The city reclines against
the mountain, the aspiration and purpose of the city center giving way to an
easy sprawl along the plain. Buildings are slung low and obviously cheap, drab
houses that could be sneezed down, commercial buildings of cinderblock,
uninsulated against the mountain cold. It feels expedient and careless, like
someone said there should be a city and then walked away.
This seems to have
been liberating. Garages and junkyards share space with houses with yards and
picket fences. A restaurant with a line out the door sits across the street
from condemned houses, their roofs punched in to deter squatters. Homeless
people sleep in a parking lot next to a cinderblock building with carefully
patinaed steel doors. It houses an architect’s office with a neon sign and a
quite excellent cafe, bearded men within like ghosts of the bearded men
outside.
The death and life of
the modern American city run together here, Ouroboros tattooed upon the sierra.
Green shoots are scattered at random through the ash of the last recession, and
it feels like the next one is just waiting to happen. The streetscapes seem
born of tenacity and inertia and the fear of the future. The dreams are small
and careless because even here, under the infinite sky, no truly new ones have
been born in years.
