Although I frequently kvetch about fears of growing older…it is worthwhile considering the upside. Stick around long enough, and you’ll see a thing or two.

I essentially missed the Summer of Love because in 1967 I was enjoying the summer of Point Reyes. Student friends from Berkeley drove me there several times. I didn’t have a car, after all. The semi-wild peninsula just northwest San Francisco is virtually within sight of the Golden Gate…yet it probably harbors a few mountain lions. Possibly bears. And most certainly beaches. The place had a new sort of wildland designation. National Seashore. It garnered this designation sometime in the late 1960s. And in August, 1967, the San Francisco Chronicle showed a picture of one of the parking areas of the new National Seashore. Empty. Nary a car. The photo caption suggested to Chronicle readers that the new park was a bust. See? No one here.

Precisely 50 years later Jane and I crept through a traffic jam en route to Point Reyes Station, the area’s principle burg. We were going out for dinner, having wisely booked one of the few motel rooms available in the area. In San Francisco the weekend temperatures had reached 42°C. A record. Luckily we also had a restaurant reservation. There was no place to park. There was essentially no place to eat. And the cars kept pouring out of the National Seashore.

Ironically, the dollars keep pouring out too. A famous and very picturesque lighthouse that attracts so many visitors at the actual Point that most take a Park Service shuttle…well, it keeps closing down for more days each week. Because in this moment of American prosperity, funny thing, there’s suddenly no money for National Parks. In other words, first we insist the Commons has no worth…until its worth becomes obvious, then we try to starve it out of existence. We’re quite a country.

Another thing I happened to see in my 70-year stroll is a particular Mexican restaurant in Nogales, Arizona. The year must have been about 1994. The month was probably February. My sister and I sat outside eating enchiladas while I stared at a most interesting sight. The US-Mexican border. The latter was maybe 100 feet away. It consisted of a guard shack where a border control guy stood checking documents of people streaming past. Each person arriving from south of the border showed something. A work permit? Standard immigration card? Whatever it was, in those days of no passports there also seem to be virtually no documentation. The guard spent two, or at the maximum three seconds, examining the bona fides of each entrant. Okay. Okay. They flooded in.

This caught my attention because I remembered what it was like living as a young man in the UK. Any border anywhere involved a palaver. It could be the harbor at Dover. LAX, Gatwick or JFK. Heathrow, of course. Whatever end of the border was yours, you wanted to have quite a chat with anyone crossing it. How much money were you carrying? Where had you been? How much did you buy?

The border at Nogales ran up and down hills. It was a picturesque hodgepodge of fences with versions of the same town on each side. One poorer, of course. As a border, it clearly wasn’t much. Just a sort of loose turnstile. And if one spent any time in Arizona, it was not hard to understand why things were as they were. Every person cleaning every hotel room in Arizona, mowing every golf course, busing every table, stocking every store shelf, washing every car, and so on and so on…was from Mexico or Central America. That’s why lettuce was so cheap and resort profit margins were so high.

There must have been some changes at the border after 9/11. But the real shift came after 2008. Around that time I made another drive with my sister and brother-in-law. This time, north out of Phoenix. It was early evening, rush hour over, and we zipped along at 65 or 70 mph. And for almost half an hour we passed abandoned housing and apartment construction projects. Mile after mile. Acres of framed buildings. Then miles of homes with exposed plywood roofs, rolls of tar paper flapping in the hot wind. Realtor signs blown over. Tumbleweeds bunched against front doors.

And what of the carpenters, roofers, plumbers and their families? Well, they were unemployed and home doing what Americans do. Watching television and blaming immigrants.

Today with the announcement that a humane and sensible immigration law from the Obama era had been struck down…well, I got on a bus and went to the center of town to protest. I didn’t get very close to the crowds. The latter were moving suddenly and eventually blocked a rush hour thoroughfare. I felt a little useless. Until one moment. I was waiting for the elevator in the local subway station and a group of young people insisted I go first. They asked if I’d been to the protest. They had. They were all Hispanic. I insisted they go first. Finally we grasped that there was room for all inside. On the way down to the trains, I told them this nation was built by immigrants. Si, se puede, I added. We all rolled out together onto the subway platform.