Journal of Alta California Winter 2022

ROBERTO LOVATO “The Gentrification of Consciousness,” page 22 Your essay on the psychedelic renaissance is also a meditation on San Francisco’s Mission district. What is the importance of this setting? The neighborhood’s storied past provides a textbook example of how entire communities are erased from physical space. Those of us who experienced the magical Mission consciousness moment of the ’60s and ’70s know that a similar erasure is taking place in the nonphysical realm of story, narration, and accounting of psychedelic history. MARTIN GEE “Keeping Hollywood in Hollywood” illustration, page 76 Your illustration summarizes the changes afoot in Los Angeles in a way that is both bold and simple. What is your connection to the city, and did you draw on it when creating this image? Although I’m from San Jose,…

There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about. Truth…is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. —JOHN VON NEUMANN The inventor of the stored-program concept—the idea that machine instructions were another form of data and could be stored in a machine’s main memory—foresaw that automated computing would generate a revolution in human affairs. Mathematician John von Neumann made his discoveries in the first half of the 20th century but lived in the future. He imagined devices that could reproduce themselves, like living forms, a brainstorm that preceded the discovery of DNA’s structure and the mechanism of gene replication. But he had the good sense to know that prediction is difficult in the details. For example, it’s easy to see that technology has…

Before his commute to work every morning, Sergio Lopez packs the essentials: Cell phone, check. Calculator, check. Laptop, check. Long-iron irrigation-gate bar, check. Lopez is a zanjero, or irrigation-ditch minder, in the Imperial Valley, an agricultural expanse that lies between the Salton Sea and the Mexican border. The Spanish word for “ditch” is zanja. Since the days of old Alta California, zanjeros have directed irrigation water where it’s needed, released exactly the right amount for crops to grow, and stopped the flow when the earth has had enough. California leads the nation in farm cash receipts—the Imperial Valley alone produced more than $2 billion in crops in 2019. Every farm in the valley needs water delivered by the Imperial Irrigation District. Lopez is their deliveryman. When people think of the…

At San Francisco’s nostalgia-inducing Swan Oyster Depot, the menu includes oysters from both coasts: you might choose among Kumamotos from Humboldt Bay, California; Miyagis from Puget Sound, Washington; Blue Points from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. But if you go to the restaurant, with its marble counter and 18 wooden stools, half of which date back to the 1800s, you might be able to try the favorite oyster of one of the restaurant owners. “If I had one oyster I could eat from anywhere in the world, it would be the Olympia. It’s a very unique oyster, with a very briny, very mineral-y, almost coppery taste,” says Steve Sancimino. Sancimino loves to tell interested customers that the Olympia is San Francisco Bay’s native oyster and that the miners came and ate them…

Over the past two decades, California’s Channel Islands—windswept, rocky, and eerily quiet—have emerged as a success story in the battle to restore and protect threatened ecosystems. Wildlife officials credit the recovery of these islands—five of the eight make up Channel Islands National Park—to the systematic removal of invasive species and human-made threats, which has helped preserve the habitats and populations of native species, 145 of which are found no place else. Surprisingly, despite this progress, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other entities have approached the national park about the possibility of translocating a new breeding colony of black-footed albatross to its shores, even though the species has never nested there. Purposefully introducing a foreign population after decades of exotic-inhabitant removal would be a drastic act. But with their…

David L. Ulin is Alta Journal’s books editor. He is the author or editor of many books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was short-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He teaches at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light. I never set out consciously to write a poem; either one appears or it does not. This one did, on a Tuesday morning when I was trying to construct a syllabus. One moment, I was considering class schedules and reading lists; the next, I was thinking about my son. He had stopped by for dinner the night before on his way home from work, and his visit had reminded me of all the vagaries of exposure and of…