Scanned from: HONEYDEW: an anthology. Selected by Bill Vartnaw.
Published by TAURIAN HORN PRESS,San Francisco, California in 1974
Eugene (Gene) Berson was born in the Pleiades during the Thang Dynasty. His father was a typewriter salesman, his mother was not. He grew up in Redwood City where there were no redwoods and before it was much of a city. Of his childhood, he gives us the following Place Essay that he wrote on 4 - 24 - 1990 for Eng 418 - Final Draft:
I remember driving down El Camino Real with my father when I was six, sitting on the edge of the seat so that I could look out, bracing myself between the back of the seat and the dashboard of our ’51 Studebaker, and noticing for the first time a green sign that arced just to the side of the road: REDWOOD CITY Climate Best By Government Test population: 10,000. I remember this as the first time I had an inkling of the city I lived in, a city of ten thousand people. Until then I had moved through the ripples that surrounded me in a more concrete way, exploring my house, my backyard, the chicken coop, the bamboo, my front yard, my block, the almond trees, the cow field, the marsh and so on, moving out in a widening circle until I reached that sign, which rewarded me with something intriguingly abstract – the idea of my city – which contained ten thousand people besides me.
As time went on, I would consult that Redwood City sign as if it were a thermometer of the population, noticing that we were now fifteen thousand, now twenty thousand, now thirty thousand – until when I left town only eleven years later, the population reached one hundred twenty-five thousand. The effect this rapid population increase had on the enchanted world of my early childhood left me with an uneasy feeling that places I loved the most were likely to be destroyed.
One of the most important places that this influx of people took away was the fields – certainly the dominant terrain I explored as a child. There were fields everywhere at that time. The end of my block culminated in the cow field, which swayed with wild mustard and red-winged blackbirds in the spring, and billowed with sparkling hay in the summertime, rising and falling like the sea itself. We crawled through its high spring grass and build forts in its hay bales in August. The cow field embodied the seasons for us, and allowed us a refuge from our parents.
I recall standing in front of my house and looking down the street, realizing how many vacant lots on our block had become houses. I though back to all the ones I could remember having been lots and counted twenty-four on our block alone! It was easy to remember them because each one had a specific character and purpose of its own; vacant lots belonging to us kids, since nobody else used them or knew them as intimately as we did. We even knew which weeds grew where and when they would appear. I seemed to me that the world of the adult, which was the world of house-building, was eating up our territory, shrinking the areas where we played.
As time went on, all the places we held sacred as children were built on or changed so much that the mysterious presences we felt inhabited them diminished beyond sense, just as our childhoods faded into memory. The cow field at the end of the block became Ampex Corporation, and the marsh, which held a primeval hush and where a great blue heron once fanned my heart with its great wings, gradually filled up with wrecking yards and trailer courts. Oak trees that challenged us to climb them and inspired heroic efforts, such as walking out dangerous limbs to tie ropes to for swinging, were collared by parking lots, the once vast fields that were their natural dominion eventually insulting them with cars and asphalt. We could no longer raise chickens and we were stopped by police if we had slingshots hanging out of our back pockets. Our dogs could no longer roam free. As we grew up we realized that the mythical realm we had known as children had indeed disappeared.
As a result of this, people my age, as they married and had kids of their own, began to move away, to find a place with a similar, quasi-rural atmosphere where they could simulate the Redwood City that had sheltered their early years. It’s natural for people to try to raise their children in an environment similar to the one they grew up in, just as fish and birds return to their original spawning or nesting grounds. So the natives began to move, as most people in California are in transit, but their quest was to find a place that would allow them to stay where they had been: they were moving to different places, to Santa Cruz, Nevada City, Oregon and so on, so that they could stay in the same time.
When these people moved, usually following a vague urge to escape the problems of urbanized areas, perhaps acquiescing to that form of despair known as nostalgia, they became part of the problem that originally displaced them – for they required housing and jobs in their new areas. I have a friend, for example, who recently moved to Oregon, a move made possible, incidentally, because the house he bought in San Francisco for $19,000 in 1974 sold for $110,000 twenty two years later, and he tells me that Oregonians are increasingly resentful of Californians coming into their state and driving the cost of housing beyond the local resident’s price-range.
Of course, this is exactly what has happened in San Francisco, with the influx of immigrants from Hong Kong, Nicaragua, the Philippines and many other places, and this is also what has happened in Redwood City. The cow field I revered was merely the last vestige of the old Sweeney Ranch, some of which was lopped off to build the house I lived in. I happened to live there when the landscape still preserved some of its wild power, when some of its bird life still flourished there. The neighborhood I grew up in is now similar in feeling to LA. The people who live there probably do not feel the presence of the marsh, which has been filled in.
But I feel it, like an amputated limb. I recall being lured across the highway to that marsh – a primeval region where all lived in a prehistoric hush: fog surrounded me as I walked across the levees of the salt flats, until I felt alone in the world; and the croak of a great blue heron, like bark cracking, would break the stillness. A part of me was awakened as I attended that stillness. A part beyond my family and my school, something that felt at home in the wild. Perhaps that’s what people hope to find as they move from place to place, ironically destroying what they seek in their wake.
When I think now of that Redwood City sign I realize what puzzled me was trying to reconcile that natural world with the man-made world. The sign showed me that the government, another abstract entity, knew about my city and had anointed it with a test of its weather, proclaiming it to be the best: REDWOOD CITY Climate Best By Government Test population: 10,000. This proclamation seemed a little odd to my young mind, as indeed it does to me now. I had never conceived of the weather as a constant, a vanity. That day was certainly a sparkling day. At that time there was no smog whatsoever; I can remember standing on my back porch looking east to the dreamlike San Gabriel Range that floated pinkish beige and black, like a giant pinto grazing in another realm, with no smog to dull the view.
It’s strange to think that my generation is the last to view those hills clearly on hot days, for a hot day now will bring the brown smog haze to smother those hills from view.
Berson has an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State. Roethke, Lawrence and Yeats were early major influences. He coordinated the Poetry in the Schools program for two years, and was a member of the Poet’s Coalition. His work has appeared in Honeydew, Transfer, Academy of American Poets Contest 67-69, and American Poetry Review. You can contact him at Bersone@comcast.net.
