My husband, Dick Burkhart, and I have chose Amtrak and tandem bicycling as our modes of travel during a recent trip across America. Conscious of human impacts on the Earth's ecosystems, Dick and I noted that many neighborhoods are making small efforts to reverse the trend. Everywhere there are signs of turning away from suburban sprawl and gluttonous resource consumption.
Our first stop was Portland where my nephew, Kenneth Southerland, lives in the Hawthorne District, a committed bicycle community. Ken and his friends refuse to own cars. They carefully choose their homes, jobs, and entertainment along Portland's intricate complex of bicycle lanes. Ken's small back yard is mostly a vegetable garden that includes a patch of wheat from which he grinds his own flour.
Eugene had bike lanes and paths running everywhere. Our host, Gary Trudeau, lives three miles from the city center on an acre of land with a big vegetable garden and several bee hives. Most of the time he bikes to work, a lifestyle not uncommon for Eugene.
When we got off the train in Chico, California, most people we met thought nothing of driving cars miles in any direction. In fact, I spent most of my time in the Chico area sitting in the back seat of a car with our friend, Lucy Sperlin, an anthropologist and the backbone of the Butte County Historical Society.
She drove us miles out of town past the remains of abandoned gold rush era mines to the ghost town of Oregon City, California, of which there is nothing left but the school house and cemetery. It seemed to symbolize the sustainability level of today's neighborhoods. How many of them will be ghost towns when cheap oil, the gold that made them possible, is a thing of the past?
From Chico we bicycled across the Central Valley toward the town of Willows. In this 30-mile stretch of nut groves, fruit orchards, and rice fields we did not encounter a single functioning grocery store or restaurant. In the town of Glenn, Dick snapped a photo of the post office and the ruins of what had once been a store.
"This is what the car has done to America," he said. "The only rural businesses that survive are the ones near freeway exits."
It was while biking through the vast farmlands of California that I began to wonder about the sustainability of my own neighborhood, Othello, back in Southeast Seattle. I had thought we were building a good infrastructure to survive a future no longer dominated by the automobile. We will have a light rail station, affordable housing, the Chief Sealth Bicycle Trail.
But what about food? Most of our food is grown in the very fields through which we were pedaling. Here are perhaps the world's largest rice paddies, seeded and tended by crop-duster airplanes. Nearby, in the fields of bushy plants stretching to the horizon, our tomatoes are grown. How much will rice and tomatoes cost if they have to be shipped all the way back to Seattle when the price of gas reaches 10 dollars a gallon?
I began to imagine the New Holly P-patch expanding to fill the entire green belt under the power lines as farm tractors ply the Chief Sealth Trail. Maybe, like my nephew, we'll be growing our own wheat.
Davis, California may fare the best, sitting so near America's great food basket. There is a bike path entrance a hundred yards from the door of our host, Bill Diemer. His daughter, Diane, took us on a bike tour of perhaps the only town in the United States where bike and public transit infrastructure take precedence over cars.
The central bike path is a groomed park traversing the entire city, and every major street has a bike lane. Drivers gave us tolerant, patient looks as Diane signaled flamboyantly for left turns and charged unabashedly into the fray. Dozens of bicycles were parked at the charming downtown train station for commuters taking the rail to jobs in Sacramento or San Francisco.
In San Francisco we stayed in the Bay View/Hunter's Point and Castro neighborhoods. Bay View/Hunter's Point reminded us most of home. It is a multicultural community consciously planned to include a mix of attractive low-income, affordable, and market rate housing, and light rail will soon open along its business district
Even in Los Angeles, that slumbering gas-guzzling giant, there were subtle signs of awakening. Granted, its downtown thoroughfares are broad boulevards roaring with car traffic, but in the city's heart along Broadway we found old hotels being gutted for restoration as mixed-use buildings with apartments above the stores.
It was not until we ventured out across the interior of the Southwest that we became hard pressed to find pockets of sustainability-minded communities. Santa Fe, at the end of the now extinct old Santa Fe Trail, seems to be pretty much of a tourist-trap art market, but has a fairly good bus system. Yet along with other towns like Flagstaff and Albuquerque, the trend still is toward building urban sprawl.
It was in these hot, dry places that we began to worry about the future of drinking water as well as food. How badly do the neighborhoods we visited, including Othello, stress water resourcefulness as global warming triggers drought and climate instability? How long will the aquifers beneath these neighborhoods remain viable as populations increase?
Have a comment for Mona Lee? Drop her a line via editor@sdistrictjournal.com.
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