Essay

You can't go home again

By Steve Ford

"You can't go home again," at least that's what American author Thomas Wolfe wrote in his book of the same name. I think Wolfe was addressing the way we ourselves change, as much as the people and places we know change, when he wrote the novel.

I just made my first trip back to my old California hometown in about five years and found it to be a very different town now from the working class town where I grew up.

Home to about 16,000 souls, my town was and still is, bounded by an airport on one side, an oil refinery on another side, and on the west side of town near the Pacific Ocean sits an enormous sewerage treatment plant. Close to all this noisy smelly conglomeration of installations that nobody wants in their backyard was an electric power generating plant.

Sometimes when we went surfing the ocean even smelled like gasoline, but all this stinky industrial ugliness has always hidden a pretty neat place to live. It is a green tidy little town with several parks, a beautiful high school and a small town sense of community. Eventually other folks discovered this and housing prices soared.

Now even with an oil refinery, airport and sewerage plant nearby, the median home cost is over a million dollars.

Many of the new, more affluent residents tore down their homes and built McMansions; pretentious multi-story luxury houses, architectural monstrosities that are usually too large for the lots they sit on. They often have a Hummer in the driveway.

Still the change was not all bad, this new affluence means there are at last some decent places to eat, including a real barbeque restaurant and I feasted on smoky racks of pork ribs slowly cooked over a low fire — a most American treat.

And the people in the town were still quite friendly with conversations spontaneously popping up in restaurants and stores. A new weekly farmers' market on Main Street featured a mouth-watering variety of California fruits at very reasonable prices, like the 450 grams of cherries I bought for just three dollars.

Even though the area is quite affluent now, I was amazed by all the inexpensive clothes and was glad to once again be a moderate "M" size instead of a super sized "XL" like in Japan.

The weather was unusually cool and foggy during my visit, but on the day I was to return to my Tokyo home, the skies cleared and I walked to the beach and sat down on the sand for a while and watched the sunlight dance on the ocean. I remembered other summer days spent at the beach and for a moment it seemed that sometimes you really can go home again.

Shukan ST: July 23, 2010

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