Dry Suburbia

I recently drove my son from Oregon to Northern California through hundreds of miles of brown and wheat-colored landscape. I grew up there, in California's Central Valley, a flat place from which people like to escape to Lake Tahoe or the San Francisco Bay. As a child, I loved the heat and wasn't bothered by the lack of interesting terrain. We had a swimming pool, my grandma in Redding had a huge swimming pool, and our neighbors had pools. I liked to spend most of my time reading inside anyway.

We were going to visit my family, who mostly still live in the area. My cousin, who grew up with the same grandma, had just returned from a trip to Oregon, close to my city in the Willamette Valley. He was stunned by how green it was, he said, and lamented the sudden shift from lush to dry that happened when he crossed the state line to get home. For me the change hadn't been sudden, but it had felt distinctly unfriendly. The Sacramento area is where I was raised and where my parents are, but it is far from home. To get to my place of origin requires driving on dusty highways where miles of shimmering flatness stand between my car and the faint, squat skyline of downtown Sacramento. These agricultural outskirts are full of farms and fertile wetlands, but I hardly recognize them as such after coming from the farmlands in the cooler latitudes of Oregon, which are picturesque with green meadows, filbert trees, baby firs being fattened up for Christmas, corn stalks, hop fields, and herds of grazing animals. On a California drive I occasionally I pass a farm stand, or a roadside tent selling produce, but otherwise it feels barren.

There is more to see—and yet not much—once I cross the ever-expanding boundary of the suburbs. I drive past new housing developments abutting streets where my high school peers used to go for joyrides because nobody and nothing else was around. On a large scale there still seems to be little around except dirt, and it's dirt with that unnatural hard-packed look that says it's destined to be the base for yet more construction. Every new neighborhood is enclosed by dun-colored stone walls branded with the development company's name, like a dog collar with an engraved tag altering you to the fact that it is owned. Outside the fortified collar is a four-lane-wide moat of asphalt road, which doesn't seem inviting to anyone who might use the bike lanes thrown in as a token gesture (or in compliance with local development laws). If you're equipped to get past those, and have the gate code that lets your finally breach the neighborhood, you can try to find whichever tan house and HOA-regulated lawn belong to your family members.

I dislike this type of overly manicured, car-dependent suburb. Maybe it's my urban planning-adjacent education, when I learned the gospel of mixed-use development. Maybe it's memories from childhood, when I grew up feeling like something was a little bit amiss, or a bit shallow, in my suburban life. Maybe there is something objectively dystopian about a town where you can draw a five-by-five-mile plot anywhere and record the same composition of snaky residential roads, stucco houses with open concept layouts, and a strip mall composed of the usual gas stations, chain retailers, Starbucks, and fast casual restaurants.

I'm not completely cynical. I admit the newer commercial centers often include some locally owned businesses, and the residential areas have nicely designed parks and walkways. Housing has to start somewhere; we can't all have homes with old trees and "character" earned over 50 years of weathering. But I usually visit the family-occupied suburbs in summertime, and I find it especially intolerable during those months, when the heat shimmering off the asphalt blurs away any texture you might see in the surrounding landscape. The world beyond the built environment becomes a two-dimensional painting of sky blue and earthy beige.

When I stay with my parents, I get restless as soon as the morning newsmagazine show is over. I'm not satisfied to just move from cushioned seat to cushioned seat, reading my book or looking at my phone or surfing the TV channels until it's time to plan the next meal. I'm sure that half of the problem is just missing the familiar stuff of my own home, including all the little jobs I do every day. My parents keep their house immaculate, so there's nothing for me to tidy or organize. But when I venture out for entertainment, I get that unsettled feeling of being in a community that looks the same as pretty much anyplace else in America. I'm no ascetic, but I think that material consumption has to come with limits, and the suburbs are part of a culture that conditions people to disregard those limits. They purport to offer us everything we need while limiting our choices to familiar franchises selling products that have been run up a corporate approval chain and designed to generate profits. They may have bike and pedestrian paths, but on the whole, they're built on a scale that inarguably works best for cars. Few amenities are within walking distance of a residence, and traffic is thick and aggressive.

Consume artificially cooled air when you're home. Consume a recycled version of that air in your car while you drive to a store to buy things and bask in the store's industrial air conditioning. Watch television, scroll through Facebook, and encounter ads imploring you to buy even more things. Repeat, then repeat even longer the following summer because climate change is making every season more extreme, and you shouldn't be outside in the heat. The globe is warming, and life is getting harder for the bottom 99 percent, but it's okay because Corporate America has shiny, comforting things for us to hold and look at while we're going down.