California Dreaming
Sometime it's good to slip away to get a fix on things. With all the talk lately about growth in the Upstate, I wondered where some community had done it differently. Where have those who believe in the rhetoric of growth as if it were a religion not cleared the land and covered it all with suburbs? Where have those in power not simply accepted that populations must double, that all land must be privately bought and sold?
So over spring break we flew west to California and landed at San Francisco International, but it would be almost a week before we spent a night in the city.
The rental car company wanted to assign us a PT Cruiser. They thought we were simply tourists looking for a bargain, not seekers on a green path. A Chrysler just didn't seem the right rig for our pilgrimage to organic heaven. We paid the premium and loaded our luggage into a hybrid.
A half-hour later we were through the city and across the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County, the place I've always imagined as the epicenter of all things environmentally progressive and edgy- green agriculture, green space, green architecture, green thinking. If the country has a green navel it might be hidden somewhere in Marin's hilly landscape.
Almost every square mile of Marin, a county a little smaller than Spartanburg, has been fought over. It's beautiful and people have always wanted to live there, but the "pro-growth" agenda that emerged as the Bay Area's population surged in the 1960s was stymied in Marin by the local will of the people. After decades of eye-popping growth rates a popular movement equated to a "green machine" virtually halted urbanization in the 1990s. By 2000 the county's population had stabilized at about 250,000 and over half the land had been reserved for agricultural, recreational, and ecological purposes.
Saving over half of Marin as protected space has been something that's taken popular support, political will, and decades of work in the trenches. It wasn't easy. As early as 1900 private interests wanted to cut the redwoods in Muir Woods and turn the canyon into a reservoir for the growing city across the bay, but powerful conservationists acquired the grove of ancient trees and preserved them with the help of the federal government.
The control of water has proven one of the most successful methods for limiting growth in Marin. From the 1970s forward the county has time and again stopped "the growth machine" by denying hookups to all but a limited supply of new homes each year. They have successfully used the denial of utilities as a way to place growth where it is planned-along the urbanized Highway 101 corridor in the middle of the county.
We drove curvy California State Highway 1 up the coast and I thought of Highway 11 along our scenic border. We in Upstate South Carolina seem to have no resolve to stop the growth along our most scenic spaces. We don't have the Pacific Ocean, but we do have the mountains.
Our first two nights in California were spent in the heart of Marin at Ten Inverness Way, a bed and breakfast near Point Reyes National Seashore. The air was filled with the scent of eucalyptus, and the cool Pacific fog rolled in over the green hills where California poppies bloomed. We hiked and saw whales and California sea lions along the shore. We ate a breakfast pancake full of organic apples.
Point Reyes juts ten miles out into the Pacific. It alone is 66,000 acres of Marin. Along one stretch of the coast there is a beach ten miles long with not one vacation home to spoil it. The morning we were there only two other pilgrims walked the strand. We were only 40 miles from downtown San Francisco.
What does it take to maintain the good life? That's the question I'm always asking as we travel. Back in Spartanburg I'm always glad to be home, but our travels open up vistas in me as wide as those from the Pacific cliffs along Point Reyes.