Week 10

Part 1:


• Ode to Caltrans by Hector Tobar

In this essay Tobar begins with a dream he has about the Hollywood Freeway which he writes about. He talks about Freeways in other parts of the world or places he’s visited that have a totally different system. He also said that the law of evolution has dictated our adaptation into homo californius mobilius, and clever tool-making─the hands-free cellular phone, the multi-CD player, and the radar detection device─has saved our breed from extinction. When his two babies were going to be born he decided not to drive in the freeway. His stepfather committed suicide on the green lawns of Rose Hills, overlooking the 605 Freeway. His stepfather had shot himself during one of those windswept Thanksgiving weekends. He talked about when he was learning to drive and then about when he was eight years old and was in an ecology class. There he saw the Freeway as a place of pollution and peril for the first time. He talks about his father and how his palms would begin to sweat every time he did this, because he was just a couple of years removed from Guatemala and didn’t have a driver’s license yet. When his mother was going to have him she and his father didn’t have a car and her neighbor gave them a ride to the hospital. He wonders if, maybe the anxiety her mom was feeling at birth was passed on to him.

My favorite sentence was, “When you live far away from California, as I have for the past three years, you begin to appreciate the freeway for the essential idea behind its construction─that automobiles should inhabit their own universe, segregated from the slower forms of locomotion”(52).

This story makes me think of the Freeway here in Healdsburg. I leave right next to Freeway 101 and if I look outside my window I’ll see it. Every time I’m in my room I can hear it even though I have adapted to it and can’t even hear it anymore only if I stop and listen to it. Sometimes at night I look outside my window and hear and see many cars. It looks like a bunch of light speeding at about 60-75 miles per hour. Then in the mornings I look outside and see it again but its time I see the different types of cars. I have become so used to it that if I don’t hear any noise from the cars I get scare and feel the difference.

Something I know now that I didn’t know before is that in Iraq, the super highways Saddan built are a kind of Middle Eastern tribute to CalTrans. The undulating zinc center dividers of the Baghdad freeways are the same as those running through Santa Monica and the functional, gravity-defying concrete overpasses are engineering cousins to those designed on drafting tables in Sacramento.

• Montalva, Myths and Dreams of Home by Thomas Steinbeck

In this essay Steinbeck starts out explaining what he will be writing about. He then starts with the early fifteen hundred which were remarkably shallow years for the game in Spain. The Dutch were already publishing seventy percent of all the books in Europe, and they found the Spanish market a perfect place to unload all their seconds and returns. He mentioned Miguel de Cervantes and his masterpiece, Don Quixote. But I 1510 the literary picking were bone slim, so obviously the arena was open to all sorts of hacks and literary footpads. He talks about the best sellers and how the church was becoming an authority because the books were too unmoral. He then says that few know or care about the original story, everyone knows the name of Montalvo’s “Atlantian” cousin, for he christened his paradise California. He talks about Cortez and the conquistadores’ whom named California and where mistaken. Indeed, the very notion that California was, and is, a veritable paradise on Earth, has had many proponents throughout our national history. He said that for most people, the heady delights of even a mythical seduction fade with the realities of a new day. But the California Myth has a slippery custom of reinventing itself every time you turn around. He also said that the Big Sur is the only place in California, besides the high Sierras and the Northwest, where stories of strange and unexplained humanoids abound. He mentioned Sasquatch and The Dark Watchers. He talks about all this myths and at the end he said he believed every word. But that’s what happens when you’re in love.

My favorite sentences were, “It can be a jarring experience to watch one’s environment change with such rapidity that the recognizable becomes foreign in the blink of an eye. Sic transit Gloria mundi. (Thus passes the glory of the world.)” (66). And also, “If it can truly be said that one’s spirit may be stimulated to accept the sublime by one location as opposed to another, then for me that lace exists high on the crests and along the rugged cliffs of The Big Sur” (67).

This story made me think of the conquistadores and Cortez confusing this land. It also made me think of all the myths about California and the myths about those humanoids and unexplained things like Sasquatch and The Dark Watchers along with others that are said to live here in California. I thought about California as a mythical place in the world.

What I didn’t now before that I know now is that there was a myth about California and that started a long time ago when the romance novels were starting to be written. And then when Cortez came across Baja California. I also didn’t know anything about The Dark Watchers myth. They sound interesting but I had never heard about them.

• The Last Little Beach Town by Edward Humes

In this story Himes writes about Seal Beach. He said Seal Beach’s red-tile roofed, hacienda-style City Hall was built in 1929, but lately part of the lower floor has been rented out to a beauty salon to bring the town a bit of extra revenue. He had gone to buy a little book called A Story of Seal Beach. But he forgot his wallet and Joanne Yeo; the City Clerk told him he could take it and pay her back whenever he could. He said that Seal Beach was a very special place where people do appreciate you and trust you. He said that this does not happen in this century in any part of the world─except, in Seal Beach. And he said that people actually walk to go to places there. Confusion about Seal Beach’s identity and location is key to its survival─people who live twenty minutes away aren’t quite sure where or what it is. He talked about arriving there when the pollution was at its worst and then he saw the beach. And said that seeing that, seeing his mythic California hadn’t been paved over entirely, he knew he could move there after all. He said that today Crystal Cove is a strip mall and a golf course and stack of carefully coiffed and color-coordinated mansions overlooking the non-native vegetation and palms imported to replace the uprooted native landscape. He mentioned that the council member can’t afford the Seal Beach’s way anymore. He doesn’t want Seal Beach to become a suburban area.

My favorite sentence was, “I can’t help but remember Crystal Cove and its vanished paradise, and just how fragile our dreams and myths truly are, at least the ones that count” (78). In this world there are many mythical places that are very natural and are being abused by humans. This needs to stop we cannot abuse the world anymore. We are too selfish and just want the best for ourselves.

What this story made me about was some of the many Beaches that I have been to. Some in Bodega Bay and some in Mendocino County. My favorite where definitely the ones that haven’t been visited by humans too much because they just look very natural and untouched. There is nothing there but green all around, nice sand, unpolluted water and great views. A very good Beach was in Mendocino County close to a small place called Philo up in the mountains. The population close by is very low there for not a lot of people know about that Beach.

What I didn’t know that I now know is that this Beach existed along with Crystal Cove, and that Crystal Cove has changed. And that Seal Beach was in danger of being urbanize and maybe it is right now. This has to stop happening.

• Surfacing by Matt Warshaw

In this story Warshaw writes about Sixteen-year-old Jay Moriarity from Santa Cruz. At about 9 p.m., halfway through his evening shift in the kitchen at Pleasure Point Pizza in Santa Cruz, Moriarity phoned the National Weather Service for the updated buoy and weather report. He discovered that the surf was going to be bigger than he’d thought, and it was due to arrive in just a few hours. Next morning Moriarity steered his mother’s Datsun pickup north on Highway 1. He went to Maverick’s and caught the wave. The first time he didn't quite make it and was pulled to the bottom for about twenty seconds. And then he made all of them perfectly. But when the fist one came and wiped him out Jay Moriarity, a week later, couldn’t do much more than sketch out in the most obvious terms the big-wave vignette─generally described at the point as the worst wipeout, or at least the worst looking wipeout, in surfing history─that soon appeared on the cover of Surfer and the front section of the New York Times Magazine. Moriarity’s banal reaction may have had less to do with a deficient imagination than with the general inarticulateness of sixteen-year-olds. Or perhaps he was just following the form of biog-wave protocol that says, play it down, play it cool.

My favorite sentence was, “And as the untroubled imagination reduces fear and anxiety beforehand, it may also smooth out afterward” (87). I think this is true.

This story made me think of San Francisco. When I went one day and I was at the Golden Bridge looking down at the water. There really were some big waves one day; and another day when I went to the San Francisco zoo and was passing by the edge of the sea. The waves were really strong that day. It makes me think about the waves they would surf on

What I did not know that I know now is that so many people go catch big waves and from all over, Surfers from San Francisco, Santa Cruz, half Moon Bay, and Pacifica. Also a few surf photographers and spectators.


The similarities of these essays are that they all write about something from California. The first one has to do with the Freeways. The second one about the myths in California and he is saying that it’s a magical place. The third one is about a Beach that not a lot of people know about and that was intact and magical as well. The Last one was a story about surfing and big waves. I think two stories had a lot in common the one about the myths in California and the one about the Beach because they both give important messages.

Part 2:

1) Antonio- He learned that there is a Japanese ceremony in the American River that commemorates those that died in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

2) Tamika- She learned that the American River Parkway runs through the heart of the city from Folsom Lake to the point where the American River joins the Sacramento.

3) Mario- He said that, " All this glamor that the city puts and ignores the shadow people such poor people and others. We shouldn't be blind."

4) Raquel- She wasn't aware that Kings river irrigates more farmland that any other river in the world second from The Nile and Indus river.

5) Michael- One thing he learned was what bait was used to catch the Lower Owens Trout, that was really interesting how that was figured out.

6) Megan- She learned that Tulare County is the dairy capital of the world.

7) Alexa- When she was reading The Big Valley it made her realize how much our world has changed from the 1950s.

8) Alex- He learned that at the time period they lived in the dirtiest air basin in the nation, eight hour smog readings worse than Los Angeles.

9) Stephen- What he didn't know before reading was that figs were booming in Fresno in the early and mid-20th century.

10) Daniel- His favorite sentence was,"And there you have the essential current between desire and fear. Desire is merely the version that says, I want and am taking mine - and better me or us than them and you. While the inverse, better him or her or them than us, is simple code for fear. "(Liu, p.33)