of business and squandered opportunities, and wasted funds and general silliness.
