Blue Sky Dream (7 page)

“Didn’t the sterility scare the hell out of you?” I’ve asked my mother often. “Didn’t you look around and wonder if you’d been stuck on a desert island?”

The questions never faze her. “We were thrilled to death. Not afraid at all. Everyone else was moving in at the same time as us. It was a whole new adventure for us. For everyone!”

Everyone was arriving with a sense of forward momentum joined. Everyone was taking courage from the sight of another orange moving van pulling in next door, a family just like us unloading pole lamps and cribs and Formica dining tables like our own, reflections of ourselves multiplying all around us in our new emptiness. Having been given the emptiness we longed for, there lay ahead the task of pouring meaning into the vacuum.

Listen, listen … look around … must be found.

W
e were blithe conquerors, my tribe. When we chose a new homeland, invaded a place, settled it, and made it over in our image, we did so with a smiling sense of our own inevitability. At first we would establish a few outposts—a Pentagon-funded research
university, say, or a bomber command center, or a missile testing range—and then, over the next decade or two, we would arrive by the thousands and tens of thousands until nothing looked or felt as it had before us. Yet whenever we sent our advance teams to some place like the Valley of Heart’s Delight, we did not cause panic in the populace; more likely, a flurry of joyous meetings of the Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Clubs. You can understand, then, why families like mine tended to behave with a certain hubris, why in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, for example, we were little concerned with a rural society extending back through Spanish missions to acorn gathering Ohlone Indians. We were drawn to the promise of a blank page inviting
our
design upon it. We were perfectly capable of devising our own traditions from scratch if need be.

My mother and father, for example, invented for us certain rites of spring. In the spring of 1962, the Valley of Heart’s Delight was covered with blossoms. Back then, the cherry and plum and apricot trees would froth so white and pink that driving around the place felt like burrowing through cotton candy. Spanish colonizers had planted the first of these glades. By the middle of the nineteenth century the valley was a center for growing the “fancy” fruits that needed rich soil, gentle rains, and frostless springs, a Mediterranean soft touch. Just two dozen years before my family’s arrival, this was a place of 100,000 acres of orchards, 8,000 acres of vegetable crops, 200 food processing plants, a small city of 50,000, and a half dozen villages that were, as one county planner fondly remembered, “enclaves in a vast matrix of green.”

“It was beautiful, it was a wholesome place to live,” by that planner’s recollection. And every year there would come a day in spring that called forth the blossoms, that seemed to make the world white and pink again in a decisive instant. That was a day eagerly looked toward, no doubt, by the people who had done the planting, the orchard people there long before us.

On warm evenings in the spring of 1962, this is what my father and mother would do. After dinner they would place my
baby sister in her stroller and the four of us would set out from the too small, used house they were renting in an established subdivision (already half a dozen years old) named Strawberry Park. We would walk six blocks and run out of sidewalk. We would pick up a wide trail cut a foot and a half deep into the adobe ground, a winding roadbed awaiting blacktop. At a certain point we would leave the roadbed and make our way across muddy clay that was crosshatched by tractor treads, riven by pipe trenches. We would marvel at the cast concrete sewer sections lying about, gray, knee-scratching barrels big enough for me to crawl inside. We would breathe in the sap scent of two-by-fours stacked around us, the smell of plans ready to go forward. Finally we would arrive at our destination, a collection of yellow and red ribbons tied to small wooden stakes sprouting in the mud. These markers identified the outline of Lot 242 of Unit 6 of Tract 3113, exactly 14,500 square feet of emptiness that now belonged to us. All around the outline were piles of cherry and plum and apricot trees, their roots ripped from the ground, the spring blossoms still clinging to their tangled-up branches.

My parents had laid claim to this spot in the usual way. They had sat in folding chairs in the garage of a model home while a salesman showed them maps of streets yet to exist, the inked idea of something to be called Clarendon Manor. They had been given a choice of three floor plans, the three floor plans from which all the dwellings of Clarendon Manor were to be fashioned. My parents had selected the 1,650-square-foot, four-bedroom floor plan, the one with the front door in the middle and the garage door on the right side. They had judged the price of that house—$22,000 at low GI Bill rates and no money down—to be a fair value and just within their budget. They had specified that the kitchen tile be yellow, the exterior trim white, the stucco blue.

My parents had been attracted by some of the features they saw in the Clarendon Manor model home. They liked, for example, the short brick wall with lantern that jutted out the side of the garage, creating a kind of courtyard just before the poured
concrete stoop. They liked, as well, the sparkles in the living room ceiling, tiny chips of glass embedded in the white flocking that twinkled by lamplight. They liked these modest nods to tradition and romance, though what they liked most was the functionality of the house’s design, the way, for example, that the kitchen, dining nook, and family room merged to created an unbroken expanse of linoleum. This was design for maximum efficiency in the flow of family life, an important selling point for my mother and father.

Here was the deal sealer: By rising early and hurrying to the Clarendon Manor sales office on the day it opened, my parents had been first in line and so had managed to secure a prime lot. Lot 242 was one of very few that stretched wide around the bottom end of a cul-de-sac, a choice cut of land more than twice the size of a standard lot. Naturally, the price was higher: For an additional 8,500 square feet of Clarendon Manor soil, said the salesman, my parents would have to pay $200 more, cash up front. They were only too happy to purchase the extra emptiness.

Once the papers had been signed, the rented house in Strawberry Park seemed to my parents all the more constricting and stale, a house not just used but used up. There was nothing to do, however, but to wait for Clarendon Manor to come into existence, nothing to do but make our visits to Lot 242 on warm evenings. Our rite evolved with the season. Early on, my father would go from stake to yellow-ribboned stake, telling us where the kitchen would be, where the front door would go, which windows would be getting the most sun. Later, after the concrete foundation and plywood subflooring were in and the skeletons of walls were up, we would wander through the materializing form of our home, already inhabiting with our imaginations its perfect potentiality.

O
ur home, like millions of similar tract homes built throughout America at the time, was said to be “ranch style.” Its sober
horizontality was said to owe itself to an old-fashioned, Out West wisdom about what a house should be. In truth, the design of our house owed more to a Frenchman named Charles Jeanneret, a man who found his optimism in mechanized shapes, even those (or especially those) made for war. Jeanneret, better known as Corbusier, was that prophet of Modernism who famously declared, “A house is a machine for living in.” He wrote this four years after the close of the First World War in his
Towards a New Architecture
, a manifesto containing, as well, these lines:

Corbusier’s theory was that houses, like airplanes, worked best when constructed according to rational, “universal laws.” One of these laws held that any machine, just like nature itself, must evolve toward ever purer forms. This is why the shapes of progress must look more and more like an airplane, must be ever more streamlined. This is why every bit of sentimental bric-a-brac was wasteful drag holding back our flight into a better future. This is why Corbusier hated Victorian decor “stifling with elegancies” and found the “follies of ‘Peasant Art’ ” downright “offensive.” Now was the moment to make “an architecture pure, neat, clean and healthy.” For, “We have acquired a taste for fresh air and clear daylight.” And, “Everything remains to be done!”

Corbusier’s hugely influential “Purism” glorified not only the shapes of machines but the assembly line production machines made possible. He would exploit economies of scale. He would make the parts interchangeable. For the rationally minded new technology worker, he would create “towers in the park”
surrounded by greenery and laced into freeways. He would design vast high-rises that stacked families in hundreds of identical compartments, give them “open plan” living areas without room dividers, sit them in no-frills furniture that Corbusier preferred to call “equipment.”

You can find the bastard progeny of those towers in skylines from Warsaw to Chicago. Housing projects gray and stark, they are today’s emblems of beehive alienation, the worst possible place to look for Corbusier’s optimism realized. No, to find that, you would do far better to go to where Purism met the American Dream, places where single-family homes were mass assembled from three blueprints and shopped for like cars, places like Clarendon Manor. In such blue sky subdivisions, Corbusier’s tower of identical compartments was unpacked and spread out, forming an architecture all the more “pure, neat, clean and healthy.” We who dwelt in them were as Corbusier had predicted. The era’s new worker, the aerospace worker, did want to live surrounded by greenery and laced into freeways. We had indeed “acquired a taste for fresh air and clear daylight.” And what we wanted were $22,000 Parthenons expressive of the same cold reason we saw in the lines of a jet fighter’s fuselage.

There was a man in the Valley of Heart’s Delight who made it his business to build the purest tract house forms of all. He was named Joseph Eichler. Joe Eichler had been a rather conventionally minded fellow until the day in 1936 when he happened to rent a home designed by Corbusier’s fellow Modernist prophet, Frank Lloyd Wright. With its bold spaces (a long, glass-walled living room) and latest technology (“radiant heating” via water pipes in the concrete floors), the home was to Joe Eichler a revelation, and when the cigar-chewing dairy wholesaler eventually decided to get out of butter and into subdivisions, he hired Wright disciples as his architects. They gave him a three-bedroom house with a sleek flat roof, floor-to-ceiling glass along the rear facade, post and beam ceilings, radiant heating, an open plan interior that spoke of free-flowing emptiness, all of this mass
producible with a 1949 price tag of $9,000. By 1967, Joseph Eichler would build some 10,000 houses in Northern California, a particularly large concentration of them in areas closest to Lockheed.

From the street, Eichlers resembled lined-up, identical, earth-toned bunkers, their redwood-sided fronts punctured by the merest, if any, glass. You entered the private realm of the bunker through a door, and then—this was an Eichler trademark—suddenly found yourself standing in an open-air atrium. The atrium, an Eichler sales booster from the day it was introduced in 1957, was the
extra
dollop of emptiness you passed through before you met the true front door of the house and all the glassy walls and clean space within. “The Eichler design stunned us,” my father remembers of the first one he and my mother explored on one of their house-shopping expeditions. “The low lines, all that glass. We thought it was a marvelous house. It had this California look to it. It was like nothing we’d seen in the Midwest.”

Which, indeed, was the genius of the Eichler design, the way it congratulated its owner for fleeing places so encumbering as, say, the Midwest. Midwest weather made flat roofs and atriums impossible. Midwest people were suspicious of houses with no windows on the street and too few walls inside. A Midwest house (like the lives within it) stuck with tradition. No, the Eichler was like nothing you’d ever see in the Midwest.
A whole new adventure for us
, the Eichler said to its owner.
For everyone!
said the many streets lined with Eichlers, streets that ran in concentric circles closing finally around a swimming pool with a clubhouse, for that was the modern shape Eichler gave the entire neighborhoods he built from scratch.

My father and mother did not buy an Eichler home in an Eichler subdivision, a missed opportunity they speak of wistfully to this day. At the time, the Eichler price, though consciously pegged to aerospace salaries, was a few thousand dollars beyond my father’s bottom-rung pay. And yet the allure of the Eichler illustrates why we saw so little “ranch” in the house we did move
into in the autumn of 1962. Compared to an Eichler, our house was a quieter shout of Corbusier’s machine-minded optimism, perhaps. But our house, too, was “open plan,” bright and low and streamlined, laid out unsentimentally enough to please any engineer. Most importantly, ours was nothing that could be mistaken for a used house of the past. Ours was a blue sky house, pure and simple.

O
ne spring Saturday my father rounded the corner of the cul-de-sac wearing his brown leather flight jacket, his hands at the controls of a machine with knobby tires taller than me and an enormous claw upraised. By then we had inhabited Lot 242 for nearly a year, the seasons had come around, and now had arrived the time for making a backyard lawn. Having taken the measure of the hard clay that Clarendon Manor was built upon, my father had devised a plan. The first step was to break the clay into clumps and so he had rented this tractor, had driven it across town and right into the yard through a portion of fence he had removed. To the delight of me and other children in the neighborhood who gathered round, he pulled us up one at a time onto his lap, the rattling of the beast passing through my father’s blue-jeaned thighs into our own bodies. We rode the machine as it ripped up the earth, and when the frenzy was over we each took turns sitting in the quieted claw.