Living on a Ripple

Posted on July 15, 2003 in Ecotone

This is part of the Ecotone discussion on “Suburbs”.

Suburbs are the ripples of big cities. Here in Southern California where I live, the working definition I have developed is that a suburb is a community that connects to a larger metropolitan area. To tell the difference between an independent city and a suburb, you mark the developments: when there are clear, rural spaces between a large city and a smaller one, the smaller city is its own metropolitan area. Where towns and developments run on and on without break, you have suburbs.

Application: San Bernardino is a suburb of Los Angeles. Bakersfield is not.

Census takers and geographers go to great pains to define where metropolitan areas begin and end. I’m told that there are four metropolitan areas in a region where I mark only one. But then government officials use a different definition that also works: metropolitan areas are not only bunched contiguously around the main city or cities, but they also form an economic and political community. You can watch the trucks rolling out from and back into the metropoles, see the warehouses clustering near the decision-making centers. Suburbs are the towns which are not mentioned in the metropolitan district name.

I live where the big pond that is Los Angeles ends. Beneath me stretches a network of streets and a complicated patchwork consisting of housing developments, apartments, planned communities, enclosed shopping malls, strip malls, offices, factories, parks, open spaces, greenhouses, avocado orchards, and strawberry fields. Each fits unabashedly in the haphazard scheme.

Conformity does exist and there are communities near me that go to the extreme of setting up gates to keep strangers out. Some rely on magnetic cards, a system which some thwart by simply following someone else in. Others place guards: the entrances look like border crossings where they want to see some identification and have you fill out paperwork describing your reasons for visiting the country within a country. Many developments — including the one where I live — have strict rules that prohibit tampering with the “look” of the place where you live. I can’t paint my door a bright purple if it suits me because it is in the deed that I must go with the aesthetic sensibilities of the designers and, their successors, the condominium association board.

But I also see freedom here. The writing groups which I am a member of bring in all kinds of people: a Marine, an English professor, a social science Ph.d who went her own way after her dissertation defense, technical writers, the editor of a sailing magazine, housewives, salesmen, and a painter. We critique together and when we do so, we all respect the fact that we have different minds and different tastes in literature.

The same inner life happens behind closed doors. No one feels compelled to paint their interiors in the same colors as the builders put them up and I’ve even known people to freely knock down walls and rearrange things inside their condominiums. The creative urge is sublimated. Entering the home of a neighbor is like suddenly finding yourself inside their minds, surrounded by their tastes and impulses. Yet they do not detach themselves from the community: they remain inside it. There’s no gap between interiors and exteriors, just like there are no gaps between cities. They all run into each other.

How do I feel about living in a place without lines? I’m searching for words and rejecting them. Ambivalent? Contented? Exhilerated? Disgusted? Naseous? I feel the burn of the air on my shoulders and I feel hot. I have opinions about many elements of the place where I live, but the whole is just the pond. And I live on one of its ripples.