Free Blue Sky Dream by David Beers Page A

Jackson, “made possible the easy transfer of savings funds out of the cities of the Northeast and Middle West and toward the new developments of the South and West.”
    My tribe found our collaborators in government bureaucracies wherever we needed them. We found one, for example, in A. P. Hamann, city manager of San Jose, the largest town in the Valley. He proudly declared, “They say San Jose is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I’m going to do everything in my power to make that come true.” We found one in California’s Democratic Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who ordered a flag-waving, statewide celebration on the day, not long after my family arrived, that California’s population eclipsed New York’s to become the largest of all the states. When we saw those flags, my people knew they waved in thanks for our coming.
    We found the quislings we needed wherever there were orchard people and farmers who might have blocked our plans. We found them because enough money can make a quisling of anyone. Within a decade after the coming of aerospace to the Valley of Heart’s Delight, our developers were shelling out nearly$100,000 per acre for any land left that might still be covered with blossoms. The math is simple enough. One of those acres might have yielded $450 worth of cherries or apricots or plums per year at the time, which meant the acre would have had to blossom year after year for two centuries in order to
begin
to match the amount our developer was offering for it immediately. This should give an idea of the quiet force my people exerted whenever we entered a place, power enough to undo a century-old economy and strip the blossoms from a valley once and for all.
    M y people did sigh at the extinction of those blossoms. We missed them the way you miss any pretty decoration taken down for good. But honestly, we did not mourn their disappearance in any deeply felt way. Certainly we did not feel guilt. The reason we did not is that those blossoms never spoke to us as they did to the orchard families. We had not, after all, come to the Valley of Heart’s Delight to join the circular rhythm of nature. The rhythm we sought to join, the rhythm of Corbusier and Eichler and Stanford Industrial Park and Lockheed, was nothing circular as we understood it. Our imagination was linear, proceeding forward and upward, and our lines did not curve back on themselves as did the seasons. We saw promise in the clean possibilities that arose once every blossom had been erased, never to return.
    Those orchard people who held their ground longest, either on principle or for a better price, were phantoms to families like mine. Sometimes from the rear window of the family station wagon, as the pink and white forests whizzed by, I’d catch a glimpse, back in the shadows, of weathered wood buildings, the drooping shape of a barn next to the faded bric-a-brac of some old Victorian. These were the hunkered-in homesteads of the people who used to have the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Here and there, too, were stretches of old cannery buildings where fruitwas packed by other people we never saw. The city’s downtown was a zone of musty hotels and dirty-windowed shops, which is why we rarely went there. The restaurants where the old families ate were shy little turn-ins with something sighingly nostalgic out front like a wagon wheel. It’s hard to conjure the images now because at the time none of these places showed much interest in attracting the attention of us newcomers.
    Instead, the new roadside buildings on the edges of the Valley of Heart’s Delight, our edges, were those clearly eager to please my tribe. So eager, in fact, as to be obsequious. Planets twirled above gas stations, rows of sky-aimed girders turned car washes into rocket gantries, the Futurama bowling alley near Clarendon Manor covered its huge sign with neon stars and amoeba letters. We visited the new eateries and were charmed by the orange