CUL-DE-SAC

I walked through my neighborhood yesterday and got a strange feeling. Everyone seemed to be someplace else. It was a long weekend.

Memorial Day and Labor Day bookend the summer, and this Memorial Day weekend everyone in my immediate family actually had three days off. We could spend the whole time being a family. Long weekends are small gifts that allow you to do something special or do nothing.

On Saturday I called some family friends to see if their kids (my kids’ age) wanted to join us for lunch at Pizza Port, but this is a family that has a hard time doing nothing. This time it was “Sorry, but we’re just loading to the car to drive up to Big Bear to go camping!”

Other times they were about to fly to Mexico City to visit friends or headed to LA to take part in a special bike ride when they close down the streets.

This long weekend, I’m doing nothing.

The empty streets of a long weekend were a common thing where I used to live. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN people who lived in the city had cabins at the lake, and on Memorial Day and 4th of July weekends that’s where they’d be. The city streets and sidewalks were empty. Freeway traffic was intermittent. You didn’t hear TVs blaring as you walked past homes.

The lake. It was place and a state of mind for urban and suburban Minnesotans where they’d go fishing and watch the sun set over the water during long weekends or weeks off in the summer.

It’s also a place to get bitten by mosquitoes and where you have a second home to maintain. Not a great thing for people who like to do nothing. Not being raised in Minnesota, I was also never overcome by the lure of the lake. I never felt the need to give another Minnesota man that knowing look as I told him it was time to go up to the cabin and take in the dock.

San Diego is a place where you can feel like you’re on vacation even if you haven’t left town, so more people tend to stick around town on Memorial Day. The beach and Balboa Park, the weather and the inevitable communion of tourists helps you imagine you’ve made a special trip here to enjoy yourself.

But I think an escape from the midlife grind of going to work and taking kids to and from school can make any place where you live seem exotic. It’s a different place, at least. I take long looks at the street and the canyon out back. There’s no rush to be done with breakfast and there’s no place to go.

The wife reads a book and my daughter puts her dolls to bed and tells me to watch after them. My son sits on a skateboard that rolls slowly along the floor. It’s a long weekend, and we’re doing nothing.

I grew up in a small town so I’ve always been fascinated by big cities, and I almost certainly fall into the category of clueless snobs identified by a I guy I just talked to.

The guy is named Michael Lind and he just wrote an article for Salon that zeroed in on the needs for future infrastructure. Basically, he thinks fossil fuels are going to continue to energize the world for generations and fixed rail transportation will soon be a thing of the past.

Trains, see, are kept going only thanks to sentimentality and because a few people think they’re cool.

I called Lind to draw him out on the subject of robocars, which he sees as being the future of coordinated (though not really mass) transportation. And I decided his ideas are founded on the belief that the only people who like trains, mass transportation and dense cities belong to a small, crabby collection of liberal elites.

He believes that car-dependent, point to point transportation is the only kind of travel people in developed countries will accept. The ability to mine shale gas means we have a virtually endless supply of fossil fuels so we might as well get used to it and forget about the windmills and solar panels. The only “alternative” energy that makes sense to him is nuclear.

He believes building dense communities and giving up cars only makes sense if they free market tells us they make sense, and it doesn’t… according to Lind.

I won’t waste much time saying why I disagree with him, though I WILL say this guy seems to ignore the huge expense in energy, cash, roads and sewer pipes that it takes to build and maintain sprawling suburbs. But he has a point when he says urban liberals turn their lifestyles into a moral issue.

Lots of people on bikes have an attitude which says, “I am riding a bike and you are driving a car, therefore I am morally superior so get out of my way even if I’m running red lights and riding in one lane, three-abreast.” I know this because I used to ride a bike and had a similar attitude.

I once read that Hummer drivers joked that the car I drive should be called the Toyota Pious. Funny.

But even before being whacked by a car, which put an end to my cycling, I think I realized that the microscopic reduction I was making in greenhouse gas emissions was not a worthy motivation for mounting a bike, nor was the mistaken belief that I really was being a better person than you.

So let me say this: I live in what is (locally) considered an urban neighborhood because I like old houses. I walk to work sometimes, and to the grocery store most of the time, because I like the exercise, it’s relaxing to not be in a hurry and it causes me to run into neighbors and ask them what’s going on.

Am I being a snob? At some point you have to stop worrying about that, otherwise you’re just way too self-conscious. But to those who live in the distant ‘burbs, please enjoy it because I believe in freedom. But I also believe, unlike Mr. Lind, that the gravy train we’ve enjoyed thanks to oil and gas will not last forever because it will either run out, or do intolerable damage to our environment.

On the other hand… I could be wrong.

The guardian of the wilderness. The marshall in the war against urban sprawl. In San Diego it’s an old guy who lives in the forest named Duncan McFetridge.

An Old Picture of Duncan

He lives in a village in eastern SD County called Descanso, where he is periodically chased out of his home by wildfires but otherwise broods over real estate developers’ rape of the land. I called him last week and we had a talk similar to many past ones. He speaks in a gruff voice that sounded the same 14 years ago. But he says he’s changed.

“Tom… if you saw me today you’d see a different person.”

Duncan calls you by name then follows with a long pause to bring gravity to what he’s saying. This time he’s talking about something truly serious, which was his brush with death. He was bitten by a venomous snake and, soon after, suffered a heart attack that required heart surgery.

Did that change you philosophically? I asked him.

“Philosophically, yes. And spiritually,” said Duncan.

I had called him to ask about the lawsuit his environmental group is bringing against the county planning agency. It claims the agency’s 40-year regional transportation plan goes quick to work improving freeways but ignores public transit until 2030, a year Duncan is unlikely to see.

That brings greater urban sprawl and more greenhouse emissions. He condemned the greed of developers and their political lackeys, but then switched to the subject of his artwork; sculpture.

“Tom… I’ve become more interested in beauty. Ancient civilizations idolized beauty. San Diego used to be a beautiful place, but they’re turning it to shit.”

Duncan’s vision of a perfect San Diego County is a dense urban city surrounded by a greenbelt. He’s sentimental about preserving ranchlands even though cows have not been friends to the western wilderness.

I first knew him when he was leading the campaign for a political initiative that would have created a San Diego greenbelt by dramatically limiting the number of subdivisions you can make out of land in the back-country. People in agriculture, ranchers included, have always disliked Duncan for trying to limit the profits on their land sales.

But just within the past year the County Board of Superevisors passed a general plan that did — basically — what McFetridge wanted to do in 1998. So maybe he was right after all.

Is he right this time? Maybe or maybe not. But he will always be tough back-country loner with a face that looks like the wilderness. I don’t know if we need more like him, but I’m glad there’s at least one McFetridge.

Daily newspapers are having troubled times, financially, but a different kind of trouble has also arrived at San Diego’s daily, the Union-Tribune. Excuse me… UT San Diego, it’s now called.

But I don’t care what the new publishers call it. The issue is the integrity of the paper’s content.

When San Diego real estate mogul Doug Manchester bought the paper, a few months ago, he and his partner shocked journalism purists by saying the new UT would be a “cheerleader” for San Diego (not a watchdog or a paper of record).

They said their sports page would portray opponents of a new stadium for the San Diego Chargers as “obstructionists.” To me this all meant that UT journalists would not be objective reporters, but promoters of the publisher’s agenda.

Some of us wished for the best, hoping this was a naïve attitude of someone who had yet to learn the news business. Eventually, we thought, Manchester would understand what is required of journalism and he’d let the newsroom do its job.

But I now believe that was wishful thinking because the footprint of the new publisher has been so clearly seen.

Within the past month, the paper endorsed conservative Republican mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio in a special front-page section. Endorsing a candidate in the primary is unusual; endorsing him with that level of display is practically unheard of.

Not long after that, a news headline described independent mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher, arguably the person most likely to defeat DeMaio in a general election, as a “panderer.” The day after that, a front-page story about Robert Brom, who’s retiring as bishop of the San Diego Diocese, made no mention of the enormous financial settlement, paid on Brom’s watch, to victims of sexual abuse by priests.

We read this in the paper owned by Manchester, who’s well known as conservative Catholic and a big supporter of Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m Catholic too and I’ve got no problem with Doug Manchester’s views on gay marriage or his history of donating to favored political causes.

I also understand that the opinion page of any newspaper is bound to reflect the publisher’s opinions. For years, the Wall Street Journal combined a right-wing editorial page with great nuanced coverage of major news stories on the front page.

But what’s happened in the UT has gone beyond a simple rejiggering of its editorials. It’s infected the actual coverage of news.

I’m sure the editors at UT San Diego could offer some other explanation of the stories I mentioned. They may say the headline was a mistake, not a malicious effort to smear Fletcher.

But the problem is; I wouldn’t buy those explanations and it doesn’t really matter whether I’m right or wrong. The paper is losing my trust, and if you want to have editorial integrity, you’ve got to have trust of the readers.

I’d say this new development is a sad chapter in a newspaper that’s always been a bastion of fair reporting but that would not be true. In the old days of the UT, back when there was a Union and a Tribune, the publisher’s politics had a huge impact on news coverage.

I’ve spoken with people who’ve told me during the 1970s you simply could not get coverage about Watergate in the San Diego papers. This was thanks to the tight relationship that owner James Copley and editor Herb Klein had with the GOP and the Nixon administration.

So the moves by Manchester & Co. aren’t really a new thing. But they sure look like a return to the bad old days.

And it’s sad. In the past half-dozen years the UT won two Pulitzer Prizes and there are still plenty of talented journalists who work there. But members of the whole Pulitzer team that uncovered the great bribery scandal of Congressman Duke Cunningham have now either left the paper or have been fired.

Meanwhile, there’s talk of the Manchester group buying the Orange County Register as well. I’m still hoping for the best and my trust can be regained. But so far the signs have not been encouraging.

Have you ever heard of Pradeep Khosla? No. And that’s my point. Neither had I when I had to write and recite a story for KPBS Radio about the fact he had been appointed the new chancellor of UC San Diego.

Pradeep Khosla

Khosla is a scientist. He’s a pen-and-calculator-in-the-pocket kind of guy, an electrical engineer who has been the dean of the engineering school at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He’s also Indian, and he has an exotic name that nobody knew how to pronouce… at least nobody I knew in California, including nobody in the UC President’s office in Oakland.

A guy there told me it was PRAH-deep KAHS-luh, so that’s what I called him on the air. But it was supposed to be PRAH-deep KOSE-lah (KOSE rhymes with dose). This might seem like a small thing, and the vast-majority of non-Indian people who heard it didn’t care and didn’t know any better. But I did get it wrong, and I first knew this when I listened to a voice message from Pittsburgh that informed me of the right pronunciation. Unfortunately, I’d already filed my story and it had already been broadcast.

The next day I started hearing from the Indian community. Amita Sharma, who works with me, came up and said, “You know that Indian man you talked about yesterday? And the way you said his name?”

“Yea,” I said. “It’s supposed to be KOSE-lah. I know.”

Then I got a call, forwarded to me from the main switchboard.

“Excuse me. But there was a story on the radio yesterday about a man from India and his named was grossly mispronounced.”

“Yes, I know! His name is KOSE-luh,” I said. “I was told is was KAHS-luh, but the person who told me that was wrong. Sorry!”

She may have also been reacting to the fact that our morning newsreader botched his name even worse, calling him KASS-luh. Don’t ask me why.

I know, from years of working in broadcasting, that you can never be sure of the way someone says their name until you hear it from their lips. But I’ve gotten the impression that the Indians are pretty consistent in the way they pronounce common names. For all I know Khosla is as common a name, in India, as Jones is in the U.S.

We all know foreigners who get tired of forcing Americans to say their names right and finally relent. “Pray-deep Case-la? Sure. Whatever.” We’ll see. It wouldn’t surprise me if Pradeep arrives and actually tells us it’s KAHS-luh, after all. Or maybe he heard about my radio story, and he’s always wanted to pronounce his name KAHS-luh and he decides this is his opportunity to make the change.

If he does, just know you heard it from me first. In the meantime I’ve stopped taking calls from Indians.

My second Catholic child is one week shy of a sacrament. The seven-year-old will wear her First Communion dress a week from today and receive the host for the first time. I suppose she’ll also drink the blood of Christ.

First Communion at St. Didacus. 2008.

I typically sit in the back of the church on Sundays when I attend. So by the time I get to the front, nearly all the church has taken communion and I can’t help thinking about all of the folks who have put their mouths on the communion cup. Seems unsanitary. I usually skip the wine.

I’m glad my daughter hasn’t asked me any serious questions about transubstantiation. When I became Catholic I was surprised to hear you’re supposed to actually believe the wafer becomes the body of Christ. I mean the actual body of Jesus Christ. Not just a symbol. Are they serious?

Being the father of a kid who’s going through First Communion has meant I’ve had to attend a couple of classes, in which Father Mike explains some of the meaning of the sacrament. A funny thing happened. At one point, he asked a question of me and the about 25 other parents sitting in one of the St. Didacus classrooms. I can’t remember what point he wanted to illustrate, but he said:

“How many parents here have big families?” No hands went up. “Anyone have five kids?” No hands. “Four kids?” No hands.

A couple of parents finally raised their hands when he asked if anyone had three children. But it was pretty clear the church teaching on birth control wasn’t getting through.

One other thing the Padre mentioned during his lecture was Psalm 139. When I got home I read it and I got the point, which was the completeness of God’s embrace of us. The writer of the Psalm speaks to God:

My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

But the beautiful poetry of the Psalms always seems to end with a line like this one, also found in Psalm 139:

Do I not hate those that hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with a perfect hatred!

Typical Psalm. A beautiful adoration of God is ended by saying, “Oh… by the way, God. You know those people who live over there, who don’t believe in you? And who are real jerks? Please make sure they starve or fall off a cliff. Amen.”

Hopefully, the message next Saturday will be more positive. After First Communion comes May Crowning, that cheerfully idolatrous coronation of the Virgin. Hope you can make it.

I always gotta have some book to read, and couple of weeks ago I picked up Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I’d read Isaacson’s bio of Benjamin Franklin and knew he was a hardworking researcher and a deft storyteller. I’d also been enticed by the many articles, that followed Jobs’ death, in which the book was quoted.

I haven’t finished Steve Jobs, and I may not because I think the writer’s profile of him comes through early in the book. Jobs was a brilliant California kid who was raised in what was becoming Silicon Valley.  He turned into an extremely ambitious, successful, energetic and sometimes abusive man who could fairly be described as an arrogant jerk. He was a perfectionist, and he had an amazing knack for knowing what your average computer user needed and wanted to buy.

Some people go so far as to say he invented the personal computer, with a little help from Steve Wozniak. And don’t forget the iPhone!

Isaacson, himself, seems to think we have Jobs to thank for the connected lifestyles we now lead. In the intro he writes, “Jobs’ ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing.”

The Jobs biography seems to fall into a common pattern of heroic narratives. Great men (and they usually are…) are inspired geniuses whose drive and brilliance have brought us not just the personal computer (Jobs) but also the airplane (Wright Brothers), the theory of evolution (Darwin) and Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony (Ludwig van).

Well, OK! I guess we never would have gotten Beethoven’s 9^th without an actual Beethoven. But there would have been – and there were – other great classical composers. There also would have been personal computers without Jobs and there would have been airplanes without the Wright Brothers.

I used to wonder if Albert Einstein would have been a great physicist if he’d been born in a poor African village. Well… no. In fact, the question I once took seriously now seems absurd. Great achievers are products of their time and place. Without those two things, Einstein would have been just another really smart guy that nobody had heard of.

I began to seriously question the hero myth when I was helping my son do a school report about Charles Darwin. He checked out a kids’ history of Darwin, which I also read. Kids’ history books, by the way, are great. They are short, easy to read, and tell you pretty much all you need to know. I realized I didn’t have to read 500 pages about Charles Darwin.

The thing about Darwin’s story that fascinated me is that his theory of evolution existed far beyond the confines of his own mind. In Victorian England there were lots of naturalists exploring the same ideas. In fact, the thing that finally got Darwin off his butt to publish The Origin of Species was a letter he got from another naturalist, asking him to review a paper the man had written.

Darwin read the paper and realized hat this guy was coming to the same conclusions that he was. If Darwin didn’t publish his book soon, he’d be scooped.

We need to give credit where it’s due. Charles Darwin’s volume of research gave the theory of evolution a lot more heft than it would have had if a lesser man had popularized it. Steve Jobs pushed the personal computer industry further and faster because he was who he was. But he didn’t invent Silicon Valley, which was a big organic field of academics and engineers bunched all together. The fact that Jobs became the Steve Jobs came from the fact he was born and raised in that heady environment.

The next book I want to read is by another guy I’ve read before. Malcolm Gladwell has a book called Outliers, and it examines the societal and temporal factors that create great achievers; aka Outliers, aka people like Darwin and Jobs. I expect he’ll say that that individuals aren’t the great inventors, cultures are. Just read a kids’ history book, and you’ll know that.

One more thing about Steve Jobs

Anyone who is interested in nature v. nurture is fascinated by identical twins and by adopted children. Steve Jobs was adopted.

And one endearing thing about Jobs (there weren’t many) was his love for his adoptive parents. Paul and Clara Jobs were kind, working-class people whose intellects were clearly not on par with that of their adopted son.

Many people have theorized that Steve Jobs was angry for being abandoned by his natural parents, who were – by the way – a Wisconsin girl of German Catholic background and the son of wealthy, Muslim family from Syria. They met at the University of Wisconsin.

Steve Jobs tells Isaacson that Paul and Clara were “1,000 percent” his parents. As far as he was concerned, his natural parents were just sperm and egg donors. That may be unfair to say of the woman who bore him, and for whom giving him up was surely a great trial.

I’ve known many people who were adopted, and they have had very diverse views of what that means or whether they want to meet their birth parents. The thing they seem to share is a passion for what they believe on the subject.

Genetics are a big part of what makes us who we are. But while that may be true, families are not bound by truth. Families are bound by love, and where there is love, I don’t think genes matter very much.

It was five years ago this past week – April 14^th, to be exact – when I was hit by a car and ended up in the hospital. This was while I was riding my bike to work. A lot of people who know about this ask me whether I’ve fully recovered, and I’m tempted to just say, “Yes thanks, I’m fine.”

In fact, I still have trouble sleeping and I still have daily nerve pain; the result of traumatic brain injury. I take meds every day for both. Vicodin for the pain. Not long ago I was talking to a man, like the people mentioned above. I explained to him my recurring problems, and he asked me, “Did you sue?”

For the first time, I felt like I didn’t have a good answer to that question. My answer has always been, No, I didn’t. I’d then explain that a lawsuit would have been too much trouble and not worth the emotional pain and suffering. But now, I’m not so sure.

My modest settlement from two insurance companies seemed reasonable at the time. Unfortunately, at the time, I thought that I’d fully recover and all would eventually be behind me. I never imagined that the accident would continue to affect my health until today, and possibly for the rest of my life.

Had I known that, I would have told the insurance company of the woman who struck me that their settlement wasn’t enough. Would I have taken the step of going to court to force their hand? I’m not sure. The limited liability of the insurance company might have ultimately forced me to sue the driver individually. And who says she has any money.

You get into the hard question of what money can buy in a situation like this. I think the answer is “emotional compensation.” A larger sum wouldn’t have cured me or necessarily made me any happier. It wouldn’t have saved me from any pending bankruptcy, since none was pending. But it would have left me thinking I’d received a just reward.

In the meantime, I thank God because I know I was lucky. I’m lucky to have a loving family, a job and to still be alive. I wish the pain would go away. But thanks… I’m fine.

Addendum, April 21, 2012

It turns out I am very lucky. Later on the day that I posted the story above, Charles Raymond Gilbreth was riding his bike eastward in the bike lane of Montezuma Road, between Fairmount and Collwood. There, he was hit from behind by a car and killed. I was struck on the corner of Collwood and Montezuma, just 200 yards to the east.

A group called Bike Stand, based at San Diego State, painted a bike white, and locked it to a sign on Montezuma; Gilbreth’s ghost bike. Some people laid flowers near the roadside brush where his body ended up. Charles Gilbreth was 63. Rest in peace.

TV story about Gilbreth accident.

The shape of the land changes slowly as you drive from the Pacific Ocean into the American West. In coastal California you have to go east to be in the West. And I drove inland from San Diego past the snowy San Gabriel Mountains in the eastern reaches of the LA megalopolis to the Mojave Desert with its low, jagged peaks and scrub-covered mesas dotted with swirling dust devils. After that, I reached the high-country of the Colorado Plateau.

Piñon trees grew on a landscape of red soil until we entered a pine forest where coyotes, lions and elk lived at an elevation of about 7,000 feet. I’d been here before, so I knew that soon the ground would open up and become the Grand Canyon, with its shades of red and grey and its constantly changing shadows. Pictures and poetry are nice, but you have to be in the awesome presence of the thing to really understand it.

The Grand Canyon Village is on the south rim, and it’s a series of lodges and restaurants with a small power plant and a post office. There, you hear tourists speaking German, Japanese or with British accents and you see lots of people carrying heavy backpacks who are sunburned from hiking.

I’d never been here with my children before, and walking along the rim of the canyon makes you imagine them disappearing into it. I saw a man with two kids who yelled at them as they walked down the heavily used Bright Angel Path, “If you fall off this path you will die! I mean it… you WILL DIE!!”

A minute later his kids started running down the trail and the guy lost it. This was followed by an ugly scene of him dragging his son back up the trail as the boy screamed. I thought this dad was a jerk, but maybe heights and cliffs do that to you.

I thought about those Roadrunner cartoons when the Wiley Coyote would fail to catch his prey and accidentally fall over a cliff. We’d then see him get smaller and smaller as he approached the ground accompanied by a descending glissando that ended with the thud of his body finally hitting the desert floor.

When you approach the rim of the Grand Canyon and peer into the abyss your imagination overpowers you. You feel yourself falling in, and the reality that you’re not really in much danger doesn’t seem to matter. I’d rather walk into the canyon than linger at the top.

During my last trip to the Grand Canyon I heard some folklore that said the majority of people who fell to their deaths at the canyon did it while they were pissing off the edge of the rim. I doubt that’s true, but the story’s message is clear: The person who falls off the edge is typically an idiot. It’s the guy who walks up to a terrifying precipice, unzips his pants and shouts to his friends, “Hey guys… watch me piss off the edge!” It’s satisfying to think that people who died at the Grand Canyon somehow deserved it.

And then there’s the story of the incautious hiker. A sign near one of the paths tells of the woman who was a marathon runner, who decided to go all the way to the bottom of the canyon, carrying just two bottles of water and an energy bar. She died of dehydration.

The film version of the actor Spalding Gray’s one-man show has Spalding telling the story of a crusty British mariner who once said to him, “Spalding! Never play with the ocean! If you play IN the ocean, she can be a lady. But if you play WITH the ocean, she is a bitch!!”

People do play with the rugged, unforgiving landscape of the American West. They try to jog down the Grand Canyon in summer and they try to climb Half Dome at Yosemite without knowing what they’re doing, thinking somebody is bound to rescue me if I get stuck. They do perform rescues at the Grand Canyon. But if they rescue you, you get a bill for services rendered.

One of these days I will hike the bottom (with plenty of water I hope) but this time I stayed near the rim and the lodge, where my son and daughter liked the gift shop better than the view. My wife liked the rooms connected to the Bright Angel Lodge because they were historic and… well, just nice. Double-hung windows with sash cords, right on the south rim, and only $82 a night for a double bed, a sink and a toilet. The National Park Service concession held by Xanterra must force them to charge less than market rates.

See you at the Grand Canyon one of these days.