CUL-DE-SAC

San Diego County is a tall place. It starts at precisely sea level then rises to 6,000 feet if you drive about an hour and a half into the county’s eastern pine forests. But I learned this week the higher elevations aren’t all pine trees. There are oaks.

Climbing on the wood spider at Palomar Mt. State Park.

California oaks with rough bark, a broad reach and little acorns that littered the ground nearly everywhere in the vicinity of our campsite. Their leaves are the size of half your thumb.

When you drive east you leave the city and its endless din of traffic. I sat on a stump the next morning on Palomar Mountain and I heard our mumbling fire, birdsong and the occasional gusts of wind in the trees. Composer John Cage believed there is no music, only sound. Don’t know about that, but he also said there is no silence. And that’s true.

When the city’s noise pollution goes away you hear the wind and the birds, sometimes the screams of predators or prey. Even in the dead of night you hear the noise of your own breathing. The stars are so bright it’s strange they don’t make a sound.

I will never get used to living in a coastal desert, and maybe that’s why the mountains are refreshing. When San Diego gets two inches of rain in the winter Mt. Palomar gets nine inches, unless it’s cold enough to snow. The green of the tree canopy and the grass of the meadows (still green in April) make it look alive.

The birds in the mountains are ones I never see by the coast. One was blue with a brown throat and became brilliant blue when I approached and it spread its wings to flee. I’ll have to look that bird up. The mule deer look stoic when they gaze at you, in still life, with their erect broad ears. They are ready to sprint and high-jump.

My kids play on a fallen tree they call the wood spider. Stripped of bark by the elements, it is a white skeleton in the deep colors of the forest. Another huge fallen tree is up the path, propped for years by a live tree then it rotted and split in half, the upper half lying on the ground below.

I look up at the lower half that is now propped but prone and it looks like a human freak with many arms rotating out of its naked body.

Nature lovers want to enjoy virgin land but there is no such thing. Palomar Mountain State Park has potable water and flush toilets. We’ll come back in June and try to get campsites 26 & 27. See you then.

It was a bug-eyed Chihuahua tied to a post outside of the Vons supermarket in Normal Heights. I thought it looked funny and I pointed it out to my 9-year-old girl who then held out her hand for the dog to sniff. The dog yapped and snapped at her, causing her to shriek. It wasn’t more than a nick, but the bite broke her skin and I immediately thought about rabies.

In my circle of acquaintances I had never known of anyone who contracted rabies or had to be treated for it. I can’t even recall seeing a news story about anyone who had died of rabies. For all I knew it was non-existent in the domestic dog population of San Diego. But I did know that if rabies takes hold inside you and you start showing symptoms, you will die.

Any chance, however slim, that my daughter had contracted a deadly disease was something I couldn’t tolerate. The coming few days came with a series of events that left me at peace with what I did but still wondering what I was up against.

I waited outside the store and confronted the dog owner when he came out. I got his phone number and his name. He claimed his dog was current on all his shots but said he couldn’t remember the name of his veterinarian.

I called him the first time and left a message. He didn’t call back. I called him again and said if he didn’t get back to me with the vet’s name I would call county animal control. Didn’t call back. The third time I told him I had called animal control, gave them his name and number and said if I saw his goddamn dog tied up outside of Vons again I’d throw it in my car and take it to the pound.

Leaving a fear-biting dog unattended outside a store is stupid, especially if you can’t prove your dog got its shots. But was I wrong to get worked up about rabies?

The night of the dog bite I was busy googling. The CDC says that wild animals accounted for 92 percent of the known rabies cases in the U.S. in 2010. Raccoons are the most common carrier of rabies nationwide. In San Diego, bats are the most likely animals to test positive. Last year there were six bats in San Diego County found to test positive for rabies. No cats. No dogs. I would later learn from animal control that there hasn’t been a known case of a rabid dog in San Diego County in 40 years.

My wife made an appointment for my daughter to see her pediatrician the day after the dog bite and I took her to the clinic. We had been waiting in the examining room for half an hour when the doc came in. She is a jovial Vietnamese lady, and upon learning my daughter had been bitten by a dog she said in sympathetic tones that the girl should be given an antibiotic.

“OK,” I said, “but I’m not that concerned about the cut being infected. I’m more concerned about her getting rabies.”

Dr. Dow seemed nonplussed. Rabies? You’re afraid she has rabies? Yeah. It’s a deadly disease you know.

Our spoken and unspoken dialogue made it clear to me that it wouldn’t have even occurred to her to treat my daughter for rabies after she was bitten by a Chihuahua. She said the last time she had treated a patient for rabies was when she saw a kid that was bitten by a raccoon.

Due to my concerns she did agree to administer rabies treatment, which turned out to be a shot in the arm and not in the stomach, which is what I’d feared. It’ll take five shots in total. I simply couldn’t see the downside of taking precautions.

I think there is a reason why the state requires you to give your dog rabies shots. I said as much to a co-worker whose wife is a veterinarian, and he also gave me a puzzled look when I told him I assumed all people who treat animals for a living are vaccinated against rabies. He said he wasn’t sure, and it had never occurred to him to wonder whether his wife had been vaccinated.

Only about two people a year get rabies in the U.S. and my kid sure ain’t gonna be one of them.

I suffered a traumatic brain injury seven years ago when I was hit by a car. It stopped a lot of traffic and made the news, so a lot of people in San Diego know about it.

That’s why I was asked to host one of those walks to raise money to provide shelter and services for people with brain injuries.

So, about a week ago, I was the MC for the TBI walk. I also got a free FBI hat.

A guy came up with the hat idea after he had his TBI, and he had a table at the walk. FBI stands for Freakin’ Brain Injury. Get it?

I gave them a plug over the PA system and got a hat, and I didn’t feel too corrupted. I think they were selling for 20 bucks otherwise.

I grew up in a place where people didn’t hire others to mow their lawns or cook their food or take care of their kids. Having servants was the history of the Guilded Age or the English aristocracy. Maybe some Americans had servants but only the oddball rich like the Howells on Gilligan’s Island.

But trends in the economy are making me less comfortable that America transcends class in any way. Just look at the latest job projections (below) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among the top ten hiring professions, only nursing pays a decent wage. The others are a collection of low-paying service jobs that you don’t aspire to but settle for. We’re turning into a nation of wealthy people and an underclass that sees to their daily needs.

The other thing that strikes me about the list is that none of the jobs seem to require a college education. Does it make sense any more to save for your kids’ college tuition payments? College may have once guaranteed entrance into the middle class, but now college grads are competing for a dwindling number of decent paying jobs because the rest of those jobs have been outsourced. We’ve been thrown into a global economy with people who have the same training and education and are happy to make half as much.

Yesterday I took my kids to have dinner at Burger Lounge, one of those burger joints that pretend to be high-end: Grass-fed beef, choice of micro-brews, you know what I mean. And I watched the young people who were waiting tables and running the cash registers. They were good-looking kids and they seemed high-spirited. But for them… was this it? Not just a stepping-stone job to something better, but one in a series of jobs that will pay the same and require no more in the way of skills? And if the latter is the case, who’s fault is it?

Our stories of the past make heroes out of people named Roosevelt who busted trusts and turned America into a place where the rich weren’t all that rich. Lyndon Johnson talked about eliminating poverty even though the good book said the poor would always be with us.

But America has changed and we need to a write a new story. Life is a gift and material wealth isn’t everything. But it’s something, and what do we do when it’s something that looks out of reach for my kids and grandkids.