Portola Hills 1

Posted on July 22, 2003 in Ecotone Neighborhood Photos

“Soul-less” is the platitude both city dwellers and country folk heap on the kind of place where I live. What do they mean? That the houses have no souls? — religion and science teach me this. That the developers show no heart when they toss up what these others deride as “ticky tacky houses” after the popular song of the 1950s? That does happen. Or that the people who live in them — people like me — have no souls?

I will grant that many suburbs are put up without much thought for the comfort of the people or the overall beauty of the settlement. The faces of the condos where I live can be foreboding: the matching doors of the garages suggest that we all think the same thoughts, that we all believe the same things. I must accept the paint they slapped on, not embellish the exterior or attempt to change the roof tiles. I am not free in these things, but these are not my mind.

Die Gedanken sind frei.

I have a soul. So do my neighbors. They keep container gardens, play in the street, tease us with barbecue odors, and chat from their doorsteps and from their decks. It takes time to get to know people here and there is turnover, many strangers coming in and out.

People say that they wouldn’t want to live in a place like I do because it is too crowded. I find that walking through this place is not too unlike walking around a Greek island village or an Italian hill town. They say that it’s an unfriendly place. In every place that I have lived, it takes time to get the know the neighbors. With the turnover, it is hard to get a chance to find out about who just moved in next door: the condo at the base of my stairs is being sold for the second time since I moved here. The one on the other side of the wall from where I type is on its third resident who I have not met. That’s change in this place.

Not far — within the sight of my eyes if I walk across the street and peer over the fence — there’s another world, a rural one. These people hate us. They’re a mix of progressive earth mothers and fascist survivalists, hippies and bikers, folks out to protect their kids from the perils of the cities and grumpy old men who don’t want to pay taxes for schools. We know that they don’t like us because when we pass on our way to work or to shopping or back home again, we see them wrinkle their noses. In the more liberal places, they stare at us, take down our license plate, breath a sigh of relief when we leave. In one backwards place near me, they aim shotguns at passersby on a public road; in another, an old man brings out a lawn chair and some logs every weekend to prevent people from passing along a county road that he declares is his property.

The city lies in the other direction. It stretches and never ends. Helicopters fly over the poorer areas, shining their lights on brown men in tank tops, suspecting everyone.

This is what I hate about speaking up for the island where I live: the only balance seems to be speaking of the bad things of these other places. They attack and I counterattack. They call me soul-less. At least to that I have a positive reply: I have a soul. I have a soul.

Photo gallery collected for Ecotone. Click on the picture to view the images.