Journal of Alta California Spring 2020

GUSTAVO ARELLANO “Farewell, Frieda,” page 110 You’ve profiled so many people in your career. How is it a different experience when you’re writing about someone who’s passed, as you do this month in your appreciation of produce pioneer Frieda Caplan, a.k.a. the “Kiwi Queen”? You try to place them among the eternals—get the scope of their life, yes, but also make the argument that they mattered. It’s a challenge, but one that I find readers love even more than profiles of the living. SUSAN STRAIGHT “Tiny Bottles of Nirvana,” page 50 Is your essay on Vietnamese immigrant Ann Nguyen part of a larger project? For five years, I worked on In the Country of Women, my first memoir, about six generations of women in my family who migrated west. With…

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. —RICHARD FEYNMAN There is a long-established theory of publishing that the real goal is to attract a vast audience and then assemble, dissect, and merchandise that audience for advertisers. It’s not exactly wrong. It has worked well for publishers like Facebook who have aggregated an audience on a scale of hundreds of millions. They have developed wonderful technology to attract that audience and partition it into units, which are of economic interest to branding companies, politicians, and state actors. Lately, even the algorithms of Apple News have detected which kinds of sensational headlines garner clicks—after all, the goal is to attract a big audience. In some ways, these algorithms have rediscovered the insight of H.L. Mencken: Nobody ever went broke underestimating…

If you’ve driven California highway 101 or 82, you’ve seen them: cast-iron and concrete bells, standing miles apart like sentinels, from San Diego to Sonoma. The road has another name—a once and future name—recalling cruelty carried out at a king’s command in the name of faith. California’s heritage was plowed in the path of El Camino Real, a road featuring bells that don’t actually ring, on a highway that didn’t actually begin in California. This camino began as interconnected trails bridging indigenous communities from central Mexico north to Alta California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and south into Central and South America. With the arrival of Spanish settlers, the trade route was transformed into El Camino Real—the king’s highway—which expanded the trails to connect Mexico City to Spain’s northern and…

Last fall, two very different approaches to addressing climate change unfolded in the Bay Area. One Atmosphere commissioned a 60-by-30-foot mural of climate activist Greta Thunberg for San Francisco’s Union Square. Painted on the side of an eight-story building, the fiery teenager looks determined and unbowed, gazing down at pedestrians and traffic with eyes the size of windscreens. Per the sponsoring organization, a rendering of the Swedish teen as big as Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore is an effective way to honor and amplify a message of environmental stewardship for a warming planet. Meanwhile, across the bay, Tony Santoro’s Guide to Illegal Tree-Planting debuted. The 23-minute video—released the week before the mural’s reveal—is the work of a tattooed, foulmouthed Chicago transplant who for the past few years has been quietly…

I’m sitting on the last stool at the bar. My drink sits in front of me. I’m waiting for a man who isn’t my husband to fill the next seat over. It’s 10:30 a.m. I’ve been here for an hour. The bar, like any good dive, has a pool table. There are 12 or so other patrons. We are here for the same reason. We aren’t here to make small talk. We are neither alcoholics nor adulterers. We’re not down-and-out. We are extras. The drink before me is water dressed up to look like something stronger. I take a sip and check out the set “family” I’m working with today. The stars and costars laugh with one another as they mill around eating breakfast. The crew is having coffee after…

A 320-foot stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in San Francisco had been a popular dumping ground for years. It wasn’t unusual to see abandoned sofas, TVs, and other appliances amid the wild fennel that flourished along the fence above the Caltrain embankment. It was a stereotypical scene of urban squalor. But in 2016, the area was transformed into a showcase of drought-tolerant landscaping. A neighborhood group received permission from Caltrain, the commuter railway running from San Francisco to San Jose, to fix up the road’s dirt shoulder and plant a garden of Mexican sage, agaves, and other succulents. Since then, that same group of residents—from the city’s Dogpatch neighborhood and a small section of Potrero Hill—has managed to accelerate the excruciatingly slow engines of government bureaucracy to quickly build or refurbish…